I have been told to promote my book.
I have been told to do this by my (fool of an) agent; a man who, evidently, seems to believe that I possess the tools and know-how to perform such an operation.
- Start off by telling everyone you know, he says.
That didn’t take long. I only know eight people (and that includes me) and not a single one of them is a major player in the world of advertising
or public relations. Useless tossers.
So I counted up all my money and worked out that I could afford to hire the services of the great Max Clifford for 7.6 seconds! I duly hired Max and was halfway through telling him the title of my book when the time ran out. He said ‘good luck’, snatched my money and was out the door quicker than you could say ‘if you're so good at PR, how come everyone thinks you're a cunt?’ In retrospect, I probably shouldn’t have wasted four of my precious seven and a bit seconds on a pointless getting-to-know-you ice-breaker session, where I tried to guess the name of a famous celebrity he was thinking of. Still, live and learn.
- What about the blog? says the agent. Last I looked it was up to four followers!
I explained that the four followers made up exactly half of the aforementioned ‘eight people I know’ and he kicked a table over in disgust. I was forced, at this point, to remind him that the blog was wholly his idea and, that it had failed in so spectacular a fashion, was nobody’s fault but his own… certainly not the table’s anyway.
- Well, you’ll just have to start selling it then, he says. Get on that blog and tell everyone you’ve written the greatest book ever written. Shout it from the rooftops…
I told him, in no uncertain terms, that this sort of behaviour would clash horribly with all the noble principles of reticence and he promptly replied that he ‘couldn’t give two shiny shites about reticence’.
- How about I get you on
the One Show? he says. They’ve got Chris Evans now, you know?
- But Chris Evans is the living antithesis of reticence, I cried. Never in all humanity has any one man talked so much and said so little.
- These are the choices you make, he says. If you want more than eight people to ever read this thing…
- I’ll stop you there, I said. Only two of those eight people will actually read the book. And one of those will somehow find a way to read it even slower than I wrote it. About three words a day, last time. He’s the reading equivalent of continental drift.
- Whatever! he says, blowing his cool. The book’s being published in a month and if you have any desire whatsoever in it doing anything then it’s up to you to sell it!
Ok, so the book is called
The Pointless Adventures of Dartman & Cueball. Every time I tell someone that title I wince a little inside because I know what it conjures:
oh, how original. Yet another ‘hilarious’ superhero parody. Recently, it’s gotten so bad that any conversation I’ve had of the ‘I’ve written a book’ variety has always ended with me refusing to tell them the title of the book and leading them to the inevitable conclusion that not only have I not, in fact, written a book but that I lack even the wit to make up a pretend title to keep the charade ticking over a few minutes longer. I tell you, it’s hard and tiring work being me sometimes. Anyway, it
is a superhero parody and it
is hilarious but I swear to you it’s unlike anything you’ve ever read before. Whether that is because it’s brilliant or awful, I no longer know. I have been inside it too long now to judge it in any way and the more I read it the less I know. I would love it if
you could tell
me.
Synopses are hard and tend to rip the heart and soul out of any book so I won’t bother to write one here (the story is ridiculous anyway), but I will attempt to explain the spirit of it.
I think of this, not as a novel, but as a
cartoon novel. It is funny (I hope) and its single most important objective is to make the reader laugh. It is concerned with reality only up to the point that an episode of
the Simpsons or
Family Guy is concerned with reality. It is set in the real world but the real world is flexible and bendy and can move in more or less any direction required for the purpose of a joke. It is not to be taken seriously. I have written gritty reality stuff before and will almost certainly do so again but this is not it. This is my light relief and I hope that’s what it provides for the reader. Unfortunately, I can’t help thinking that the range of people who will enjoy this book is rather narrow: young adult boys (geeks) aged between 15-25 are my only certain audience, though I hope that it will appeal to all men with an open mind and a sense of humour. Girls, I fear, will hate it. That’s a shame because the only reason I do anything, ever, is on the off chance that girls or
a girl somewhere in the world will be impressed by it, but alas! no girl will be impressed by Dartman & Cueball. Still, never mind. The next book I write will be as romantic as a moonlit picnic by the Seine on midsummer night and will make any woman that reads it want to shag me (until they see me).
The last thing I will say about Dartman & Cueball before I leave you to make up your own mind about it is this: read it in small chunks rather than at a single sitting. This is something I’ve found to be true of virtually all ‘funny’ books. They are great for 10-15 minutes but, like a comedian just cracking one-liners for ninety minutes or
Naked Gun films, joke overload sets in pretty quickly and they can go from funny to irritating before you know it. So, if you’re reading
The Pointless Adventures of Dartman & Cueball and you find yourself getting irritated or angry in any way, please put it down and return to it later. Hopefully, by then, it will be funny again.
