One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Calling

It was recently revealed that J.K. Rowlings had written a novel under the pseudonym "Robert Galbraith," entitled, "The Cuckoo's Calling." After four months, the novel had only sold 1,500 copies, which could be considered respectable for a first time author named "Robert Galbraith," but it wouldn't exactly pay to keep the lights on. Since it was revealed that Robert Galbraith didn't exist, but was instead the famed author of Harry Potter, the novel has gone on to sell 100,000 times that amount. In a nutshell, this is what's wrong with the literary world.An author can write a novel that can garner critical acclaim and it can collect dust on the shelves. If that same author happens to be famous, that same novel will sell millions.
What causes this difference? You, the reader.
I've written numerous blogs about the roadblocks preventing a person from making it to print. To publish a work based on it's own merit is virtually impossible in this day and age. Even after making it to the shelves, there's no guarantee anyone will read your work. Worse still is the inability to independently publish an e-book and have it read, even if you offer it for free. Word of mouth, traffic and advertising are huge factors in being noticed in an Ocean with too many fish. "Robert Galbraith" could have written the best thing ever and still no one would take notice. As it stood, with sales the way there were, there would have been no justification to continue with a sequel to the novel until Rowlings let it slip that she was the author.
You can understand why a famous writer might use a pseudonym. There's too much pressure from fans and publishers alike to regurgitate what you've already written.There's also the fear of failure and criticism. In Rowlings case it looked as if she wanted to see if she could make it on her own. The answer she got was, "Kinda." If she'd been starting out as, "Robert Galbraith," she could have looked forward to years of painstaking work trying to inch up a ladder that shouldn't exist in the first place. It'd be like starting out in the mailroom of a company and trying to work your way up to C.E.O.. If all of this had been legit, the unsold copies of the book would have returned to the publisher in a few months, and "Robert" would have to do some serious convincing to get his next work published. After all, 1,500 copies or so at $12.99 apiece is only about $20,000. There's no telling what "Robert's" percentage of that would be, but he'd have to keep his day job for certain. As time goes by, he's less likely to sell more copies as bookstores keep their stock for only so long.

Books I Haven’t Finished Reading

The book report is a staple of the education system, despite the fact that there’s little you can add in your report that hasn’t been said before, and your mistrusting teacher will fact-check to see if you copied and part of your report in part or in whole. If you’re like me, you didn’t even bother reading some of the books you were assigned, or gave up halfway. It’s a habit I carried through Elementary school to 400 level university courses. Even today, I’ll start reading, then decide the book isn’t worth my time and toss it in a pile.

With my tablet and Google Books, I can increase that habit a thousand-fold. I’ve been meaning to read quite a few copies of classic novels I downloaded, but I haven’t had much luck. The most recent casualty is a book titled, “Ghost Stories,” written by a man with the unlikely old-timey name of Felix Octavius Carr Darley.

It’s essentially a book of ghost stories that aren’t ghost stories. Hence: false advertisement. It’s a 200+ page short story collection trying to debunk belief in ghosts by telling 2+ page stories about haunted houses where the real culprit is really the family dog, or a drunken brother. It’s like Scooby-Doo without all the Scooby Snacks and rubber masks. Basically they’re scary stories that aren’t scary and there’s a narrative at the end of each story explaining how it was never a ghost, but an equally unlikely situation that was responsible for each haunting. CASE CLOSED! Really, the book is an asshole. I don’t know if books themselves can be assholes, or it’s the author, but this book is an asshole. It reminds me of those books I read as a kid like Encyclopaedia Brown that were full of two-page mysteries you were supposed to solve yourself before reading the solution, which made less sense than what you’d been thinking of. Also, since the stories are all made up, it’s not like it’s using any factual evidence to debunk myths, like Mythbusters does. The author could have taken the time to research real incidents, since he’s claiming that the belief in ghosts and stories about them are commonplace. That doesn’t happen. The whole time you’re reading this book you’re thinking, “You know what would have been better than there not being a ghost? If there’d been a ghost. That would be interesting.” If you took this book, edited out the last few paragraphs about how stupid everyone in the story was for thinking there was a ghost, and have them be violently ripped to shreds by hands from Hell, then you’d have a book.

