3 Starred Reviews

DON'T EVER GET OLD has earned coveted starred reviews from Publishers Weekly, Kirkus Review and Booklist.  These are three of the four major trade publications which review most trade releases. Only about one out of every ten to twenty books reviewed gets a star, so this kind of early critical consensus is really exciting. 

PW said: 

Friedman’s excellent debut introduces a highly unusual hero, 87-year-old, politically incorrect Buck Schatz, a former member of the Memphis PD, who’s become a living legend. Schatz’s memory is less and less reliable, and his physical decline is making his world “a gradually shrinking circle.” That circle becomes a good deal larger after he agrees to a request to visit Jim Wallace, a soldier he served with in WWII who’s on his deathbed. Wallace reveals that Heinrich Ziegler, the SS officer who ran the POW camp where both Schatz and Wallace were imprisoned, survived the war. On top of that shocker, Wallace reveals that he facilitated the Nazi’s escape in exchange for a gold bar. Schatz’s furious reaction accelerates Wallace’s demise and sets off a frantic search for Ziegler and the treasure he still possesses.

Friedman makes his limited lead plausible, and bolsters the story line with wickedly funny dialogue.

Kirkus said:

A geezer cowboy who’s been retired from Memphis Homicide longer than he served there is thrust into the middle of a murderous hunt for Nazi plunder.

What a shame that when Jim Wallace was on his deathbed, he asked his old comrade-in-arms Buck Schatz to come see him. The two had never been friends, and they don’t bond now over Jim’s revelation that he’d accepted a bar of gold in return for letting the supposedly dead Heinrich Ziegler, the SS commandant of the POW camp where both GIs languished in 1944, pass through a military crossing and out of history. As if Jim’s confession weren’t bad enough, Buck soon realizes that Jim blabbed to everyone he could reach from his hospital bed. Now Jim’s daughter Emily and her repellant husband Norris, Baptist preacher Lawrence Kind, Israeli agent Yitzchak Steinblatt and casino debt collector T. Addleford Pratt are all convinced that Buck is on the trail of Ziegler and his gold, and they’re all determined to cut themselves in for a piece of the action. Worse still, someone doesn’t trust natural causes to eliminate his competitors. Since he’s 88 years old, Buck’s clear mandate is to go back to watching daytime TV. Instead, he pokes Det. Randall Jennings with a stick and, when that fails, enlists his grandson William, aka Tequila, to spend his summer off from NYU Law School helping him track down Ziegler. The real prize here, however, isn’t Nazi treasure but Buck’s what-the-hell attitude toward observing social pieties, smoking in forbidden venues and making life easier for other folks. As he battles memory loss and a host of physical maladies, it’s great to see that he can still make whippersnapper readers laugh out loud.

A sardonically appealing debut for a detective who assures his long-suffering grandson, “I care about people. I just don’t like them.”

Booklist said:

The title of this knockout of a book is misleading. Ninetyish, retired Memphis homicide cop Buck Schatz makes coot-dom look like a riot. Buck is an abrasive old party with not an ounce of codger cuteness. He has trouble remembering, his skin has grown papery, he can’t push his lawn mower anymore. But his cop’s watchfulness is intact. He keeps his .375 Magnum close by. He’s a death-camp survivor—his real name is Baruch—and right off, he learns that the sadistic guard who brutalized him is likely still alive and the possessor of much stolen Nazi gold. To honor the Nazi’s victims and maybe grab the gold, Buck and his chatterbox grandson go on a quest. But who are these people who suddenly come out of the woodwork—a loan shark, a scholar, a pretty Israeli soldier? And why does everyone start dying? In prose as straightforward and tough as old Buck, the plot reveals its secrets with perfect timing. It’s a shock when the killer’s identity is revealed. But, then, we think eventually, who else could it be?

Did This Con-Artist Trick The Big Six Into Publishing Him?

Mitchell Graham's mugshot

Via Ann Crispin and Victoria Strauss at Writer Beware, comes the fascinating tale of Mitchell Gross, a.k.a. Mitchell Graham.

Graham is the author of five books; three fantasy novels and two mysteries.  HarperCollins publishes his fantasy series and Tor/Forge put out his mysteries.  Graham is also a felon. He swindled women he met on Jdate for millions of dollars.

