The Worst Romance Novel Ever Written (2 page)

“
This could be from the late seventies,” Dweeb #1 had said.

“
Man,” said Dweeb #2, “you should auction off this antique on EBay.”

Johnny also had several boxes of rare fanfold paper, an antique writing desk held together by soda spills, nails, and gum, and his generic laptop that still ran Windows 98.

He also had a substantial library of how-to books, all of them bought second- and third-hand.
How to Sell What You Write, The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Creative Writing, How to Sell Your First Novel, The Everything Guide to Writing a Novel, Writing Skills in Less Than 20 Minutes a Day, How to Grow a Novel, Writing Smart,
and
So You Want to Publish a Romance?
filled his shaky shelves.

But they didn’t fill his mind. Johnny had yet to read anything but their front and back covers. The titles alone inspired him to greatness.

He also had a Webster’s dictionary, a Roget’s thesaurus, a decade-old
Guide to Literary Agents
, and several cardboard boxes full of old
Writer’s Digest
magazines.

He also had plenty of time. Once away from the smell of yeast, cheese, and Hector, Johnny devoted the wee hours of the night composing, re-composing, and decomposing stories. He had rewritten several novels so often that he didn’t recognize who wrote them, wondering if it was illegal to plagiarize himself.

He had originally set out to write an American epic, a thick book that would win the National Book Award and one day the Nobel Prize. After learning that mainly Swedish and European authors won Nobel prizes for literature and after spending a week outlining the entire history of the United States from 1607 to the present, he decided that he didn’t know diddly about American history.

A single page of handwritten notes just would not suffice.

He also learned that epics were impossibly long, took many years to write, required meticulous research, were hard to publish in today’s sound-byte society, and took up entirely too much disk space on his hard drive. Writing an epic would also require more printer ink and fanfold paper unless Johnny fiddled with the margins, which a serious writer was
never
supposed to do.

An action-adventure novel captured him for a while. He wrote an amalgam of bygone summer blockbuster movies called
Live Free and Golden or Transform.
Harley, his main character, was a robot that could transform into a 1959 FLH Custom Harley Davidson motorcycle. Harley’s best robot friend Huey could become a UH-1H Huey II helicopter. Harley, Huey, and Bob, a sea lion who summered in Juneau, Alaska, and could drive a Scorpion snowmobile without opposable thumbs, and Haley, a wisecracking nine-year-old girl, teamed up with a grizzled old retired New York City cop named John Grizzly, who cussed a lot and said “thoity” instead of “thirty.” “Oh no you don’t, you rascal!” was Grizzly’s signature line. Grizzly also never shaved and rarely had enough unfiltered cigarettes to share with his mechanical friends, though he always seemed to have a lifetime supply of bullets tucked into his eerily tight jeans. All Haley ever said was “Let’s get with the program, people” while rolling her eyes and looking notoriously cute. Harley and Huey just generally shivered, broke down, and froze in place, especially when they sensed danger. When terrorists, who all sounded like Zero Mostel and wore caftans instead of down jackets, took over the Alaskan pipeline after placing explosives on the pipeline’s entire 800-mile length without being detected even by moose, the quintet swung into action, and—

Johnny gave up on
Live Free and Golden or Transform
because he had trouble working in Grizzly’s love interest, Tatiana, a hot Russian babe who had been brainwashed by the terrorists until she thought she was Lebanese.

He found himself writing science fiction next:

Thignokhrl-9 hated space. It was far too big for the average Dweezilian to comprehend. It was freaking huge and went in all freaking directions, like, forever, and it was easy to get lost since there were no good small maps. The best maps were several parsecs wide and never folded back together, and the directions for the Intergalactic GPS devices were usually written in Swedish. There were also few McDonalds this far from Earth, a dreary planet that at least had satellite radio, TV, trans fat, and Gilligan’s Island.

Thignokhrl-9 also hated Dweezil, his home planet. No one on Dweezil knew the recipe for a good bowl of New England clam chowder or Ed’s Buffalo Snort Red Chili that didn’t include sand. Thignokhrl-9, nicknamed “Thiggy,” hated sand more than he hated space. Sand the flavor and aroma of blue whale coated every surface of Dweezil. Dweezilans bottled and sold the sand as kitty litter throughout the Ruta-Baga system and as a male species libido enhancer throughout the rest of the universe, especially south Florida.

And that was Thignokhrl-9’s job. He sold intergalactic kitty litter and male species libido enhancer from the trunk of his 3027 Q-wing Vega Star Cruiser.

Thignorkhrl-9 hated his job. He worked for Jely Rol, a three-headed Anthraxian with six rolls of blubber, who, unfortunately, preferred to wear cut-off T-shirts and didn’t believe in antiperspirant …

Johnny next tried his hands at a western, using a copious amount of exclamation points because he believed the Old West was a loud place what with all the shooting, murdering, rustling, and marauding going on:

Tex carefully whipped out his trusty Bowie knife, twelve inches of steely steel. “I’ll save ye, dahlin’!!!”

“
Oh, Tex!!!” she cried in a southern accent. “Yer muh hero!!!”

Tex jumped off his fiery steed Cupcake and used his knife to deflect all six shots blasted from Evil Diesel’s Colt .45. Then Tex did a back flip over Diesel and held the seriously dented Bowie knife under Diesel’s loathsome, vile, and unshaven chin.

“
Iffen ye don’t cut it out,” Tex growled, spitting a stream of black tobacco juice on a stray horny toad’s head, “I’ll cut yer head clean off!!!”

“
Oh, Tex!!!” she cried again.

