Next to the Tenth

Like millions of other bloggers out there, I am pretty sure the next Great American Novel lives in my head. Well, maybe not the next, but quite possibly the next-next-next. I've got it all mapped out in my head, and it's a pretty interesting concept. I've been thinking about it for a couple of years, because sometimes really good ideas should sit and stew for a while. If it still seems like a good idea a couple of years later, then you might be on to something. Sadly, I didn't know this when I was engaged for a total of nine months. If I had sat on that for a couple of years, then I would have known, run away, little girl, run away. But I digress.

The only thing is, regarding my concept, I haven't lived enough of my life yet to make it a complete novel. It would only be about half of a novel at this point in my life. So I'm sitting on my idea, waiting for another 25 or so years to pass, and then I'm good. Actually, we might not be talking about the next-next-next Great American Novel, but more next to the tenth. We'll see. As long as it's not categorized as chick lit, all will be well in my world. I take great offense to the chick lit categorization, mainly because I find it pretty misogynistic in a really subterranean feminist sense, and I take even greater offense to the fact that women are continuing to perpetrate this label. These female authors have so much more to say than just tripe chick-y stuff, but they get sloughed off in the chick lit category. I say, let's leave the chick lit category, but to level the playing field, we need to do some re-categorization of works by male authors. And we shall call that dick lit. Because what's fair is fair, right?

But back to my novel. I've been thinking about what my photo on the book jacket would look like. I think I've already got a picture in my mind's eye of the cover art, but I need to have a phat ass photo, because that just kind of wraps the whole thing up. I hate it when I read a book and there's no picture of the author. Dammit, I want to know what they look like. If I bought your freaking book, you can at least be decent to put a pic on the inside of the back cover or something. The photos always fascinate me, because they are usually of professional quality, and if it's not, then this is their first book. If this is an author who has written some halfway scholarly non-fiction book, the photo they use is probably the same one shown on either their corporate website or the departmental website for whatever university they are tenured at. If this is a regular, albeit famous, author, then the photo is generally pretty staid, yet always classy in that I'm-rich-because-you-just-bought-another-of-my-books-and-I-can-afford-to-pay-Annie-Leibovitz-to-take-my-book-jacket-photo. Or the publishing house just took it out of their advance. Whatever, same thing.

I like to picture myself all dolled up in some really nice duds, the kind of clothes I can't really afford right now because I own children, and they in turn own my money. But I'd have some nice shit on, but the background would be kind of gritty in that inner city sense because that's a huge part of who I am and what I'm about, even though I can still bale hay and split wood like a motherfucker. I can guarantee that it wouldn't be on Belle Isle or any other island in the middle of the James River, because that's been done to death. Over it. So yeah, I'd probably be in an alley somewhere, maybe sitting next to some nasty ass dumpster or something. But then, to totally offset the clothing and the background, there would have to be that element of stupidity, because that's an even bigger part of who I am. I've given a fair amount of thought about the kind of stupidity my photo should have. Not a whole lot of stupid, but just that one thing that's totally off that would make someone look again, and think, what the fuck is she doing? I'll call that the WTF element. So here's me in this alley in downtown Richmond, standing next to a dumpster totally rocking out some Manolos, and maybe I'm pouring a can of Milwaukee's Best into a champagne flute. Or I've very casually got this huge veiny dildo dangling from one hand. Maybe we'll do a close up and I've got this ghetto-ass necklace, like the kind that say your name in cursive, but my necklace wouldn't say my name. It would say something like "I heart midget porn". It's got to be the smallest visual element of the photo, but jarring enough to to be the one thing that makes the biggest impact. I'd like to think that's how my writing is. Sometimes the shortest sentences make the biggest statements, so I need that to translate visually. In a really stupid kind of way.