Ironically, having died in 1888, the author is now a ghost.

Life of Pi

I haven’t read, “Life of Pi,” nor have I seen the movie, but from what I can gather it’s “Moby Dick,” only the whale is a tiger, and it’s in the fucking boat with him. When I was a young writer, I would read advice on how to make it in publishing, (Phil’s Pro-Tip: You can't). One of the first rules was to never write a, “Moby Dick,” story, because it would just be sent back to you with a rejection letter. It’s good to know, many years later, that I should have ignored that advice and plagiarized the shit out of someone else’s work. I’m not even talking about, “Moby Dick,” in this case. The author of, “Life of Pi,” was accused of plagiarizing another author’s work.

This Thursday is, “Pi Day,” because it’s March 14th. I just thought I’d tell you that in advanced, because you might want to filter your more annoying facebook friends now.

Pi, itself, is an illogical number. It supposedly goes on forever. Scientists and mathematicians (nerds) have tried numerous times to find a way to find the last digit, or the point at which it repeats itself. They’ve even calculated the type of computer it would take and how long it would take the average 1980’s computer to complete the calculation. Fact checking that the computer itself was correct if it ever does finish would take multiple generations. Really, though, if you guess which number is the last, you have a 1-in-10 chance of being right.

The real issue is that because of the absurdity of Pi it is impossible to 100% accurately calculate the circumference of a circle using it as a formula. You’ll always be off by the amount of decimal points you decided to stop counting. Meaning, Math is basically giving up. So celebrating Pi is celebrating human failure.

Fifty Shades of the Olympics

Am I the only one that noticed the Olympic opening ceremony contained Harry Potter/Marry Poppins Slash fiction?

Seeing them both on stage together made perfect sense. Marry Poppins, of course, is a witch. No one likes to talk about her being a witch, but she’s a straight up witch. I don’t know how she came about her magical powers. Maybe everyone in England is secretly magic, or maybe she fucked the devil. What’s important is that she fits seamlessly into the Harry Potter universe.

Which brings up the possibility of erotic fan fiction.

On the note of popular fictional characters fucking, Fifty Shades of Grey is a multi-million dollar selling series of novels. They’re also, by all accounts, terrible. I personally have no clue what the fuck they’re about. Like literally no idea. All I know is that it includes boning and it’s basically fan-fic. I don’t even know what characters it’s purportedly ripping off. Given recent trends, I’d assume Dracula, because hey, “Vampires.” It’d be far more awesome if it was Oscar Wilde’s character, Dorian Gray, then the title would make sense, although using one of history’s most renowned homosexual’s character in an erotic novel intended for hetero, idiot women would be a stretch.

I’m all for ladies masturbating, but about twenty years ago, I started writing a book at the tender age of twelve. It was called, “Shades of Grey,” so I’m a little bitter. You can buy a copy on Amazon for Kindle, in it’s unedited format. I assure you it predates the erotic novel, but be warned: it has nothing to do with penises going into vaginas, but you can interpret it however you wish.

Obviously, I’m missing out on millions of dollar by not tapping into the lucrative “fan-fic” market. There’s no such thing as good fan-fic, of course, so quality doesn’t matter. What matters is not being sued senseless by Time-Warner and Disney.

Well too bad, mega-corporations, because I’m about to tear you a new asshole!

Tentative titles for my work:

Marry Poppins VS. Voldemort:

The Sexoning

Sex Hex

The Whoreacruxes

Marry’s-a-Poppin’

Good God, how do I do it?

Possible lines of dialogue:

“What a big snake you have.”

“Use your Elder wand!”

“I’m going to sweep out your chimney.”

“Just spoonful of sugar make the medicine go down… on you!”

“Your ass is practically perfect in every way.”

“Not having a nose makes it easier for me to stay down there.”

“ENGORGIO!”

“Use the umbrella!”

“Let’s have a pee party on the ceiling.”

“Two points for Slytherin!”

Did you cum yet? Then see a doctor.

