I Blame Ernest Hemingway

Every male writer with an ounce of testosterone owes a big debt to Papa. For example, without his example, how would James Jones, Norman Mailer, Hunter S. Thompson, or John Milius have known to pose for their publicity photos wearing safari jackets? Why, I bet they'd have showed up in some kind of wussy Tom Wolfe ice-cream suit! With a pocket handkerchief! Full article on Ezinearticles.com.

"Rubber Babes" Sneak Preview

The renowned fratirist and author of My Inflatable Friend reads from the second whimsical book in the series of Rollo Hemphill's misadventures.



The event was at Barnes & Noble last Sunday on the Santa Monica Third Street Promenade. Also reading that day were IWOSC colleagues Regina Apigo, Bob Birchard, Dr. Diane DeLaVega, Ron Vazzano, Telly Davidson, David Groves, Stephen R. Wolcott, Flo Selfman, Dale Henderson, Gail Wichert, Christine Candland, and Marvin Wolf.

Rollo Bugs the Hellraiser

I'll be reading from the *sequel* to My Inflatable Friend on Sunday, March 9, at 2 pm at Barnes & Noble on the Santa Monica Promenade. And speaking of book events...

Authors complain that their publishers and agents won't return their calls. So the recent experience of my friend Tom Page is a delight to behold. UK publisher Trashface was so obsessed with reissuing Tom's fantastique thriller The Hephaestus Plague that they literally tracked him down. Apparently unable to locate him via conventional means, the dauntless publisher ran a genealogy on him, which not only succeeded in finding the target but also links his bloodlines to King Edward III!

I caught up with Tom last Saturday at Dark Delicacies Bookstore in Burbank, where he was signing copies of the book, a creepy tale of fire-spewing bugs that threaten all we hold dear. (The story was made into the cult-movie Bug, produced by William Castle and directed by Jeannot Szwarc.)


Gerald (hatted) visits Tom Page at Dark Delicacies

Hanging out with Tom that day was another cult phenom, Peter Atkins, one of the geniuses behind the Hellraiser movies, based on the books of Clive Barker. (Peter pleads not to be confused with the Oxford professor of the same name, although that guy's popular books on the physical sciences are selling well, and a confusion about where to send royalty checks might help temporary cashflow!)


Tom Page (the Bug guy, left) and Peter Atkins (Morningstar, Wishmaster) take a break from defacing brand new books with their scrawls.

Gerald Everett Jones is the author of My Inflatable Friend: The Confessions of Rollo Hemphill. He blogs on comic fiction at Boychik Lit.

Guest Post: Maggie Ball's Rollo

Rollo gets both barrels full in the face on The Compulsive Reader site.

Magdalena Ball is a frequent guest of the boychik and the author of Sleep Before Evening.

Guest Post: Lad Lit vs. Chick Lit

Can debauchery ever be as marketable as romance?

Chick Lit
– a well established genre of writing, usually written by women for women and dealing with issues such as fashion, shopping and men. The female lead character, always good looking but she rarely knows it, stumbles from one no-good guy to another, before falling madly in love with Mr Perfect. Mr Perfect proves stubborn at first, but then comes to his senses, sweeps the girl off her feet and takes her for a romantic weekend in Paris aboard his private jet where he proposes mid-orgasm while conceiving their first set of triplets.

Lad Lit
aka Boychik Lit, Guy Lit, Dick Lit, or Fratire
– a new breed of novel, usually written by men for men and dealing with issues such as drinking, vomiting, and sex. The male lead, never good looking and he always knows it, stalks one unobtainable girl after another, before falling madly in love with a keg of beer and numbing his pain on a nightly basis. Just when all hope seems lost, he finally finds a girl who will drop her knickers in his presence and wipe the crusting vomit from his face in the morning. His life is complete.

With the definitions out of the way, we can now get down to the nitty-gritty. Let us first consider the market appeal of each of these species of book. More women read novels than men, due no doubt to their inherent capacity to multi-task. Women are freely able to read books whilst simultaneously performing activities such as bossing men around, telling men they have small penises, chatting about loser-men to their girlfriends, and boasting about how much better they are at multi-tasking than men. Being aimed at women, Chick Lit therefore clearly has the advantage in market appeal. This is particularly true as men are too busy playing video games and browsing ever more depraved pornography to even consider picking up a Lad Lit novel.

