Recommended: Publish This Book

I officially now can get behind Stephen Markley's new book, Publish This Book: The Unbelievable True Story of How I Wrote, Sold, and Published This Very Book. I read close to 300 pages of it yesterday. I've never read 300 pages of anything in a single day, so that was new. I also checked Amazon and noticed that he only has four- and five-star reviews so I won't embarrass myself by telling you how great it is.

I got the book on Monday and here was my first reaction: Jesus Christ, this guy is only 26!!

So before I could write this, I had to get over the fact that he was born the same year that Madonna hit it big with "Like A Virgin" (or thereabouts) and I started shaving my legs. I also had to get over the fact that he's a full generation behind me, this thing called the "Millennials," and actually it was the first time I realized that MY generation was not THE generation, the new ones, the up-and-coming, the youngest wave of adults out there, the ones who point to older generations with their index finger and say to themselves "how uncool are they?" Now the "Millennials" are doing that to us. Yes, to us, the Gen-Xers. Remember when that Coupland book came out and all we Gen-Xers thought we were so cool? That was 1991. Yes, 20 years ago. We're done. I just looked up Coupland on Wikipedia and he's (I'm heaving here) half bald.

So Stephen, bravo. Really good book. It's funny as hell. I don't mind the dick jokes that much (though they kind of go on and on). I want to meet your friend Roger, but only after I've had more beer than him. And I feel pretty bad about Sarah (I read that chapter first), but in a "wake up and live your life" kind of way, which I think is what you were going for.

You will be "the voice of Generation Y" in no time. I'm sure of it. Unless there already is an official Voice of Gen Y. I don't know, I haven't been keeping track. But if not, you will be their Coupland. And all you Gen Yers will think you're cool until 20 years go by and Stephen Markley will be bald on Wikipedia and there will be some other "voice of Generation ____ ."

But all of that has nothing to do with my own quest to publish my own novel. In fact, I can't even read Stephen's novel within a two-hour time frame of starting work on my own novel because all my dialogue would turn into street trash talk with an abundance of profanity that my characters could never get away with. His hilarious, profane voice would just shit all over my Charlotte Bronte kind of brooding moral saga voice.

All of this maybe is to say that my own blog here (the one you're reading, and you are the only one actually) is just a fledgling derivative of Stephen's book about publishing a book. The derivative of an idea that was thought of by a much younger writer and executed with much more confident use of the word "Fuck" than I could ever manage. But he's put in the work, clearly, so he deserves this. He's probably put in 10 more years' worth of work than I have on his writing, getting rejected, and repeating it over and over.

Fuck.

(See what I mean?)