The Dan Brown Method

Setting: Some place Dan Brown wants to visit on his next trip. Everything regarding setting must read like a brochure.
Props: Some weird-ass cipher/pyramid/painting with a secret clue that should work like a prize in a cereal box.
Person A: *Gives Person B a sarcastic look* “You didn’t know that {insert wikipedia entry here}?”
Person B: *Overtly incredulous reaction to boring information. (Person B must be more fascinated by what they just heard than the fact they’re being chased by an albino serial killer.)* “But that would mean…!”
Person A: *Nods* “The Freemason Illuminati Templar Knights!”
Killer: *Enters scene. (Killer must be deaf/albino/completely covered in tattoos/Catholic or have some other facet that would immediately separate him from the rest of society.)* “Bwa-ha-ha-ha! Give me the clue!”
Person A/Person B: *Run frantically. Running should take up the next eighteen chapters. Chapters must only be one page long. Person A/Person B find Person C.*
Person A: “We need help!”
Person C: “I’m secretly evil!”
Person A/Person B: *More running. People close to Person A/Person B will be killed. Neither Person should have any strong reaction to that, they’re so entranced by the Benjamin Franklin sudoku puzzle they have to solve.*
Person B: “Wait, we’ve been doing this wrong! The clue actually means {insert wikipedia entry here}.” *More running.*
Person A: “Gasp! The truth! It’s {insert Glen Beck conspiracy theory in here}.” *Neither Person A/Person B will attempt to use new knowledge for financial gain/advancement of civilization, because they’re too “classy” for that.*
Dan Brown: *Does a line of cocaine off a hooker’s back.*
The End

  

