Writing a Book - Humor Writing from Michael Long

by Michael Long

Writing a book sounds like a great idea, and it is, but in some ways it has ruined things that I used to enjoy. Book stores are now torture. I used to love book stores. I could spend hours in Barnes & Noble leaving thumb prints on the insides of all those new copies while nursing a 99-cent cup of coffee. I wasn’t the only one with this idea. Due to their liberal homeless policies, the downtown Seattle Barnes and Noble smells like a bum’s jockstrap and you need a fifty-seven digit alphanumeric password to get anywhere near the restroom.

Despite all of this I have to give the Barnes & Noble staff credit. They put up with a lot of shit and they still manage to clean up everyone’s mess with a smile. I miss Barnes & Noble. I miss the hours I spent reading the Economist and flipping through the basketball magazines. The store just reminds me of what a failure I am. I can’t stand to look at three thousand square feet of books by successful published authors without being overcome with jealousy.

I annoy my wife by making bitter little comments any time we walk past the new releases table. “I can’t believe that won the Pulitzer Prize. I would give my right nut for the Pulitzer Prize.” Can you imagine V.S. Naipal or Solomon Rushdie saying something so crass and immature? This comment alone illustrates why I have little chance of winning the Pulitzer Prize or any other prize for literature.

I self-published my book -- not the most dignified way to see your name in print. I paid almost twelve hundred dollars in total to get my book Obscure Dead Celebrities in some kind of format that I could show to friends and family. Thankfully, I’ve found that most people don’t know enough about the publishing world to know that the book is self- published. They assume that you are a wealthy, successful author as soon as they see your book in print.

Name dropping and making vague references to famous friends and a second home upstate can help add to this misconception. Even though you don’t have the money or acclaim that comes with literary celebrity, you can still achieve the jealous respect from friends and family that makes the entire writing process worthwhile.

Luckily for me, I don’t really need money. Not that I’ve got a lot of it. It’s just that I have never really liked the type of people that have money like home owners, with all of their self-righteous ideals about oral hygiene and underage Asian hookers. Never really seemed like my kind of people. I’ve always been attracted to the type of people that can barely keep it together.

It’s not just the people either. I don’t even want the trappings of wealth and prosperity. I am repulsed by fancy foreign cars. Any flashy expensive car says to the world “Hey, look at me,” while the rusted Dodge Aries K that I drive make a simpler statement of “fuck you”.