Tex deftly made several slicing motions in the air, reducing Evil Diesel’s black leather vest, chaps, pants, and snakeskin boots to shreds.

“
An’ let this be a lesson to ye,” Tex said with glee in his heart and a yellow grin on his face. “You cut up in muh town, and yer gonna git cut up, y’hear?!!!”

“
Oh, Tex!!!” she cried yet again.

Johnny thought he had a good thing going until he realized that he couldn’t visualize the “her” or the “she” in anything he wrote.

Johnny didn’t get out much.

Since Marla had dumped him three years ago, Johnny couldn’t visualize any woman in his real life either. He was a Spartan about it, however, believing he had chosen “the write road,” a hard road, a lonely road, a road of isolation and despair, a road filled with dark nights, the smell of yeast, and the pitter-patter of little mice feet. Marla didn’t want to be on that road. She had actually wanted a house without Swiss cheese walls, a reliable car from this century, and crunch-less carpeting free of mouse M&Ms. Writing by forty-watt bulb in the wee hours and delivering doughy, unhealthy, overly oregano-ed pizza from four to midnight and beyond became Johnny’s life. He had no room for love, no room for romance, no room for even one cup of coffee with a woman.

Johnny had, he thought, a date with destiny.

And he wasn’t even on any form of medication.

He had already been published—sort of. He had written a ten-page letter to a syndicated columnist asking for advice, and a truncated version had appeared in newspapers around the country:

I am a virile, employed, heterosexual, educated, well-read, not terrible looking, clean, somewhat spiritual, and easygoing 30-year-old man. I have my own place, my own car, and am debt-free. My problem? I’m not enough for the modern woman to notice. The modern woman seems to want buff, tough, filthy rich, brilliant, metro-sexual, trendy, and fashionable alpha males with beard stubble on their faces and a trust fund in their pockets. I could never be all those things. What can I do to find true love? Signed, Average Man in America

The response: “Get counseling, you freak!”

This was Johnny’s first critical review. He had saved it, of course, because even a negative review from a national source was a positive in his mind. He had even posted it on the wall above his writing space to motivate him.

“
Get counseling, you freak!” became his mantra.

Luckily, only the mice heard him mumbling it long into the night.

As a result, Johnny evolved naturally into a writer of military spy thrillers, since most of these writers seemed to need counseling, too. Johnny had seen all the Jason Bourne and James Bond movies. He had read John LeCarre and Ian Fleming, even if Fleming’s
Chitty Chitty Bang Bang
threw him for a loop. He had played
Call of Duty
and
Splinter Cell Double Agent
demos at Best Buy. All he had to do was spend half the book describing the high-tech weaponry and the other half of the book blowing up stuff while jumping all over the globe from “flashpoint to flashpoint.” It would be easy for his hero, Denzel “The Rock” Connery (codename: “Columbia”), to save the world, and because readers expected a little romance, he knew just how he would begin
In His Commander-in-Chief’s Clandestine Stealthy Super Sneaky Service
:

They had killed dear Emily, the dearest love of his life, and they would pay dearly.

“
I will bury them,” he said, pounding his fist on his kitchen table, which also doubled as a Patriot missile array if the kitchen got too hot.

He had no idea who “they” were, but he didn’t care. He looked at his store of weapons in a secret compartment in his basement that no one knew about, not even the man who installed the secret compartment to house them …

Sixty pages of exhaustive descriptions of secret, cutting-edge weaponry later, Johnny typed: “He was ready. He was armed. He was dangerous. He was—”

Tired.

Johnny was tired. He had researched weaponry for days at Janes.com and spewed it all into his laptop. With all these technical specifications getting in the way of a good story, how could he keep his thriller “taut,” a word he had seen often on the back cover of military spy thrillers? How could he keep his female readers interested unless he broke up a firefight, shootout, or some daring hand-to-hand combat for a flashback to Denzel getting romantic with dear Emily? How could he suspend readers’ disbelief that, in the middle of battle, Denzel would flash on some of dearest Emily’s innocent flesh?

“
Write what you know!” the how-to books screamed at him from their covers on his bookshelf, but how could Johnny write about what he had never experienced? How could anyone? Sure, he and Marla had gotten romantic, but that was back when Johnny was firmly in the middle of the weight charts at the doctor’s office and had several somewhat defined abs. Now he was a fringe dweller on the far right in the red section with a single, lonely ab. He could have blamed the cheese at Señor Pizza, or the sweet iced tea he drank for every meal, or the combination of the two that provided him with hours of pleasure in the bathtub every few months when he was working out a kidney stone.

But he didn’t.

It’s the life,
he realized.
I can’t very well write about it if I’m out living it, right? I have to keep my literary distance to write about the unknown effectively.

He put the spy thriller in the “Garbage” folder on his laptop and tried writing a “Contemporary Issue” novel but could only think of ranting about the life of the average “pizza guy”:

Through fog, rain, sleet, wind, hail, traffic, and blistering sun, I bring you your dinner so you don’t have to cook. I should be your hero, but I’m not.

How do you treat me? You don’t shovel your walks or porches when it snows, not even sprinkling a little salt I can track around later. You leave no lights on, don’t have house or apartment numbers, and give the worst directions imaginable. You tell me to “turn left at the old Sears,” a building that now houses a police precinct. You tell me to “drive till you get to the fire hydrant,” and I end up wasting twenty minutes looking for a dog with its leg up in the air. “You can’t miss it cuz my truck’s parked in the yard,” you tell me, and on some streets, every yard contains at least one truck.

Oh, sure. You have a nice house. I’ll bet it has a bazillion bricks in it. You want me to come inside and put the pizzas on your kitchen table. So you can show off, right?