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Wednesday, August 25th, 2010
2:09p - Vintage book wank exclamation mark
(Apologies for the age of this wank [2007] and the shortage of fights, but the strangeness mostly makes up for it.)

Once there was a man called Nathan Carnes. Nathan really liked exclamation marks and the word “whom”, and he wrote a book called Space Ark! so that he could use both frequently. He also liked rainbows and the Copperplate font, so he created a website to promote his opus, and found a vanity publisher who was prepared to realise his dream of the world’s most amateurish cover.

The writing was bad. Really, really bad. )

But, of course, if he’d just stopped there, it wouldn’t be a wank. What’s more, he was getting restless. During its 15 years (!) of vanity publication, the book had managed to sell only 2,700 copies (er, he says). Accordingly, Nathan sent what I assume was intended to be a query letter to literary agent Miss Snark [blog is archival], and, further, promised to let her see sample pages for the low, low price of $35!

As you can probably guess from Miss Snark’s name, this was not a wise move. )

Regrettably, I’ve been unable to find any more of Nathan’s public utterances. I am disappointed about this because I’m pretty sure every one of them is gold. Oh, well; I shall take comfort from his “reviews”, which feature an ENT specialist, one of the agents condemned by Preditors and Editors and someone who says, “Your vocabulary is one of the richest I have encountered. Wow!” (Hint: there are times when that’s not a good thing.)

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