Maybe, then, we should consider the potential for multi-million dollar movie spin-offs. While gross-out comedies clearly have their place in the market, their box office pull is dwarfed by that of the chick flick. It’s not too difficult to drill down and analyse the reasons for this, which all revolve around the fact that men need sex more than women. You see, men are so desperate for a good dose of sweet lovin’ that they will happily endure another vomit-inducing Anne Hathaway movie on a Friday night. They will even put up with a tortuous 4 hour Legally Blonde DVD marathon if there is the merest sniff of some panty action to be found at the end of the night. Women, on the other hand, would much rather go without sausage for eternity than watch a Will Ferrell film or yet another sequel to American Pie.

So should Lad Lit authors resign themselves to the fact that there just isn’t the market out there to sustain a living from their smut-filled pages? Yes, we should. But in the absence of that kind of common sense, we should instead focus on making our work more chick-friendly. Love, romance and premenstrual should no longer be regarded as dirty words, and women should no longer be treated as slabs of meat to be rated, ridiculed and drooled over. Well, at least not on even and odd numbered pages. This is a new world order, where proud owners of titties and todgers are all welcome to enjoy the delights of the modern Lad Lit novel.

Craig Alan Williamson is the author of the chick-friendly Lad Lit college comedy novel ‘A Foreign Education’. He welcomes all sexes to sample the opening chapter of his book at www.CraigAlanWilliamson.com or buy the paperback from Amazon using the links below.

  

Don't Accept Imitations!

I have a Hollywood rep who is peddling the movie/TV rights to My Inflatable Friend. Now, you might think a challenge would be that the presumed subject matter is deviant, bizarre, or insufficiently squeaky for a PG-13 rating.

Think again. The biggest objection so far is--it's been done!

Mind you, these other stories bear only superficial resemblance to Rollo Hemphill's pathetic misadventure. The first of the recent ones is The Valet (La Doublure, 2006), a French movie about a hapless car jockey at a luxury hotel in Paris who gets involved in a phony love triangle. Except in this case, the real-live femaleness of the woman in question is not at all in question. She's a doll, but a fleshy one, runway model lookalike Alice Taglioni. I'm one of the five people in the U.S. who saw the movie, and I have no worries that I was ripped off or vice versa.

However, apparently the Farrelly brothers thought the story was sufficiently zany and commercial to produce an English-language remake, also titled The Valet, which some say will be released this holiday season. I can't get much advance information about its plot but unless they've squared the love triangle with a rubber doll, I doubt they ripped me off.

A lump also came to my throat when I learned about Lars and the Real Girl, a movie premiering this month starring Ryan Gosling as a lonely guy who has a delusional relationship with a lifelike silicone dummy. Turns out they used a silicone-and-steel babe from the same manufacturer I cite (with permission) in MIF. There the similarity ends.

And... at least two episodes of Boston Legal have also featured synthetic females. (From the same source I suspect: Do you see a strong resemblance between the doll Jerry had in the car to Lars' main squeeze? I do.)

But remember the magic formula of Hollywood, which could well be a Goldwynism:

Kid, gimme a new idea that stood the test of time!

There are plenty of antecedents. Closer to Lars' story than to Rollo's is the movie Mannequin (1985) in which a love affair with a fashion dummy results in a transformation to live flesh with an attitude.

That idea was nothing new at all. In the ancient myth, Pygmalion, a sculptor, falls in love with the lovely statue he calls Galatea, and his passion brings her to life. George Bernard Shaw borrowed the story to craft his Pygmalion, from which Lerner and Loewe created My Fair Lady. Somewhere along the line the girl's transformation began as a street urchin rather than a statue.

So expect the new cable-TV series (aimed squarely at the Entourage audience and the guys who didn't care that Flight of the Conchords was lame) The Misadventures of Rollo Hemphill -- I just can't give you a date. We're waiting to see whether the dummy goes SAG and holds out for Web residuals.

And if the Hollywood truism holds true, also be looking for a remake of My Fair Lady with Eliza first seen in remarkably realistic silicone and steel.

You read it here first!

