Mar 24, 2009

From the files of the prudish...

From Chapter 6 of James Patterson's mind-numbingly stupid online "chain thriller" Airborne:
Sh*t! Peter went over his plan again.
Yes, you read it right: Sh*t! In an adult novel about kidnapping and mysterious viruses, a character actually thinks to himself, Sh*t!, no doubt pausing afterward to genuflect and repent for daring to think up such a loathsome word.

Can we possibly hope to take any part of a novel seriously when an author is so much of a prude that they won't spell a curse word completely? What, expletive deleted was too subtle?

For the record, the 'novel' is written by 28 winners of an online writing contest. Each 'winner' submits a 750-note chapter, with James Patterson himself (ooh, thrilling!) penning the first and last chapters personally.

We're six chapters in, and it is as fantastically awful as feared, rife with hilarious exposition, howlingly bad inner monologues, and suprisingly enough, spelling errors. But if it might be true that a million monkeys can write for a million years and create a masterpiece, it is definitely true that 29 people can write for a few minutes each and create sh*t.

3 comments:

Remi said...

I figure at least one of the chapters will start with "It was a dark and stormy night. . . "

Tyson Lister said...

750 page chapters? So the novel is to be over 20,000 pages long?

Holy sh*t!

Corey said...

Duly noted and altered, Tyson, thanks.

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