Are You a Book Editor Reading This? (Second and Last Attempt)

So nearly two weeks ago I told you folks about a largely non-SF/fantasy novel of mine called “Spoken Word,” and my inability to sell it because it’s largely non-SF/fantasy. I put out an open call for any editors who might be reading it to send me an inquiry at padguy@aol.com and I’d send them the entire MS.

Number of editors to respond: zero.

I’m taking one more shot at it, and including Chapter Two below. If I still continue to get no response, I’ll self-publish it through Crazy 8. For those who enjoyed Chapter One, enjoy:

Laura

It all seemed brilliant in his living room, that’s all Mickey could tell you in his defense of that night where Mickey just stank up the place.
No one goes into a set firmly believing that their material absolutely sucks. Okay, maybe some do. There could be some random masochists out there who thrive on having audiences heckle them and boo them or, even worse, just kind of ignore them.

That’s definitely the absolute worst. When you’re working your ášš off to get laughs and not only is no one laughing, but they’re just talking with each other or nursing their drinks while just kind of staring into themselves and worrying about whether they’re going to get fired or if their girlfriend is ever going to forgive them or whatever depressing thing is going on in their lives that caused them to show up at the comedy club and look for some kind of escape from their lives…

At least with hecklers, you know you’re making some kind of connection. In fact, if you keep your cool, you can even turn it around. Deal with a heckler or boos or catcalls in a humorous and witty manner, and you can remind the audience that they came there to be entertained, and maybe even convince them in that manner that you’re the one to do the entertaining.

At the time Mickey was, as they say, between actual paying jobs. The downside of that was that Mickey didn’t have much money to his name and none coming in. The upside was that it meant Mickey could spend all his time honing his material for a gig Mickey had on that particular evening down at the Whistle Stop.

The Whistle Stop used to be a big deal in the world of comedy clubs. It was kind of a pit in downtown Manhattan, but once upon a time it used to be a pretty big deal. Lots of people, legendary big names, were discovered there, and the Whistle Stop had autographed pictures of them lining the walls. They’d stare out at the rest of the young comedians as if to say, “Keep on course and stay with it and someday you too can be up here.”
But the pictures were caked with dust and a lot of those comedy greats had names that a lot of people wouldn’t recognize anymore. The day you know you’ve lived too long is when you overhear some guy in his 20s staring at a picture of Lenny Bruce and saying, “Who’s that guy?” and his dipshit girlfriend just shrugs. And you just want to shout at them, “What the hëll is wrong with you? How can you be so ignorant of the greats of the past?” The problem is that that’s the first step down the path that eventually winds up with you sitting on your front porch shouting for the neighborhood kids to keep the hëll off your lawn. So you bite your tongue and hope that someday they either buy a clue or else just get hit by a truck and taken out of the gene pool because they’re too stupid to live, much less procreate.

Anyway…

Mickey was slated to do a set at the Whistle Stop and he spent a lot of time putting together what he thought was just killer material. There’s no point in repeating any of it here, now, because it was all pretty timely, based on stuff that was going on in the news. Plus the whole set just crashed and burned on the night Mickey went with it, so it’s unlikely that time would have improved on it. Not much point in rehashing it, really, since the whole point of this isn’t about how badly Mickey did, but what it all led to.

The weather was supposed to be pretty mild, and Mickey dressed accordingly, so naturally he got soaked when he came out of the subway to find that the skies had opened up. Everyone bìŧçhëš about how weathermen are always getting it wrong. But even knowing that, we wind up listening to them anyway, so who’s the bigger dûmbášš?

Mickey showed up dripping wet, already in a lousy mood, barely glancing at the crowd, which was probably his first mistake. A smart comic always gets a read of the room and adjusts his material accordingly. If he’d done that, things might have gone better. On the other hand, Mickey might not have met Laura. No wonder people embrace the notion that there’s some grand design where God’s involved, moving everyone around like chess pieces. If people gave any thought to the sheer random chance about everything in their lives—that everything good might never have happened, that everything bad might have been avoided, and all the real ramifications that was part of all that—they’d just go out of their minds. Just lose it. The world would be nothing but crazy people climbing up on the Washington Square Arch and firing away with high powered rifles.

In case you’re wondering, Mickey was never much on the whole God moving things around theory. But things happened later, way later, which you may have read about since it was all over the dámņëd newspapers and CNN and like that, his whole life being spread all over like it was some big freakshow to entertain people. That comes later, though. Way later.

Ralph, the guy who owned and ran the place, was kind of built like a beach ball, except with less personality. But he was that rare guy who wasn’t funny himself, but could see funny in other people. The moment he saw Mickey come squishing in, he told him he’d move him back in the running order so he’d have time to dry out. Mickey headed down to the dressing room that all the comics used and sat there trying to dry himself out with a hair dryer. The result was that on the outside his clothes looked drier, but they were still kind of damp on the inside, not to mention his shorts were riding up something fierce.

So Mickey was not, to put it mildly, in a good mood.