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution story linked above describes how Graham persuaded his girlfriend to "invest" over three million dollars with a nonexistent financial manager, how he sent her fake tax forms, and how he used her life savings to support his lavish lifestyle and pay off his ex-fiancee, who he'd bilked out of $1.4 million using a similar scheme.

But, years before he duped his lovers, he may have conned a literary agent into representing him, and HarperCollins into publishing his book.

In 2002, Graham "won" the gold medal for fantasy and the overall grand prize in the prestigious third-annual Delmont-Ross writing contest.  There was no fourth-annual Delmont-Ross writing contest, and there was never a second or a first.

Writer Beware is the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers' of America's scam-watching task-force.  The Delmont-Ross contest came to their attention because writers who had seen publicity about Graham's book asked SFWA about the contest, and how they could enter it.  Writer Beware found that Borders and Merrill-Lynch, the purported sponsors of the contest, had never heard of it, and there was no trace of any Delmont-Ross foundation.  Prominent sci-fi writer Ben Bova who was hired to judge the contest, told Writer Beware that Graham's manuscript was the only "finalist" submitted for his consideration.

The Delmont-Ross award was fake.  Graham made it up, so he could give his manuscript a "grand prize."  Then he sent out fake press releases, ostensibly from a Merrill-Lynch trust administrator, announcing his victory.  He also placed an announcement about the award in Locus magazine, a legitimate sci-fi/fantasy publication.

In interviews with the South Florida Sun-Sentinel and the online journal Writers Write, Graham claimed that he was inundated by requests for the manuscript from agents and publishers after his Delmont-Ross announcement. If he's telling the truth (which he almost never is), this con man actually got literary agents to query him!

I'm not going to muck up his agent's Google results by putting her name in this post, because she did exactly what an agent is supposed to do.  She got him a 3 book deal.  But I wonder if the agent really reached out to him based on his phony press releases, or if she was persuaded to offer representation by his grand prize in the prestigious Delmont-Ross competition.

There's no way a con like this would work today.  Agents are inundated with too many submissions to chase down the winners of writing contests they've never heard of.  And there are so many contests these days that  even legitimate awards don't carry a lot of cachet with agents.  But agents were a lot harder to get in touch with a decade ago, queries were only accepted by snail-mail, and the slushpiles were a lot smaller.  Maybe agents ten years ago were subjected to a lower concentration of insanity.  A completely phony announcement could have looked very credible, in those days, if it was placed in a legitimate publication.

Anyway, for bonus Mitchell Graham hilarity:

In this interview he claims to have corresponded at length, over a period of many years, with both C S Lewis and J R R Tolkien.

And, in this article, which Writer Beware fished out of the deep recesses of the Internet, Graham claims that Stephen Spielberg personally called him on the phone to option his books for film.

Being Times Square Elmo

Let’s assume, for purposes of keeping me from getting sued or arrested, that Elmo is my name.  Like, my actual name.  I’m just some guy who happens to be named Elmo.  Elmo is a name that people have, sometimes, so this is a fact that could, conceivably, be true.  There was a saint named Elmo.  All similarities to well-known media properties are entirely coincidental. 

"I've got something you can tickle."

No, I don’t have any identification to back that claim up.  I’m wearing a fuzzy, red costume.  It’s got a round, orange felt nose, big googly eyes, and no pockets.  I don’t carry a wallet.  I have a cloth sack with the word “TIPS” stamped on it with plastic bedazzled rhinestones.  There’s no driver’s license or passport in my sack.  No credit cards, either.  Men with sacks don’t tend to have credit cards.  So you’re just going to have to trust me.

The costume is unrelated to the trademarked Muppet characters, the Childrens’ Television Workshop or the Sesame Street program.  Any similarities are, like I said, coincidental and unintended.  The costume is made in Taiwan.  According to the tag, it’s called “Tickles,” and it should be machine-washed on a gentle cycle or dry-cleaned.  I almost never do either of these things, so the suit is usually rank and filthy.

“Oh my God,” says a teenage girl, to one of her stupid friends.  “It’s a hobo Elmo.  It’s an Elmo hobo.  It’s Elbow.”

“You should totally tweet that,” says her fatter, oilier little sidekick.

“I will,” says the first one, and then she takes a picture of me with her iPhone. She’s not even sneaky about it.  The flash goes off, and everything.  I wave my “TIPS” sack at the girls, but they just giggle and run off.

People who take photos of me and then don’t tip are the worst people in the world.