Guest Post: A Male Weighs in on A Female Perspective to Boychik Lit and related topics

Well, some of my favorite female writers are women. There's Emily Bronte, Jane Austen, Edith Wharton, Virginia Wolfe, and of course some others like the beautiful poet Anne Waldman. Have I misspelled some of these names? How condescending of me. What makes these women all better writers than I? Well, they've all got teats, for one thing. Most of them had to put on a brassiere before they could go out in public, or even to write, and put it on over both teats, and that's a hard thing for me as a man to imagine. Is this mild form of sartorial torture a character-building exercise? There's no man that's as manly as Heathcliff ... and to think some poor girl had to put on her brassiere and sit down at a writing table far out on the moors and imagine the curly-haired romantic cad. I don't think the suffering that kicked the creativity into high gear came from having to lean farther over the writing table than I would have, even if I had a writing table. No, the girls had to create men in their books so that women would buy them. This is admittedly a bigger stretch for me than for a woman, and perhaps that's the fount of their creativity. For me to create fascinating, believable men is as easy as poop. But for women? The girls worked for it with their brassieres on. Didn't they?

Quentin Cain Strikes Back!

Oh, sure, Gerald can dish it out. But can he take it?

Brother Cain has choice words about My Inflatable Friend.

It's not yet a rousing debate about what's fratire and what's not--but we're getting there!

Tucker Max, you dog. Where are you?

Kerouac Is Back!

It's the fiftieth anniversary of On the Road, and here comes bad-boylit author Quentin Cain with a series of road-trip novels narrated in the first person by one Slick F. Worthy, presumably Quentin's only slightly less reputable alter ego.

Quentin knows how to construct a sentence, spin a yarn, and engage an audience. So I'm suspecting he's not the dropout he claims to be. I read Notes from the "G" Spot: The Uncensored Diaries of Slick F. Worthy, and it is indeed a slick, sick, and funny hunk of prose. Never mind that Slick not only has the predictable predicament of searching desperately for the legendary spot--but also, like most of us most of the time, he has a hard time just describing what he thinks it is. It's the pursuit of that ration of individual happiness the Constitution guarantees us the unrestricted pursuit of. That it evades Slick's detection isn't so much a surprise as the extent of sexual suffering and kink twisting he's willing to endure to find it.

You will want to peruse these Notes, particularly if: 1) you are a ninety-five pound weakling who dreams about being an NFL almost-ran with no money whose rough charm keeps him barely out of trouble, 2) you are bedridden and can't take a road trip just now, 3) you avoid casual sex for fear of STDs or because all your pickup lines fail but you're curious about what might happen if you actually went home with a hooker, or 4) if you wonder what sense Jack Kerouac might make or not make of post-digital society.

Quentin promises another Slick novel sometime soon. But he might also do well to brag that he's descended from that other Cain (not the Bible guy--James M.). Then he could do a noir story and call it The G-Man Never Asks Twice.

Fat Tire Is My Inflatable Friend

That's my beer (ale, actually). I know you can get it in the West and Southwest. Not sure whether it's distributed nationwide yet. There was a time (long before I was born, of course), that you couldn't get Coors back East, and now it's, what, in the top-three national brands? FT and Coors both started in Colorado. Not sure what that means, either. They say it's the water but municipal water and a chemist will get the job done just about anywhere on the planet. For example, one place Busch brews Bud is just over the hump from here in Van Nuys, and nobody ever claimed that L.A. water was anything special (although lots of it is snow melt from up north).

Comments encouraged on the theme of: "Why a Fat Tire Is My Inflatable Friend."

Book copies of My Inflatable Friend: The Confessions of Rollo Hemphill now on sale at a shockingly low price for your end-of-summer reading pleasure at our new eBay store LaPuerta Books and Media.

Think of LaPuerta as a micro-brewery for books, and don't forget to check your pressure every now and then.

The Mommy Angle

I've been saying for awhile now that boychik lit is hipper fratire. One reason is because the potential audience is broader. Consider the HBO series Entourage as an example. This show draws not only an audience of young men, but also older men who like to fantasize about being young and on the make again.

I'm just beginning to realize, however, that the audience is even bigger than that. In My Inflatable Friend, unlike either Entourage or the fratire novels, Rollo Hemphill is a lovable loser.

