Ok, I was going to include something in the title there about Britney Spears or her little sister (not so little anymore, I guess) but I feel mean taking pot shots at that infinitely sad family so I stuck with Prince. Â My beloved husband has been amusing himself with trying to come up with something controversial that would get me and my books some ink. It seems that as a society our titillation with tragedy and bad behavior knows no bounds. Sad, but true.“How” I mutter to myself cackling evilly. “Can I turn it to my advantage?”
I’m not being completely serious here even though through the encouragement of my five-year old son, I can cackle with the best of them. It’s just fun tossing these ideas around the dinner table.
So far he (my husband) has come up with me systematically getting kicked out of every bar in NYC- but who knows how long that would take? And also I just don’t have the stomach for that kind of drinking or the imagination to come up with something so awful that I would get kicked out of a NYC bar ’cause those bouncers have pretty much seen everything. And, incidentally, as I keep telling my husband, I am a children’s author and we don’t do that sort of thing. Â But that’s the point, he tells me.
He also thought I might get a few inches of ink if I devoured our 9 month old. Vegetarian kid’s lit author eats baby! prompted by voices in the TV.
Ewww. Let me say in his defense that we’ve been watching old episodes of the X Files back to back
By far his best suggestion has been to stage a book burning. Get the religious right all riled up about Feltus. I did have a run in with a sweet old church-goer once who took exception to the name ‘feltus ovalton’. I had a bumper sticker on my car that read ‘I (heart) Feltus Ovalton’.
I guess she thought it sounded like some unspeakable act and she was hardly mollified when I explained it to her, just glared at me, mouthing the words, and then drove off speedily. You-know -who’s books raised a fervor of righteous indignation because of all the magic. And because of course she’s sold millions of copies to malleable young minds who might turn to the dark side. If she wasn’t so successful she’d hardly warrant the attention.
There is magic in my books but not done by Feltus who only has enough arcane blood in his veins to make his ears hairy. Most of the magic is done by a toad and since my toad readership must be less than 1% I can hardly be accused of warping and mis-directing children or amphibians. I have no idea how you-know-who’s declaration that Dumbledore was gay was received by the morally indignant but I’d guess, not well and not with any approval.
I was talking this over with my successful writer friend. She pointed out that I do know a priest- a cool one with a sense of the ridiculous, and that there are some nebulous types in my books. Maybe we could set something up, make a stink. If you ferret around long enough you can twist anything to your cause.
(Dirty Mind- another great Prince song. And hey, what’s up with the clothing he wears?)
For example: The PoodleRats are male creatures and live in a colony; Great Aunt Eunida and Winston the toad are in a relationship; the angelic-appearing member of the Patrol, Dare Al Luce (Italian for ‘give to the light’ which has come to also mean ‘to give birth’) looks like a beautiful woman but seems male and is as Eunida says ‘like a snail’ meaning hermaphroditic. Dare Al Luce confuses Feltus a lot. Could I twist these details and turn them into some kind of subversive message? I guess so, but I don’t have a hidden agenda. I write fantasy and in my perfect, imaginary world people (& creatures) are different, perplexing, challenging, non-conformist, flawed, and accepted, and that, as far as I’m concerned is how it should be.
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This conversation you had with your husband reminds me of a conversation we had with one of my painter grandfathers (I had two of them!) about how to promote his paintings. I was 8 years old, and I offered to become famous so I could promote his work. My mom said, “How about you stand on top of the Empire State Building and throw them down at the people passing by?” We had visions of people getting konked on the head with paintings and then saying, “Hey, nice work! Where can we get more?”
By the way, what do you make of this? Talk about controversy:
http://www.mediabistro.com/galleycat/authors/is_having_an_imaginary_publicist_so_wrong_73917.asp?c=rss
Thanks for sending me the link to the ‘invisible publicist’ article. Very interesting. I, personally, see nothing wrong with what he did. It’s so hard to get attention as a new author even if you’re not self-published, and most of us can’t afford to hire a publicist ourselves.
Your story about throwing paintings is hilarious.
Check out my previous blog about self-promotion.
And thanks for stopping by.