If you see me on the corner of 42^nd Street at Seventh Ave., and your kid hugs me and you have your picture taken with me, just remember I’m not that Elmo.  I’m another, unrelated, entirely coincidental Elmo. You have no idea who I am, underneath this.  I could have a tattoo of a pentagram on my neck.  I could have oozing, dripping sores on my face.  I might be missing an eye.  If your kid asks why Elmo smells funny, it’s definitely not because I just burned a J in the backseat of somebody’s Bentley with the guy who valet-parks cars at the W Hotel. 

Maybe I am Elmo Gutierrez; just a guy who does this job because his immigration status is questionable, and he can’t get a straight gig. 

Maybe my name is Elmo Yoder, and I came here two years ago, on a Trailways bus out of Des Moines.  I was the best singer in the church choir and the best dancer at the hoedown, and I thought I could make it on Broadway.  Maybe this is as close as I got.

Maybe I’m Elmo Johnson; a man who spends an hour every morning on the train to get down here from Yonkers; a man trying to keep his nose clean and put in an honest day’s work in a tough economy.  Think about that, and about how you call yourself a progressive, while you don’t punish your pampered, Park Slope private-schooled ten year-old for sticking his chewing gum in my fur.  I know you saw him do it.  Don’t just walk away like nothing happened.  I didn’t spend all that time bedazzling this sack for you to not put money in it.  It says “TIPS” for a reason, asshole. 

Maybe I’m Elmo Schmitt, convicted felon.  Try not to think about how there are no schools within five hundred feet of Times Square while I’m tickling your kid.  Parents will let anyone in a cute costume touch their children.  It’s really kind of amazing and terrifying.

Ever taken your child to visit a department store Santa?  That is a man who was in need of seasonal employment; a vagrant of some kind.  Think about it for a second, and try to calculate the odds of whether the department store Santa has a substance abuse problem. If you roll up Santa’s velveteen sleeve, will you find needle tracks and prison ink?  Go ahead and let your first-grader sit on his lap.

You can’t even roll up the sleeves of the Elmo – excuse me, the “Tickles” costume.  The gloves are attached to the sleeves.  I can’t get out of it unless somebody unzips the back for me, and helps me take off the head.  When you’re taking a photo and then not paying me, don’t think about how hot this gets in the summertime.  Don’t think about how difficult it must be for me to deal with having to take a piss.

Psychookie probably just pees right in his suit.  “Psychookie,” by the way, is what I call the psychotic Cookie Monster who hangs out by the flagship Toys R Us store.  I don’t even think he bought a Taiwanese knock-off suit.  His costume looks like it’s made out of blue dryer lint.  His googly eyes are just ping-pong balls krazy-glued to the head of his suit.  The pupils are just drawn on there, and not even with, like, a sharpie or a magic marker.  I think he scribbled them on with a ballpoint.  His sack says “COOKIE” on it, but he still wants tips, and if you take a photo and don’t pay him, he will chase you down the street.    

Rejected Titles for Nathan Englander's "What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank"

•  Jewlysses
• A Passage To Israel
• The Way Of All Gefilte Flesh
• Catskills Revisited
• A Portrait Of The Rabbi As A Yeshiva Student
• Where I Hardly Ever Remember To Call From
• Zuckerman's Wake
• Tender Is The Brisket
• Whitefish Noise
• The Sound And The Fury And The Holocaust

For Whom The Butt Tolls

A little after six in the morning, while I was putting in my daily four miles on the elliptical machine at the New York Sports Club near my apartment, I smelled a fart that made me contemplate death and its inevitability.

As I’m sure the reader is aware, there are many different kinds of farts.  There are loud baritones and there are brazen trumpets. Sometimes, there are squeaky ones.  I didn’t hear this one at all; if it announced itself in any way, the sound was lost amidst the whirring and clattering of the cardio machines.  But what the fart lacked in fanfare, it made up in foulness.  It smelled like a dumpster behind a Chinatown fish market.

I put a hand against my face to mask the ass-stench with the stink of my own sweat, and I looked around for the culprit.  I was on the elliptical at the end of the row.  The machine next to me was vacant; it was broken, in fact.  There was a woman two machines over.  I wouldn’t say she was a big woman, exactly, but she wasn’t skinny either, and she was tall. Like, five-feet ten; a strapping specimen.  Had she the capacity to unleash such an abomination?  I wouldn’t put it past her.

