Writing and Sex

February 26, 2008

Yesterday, in lieu of being a productive member of society, I spent some time dithering around on the internet (shocking, I know) and one of the things I came across was a video of Joe (J.A.) Konrath at a book talk.

Now, Joe's a good guy and he blurbed The Devil's Pitchfork. Which is why I found it amusing, because Joe mentioned that he had edited an anthology, which he described being "like a prostitute that doesn't get paid. You don't have the satisfaction and you don't have the money."

You can generally count on Joe to have something funny and typically bawdy (to be nice) to say. Here's what Joe had to say about The Devil's Pitchfork: "Gripping. Unrelenting. Terrifying. Terry has created a bioterrorism thriller that will make you skip food, sex, and sleep to finish reading."

My web designer said, "It's a nice blurb, but Joe always manages to fit sex into his blurbs."

I was sorry I wasn't on the panel with Joe because it would have given me the rare opportunity to be a smartass in front of a crowd. I could have said, "I don't know, I think being the editor of an anthology is like being in Mission Control at NASA. It's fun, but you'd rather ride the rocket." And then see if anyone else could come up with a simile for being the editor of an anthology. I mean, these book panels are not riotously entertaining, so anything you can do to liven them up helps, as far as I'm concerned.

Anyway, as I was slipping and sliding through the snow and ice this morning with Frodo, I thought, why don't you ask your blog readers to do something like that. Might be amusing. (So, I might add, would be a vacation on a tropical beach with a strawberry margarita in hand, but it's less likely to happen).

So, here we are.

Writing is like masturbation. It's kind of fun, but it's hard to pay the bills with it.

Your turn. 

Cheers,

Mark Terry