The Agent Dunnit!

Okay, so I'm addicted to films about writers trying to get published. Last night I watched this Christmas TV movie starring Rob Lowe - The Perfect Day.

Guy gets fired, writes novel, gets rejected ... the usual.

Then a literary agent (Six Feet Under's Frances Conroy) sees the marvel of his manuscript and signs him ... the book climbs to number one on the New York Times bestseller list ... and the Rob Lowe character promptly turns into a jerk.

The jerk needs to learn a lesson which is provided by mysterious meetings with the mad professor from Back to the Future telling him all sorts of unknowable things including the fact that he was going to die on Christmas day.

So are there supernatural things at work? Is he going to die? After all those rejections, isn't a writer allowed some Pride before the Fall?

Turns out it was all a trick. He was getting too big for his boots. He had to be taught a lesson. And who was behind the lesson?

His AGENT.

I could have cried after this plot twist was revealed.

Except I was too busy laughing.

Zombie Idol Winner Vows to Devote Life to Zombie Work

If you've been following the Zombie Idol over at YA author Maureen Johnson's blog, you will be pleased to learn that the winner of the competition to insert a zombie into literature is Adrienne K with her version of How to Be An Artist by Sark -

HOW TO BE A ZOMBIE by Adrienne K.

Never stay dead. Learn to watch from shadows. Spread incurable viruses. Invite slow runners to tea. Collect occipital lobes and put them all over your house. Make friends with fear and trepidation. Look forward to nightmares. Make men cry in movies. Eat brains naked. In moonlight. Cultivate apocalypse. Refuse to “be entombed.” Do it for evil. Take lots of innocents. Give undeath away. Do it now. The living will follow. Believe in the cursed. Groan a lot. Celebrate every gorgeous medulla oblongata. Take bloodbaths. Steal others’ wild imaginings through transformative cerebrum-sucks. Revel in perfect chaos. Draw on the walls. With gnawed-off knuckles. Imagine yourself victorious. Giggle at shot guns. Listen to old people wail. Open them up. Dive in. Be free. Damn yourself. Drive in the fear. Play with entrails. You are unholy. Build a fort with corpses. Get revenge. Hug graves. Roam aimlessly. Massacre.

IN response to ecstatic praise from all corners of the internet, the winner said:

This marks a new course for me, as I think I will pursue zombie research and writing full-time. Read more

Judging Books by Their Covers Titles

The Diagram Prize is upon us! Members of the public vote for the books with the oddest titles in a competition sponsored by the Bookseller. The titles are spotted and submitted by publishers, booksellers and librarians around the world.

It is quite a thrilling shortlist -

I Was Tortured By the Pygmy Love Queen by Jasper McCutcheon
How to Write a How to Write Book by Brian Piddock
Are Women Human? And Other International Dialogues by Catharine A. MacKinnon
Cheese Problems Solved by P.L.H.McSweeney
If You Want Closure in Your Relationship, Start With Your Legs by Big Boom
People who Mattered in Southend and Beyond: From King Canute to Dr Feelgood by D. Gordon

Bookseller diarist and prize custodian Horace Bent commented:

"I must pay homage to those books that narrowly missed out on a shortlist place. These were, in no particular order: Drawing and Painting the Undead; Stafford Pageant: The Exciting Innovative Years 1901–1952; and Tiles of the Unexpected: A Study of Six Miles of Geometric Tile Patterns on the London Underground. All sound like they are positively thrilling reads, and I do hope that the authors will try again next year. Honourable mention should also go to two titles that were ruled out because they were published too long ago: an unlikely-sounding HR manual called Squid Recruitment Dynamics, and the fascinating anthropological tome Glory Remembered: Wooden Headgear of Alaska Sea Hunters.

The spotter of the winning book receives a magnum of champagne.

Emma Jepson of Borders UK spotted McCutcheon's Pygmy Love Queen novel in which a parachutist finds himself stripped naked and erotically tortured by the female leader of a pygmy tribe. McCutcheon has already written a follow-up: Go Ahead, Woman, Do Your Worst! Erotic Tales of Heroes Chained.