An All Expenses Paid Vacation on the Fabulous Isle of Montserrat PLUS Why PETA Luvs Hitler

[mallorys_camera]

One of the more amusing constraints I’m writing under on the current revenue-generating project is that I am not allowed to mention a single thing about a place that might dissuade a customer from pulling out that American Express black card and immediately booking a 10 day vacation in the destination I’ve so cunningly described.

Thus when I wrote about Montserrat yesterday, I was absolutely forbidden from mentioning the fact that there isn’t any Montserrat anymore. Well. There is. But most of it’s been buried under lava and ash since the Big Volcano blew there 20 years ago.

Do you like to dive? Then Montserrat is the place for you! I wrote and proceeded to spend 500 words or so describing underwater funicles and parrotfish.

I wish I’d had the guts to write, Take a tour through the devastated capital of this modern day Pompei! The famous lifelike poses of many of the victims are not expressions of despair, but rather cadaveritic spasm, a result of the intense searing heat – But strictly speaking, this would not be true since I don’t think anybody actually died there, they were all air lifted out.

I really have fun describing those destinations that are currently on the State Department’s Advisory List!

In other news, I just watched the Joan Rivers episode of the latest season of Project Runway.

I’m kind of agnostic on the issue of Joan Rivers. On the one hand, yes, she’s physically hideous. When she was younger, she looked a bit like Debbie Reynolds. Now, she looks like Liberace. I’m pretty sure her plastic surgery addiction is just a coverup for the fact that she’s a vampire and surgery is the only way she can ensure a supply of fresh blood whenever she wants it.

On the other hand, she’s pretty fucking funny and I suspect she might write a lot of her own material – I’ve seen the gears grinding in her head before she burps out a quip. Yes, yes, I’m always biased on behalf of writers. It’s kind of like PETA and Hitler – so what if he had it in for the Yids? He was kind to animals and dammit, he was a vegetarian!

For this episode, the design-ahs crafted looks for participants in a senior Zumba class. What a coincidence that the winning design-ah paired with the senior who had tall, thin silouette and the design-ah paired with the shortest, most obviously osteoporitic senior lost.

Really, the Manhattan stylocracy is so out of touch with the way most bodies look. I'd like to see a Project Runway season where all the models were 5'4" and weighed 145 lbs. I believe those are the proportions of the average American woman.

And in other news of other news, I got an enormous if backhanded compliment yesterday from the most professionally successful of all my writerly pals. He reads this LJ. I think he's looking for someone to play Jack Abbott to his Norman Mailer. "Your style is terrific," he told me. "You've got everything it takes to be a successful commercial fiction writer. But you've got
to figure out something to write about that showcases your style. That Steinbeck book?" (He's skimmed a bit of it.) "Not it."

"B-b-but -- it's got a built-in audience!" I said. "All those Boomers following their bliss!"

"And God knows J-Beck as he's known on the street is a hot commodity in the under 30 set!" said the King of the NYT midlist. "Honey, no. Just no."

Sigh...

Comments

[robby.livejournal.com]

Will you continue with the Steinbeck novel? I've seen Joan Rivers on Celebrity Apprentice, and while she is getting quite old and even a little frail, she still has lots of energy and smarts. I have to admire her for that.

Donald Trump gave her a glowing introduction and asked how she was doing, and she replied, "I'm bankrupt!"
Just a joke, but she shocked The Donald with that quick little quip.

[mallorys-camera.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I believe in the Steinbeck novel. Ithink it's good. :-)

[alexkaufmann]

Years ago, I was in the Union Square Green Market and one of the stands had a book titled 100 Famous Vegetarians.

I asked the guy running the stand if Hitler made the list.

He insisted Hitler had not been a vegetarian-- that, like all Germans, he ate sausage.

The cognitive dissonance still amuses me.

[mallorys-camera.livejournal.com]

It amuses me too! :-)

[millysdaughter.livejournal.com]

I think if the fashion designers wanted a true challenge, they should not only be forced to design clothing for women 5'3" tall that weigh 160 lbs, the clothes must be required to look good after a full day of chasing toddlers and crawling on the floor!

[mallorys-camera.livejournal.com]

Last night I watched the Prom Dress episode. It was so irritating because not one of the judges had ever been to a prom!!! They kept babbling, "Fashion-forward! Fashion-forward" like monkeys, and I'm sorry: No American girl wants to be fashion-forward at the prom! They want a long evening gown!!!!!!

[millysdaughter.livejournal.com]

Prom girls want to look just like everybody else -- only better!

In Promspeak, fashion-forward is the winning Duct Tape dress -- with the $5,000.00 prize. It takes a highly confident (and incredibly popular!) redneck girl to pull that dress off, however...

[millysdaughter.livejournal.com]

If you just want commercial success, add a vampire for Steinbeck to defeat.

[mallorys-camera.livejournal.com]

Believe it or not, that has been suggested to me and I actually do have a supernatural creature -- I call her a shenshi and have made up this elaborate cosmology for her, but fuck it: Maybe she should just be a vampire. :-)

[millysdaughter.livejournal.com]

Vampires sell. Unicorns do not. Personally, I would much rather meet a unicorn, but there you go...

[katestine.livejournal.com]

Vampires are overdone. If you've found a supernatural creature that hasn't been done (badly) to death, more power to you.

[mallorys-camera.livejournal.com]

Shenshis are my own creation. They're neuresthenic female ghosts who live off tragic memories. :-)

My fave part of writing the rough draft, in fact, was backfiguring all this shenshi stuff into research materials Stenbeck discovers in the Carmel Library: I have a fellow traveler on Marco Polo's caravan writng about a shenshi encounter in 14th century Kotan; I have an encounter between Rudyard Kipling and a shenshi in Rangoon... Of coursee, this is all stuff I'll have to take out of the second draft. Sigh...

[chezsci.livejournal.com]

Zombies. It's zombies now. But Brad Pitt's getting ready to kill that trend with his latest summer blockbuster. No. Don't follow any trendy hooks. Follow the bliss and hammer out the Steinbeck anyway. You have the hookups and the inside track to get it out there. So drop it and see what happens. Please yourself and get it done. So what if it's not up to your potential? It's sneaking up on your potential, at least. Like Homer Simpson says, "Trying is the first step towards failure" once you figure that out then you are free.

[mallorys-camera.livejournal.com]

Well, I think my friend was coming at it more from the angle of Write What You Know, and what do I know about John Steinbeck? (Quite a bit actually -- I lived in Monterey for over a decade and Steinbeck is Monterey's number one industry.)

And I totally love being a low-brow author. I have no "literary" aspirations as such -- except for those stupid Stegner Fellowship stories and that's just because the people that run the Fellowship are pretentious twits. I mean, fuckin' Dickens was a low-brow author in his day. If it's good enough for Dickens, it's good enough for moi. :-)