I tried to gauge the expression on her face, to see if she seemed guilty, but I could only steal glances, because I didn’t want her to catch me looking at her.  I always try to avoid looking at people at the gym.  I don’t want anyone to think I am a pervert.

Behind the ellipticals, there was a row of treadmills.  Most of them weren’t in use this early, but there was a guy on one, behind and to the left of me.  He looked ethnic.  I thought the fart smelled ethnic.  I wondered if this was racist of me.  I realized it probably was, since I had no empirical basis for my belief that farts had ethnicities.    

Off to my right, a man was working with free weights.  If you’re looking for somebody to blame a fart on, the guy lifting free weights is generally a pretty good suspect, since science has proven squatting against resistance has the same effect on the human colon that rolling up the bottom of the tube has on toothpaste.  But the tall woman and the ethnic man were closer to me than the weightlifter.  I wondered how far a fart could travel; it seemed like it would dissipate pretty quickly in an open, high-ceilinged health club.

In college, I read a book about the atomic bomb that was dropped on Hiroshima.  People within a certain distance of the blast were instantly incinerated, while victims further away died slowly from radiation poisoning.  This information was in no way applicable to my fart problem.  I decided to let the whole matter slide, so I switched on my iPod and listened to Lady Gaga sing about Nebraska for a while.

But ten minutes later, somebody released a bigger, more bombastic, more pungent sequel; the “Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen” of farts.

The free-weight guy was gone, so I could cross him off the list.  I looked back and forth between the tall woman and the ethnic guy.  She caught me looking, and she scowled at me. He had a Forbes magazine draped over the console of his treadmill, and he was oblivious.

I leaned back on my elliptical, and tried to take a broader look around the room.  Maybe there was some sort of ass-ventriloquist who had mastered the art of throwing farts across great distances.  But I didn’t spot any such trickster.  And then I realized there was a suspect I hadn’t considered.

Me.

If you’ve seen movies, you are probably familiar with this moment.  This is the part where they realize the serial killer’s phone calls are coming from inside the house.  This is the moment when Bruce Willis learns he’s already dead.  This is the bit when Edward Norton figures out that he and Brad Pitt are actually the same guy.  This is the plot twist.  This is the part where the story about farts becomes a story about death.

Now for the expository flashback: four days before the events described herein, I had decided to try a three-day crash diet called a “juice cleanse.” The purveyors of this product argue that a super-low calorie diet of raw vegetable juice can cleanse the body of certain unspecified “toxins” and “rest” the digestive system. 

Most doctors respond to these dubious claims about the same way one might respond to a fart in the gym.  But people on the Internet claimed to have lost six pounds in seventy-two hours. If there’s one thing I’ve learned from the Amazon.com customer reviews for self-published books, it’s that I can always trust people on the Internet.

Also, the people claiming to have lost all the juice-weight seemed to mostly be marathon runners and yoga instructors, so if they could find six pounds to lose from their waifish, birdlike bodies, I could probably expect to drop even more from my own keg-shaped, fat-sheathed torso.

I ordered the juice.  By lunchtime on the first day of the cleanse, my nose was running like a snot faucet. The website claims that this is a common result of the purging of toxins, but since toxins do not exist, it was probably an allergic reaction.   Or else, the unpasteurized juice was full of bacteria.  But it didn’t matter; the juice people already had my money, and, being both stubborn and stupid, I decided to see the thing out. 

So, the morning of the gym fart, I had just eaten my first breakfast after completing the cleanse: a container of Greek yogurt and a couple of kiwifruit.

With this data taken into consideration, I had to put myself right on top of my list of potential fart culprits.  And that was scary, because I was a reasonably healthy thirty-year old man, or at least I had been one, prior to my juice cleanse.  If I farted, I was usually the first person to know about it.  The idea that something so singularly noxious could make a frictionless escape from my bowel was one I found extremely disquieting.  It meant that I’d done some serious damage to my body.

I had a great aunt who suffered from Alzheimer’s disease.  She lived, during her last years, in the dementia ward of an assisted-living complex.  I remember going to visit her, and sometimes seeing one of the other residents, a man who had suffered a stroke.  He’d lost motor control over half of his body, so the lid of his left eye and the left side of his mouth always drooped, slack and loose.

Maybe that was what my asshole looked like after the juice cleanse.

I imagined myself lying face-down on a hospital bed.  A doctor entered the room, trailing a group of medical students, like a mother duck with a string of ducklings.