Here are a few extracts from the first couple of chapters:-
Charlie Stanley sat quiet and motionless at his desk. His face bore no
expression. His body was drained of fight and spirit. All hope had left him. His numerous failed attempts to “get rich, quick”
– his lottery predicting machine, his lottery fixing machine and his lottery
ticket forging machine, to name but a few – surrounded him, taunted him and
battered his self-esteem with their uselessness. All these get-rich-quick
schemes had done was help him get-more-poor. His shares in Enron were currently
worth less than the paper they were
printed on, and his box of 100,000 lottery scratch cards (excitedly bought
after working out the odds and realising he simply couldn’t lose) had turned
$100,000 into $4000 overnight. This $4000 was then quickly converted into 4000
more scratch cards and before you could say “you’ve got to lose money to win
money”, Charlie Stanley had lost the lot.
Now all he had to show for his efforts was a
nickel, eroded away almost to nothing, and a thin lining of dust-like silvery
shavings that covered just about everything he still owned in the damp and musty,
half-converted garage he ambitiously referred to as a lab.The whole place reeked of failure. It was on
the walls, on the ceiling, on the lightbulbs, windows, curtains, and now,
finally, it was on him. He couldn’t fight it any more. He’d given up.
“Charlie Stanley,” came a voice from behind. “Welcome to the
first day of the rest of your life.”
Before he had a chance to turn around a trigger
was squeezed, a shot was fired, and Charlie Stanley – crackpot inventor and bad-decision
maker – fell face down on his desk with a hole in his head.
–
Commissioner Wilson may not have actually seen it all before but he’d sure as hell seen most of it. He’d been on the
planet for 81 long years and had devoted 52 of those years to the noble fight
against crime. The other 29 were devoted, in no particular order, to learning
to walk, riding a bike, losing his virginity, going to college, building up a
decent collection of screws and washers, getting married, and going slowly but
surely bald as a coot.
He often told people he didn’t look like an 80-year-old man –
and out of politeness they usually agreed with him – but he did. Every gruelling
day of his 81 years clung to his wrinkled face like rust on an old Datsun and
his colleagues in the force were constantly asking when he was going to retire.
“The same day every criminal in Topham City retires,” he’d
reply.
–
Nobody seemed to have noticed, but this average-sized middle-American
city had produced more super villains down the years than the rest of the
country put together. Possibly the reason nobody had noticed was because the
super villains had the good sense (or was it simply good manners?) to not all
cause chaos at once. While one villain would be out robbing banks, hypnotizing
people and blowing things up, the rest of them would slip into hiding and
patiently wait for their turn. It was almost like they had some sort of rota
drawn up.
And it was a good thing for Topham that they did because if they’d ever
all come out to play at the same time the city would have been destroyed quicker
than you could say: “You’ll never get away with this”.
In the north-east corner of town there was Jumping Jack Flash: a man
whose face had been horribly scarred in his youth by a stray firework, leaving
him warped and deranged and hell-bent on exacting a bloody and terrifying
revenge on the whole world. Every 4th July, regular as clockwork, he
would appear and attempt to launch one huge homemade rocket into the sky. A
rocket that would blow Topham City and its neighbours to smithereens and plunge
most of America into a nuclear winter.
The west side of the city was patrolled by the mysterious Knights In
White Satin. Of this gang of reticent strangers, nothing was known except that
they dressed head to toe in white robes and roamed the streets after dark like
ghosts, occasionally carrying burning crosses to light their way.
Down south, on the weird side of the tracks (Topham technically didn’t
have a “wrong” side of the tracks but it was certainly true that south of the
railway everything suddenly got really weird for no apparent reason), lived the
Man With The Child In His Eyes. This was a man who had somehow managed to
capture a small living child within his own eyes. It was unknown whether this
had happened by accident or by design but it was clear for all to see that the
Man With The Child In His Eyes was just as freaked out about it as everyone
else. “Get it out! Get it out!” he would scream, as he ran around town
terrifying anyone who came near. Calling him a super villain was, perhaps, a
bit of a stretch though as there was no obvious way to see how having the child
in his eyes would lead him to either of the two WDs (World Domination or World
Destruction), which were generally considered to be prerequisites for super
villain status.
–
Dartman’s costume, which he’d designed himself and the Mayor had had
made for him after his homemade one fell apart, was mostly black with a large red
dartboard stretched across the chest. The board was drawn only in outline and
so looked more like an unnecessarily precise cobweb (the kind an autistic
spider might make) than a dartboard, and it was set at a classy, three-quarter
sort of angle which meant that, either by chance or by design, the bullseye sat
smack-bang on top of his heart. It is not known whether this was some sort of
arrogant boast to his enemies, kind of a “come and shoot me in the heart if you
think you’re hard enough” sort of thing, or just an ill-conceived design. It is
known, however, that Dartman has been shot in the heart on no less than 50 occasions.