The Intermission

Ever since I moved out of my parent’s house and moved out on my own, I basically stopped reading books. This period lasted for about seven years or so, wherein I’d play video games and dick around on the internet instead of reading. There’d be the occasional novel here and there, but I’m guessing less than twelve altogether. This is interesting because:
1: I’m an English Major.
2: I’m a failed novelist.
3: I’m a huge fucking nerd.
Reading had become more of a chore than a past time. Plots became all too predictable and characters unsympathetic. I’d forgotten what had turned me off to reading in general, when I picked up an old book I’d left at my parent’s house.
It was, of course, Steven King. I rarely had picked up a book without finishing it, but in this case, I had made an exception. I’d gone about four hundred or so pages into the novel and then given up with three hundred to go. Considering this was book four, that was quite the commitment to make and then back out.
The book was The Dark Tower Book IV: Wizard and Glass. After three novels depicting the journey of the main character Roland to the titular Dark Tower, Steven King finally delves into his elusive past through a framework story. It is the retelling of Roland’s life through Roland himself. Only: instead of using a first person narrative, it uses a third person perspective. Essentially, it’s two novels in one, as the one does not co-mingle with the framework due to this ham-fisted neglect of narration. The novel itself could have been edited and placed as a prologue to the series proper instead of being injected in the middle like a mockery of Kurt Vonnegut, except that I doubt the series would have made it far were this the case, for Steven King is an author of horror and suspense: this is a western romance.
It starts off promising as the younger Roland has to train for what will become a lifetime of gunslinging murder, then, as soon as it develops the romantic plot, falls apart. We know how each character in the book is destined, as it foreshadows endlessly. The word, “ka,” meaning a kind of cruel fate is used on almost every page. Roland: first off, is fourteen at the time this is all unfurling. I don’t remember quite what it was like when I was fourteen, but it didn’t involve getting laid and shooting people’s heads off. It’s like a kind of adolescent fantasy reserved for comic books smuggled inside of mainstream paperbacks. I’ll read a Batman comic featuring a fourteen-year-old Robin taking down a three-hundred-pound man, and think to myself, “This is retarded,” even for a comic directed mainly at teenagers. Now change this to a novel with a broad age-range demographic. I couldn’t even bring myself to think of Roland as a scrawny Harry Potter-esque fourteen-year-old. It was disrespectful.
The book is fraught with the fault of all fantasy novels, which is to say: cutting away to the supporting cast. If you’re reading a series like Lord of the Rings, you’ll know what I’m talking about. The series begins with a single group of characters, who split into separate groups, and the story will break away to follow each group. Two chapters will be dedicated to Frodo and Sam, then two to Merry and Pippin, then two to Aragon, then one for Gandalf, and so on and so forth, until you forget what the hell Frodo’s supposed to be doing: which is throwing a ring in a volcano. The story here is supposed to be Roland’s exclusively, but every few pages it skips away to another character in the book. While most of this relates to the main character and his story, some of it has no bearing at all. For instance, there’s several pages devoted to a bartender investigating the sounds of screams only to discover a blood-like swath of dust blowing over the moon. I couldn’t even find a reference to the main character or secondaries ever having even encountered this man. The story could therefore have been whittled down from seven hundred pages of tripe to a modest and average three hundred or so.
The “love” story in this book is of a puppy-dog teenage variety, and therefore of the worse kind, and it’s being handled by a man who typically writes about alien sewer clowns murdering children. The pair pine for each other longingly, then meet up and have under-aged sexual congress. It’s basically kiddie porn, unless you’re of a like mind to myself, imagining an older Roland in his place.
I can scarcely recall the rest, as nearly five years or more spanned the time I picked up the book, put it down, and then picked it back up again. It had yellowed with age and took upon that library scent. If it wasn’t for the creases I’d never known where I had left off. I think I could have picked any point in the story itself without missing overly much. As I said, the book is a fantasy novel, and it’s in the quest variety. Quests are typically adventures, where the meat of the story is between point A and B. In this book, everything before the climax is just empty filler. You want to get to B without having to make any stops, and not because the story is so gripping. It’s like driving through cornfields on the way to the outlet mall: it’s boring along the way and disappointing when you get there.
Then the story snaps back to “reality,” where the older Roland is telling the story to his ka-tet. At this point, you should have forgotten their names, who they are, and what they’re doing. It clumsily explains that a magic ball made the telling of al perspectives in the story possible, and that the story itself which would have taken about a week solid to tell someone had only lasted a few short hours. Then it gets into some Wizard of Oz rip-off shit. You’re reminded that the characters are still nowhere close to their destination: the Dark Tower, and sent on your way.
It’s not a terrible book, nor unreadable, although for the longest time I refused to read it. I think it reminded me too much of the Wheel of Time saga by Robert “I’m Dead Now” Jordan. I think that’s really what killed my love of books and all things living.
For those of you who don’t know, The Wheel of Time saga is a never ending series of books. The author himself has died about halfway through writing them, and passed on his work to some poor schmuck who now has to salvage this debacle. Each book in the series is about 1000 pages long, monotonous, and sexist. The entire premise is that the main character is super-magic and must defeat the proverbial devil. My complaints about fantasy novels tarrying too long on supporting characters is taken to absolute extreme in this series. There’s a cast of thousands, with each nearly identical character receiving a garish amount of attention and detail. The details are nearly all the same. Robert Jordan is accused of having only two kinds of women in his books. Both are catty, manipulative, ear-pulling bitches, so there’s not reason to even make that distinction. The men are all dumb as fuck and lead around blindly by these Sarah Palin types.
The worst part in the drawn-out series was when at the end of one book, the main character had successfully expunged a problem which prevented the men from becoming sane, full-fledged magicians in a world ruled by literal witches. It was the prefect starting point for an escalation and acceleration towards a climax involving magical Armageddon. It could have been like the Matrix meets tits in 3-D, and everyone gets free slurpees. The next book, taking place directly after these events, makes no mention of it. 1000+ pages, and nothing progresses. It’s like American politics. Seriously: IT’S LIKE AMERICAN POLITICS.
In short: it killed my very spiritual essence. I could almost see it escape by body like a misty breath on a cold morning. Robert Jordan is in hell now, but as it’s chief mechanic. His books are like WoW. Endless grinding, characters searing for allies and artifacts in preparation for a final battle that never comes.

   

The Downward Spiral of Humanity

This article is, of course, about The Jersey Shore. Not the TV show, necessarily, but rather it’s spin-off into other brands of media, like books. I went to Chapters yesterday, and noticed a strange trend. Where there should be books about political intrigue and cooking and whatnot, there were instead books written about reality shows. Do people that spend all day in front of a TV watching reality shows read books? Do they want to read a book about a show they’ve just spent the last nine hours watching a marathon of? If you’ve ever been the the Fantasy or Science Fiction section of any bookstore, you’ll realize the answer is yes. There, you’ll find that 33% of the section is devoted to media-tie-in products. Why should the rest of the store be any different?
I picked up a novel that claimed to be written by Nicole “Snooki” Polizzi, A Shore Thing.