Maybe that’s why most of his routine tanked. Great comedy may well come from anger, but when you’re just feeling šhìŧŧÿ and uncomfortable, that doesn’t take you anywhere good.

Mickey was sure living proof of it that night.

Long story short Mickey got up and did his set and not once, during the entire time, did he even come within a pubic hair’s width of connecting with the audience. It’s always nice to try and blame it on the guy who was on directly ahead of you, but he was perfectly okay. Actually, it was pretty impressive, because all his stuff was redneck humor which you’d think would just die with a New York City crowd. But no, they were really into it. He killed. And Mickey came out, and there was no killing, just dying.

There is no lonelier feeling than being alone in a crowd, and what’s even worse is when you have a single spotlight on you so that your aloneness is highlighted. There is literally nowhere to run. You ever seen desperate comedians tapping the mike, saying, “Is this thing on?” That’s because when you’re up there with the light in your eyes, and you really think you’ve got great material, you figure that there has to be a technical glitch.
Sometimes you even fantasize that, as part of a big joke that someone’s pulling on you, the whole audience has been cleared out in the darkness while you’re doing your set. That at some point when flop sweat has drenched your shirt and the fear is just coming off you in a big stinking cloud of failure, that’s when they kick on the lights and you see nothing but empty chairs. And there Ralph will be, and the waiters serving drinks, and everyone just busts their ášš laughing at the expression on your face because it’s really pretty priceless. And eventually, if you’re a good sport, you’ll join in the laughter, too.

Nice idea. Nice fantasy.

In his case, not so much.

Mickey was too mortified even to pick a fight with the audience. He said his good nights to the audience about two minutes earlier than he was supposed to, and Ralph hurriedly brought on the next guy, who proceeded to kill.

Mickey was busy drowning his sorrows over at the bar. There was a cute bartender named Gillian on that night, with red hair and nice breasts that strained against the fabric of her thin white shirt as if they were trying to make a break for it. Mickey nodded toward the guy who had followed him and clearly had the audience at his mercy, and Mickey said defensively to Gillian, “I warmed them up for him.”

She looked at him in a pitying manner and Mickey shrunk back a little, suddenly taking a great deal of interest in the beer that she’d slid in front of him. “On the house,” she said, and that’s the point where Mickey knew that he had indisputably crashed and burned. The only way Ralph felt badly enough for him to sign off on free drinks was if it was going to be the only good thing to happen to him that entire night.

Mickey clutched it like Gollum coveting the ring of power and sipped it, wanting it to last.

That was when Gillian caught his eye and tilted her head slightly to his right. She wanted him to look at something or someone.

It was, as it turned out, the latter.

Mickey had never been a big believer in the whole “love at first sight” thing. Instead Mickey was sure that it was steeped in a conscious attempt to rewrite history. That people became retroactively certain that the moment they stared into the eyes of their eventual lover, they would convince themselves that they had known from the moment they had laid eyes on their eventual mate that it was meant to be right from the get-go. Mickey had little patience for such obvious reordering of history in order to retrofit a convincing narrative into a happenstance encounter.

All of that evaporated when Mickey met Laura.

In the interest of full disclosure, Laura was not the most beautiful girl he’d ever seen. She didn’t have the greatest body, or at least what Mickey could see of it, considering that she was dressed in a fairly loose shirt and a pair of black slacks. But there was such quiet intelligence in her blue eyes, and a look of infinite patience that, let’s be realistic, any woman that Mickey would be with for the rest of his life would certainly require. She had a wonderful aroma wafting from her that reminded him for no discernible reason of cookies and ice cream, and Mickey tried to figure out what perfume it had to be. Turned out that that was just the way she smelled, or at least the things that she reminded him of.

When Mickey turned to face her, she raised a single, sardonic eyebrow, a look that Mickey would come to know very well. She said, “Nice set.”

“Of what?” Mickey honestly didn’t know what she meant for a moment, and then he realized. “Oh, you mean…” and Mickey gestured vaguely toward the stage. When she nodded, Mickey said, “I don’t know what set you were watching, but…” Mickey shuddered at the recollection.

“No, you had some good ideas in there.”

“I don’t need your pity.”

She shrugged. “Okay.”

She turned and started to walk away and immediately he ran around her so that he was facing her again, blocking her exit.

“I lied,” Mickey said. “I totally need your pity. Need it, want it, take it. Give me your poor, your tired, your huddled pity, yearning to be free.”
Laura (Mickey didn’t know her name yet, but why be coy?) laughed. She had a wonderful laugh, musical. The Mormon Tabernacle Choir could have worked for a year to hone the perfect choral laugh and wouldn’t have come up with something as sweet sounding as the sound that Laura produced right then.

“Okay,” she said, “now that was funny. You know why?”

“Blind luck?”

“Because it was honest. You’re standing up there trying to do smart comedy, and that’s fine, but you were so busy trying to prove that you were smart that you totally forgot to be funny. You want to do jokes about the government being inept? Fine. But you can’t be deconstructing it from an intellectual point of view; you’re keeping people at arm’s length when you do that. That type of humor has to come from a place of rage. You have to be angry about it. You have to be pìššëd øff. Life pìššëš everybody off. The reason that people would relate to you is because they’re connecting with you in that place of rage, and the reason they’d laugh is in appreciation of your being able to express the things they’re thinking, but you’re doing it way better than they could. You get it?”

