Are You a Book Editor Reading This?

If so, I have written a book that might interest you.

It’s hardly my first. I’ve had over a hundred published, including some NY Times Bestsellers. But this one is different. It’s not SF or fantasy. And I can’t seem to sell it.

Does it have a fantasy element? It might; that’s subjective to the reader.

But apparently that’s confusing to the editors who have read it thus far. SF editors apparently feel it’s not SF enough. Non-SF editors either don’t bother to read it because it’s from Peter David, the SF/fantasy guy. Or they reject it with conflicting responses: one said it was too humorous, a second said it wasn’t humorous enough. Helpful things like that.

I didn’t want to publish it via Crazy 8 Press because I don’t consider it fantasy, but your mileage may vary. If you are interested in reading it, please write to me at padguy@aol.com and I will shoot you a copy. The title is “Spoken Word” and it’s about a comedian whose son never speaks a word…until a very unusual woman enters their lives and changes that.

Here is the first chapter:

FIRST

People make a huge deal about the first word that a baby says. Mothers always remember it; fathers usually do. There’s a kind of unofficial competition between parents, lobbying to see whether “mama” or “papa” are the first syllables the baby’s able to utter in sequence and have it mean what it sounds like it means. If it’s a random word, like “light” or “yes,” then a lot of meaning can get attached to it.

Mickey’s first spoken word was “fart.”

He was however the hëll many months old he was, and he was bopping around on the floor, doing the whole baby thing. It was after Thanksgiving dinner, and his Uncle Tommy, he did his usual thing of sitting in an easy chair, his legs splayed to either side (which he also used to do stark naked in steam rooms, to the appeciation of absolutely no one). He undid his belt and the top of his pants, and sighed lustily, scratching his ample belly, and then he uncorked a ripe one that supposedly went on for, like, a year, to hear Mickey’s mother, Tommy’s sister, tell of it. She yelled at him, “Tommy, for the love of God!” and Tommy apologized without really meaning it, and Mickey’s father walked in and said, “Good Christ, who died in here?” and Mickey’s mother started yelling at him, and his dad was saying, “What the hëll did I do? I didn’t fart!” and his mother was saying, “You’re treating it like a big joke,” and Uncle Tommy said, “For crying out loud, Brenda, it’s just a dámņëd fart,” and temperatures were blowing through the ceiling all because of gas passing, with this terrific dinner that his mother had produced being completely forgotten in the wake of Tommy’s faux pas.

And Mickey was sitting there, playing with blocks, and he looked up at all the ruckus and growing anger. Mickey tilted his cherubic little face up to the chandelier and cooed, “Fart.”

Everything froze. Every eye was on him. “Did…did he say–?” began his father.

He didn’t have to complete the sentence. “Fart,” Mickey said again.

Tommy started to laugh.

“Shut up!” said Mickey’s mother.

Her brother tried to do so. He really did. He clamped both hands over the lower half of his face, at which point Mickey’s aunt Susan, his wife, walked in from having gone to the bathroom. She stared at her husband, who looked like he was trying to smother himself, and she said, “Tommy, what in God’s name…” Then her noise wrinkled and she said, “Ewww…did you–?”

“Fart,” Mickey piped up. His comedy timing was already solidly in place.

His father immediately said, “I’m getting the video camera…”

“Oh, the hëll you are!” His mother was livid.

“It’s Mickey’s first wor–!”

“No way.” His mother shook her head with such determination that it almost toppled off her neck. His dad was a head and a half taller than his mother, but she stomped up to him and practically had to stand on her toes to wave her finger in his face. “There is no way that my son’s first word is going to be—“

“Faaaaaaaaart!” Mickey said, and his voice kind of went up and down in the middle. Mickey was singing it like an aria.

His aunt Susan completely lost it. She had a huge belly laugh and she unleashed it then, and that set off Uncle Tommy who had come close to controlling himself but lost it. He was laughing so hard that he slid off the recliner so that his ášš was on the carpet and his torso supported by the chair.
This got Mickey’s father going, and he started laughing. His mother looked around like a trapped tigress, overwhelmed by events that were spiraling completely out of control. Whereupon Mickey crawled over to Uncle Tommy, who was on the floor, remember, and Mickey started thumping on his chest saying, “Fart, fart, fart, fart,” rapid fire, like bullets from a machine gun.

Now naturally Mickey didn’t remember any of it first hand; most of it is what became family legend, repeated at subsequent gatherings.

But Mickey still felt a sense of empowerment, as if an understanding was being engraved in his baby brain that he could control crowds of people by reducing them to hysterics.

Three adults that Thanksgiving were helpless with laughter, putty in his baby hands, and only his mother was keeping it together, scolding, scowling, telling everyone to knock it off which only got them going all the more, because this kind of thing feeds on itself.

And finally she glared at her son, the source of all this chaos, and Mickey paused in the thumping on his uncle’s chest, looked up at her with wide-eyed innocence, and said, “Fart?”

At which point Mickey farted. Nothing remotely as magnificently sustained as what his uncle had unleashed upon an unsuspecting world. Just a quick, sharp “poot” that issued from his diapered backside.

And that was it for his mom.

Apparently she’d been suppressing it, but his final little button on the scene pushed her over. She let out a loud bark of laughter, like a hopped up seal, and like her brother had, covered her mouth with both hands as if trying to shove it back down her throat. Then her chest started shaking violently, and if she hadn’t let it out her mouth, it probably would have just torn out of her chest, like in Alien, smashing through her ribcage and running around the living room. So she did, and she was laughing so hard there were tears running down her face. Her legs gave way and she sank to the floor, hysterical with laughter. And whenever the laughing came close to subsiding, he’d declare “fart” and it would start all over again.

This went on for anywhere from five minutes to half an hour, depending upon who you ask and at what point in the family history the question is being posed.

The point of all the above—which we admittedly made right up front, but is worth mentioning again since it was, like, a thousand words ago, is that first words can be important. If you want further proof that they can be relevant in the long term, you should know that Mickey went on to become a comedian. Not an especially good one, or even a full time one, but “comedian” is right there on his resume, along with about nine other different jobs, including “father.” The job title resulted from the birth of his own son, Jordan. This was a compromise name. His wife and Mickey worked out the potential names of their child long before the birth. For some reason they settled on a girl’s name pretty quickly: Catherine. A name for a potential boy, however, prompted far longer debate. His wife wanted to name him Daniel, after her father, and Mickey wanted to name him Jor-El, after Superman’s father. This remained unresolved up until their son’s birth. He wound up becoming “Jordan,” which seemed a fair compromise. In short order his nickname became Jordy, because he seemed more like a Jordy than a Jordan. Plus Mickey felt like he’d got more of his way, because in his head it made his name Jor-D, which is like Jor-El. So, like they say, close enough for jazz.

Jordy’s first word was likewise very important.

He didn’t speak it until he was eight years old. And after he did, it set a whole series of events into motion that wound up with Mickey in jail.
This is how it started, and this is where it went.