A woman whose hair takes up half the cover. I opened it and turned to a page at random. There, the character discussed denim panties as a fashion faux-paus. I put the book back down, feeling ill. Clearly, this was a work on the level of The Great Gatsby. My deepest fear is that this will be turned into a movie.
Further into the store, I found this:


The Rules According to JWOWW. (Am I supposed to capitalize all those letters?) Shore-Tested Secrets on Landing a Mint Guy, Staying Fresh to Death, and Kicking the Competition to the Curb. I assume the secret advice is as follows:
Step 1: Dress like a slut. THE END.
Yet, the book goes on for a hundred pages or more. I couldn’t bring myself to open it, because I assume that it would be like the graveyard scene from Army of Darkness. The book could very well be the Necronomicon.
Why would anyone take advice from anyone on the cast of Jersey Shore? Even in jest? My mind can’t even get around that question. There’s nothing you can learn from the Jersey Shore that you can’t learn by spending a night in the drunk tank. If you’ve ever read a pamphlet on S.T.D.s, then you’re ahead of the game. Their only field of expertise is maintaining their haircuts, and perhaps eating pasta while standing.
Of course, according to Amazon, people who bought this book were also likely to buy this:

Here’s the Situation by Mike “The Situation” Sorrentino. I like how they have to put their full names down, because you wouldn’t want to confuse him with any of the other, “The Situation”s out there. I know that if I hear about “the situation” in Libya on the news, I automatically think of The Jersey Shore unless they give me specifics about an uprising. If you buy this book, you’re saying one thing and one thing only to the people who can see it’s cover, and that’s how you no longer have any respect for yourself as a human being. You know all those romance novels with the racy covers with the dudes that make you wonder what lonely, desperate woman would ever have this out in public? Well here’s something even trashier. Put your fucking shirt back down. You’ve done some sit-ups, and I get that. I have to imagine that the entire book is about your work-out routine and hair gel.
While in Chapters, I overheard a conversation between a customer and a clerk, and basically they were both saying that they didn’t have any copies of To Kill a Mockingbird. One of the greatest American novels ever written, and they don’t fucking have it. They have this horse shit, but not a classic like that. It’s as if their very presence in the store made the other books get up and leave. I’m lucky I don’t smoke, because if I had a lighter on me I’d torch that place to the ground and stand triumphantly arms outstretched over the roaring flames.
This isn’t even scratching the surface of the Jersey Shore book collection, but I did find this online:

Snooki in Wonderland for .99 cents as an e-book. This is possibly the greatest thing ever. I can safely say that even without cracking it’s cover. Were I a publisher, and this came into my office, I would immediately start writing cheques. I had to browse through the sample chapter and it’s basically the same concept as Pride & Prejudice & Zombies. It’s also probably garbage, but I’d like to imagine my own, better book.

   

Moby’s Dick

Anyone who has gone through the educational system knows that English class is a glorified book club. You’re expected to read whatever tripe gets put on your desk and report back with the standard essay. Your teacher will claim to want originality from you, but you’re the 124,928,123rd person to write a paper on a book every student has to read in every school across the country. Originality is impossible. Should you try to obtain this elusive beast in your essay, you’ll have to enter into the fringes of the churning abyss. It’s a fine line to walk, and the slightest misstep will sweep you away under the waters of madness.
Take for example: Moby Dick. The white whale is an excruciatingly prolonged metaphor for God, which is supposed to blow your mind, assuming that you’re appropriately stoned and easily impressed.
So what if Moby Dick really was God? God is just essentially an unobtainable metaphor, and Moby Dick is a metaphor for God. If Captain Ahab were to kill Moby Dick, would that mean he’s factually killing God? Yes. If God’s dead, how can the universe continue to exist? It can’t. The reason Ahab therefore fails in his quest and is dragged down into the briny depths of the Ocean with his hated killer isn’t because of his hubris, but rather because of the essential paradox he creates otherwise. Say that Ahab kills God/Moby Dick, or Godby Dick as I call him: he’s killing the universe’s source of perpetuation. Without God, all time and space collapses in upon itself, creating a vast nothingness. No time means no past. No past means that the events leading up to the universe being destroyed could never have taken place to begin with. Thusly: reality is thrown into a loop until an outcome allows the events to skip over God being killed: so Ahab is killed in Moby’s place. Also: Moby is a giant fucking whale.
Let me explain using Batman:

Batman has to “kill” Darkseid, whom as one of the New Gods is a metaphor for God as well. In a way, Darkseid is Batman’s Moby Dick, but unlike Ahab, Batman doesn’t fuck it up, because he’s Batman. He uses bullets that travel back in time, and in simultaneous retaliation, Darkseid’s Omega Beam eyes “kill” Batman by unsticking him in time, turning him into a living bomb that will accumulate Omega energy until he returns to his point of origin and destroy reality itself.
Fact is, Batman’s dealing in metaphors. The gun he’s using is the metaphor for every gun, and the bullet is the metaphor for every bullet, and he’s just a metaphor for a bat. Fortunately, Batman is also the World’s Greatest Detective and becomes self-aware of the fact that he’s aware of the fact that he’s a metaphor for himself. Thus, he stops Darkseid’s evil plan and saves the universe and we’re aware of all of these facts by proxy because the universe wasn’t destroyed. I mean that literally: Batman would have destroyed the universe by killing Darkseid had he not gone through these steps. So: Moby Dick is “dead,” but we’re still here.
Ahab’s an archtype as well, but he’s not Batman. So, if he killed Moby Dick, that would have been it for everyone. On a subconscious level, Heman Melville must have understood that his own shitty writing would have gotten us all killed and stopped himself short of being awesome. That’s what happened with Samuel Taylor Colridge and Kubla Khan. The opiates wore off and he tore up the original manuscript, because it would have killed us all. In all likelihood, Nathaniel Hawthorne probably saw what Melville was up to and warned him off, while fending off his homosexual advances. This happens in all cases of End of the World prophecies. Recently: the May 21st/2011 apocalypse came and went without us knowing. The world did end, just like it did in Y2K, but the self-correcting nature of reality smoothed everything out. The world is destroyed just by believing it’s destroyed. Factually committing a powerful metaphor like this into print ensures it stays destroyed.
So take that: English Professor, and stuff it in your hipster retro pipe. Is that original enough for you? Arguing with me is like arguing with Batman, it gets you dropped off a building. If I submitted this in Grade 11, you know what it would have got me? An F+. They’ll want to punish my ideas as being too “revolutionary,” but still they’d be too afraid, because they’d know that anything with Batman in it can’t be wrong, except for Batman and Robin.

Zombie-Fic

Having avoided the bookstore due to a general disassociation with the lower forms of literature I once loved and a lifestyle that affords me less time to pursue such endeavours, I happened to discover that a new genre has emerge in my long absence. That genre is zombie fiction, a subgroup of the horror genre, but due to the increase in volume is fast becoming a genre unto itself.
I had gone to the bookstore specifically looking for a book of this genre after having read about it online, and had not known how popular it was going to be. I went to Chapters thinking it would be a hard-to-find item that they specialize in, and was delighted to see it was front and centre. I did not realize this until I was on my way out, so convinced I was that the novel in question would only be found by a computer search. By the doors, I found it accompanying ten other books in the same vein, but I had to restrict myself to a single purchase.
It had also become a New York Times best seller, according to the logo emblazoned on the cover. This I had not expected, but I was not surprised. After all, it was a classic, Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen, with an entrepreneur adding, “and Zombies,” to the title.
Truthfully, this is an accurate title for the work, as it is Jane Austen’s original work with references to zombies added in. This is usually a passing reference made every page or so, with words added like, “zombies,” “unmentionables,” “deadly,” “musket,” “dagger,” and “plague.” When speaking of the sisters in the work, it may mention how refined they are in culture, as they are in the deadly arts. And so it goes. If a character should have to travel for any length upon the open road, they will be set upon by zombies. This may break away to an action sequence, involving heads being split open and zombie faces being kicked in, etc. Perhaps they’ll be at the ball, and zombies will suddenly burst in through the windows and begin devouring the guests, and the girls will have to fend them off with skills they learned in the Orient. It’s basically Classic Lit. for people with short-attention spans. There’s illustrations to go along with these asides, showing the ladies with their swords in hand.
The rest is the work of Jane Austen. If you are unfamiliar with the work, it’s basically about a group of sisters trying desperately to get laid. The modern equivalent would be American Pie. Of course, these were gentler times, and to get laid one must first be married, and sex is never mentioned, but it’s there in the subtext. Jane Austen was a horny old bitch.