“Mr. Friedman presents with some interesting symptoms,” he said. “Can anyone identify this?”

A young, attractive woman, a dead ringer for Katherine Heigl, jumped up and down on the balls of her Croc-shod feet and raised her hand: “He’s had a butt-stroke,” she shouted.

Still jogging on the elliptical, my heart rate had begun to speed up, even though my pace was steady.  I was thinking that I should cut my workout short and go to the drugstore.  What would I ask them for, though? Some kind of ointment?  A hand mirror?  Maybe I should go to the emergency room.  I was three miles into my run, with only one to go, so I decided to finish.  But I promised myself that, if I experienced any more farts I couldn’t feel, I’d find myself a gastroenterologist, or something. 

I didn’t, though.  My ass turned out to be undamaged, which means that I was not responsible for the gym farts, after all. The real culprit got away.  I think it was the ethnic guy.  All I did was spend a lot of time sniffing at a stranger’s butt-gas, and thinking about it.

So, yay for me.

E-Galley Giveaway

 I am giving away some secure e-galleys of DON'T EVER GET OLD through NetGalley.  To be eligible, just leave a comment on this post, OR tweet a link to any post on this blog you happen to think your followers might enjoy OR tweet at me that you want to be entered, and retweet anything from my Twitter feed, OR add DON'T EVER GET OLD on Goodreads.

The contest ends on February 1, so do this immediately!

I'll assign everyone a number and pick the winners using using Random.org and I'll give away 3 e-galleys of DON'T EVER GET OLD, but if I get up to 1000 followers on Twitter, or if 250 people add me on Goodreads by the end of the contest, I'll give away 5 of these e-galleys, and I'll also give away some muffins from Modern Muffin.  These are some seriously awesome muffins, and the book is pretty good, too. So tell all your friends about my Twitter feed, retweet my funniest tweets to your followers and make me famous.

NetGalley e-galleys are compatible with just about any e-reader, tablet or smartphone, and you can also read it on your PC if you don't have a reader.  If this goes well, I'll run more contests in the future, and give away some print galleys this way as well.

UPDATE: I just ran the Random.org number generator, and the numbers I'd attached to Mindi, Albert and Steph from Twitter came up.  So you get e-galleys. Congratulations.  I'll ask my marketing contact to get your e-mail addresses authorized, and you will be able to download your secure e-galleys to your computer, tablet or e-reader.  I am also having a copy sent to Rita Meade, who is a librarian and blogger and said she wanted one.

ANOTHER UPDATE: If you reach this page from Google, we are doing an giveaway for signed print ARCs through Goodreads. You can enter here:  http://www.goodreads.com/giveaway/show/21061-don-t-ever-get-old

I Need A Diet Soda That's Not For Women: A Personal Narrative

The other day, I was  hanging out in a vacant, foreclosed house, smashing holes in the fucking drywall with my goddamn forehead, when I happened to catch a look at my reflection in a nearby mirror.  That’s when I realized I’d gotten fat as shit.

I don’t know how the fuck I became such a porker.  I consume only high-octane extreme-sports food, such as Taco-Bell’s Double-Stuf Torpedito combo meal, King-Size Super-Spicy Slim-Jims, and Nacho-In-The–Face  Cheezy Doritos.  But, despite my carefully-calibrated athlete’s diet, my form is significantly softer and less-defined than one might expect, based on my intense, manly lifestyle.

I blame high-calorie sugar soda.  I chug a two-liter bottle of that shit to hydrate after I do my ten minute version of P90X on fast-forward, and then I usually pick up a 64-ounce Godzilla Gulp when I make my daily stop at the Exxon station to put another 30 gallons of super-premium in my Expedition.  Clearly, I need to stop doing that.

I’ll be damned, though, if I am going to drink some pussy-ass diet soda with dainty little bubbles and curlicue cursive lettering on the can. And I am sure as shit not going to drink water.  Have you seen water?  Water is clear, like the vodka drinks on “Sex And The City,” which I have never watched.   I don’t trust a clear drink.  A man’s beverage should be the same murky brown color as a mouthful of tobacco-spit.  If you drink water, you’d better stock up on tampons, because pretty soon, you’re gonna start bleeding out of your vagina.

I thought about drinking Gatorade, but it doesn’t seem like that will help much.  It turns out that Gatorade has almost as many calories as soda.  Plus, it tastes like fruit, which seems pretty gay to me.  That is not an appropriate beverage for a man.  A proper drink should put hair on a man’s scrotum, hair that he will leave ungroomed and unwashed, in a long, matted tangle, like God’s own beard.

