The Dog

The other day it occurred to me that there was possibly a worse minor character than Chita. There was a dog. There was. And then there wasn't.

Emmett, the possibly-cheating husband, runs out of the house, all excited by the presence of Angela, the terrible possibly-main character. He needs her to take the dog (a basset hound? named Claxton?) to the vet. Angela seems to care about the dog as much as she cares about her son. (Hint: Not very much.) She invites the son to dinner. Angela never takes the dog to the vet.

I had thought the dog up and disappeared from the story completely after Emmett makes his request, but, no, there's a mention of the dog being on the fishing trip with the guys when Angela sneaks home later in the book. I know. This is either an amazingly thick plot or a ridiculously awful story.

Chita is by far a more offensive character. In the Chita vs. Claxton smackdown, Chita wins.

The Break in Posts

Dear Reader, I'm sorry there was such a delay between posts. Shortly after I posted my thoughts on Chita, the Gungan in-home nurse, the author told me that she planned to no longer work on selling this novel. In one phone call she's telling me about how she's sending excerpts to publishers (because who needs an agent when there are publishers like Lulu?) and then in the next she's saying that she's done with this story all together.

I was so disappointed. Done? I just finished reading this stupid thing. I just started a blog about it. And now you're calling it quits. You're not even calling it quits because you became aware of how stupid your novel is. You're tapping out because you've only sold five copies in as many months. "It's been on Lulu for a while now" was your logic. Really?

So what are you new plans? To start hocking the second worst novel ever. (Until next week when you tell me that you're going back to creating the world's most mediocre screenplay.)

What are my plans? To start reviewing everything I read. And continue explaining why this—the first piece of trash, the one you actually spent money to publish, the one that is printed and bound by a third party and available for purchase—is the worst novel ever. Even if you never understand that point.

Old Notes

I took to transcribing our phone calls some time ago. You want me to call you no more than twice a month, and these calls last a maximum of ten minutes, so it's really not that much work to get a pad of Post-Its and jot down your half of the conversation. It's caused me to say less and less because I'm busy writing,  but you don't really seem to care. You only want soundbites of "what's new."

The other day you wrote me an email to tell me not to call this Sunday (today) because it is Oscar Sunday and you don't want me to interrupt. I went looking for last year's reaction to the ceremony. I mean, I would swear that for the past eight years you've done nothing but complain about how boring the show is. But I couldn't find notes about the Oscars. I found complaints about the Golden Globes and freelance clients and your "stupid" writers' group. But nothing about the Oscars. I would imagine that your renewed interest in the ceremony has something to do with a renewed interest in screenwriting.

As it turns out, I found a set of notes from a night about a year ago when there was no episode of Brothers and Sisters, when ABC "made" you "suffer" through an extra hour of Extreme Makeover Home Edition. ("What do they care? They don't care.") It had to be at least a year ago, before you'd discovered the wonders of Lulu.com. You told me you were "working" on the novel, but you were "not finding much to change."

You were "not finding much to change."

Perhaps this was a different novel? Oh no. This was The Worst Novel Ever that you were "working" on. Because there was not much to change, you were mostly looking for excerpts to send to agents. You had decided that the scene where "they make LOVE" was the way to go. You said this as though it were the most scandalous way of describing raunchy sex. Make LUHV.

In case I didn't know exactly which scene you were talking about—the scene you had been so impressed with when you wrote it in what? 1992? Long before you were aware of Candace Bushnell and the way a certain Samantha would influence how a generation of women viewed sex and sexuality—a scene you described briefly as "the bride and groom have a fight and then make love in the wedding coordinator's office. That's a good one." Oh my god. As I was typing this, I put "on the wedding coordinator's desk." But even that is too graphic for you. No, no. They make luuhv in a room. They don't fuck on someone's desk. Oh my god. Dear readers, you can only imagine how brilliant of a scene this must be. But [author] was still completely impressed with her handiwork more than ten years later.