Who loves lovable male losers more than women -- of any age? That material instinct, along with the drive to procreate, is probably the most powerful force on earth!

The Truth About My Inflatable Friend

First of all, she's not my friend, she's Rollo's, since the book is a first-person confession.

Secondly, she's not inflatable. His first attempt was a gasbag, but she didn't convince anybody, and she wasn't exactly a keeper. The one he ends up with is a high-tech, lifelike, silicone-and-steel replica with articulated joints. Custom made, cost a few grand, not available at your local party store. (If you're a fan of Boston Legal, you've seen two of her sisters.)

Thirdly, the inflatable aspect stays with him. His swelling ego, as it turns out, is no friend.

[sample chapter]

Tony Soprano's Future

OK here's my considered prediction:

Tony will survive at least two more attempts on his life. He will become increasingly friendly with the Feds. Ultimately, he will offer to make a large financial contribution to a major political party. After a cursory sanitation of his background files and several visits from the spin doctors, he will be prepped as a candidate for junior senator from the state of New Jersey. Same game, higher stakes.

The theatrical feature plot takes off from there and is basically a remake of All the Kings Men.

Dan Whitman gets sucked in!

What happens when a swollen ego creates a reverse vacuum? This guy's got it bad. I've gotta hand it to him, but then again, it's not mine he wants.

Read his new rant on Allbooks Review.

Yikes! It's A-liiiiiive!

Live on Amazon.com as of today, with respectable reviews from boychiks Peter Lefcourt, Tom Blake, Gavin Sinclair, Marv Wolf, Dan Whitman, and others.

Mind Your Tips on Valentine's Day

Have a joyous day (and night), but let's all be safe. Please don't fire your weapon into the air.

Helpful Hint: Today millions of men will be subjected to the time-honored Mind Reading Test. Remember that it's strictly Pass / Fail, and you get only one guess. So take the advice I got from old Uncle Bob -- if it doesn't sparkle or smell, YOU GUESSED WRONG!

Here's hoping your Valentine is a live one!

the boychik

Gimme a new idea that stood the test of time

Boychik lit is not new. It's a new label on an old tradition. Hollywood calls it the "coming-of-age" story, and the protagonist can be male or female. These movies are usually comedies, which makes sense--there's no great tragedy for a main character who still has his whole life ahead of him to repair whatever missteps he committed in the story. In this respect, Salinger's Catcher in the Rye and Roth's Portnoy's Complaint are mainstream boychik lit.

So might be Hamlet, for that matter--if only the Prince of Denmark had been able to run away to Spain with Ophelia and start a new network marketing company...

My Inflatable Friend - online sample chapter

You don't have to speak Yiddish or even be Jewish to know what a boychik is. Anyone who has paid attention at the movies has heard the annoyed patriarch calmly lower his newspaper, clear his throat gruffly, and preface his lecture with: "Now you listen to me, boychik..."

One might suspect, therefore, that a boychik is someone deserving of a lecture. Moreover, he is a young male who, in treading on the borders of manhood, must be put in his place by the dominant male of the household. The boychik tests limits. He is an upstart, a smart-ass, a tyro, and a doofus. He is, in short (although he's heard size doesn't matter), one of us.

So, recognizing that the boychik is not yet, or might not ever become, the ball-scratching, remote-clutching stereotype of wannabe jockdom, let's follow the hapless Rollo as he ventures into the she-lion's den, there to tempt her to embark on life's adventure... [click to view PDF]

Boychik lit = hipper fratire

In the boychik-lit story…

• The male main character is looking for sex and is bewildered by emotional entanglements.
• He is a slacker and a hacker (a shlacker). He is clever and resourceful but chronically lazy.
• He’s a dropout who can’t hold a steady job.
• Far from being the hero with a single tragic flaw, the boychik is riddled with worrisome flaws, with one or two possibly redeeming qualities.
• The tone is observational and witty, sometimes sarcastic.
• The boychik tells his story in a confessional, first-person narrative.
• At the end of the novel, the hero has almost managed to undo the complicated mess he’s made in the course of the story and thinks he has learned important lessons, which may or may not be valid.

Examples? I just happen to know of a new one...