Not content with simply having a target on his chest, he also had one on
his back. In the centre of his big, shiny yellow cape was a large, beautifully
embroidered red circle. It was another bullseye and fitted in nicely with the darts
theme but, again, probably wasn’t the most sensible thing for a crime fighter
to have stuck on his back. Completing the costume were a pair of knee-high
yellow boots; a yellow belt (containing darts, flights and all manner of other
useful darting apparatus); a pair of Marigold washing up gloves (suggesting the
Mayor’s budget had fallen just short of the whole costume) and a yellow mask to
preserve his identity. Again, budget cuts seemed to play a part in the design
of the mask, which changed suddenly during construction from a sleek and
elegant, cat-like number (so favoured by superheroes) to one of those slightly
frightening, full-face, woolly balaclavas (so favoured by bank robbers, rapists
and murderers). The balaclava covered his face all right but it was far from
perfect. The fact that it cut off most, if not all, of his peripheral vision
made it a little difficult for him to see things, and the complete lack of
earholes made it a little difficult for him to hear things. On top of that it
was also horribly itchy and brought him out in a nasty-looking rash each time
he wore it.
Nevertheless, Dartman liked his costume. He liked the yellow and black
combination because it made him look like a wasp and he liked the fact that the
suit was wipe clean because it meant he could wear it around the house without
having to worry about it getting all covered in greasy, spunky stains. He was
often heard to remark that his costume was “stylish and practical” and he meant it.
Cueball’s suit, on the other hand, was a little more gimcrack and was
rumoured to have been fashioned by the Mayor himself in one frenzied,
amphetamine-fuelled session on a stolen sewing machine after he blew his whole
budget on Dartman’s costume. It was a simple affair, made almost entirely out of
a cheap green felt material exactly like the one that used to cover the pool
table in The Crow Bar downtown before it mysteriously disappeared the night before
the costume was completed. There was no cape, no boots, no flashy belt full of
gadgets and joodgits, not even a mask (unless you count the pair of wraparound
sunglasses that were tossed at him, almost as an afterthought, when he
complained that everyone would know who he was). The only decoration of any
note, hastily and begrudgingly added at the last minute after Cueball had suggested
that the costume was “a bit light on logo”, was a large circle of solid white
in the middle of his chest. Like Dartman’s bullseye, this huge white circle
also made Cueball look rather like a human target, but with the added bonus of also
making him glow in the dark. This ensured that their enemies could see them
clearly and pick them off with ease, day or night.
With a view to making his costume look less like one of those cute
all-in-one romper suits for babies, Cueball had added a few homemade touches to
the green onesie: a rope belt for his waist, some red wellington boots for his
feet and some white cotton gloves for his hands. As a finishing touch, he’d
taken to wearing a pair of red boxer shorts over his leggings. These, he assured
people, were necessary to “break up the green”. Cueball’s sole weapon – a stocking
containing a white billiard ball – hung from his belt like one long, lone,
droopy bollock.
–
The Dartmobile was a Ford Escort. Just an ordinary, run-of-the-mill Ford
Escort. The only “weapons” it possessed were the windscreen washers which
Dartman had tampered with so they fired their feeble jets of water, not up at
the windscreen, but outwards to fend off any theoretical criminal or ruffian
who might be climbing up the bonnet towards them. Aside from that, and a roof-rack
that flew off suddenly whenever the brakes were applied, there was nothing. No
guns, no gadgets, no turbo thrust, cloaking device or hammerdrive; not even a
big dart on the roof or a personalised number plate – DART 180 would have been
good. It was just a Ford Escort.
While this was mostly due to laziness and a crippling lack of funds,
Dartman also reasoned, rightly for once, that having a big conspicuous car that
everyone recognised would, for a stealthy crime fighter such as himself, cause
more problems than it would solve. Much better, he thought, to creep up on them
unawares in an unassuming Ford Escort.
“Nobody will notice me until it’s too late and then… BAM!” he would
shout, smacking the dashboard and accidentally sounding the extremely loud
horn.
I would hereby like to offer you, loyal readers, a once in a lifetime opportunity to join one of the most exclusive clubs in the universe. All you have to do is buy and read my novel, The Next Big Thing, in its entirety and you’re in. I give you my word that more people have walked on the surface of the moon than have read this book.
The unorthodox 'Eastern grip' as demonstrated (badly) by Westerner, Phil Michigan. He was whitewashed in the first round, ironically, by a Chinese player using the more natural, and better, 'Western grip'.
And so this brings me neatly on to the second reason for my lengthy absence: prison.