Thoughts on the Voynich Manuscript

An ancient document etched onto vellum, containing a language that no man on earth can read. Believed to be an elaborate code of some kind, but the document, running between 240-280 pages, also contains numerous drawings of a fantastical nature, mainly involving nude women bathing, herbs, and astronomical charts. Some aspects of the document may have been altered since it’s first inception, especially in regards to the drawings themselves, and the arrangement of pages. Exact age of the document is unknown. Rumoured to be either 400, or 100 years of age.
Personal thoughts: While the document is assumingly coded, most documents of this nature are discrete works kept mainly to hide secret thoughts. The drawings in this work draw undue attention to it. It is meant to be read, but has been written in it’s own language. The populous theory is that the work is a forgery, but to what purpose? A work of this length would take quite some effort. While forge a work so that no one could read it? The appeal would be limited. If it was a forgery, it would have to be tailored to a specific buyer.
What if the author had created a work to express certain thoughts and feelings that otherwise could not be expressed? Such as those in a dream?
My theory is only given credence by the fact that in a dream, written words can not be properly read, as this is a function of the left brain, and dreaming is of the right. The author could be copying something he read inside a dream. In other words: gibberish, which can only be understood in the context of the dream itself. The drawings of non-existent things further evoke upon this theorem.
It’s a dream journal, written in dream-speak.
What interest me the most is the elaborate star charts. These could be a virtual map of the dream-world itself. A whorlgog.

Proof!

After shuffling through the closet of my old room at my parent's house yesterday, I discovered my collection of rejection letters from various publishers across the globe (although 99% of them are from New York {Note: it's not pronounced Jew York} so it can't really be called "the globe," just five miles of it. Amidst these was a single acceptance letter from The Claremont Review. Yes, I put in a hyperlink for you, because no one can be expected to know what The Claremont Review is. It's an anthology for young writers with works submitted by high school kids, so it's kind of like getting a story published in a school newspaper, and then having that newspaper section expanded a hundred pages or so, but honestly: some of this stuff isn't that bad. If you've ever been in an English Class and has to read or be read another student's story and thought to yourself, "That's not that bad," that's the kind of stuff you'll find in here.
Guess who's in Volume #14, though? Me, baby, me! "Heads," by Philip Allen was submitted as part of my Grade 12 Writing class. My fellow student Graeme Abernathy also had, "Head Jazz," published. Those titles may be similar, but bear in mind that my story, "Heads," is literally about heads. Two of them, hence the plural.
Having been reminded of my old submission, I now have internet documentation that I'm a published author, albeit an unpaid one (I didn't even get the fucking free copy I was promised, and these douchebags don't pay out. That's how it doesn't pay to be a writer. There's only like ten people who've ever made any money writing books. You can fill up an entire shelf at the library and still have to work at KFC unless your name's J.K. Rowling. Bitch. Seriously, do you know how much some people make per book, at a minimum? $5,000. Think you can be self-supporting off of those funds? Hells no. That's four books a year you'd have to write to even be making the equivalent of minimum wage. Ever notice how some authors take years between books? It took J.K. Rowling nearly a decade to pump out her seven books, and she had a machine pumping cash directly up her tight asshole. No one's that prolific.)
So in summation, I am a published author, and it is apparently possible to order a copy of the book I was published in, for $7.00 plus shipping and handling. Or, you could order a tasty Baconator Combo at Wendy's. The choice is yours.

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