“Yes.”

“You’re lying.”

“A little bit.” Mickey stuck out a hand. “Mickey Roark.”

She shook his hand. Her skin felt like velvet. “Very funny,” she said.

“No, seriously. That’s my name.”

“Get out.”

“Spelled differently from the actor.”

“Okay, but still…”

“I know.”

“I guess,” she said, “that going into comedy was pretty much your only choice. Either that or just be some guy who wanders from job to job.”

“Luckily I’m able to do both,” Mickey said. “And you’re–?”

“Laura. Laura Philips.”

“And what do you do, Laura Laura Philips?”

“I’m a research librarian at the New York City public library.”

“The place with the stone lions? Where the books live?”

“That’s it.”

“Wow.” Mickey considered that. “You have to be, like, really smart to do that.”

“Actually, they’ve upped the requirements. Being ‘like’ really smart hasn’t been enough since 2003. Now you actually have to be really smart.”

“Wow.”

“You said that.”

“Yeah, but I figured it was worth repeating. Do you, uh,” and Mickey glanced around, “do you want to get out of here?”

“Sure, but just so you know, I’m not going to sleep with you. At least not tonight.”

Mickey blinked at that a few times. “Why would you think I’d be interested in sleeping with you?”

“Who wouldn’t be?”

Mickey blinked even more. Then Mickey looked to Gillian who’d been standing nearby, polishing the same beer mug for the last five minutes, making no attempt to hide the fact that she’d been eavesdropping.

“I’d do her,” said Gillian.

Mickey looked back at Laura. “Touché.”

They got out of there and went to a nearby café and talked about all kinds of things as if they’d been doing it for not only the entirety of their lives, but the entirety of several lives before that. It happens like that sometimes. Sometimes you’ll run into people and there’s instant hatred. Mickey knew that for a fact thanks to all the people he’d met who instantly hated him. Then there are other times—far fewer occasions, but it happens—where you meet someone and there’s just that instant rapport.

That’s what it was with Laura and him.

The café was open twenty-four hours and they talked until the sun was coming up, and their throats were both hoarse. Mickey walked her home, and she saw that Mickey was bleary eyed and nearly dead on his feet, but happy. So she invited him up to her place, and Mickey collapsed on her couch and fell dead asleep. When Mickey woke up, it was past noon and there was a note from her on the door saying, “Some people have to work for a living. Grab something from the fridge if you’re hungry.”

Mickey did. Then Mickey noticed that she had eggs and cheese and a few other necessary ingredients. So Mickey poked around her kitchen, found what he needed, and went to work. Eventually she came home and was extremely surprised to see that Mickey was still there. “Uhm,” she said, “I’m honestly not sure whether to be flattered or creeped out that…” Then she stopped as her nostrils twitched slightly. “What is that?”

“A soufflé,” Mickey said. “And I put together a Caesar salad. It’s in the fridge.”

“Oh my God,” said Laura.

She unslung what looked to be a pretty heavy shoulder bag, walked straight up to him, threw her arms around him, and kissed him passionately. The kissing didn’t stop and the clothes didn’t stay on, and dámņëd if she was right, because the things they did didn’t involve sleep.

8 comments on “Are You a Book Editor Reading This? (Second and Last Attempt)

  1. Well, I’m not an editor, but I’m enjoying it so far. Loved the line about the weathermen. Made a friend (who wants to be a librarian) laugh at the librarian requirements.

  2. I remember when Harlan Ellison wanted to be notified when fans found bookstores which shelved all of his books in the s.f. section regardless of content.

    This is why Stephen King and J. K. Rowling had to invent pseudonyms for their non-fantastic works. I’m sorry to say this, as it bothers me that authors are pigeon-holed — but you may, too, have to adopt a pseudonym.

  3. Have you tried Baen?

    If not, contact Toni directly (i have her e-mail if you don’t) and tell her i think she ought to look at it.

    (About seventeen years ago, at a con in Louisville, i recommended an author i knew pretty well (who was getting a bit of a run-around from other publishers) to Toni.

    That worked out fairly well for Baen…

    1. Arrrgh. 1989 – TWENTY-seven years.

      Note to self, don’t do even SIMPLE math in head when i’ve just waked up.

    2. Tried Baen. Insofar as I know, they were in the “couldn’t be bothered to read it” category. You want to contact her, feel free. If she gets in touch with me, I’ll send it.

      PAD

      1. I’ll drop her an e-mail. She owes me some.

        I wonder if it came to her attention at all…

      2. Feel free. Honestly, considering Baen’s indifference in the past, I doubt I’ll hear from her, but I guess you never know.

        PAD

      3. Just FYI, it’s been a week and I never heard from her, which I have to admit is consistent since she reportedly rarely replies to my agent, either.

        Thanks for trying.

        PAD

Comments are closed.