Thank Christ for the rocket scientists at Dr. Pepper, who have developed a new man-soda called Dr. Pepper 10.  An extensive marketing campaign has persuaded me that this awesome low-calorie beverage is emphatically not for women.  This stuff comes in a can that’s the color of a gun, and it tastes like it feels to get punched in the face by an iceberg.

 At long last, I will be able to enjoy a beverage that doesn’t shatter my fragile perception of my own masculinity, and I will also be able to enjoy a view of my penis that is not fully occluded by the protrusion of my belly.  Fuckin’ A.

How to keep people from pirating your book

Much has been written elsewhere about SOPA, the industry-driven and deeply misguided legislation that the media industry is trying to push through the US Congress.

I believe that legislation and litigation are absolutely useless at deterring piracy.  The Internet always finds a way around these things.  Online media piracy has been around for nearly as long as the Internet.  Industry groups like the RIAA and the MPAA classify downloading as theft, and disseminate marketing material urging this viewpoint onto the public.

But, despite their efforts, piracy continues relatively unchecked.  Years of efforts to convince the public that downloading is wrong have failed; in 2008, 95% of music downloads were illegal.  The results of this activity for the music industry have been devastating.  Sales volume has dropped by more than half over the last decade, because a huge percentage of the consumers who used to pay for music now get it for free.

People pirate media online when the pirate copies are easy to get and function identically to legal copies.  Efforts to make pirated media difficult to obtain always fail.  Therefore, the best way to deter piracy is to make pirated media less functional by excluding it from popular devices.

You can see the difference between a protected media format and an unprotected media format by looking at a single device, the iPhone.

Apple's music devices, dating back to the original iPod, have always been very welcoming to pirated music.  You can download a song and drop it right into your device through the iTunes software, and it plays.

This function was something of an unavoidable necessity for music.  Listeners had extensive collections of high-quality digital recordings on CD when the iPod devices first came out, and they had a reasonable expectation that they'd be able to move their CD music collections onto the new devices.  And since the CD format was developed before anyone knew about the Internet or digital piracy, CDs had minimal protections against getting ripped into unprotected MP3 formats and distributed online.  iTunes and Apple have no way of telling the difference between a file you've ripped from CDs you bought and a file you downloaded.

By contrast, it is extremely difficult to use pirated software applications on iOS devices.  There is only one point of access for software, and that is Apple's App Store.  If you download some illegal software for the iPhone, it's very difficult to make your phone run it.  If you have tech-savvy friends, you'll find that many of them download music illegally, but regularly pay for apps.

People don't feel that supporting app developers is a moral duty, while supporting musicians is not. People don't feel that the apps contain more value than the music.  If you could load your iPhone with pirate apps as easily as you could load it with pirate music, nobody would pay for apps.  But it's easy to pirate music and hard to pirate apps.

The same rule holds true with video game consoles; getting them to play pirate software is very difficult and often requires physical modifications to the hardware.  So most gamers buy their software legally.

Publishers need to be talking to e-reader vendors and tablet makers about how these devices will deal with e-book files that originate from places other than the stores affiliated with the apps.  Right now it's possible to read pirate books on a Kindle, but it's much more involved than loading a song onto an iPod.  It's important that these devices not be allowed, in the future, to read PDF files or other pirate formats like e-books, and that measures are kept in place to prevent purchased e-book files of being downloaded from the devices, stripped of DRM and shared online.

The Rob Schneider Query (With Apologies to Trey Parker)

Dear Sir or Madam;

Derp De-Doo is a derp-da-derp da deedily derp who deedily-deedily derp-de-derp.  But she's about to learn that derp-dee-derp de deedily-dee.

Now she's got to derp-de-derp de dumb-da-dumb.  But when deedily-dee, she'll need to dippity doo or she'll be dumbity dipped.  And with deedily dumb-da-dumb, she's really got her hands full!

Will dumb-ba-deedily dee before doodily dumb-da-dumb, or will Derp De-Doo be deedily-duh?  I bet you can't wait to find out!

DERP DE-DOO DEEDILY DUMB is a YA paranormal romance, 76,000 words in length.  I've enclosed the first five pages, and I hope you'll be interested in looking at more.

Deedily-doo,
Dippity Q. Dee