Non Sequitur by Wiley Miller for May 02, 2023

The only thing she will inspire is a suicide note.

…and thus: “Taming of the Shrew…”

The pep talk of the century, not.

How many times do you think he can cut and paste “all work and no play makes Jack a dull boy” on that computer?

As they say, write what you know about. So it’s a horror story, no? Wait, is that Stephen King?

I tried to google “Best selling novel written in two weeks”. The results were totally inconclusive.

The monkeys ran away.

“What they lack in depth, they more than make up for in length”. Sadly, I’ve read a few such books.

Write about your frustrations. That will get your muse flowing. Once you have some ideas, stop for the day before you have them all down. That gives you a starting point for the next day, and more will come.

“Not helping, dear!”

What novel is he referring to? The only author I can think of who worked that fast was George Simenon, and though his books did sell well, I don’t think any of them were “all-time” bestsellers.

In all literature, sciences and the arts, the such afflicted daily cartoonist has my greatest empathy.

The Bible took centuries to write and people are still editing to their preferences.

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua.

The top selling author in the 20th century was Danielle Steel.

AI might be faster, but who knows if it’d sell?

Atta girl. Next, try this one on him …

‘’I had a lot of lovers, but you were the only one who wanted to marry me.’’

Someone needs to invent a better muse trap.

It’s worth a try.

Just because you heard something, does not mean it was true.

Right now, he is not a-mused.

I did write a book. It turned out to be 160 pages. It took 2.5 years to write. That’s about 17 words a day.

I think it only took a couple of hours to write “How to kill your wife.” Anyone else remember that movie?

It’s bad enough to have a publisher breathing down your neck about your deadline, and an editor carping about your production ( or lack thereof ), without a significant other saying, " Aren’t you finished with that yet? "

Been there, done that, wrote the book, and have the divorce papers to prove it!

At the height of their popularity, The Shadow pulp novels were on a two-week publishing schedule. Walter Gibson wrote more than 300 of them, and they sold a ton.

And she is busy carrying around Paulie.

Or why “Best Seller” doesn’t mean “Best Book”.

My brain is my anti-muse…

One wonders why anybody marries in the Wiley*verse?

Barbara Cartland wrote (actually, dictated) 191 romance novels in one year, a Guinness world record. Best selling? Maybe not, but amazingly popular.

This scene isn’t realistic. The cat is supposed to be spread across the keyboard.

This is true. The author was the late Robert James Waller. The book was The Bridges of Madison County. I was the first person to read any of the manuscript.

Isn’t that like the last hour’s best hamburger?

Confusing man hours for lead time. ;-)

But the bible took decades, if not centuries, to write.

wikipedia has an article “List of best-selling books”. The Bible is at the top of the list (about 5B) as well as other religious texts (Quran 800M, Book of Mormon 190M), and very high but hard-to-quantify numbers for “Quotations from Chairman Mao Tse-tung”, so ‘all books of a religious, ideological, philosophical or political nature have thus been excluded from the below lists". So after that, the ones with more than 100M copies are:

A Tale of Two Cities, Charles Dickens 1859, ~200M

The Little Prince, Antoine de Saint-Exupery 1943, ~200M

Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone, JK Rowling 1997, 120M

And Then There Were None, Agatha Christie 1939, 100M

Dream of the Red Chamber Cao Xueqin 1791, 100M

The Hobbit, JRR Tolkien 1937, 100M

Can any one write/type that fast?

For a good read about writing, try Journal of a Novel: The East of Eden Letters, Steinbeck, 1951. According to the Kindle comments -

John Steinbeck warmed up to the work of writing East of Eden with a letter to the late Pascal Covici, his friend and editor at The Viking Press. It was his way, he said, of “getting my mental arm in shape to pitch a good game.”

A fascinating looks at the efforts of a master writer to work through the process. He had those kinds of problems, so it is unlikely that any of us who want to write would avoid them.

A cat-lady, of course…

Let us not too hastily discount the influence of spice (or spouses, whatever the correct plural might be).

One winter the great science-fiction writer Robert A. Heinlein was stuck for a story idea. He’d just sit at his typewriter staring at a blank page, waiting for inspiration to strike. Annoyingly, his cat kept going to the door and meowing to go out, so he’d let it out, and shortly thereafter it was meowing to get back in. This went on for a few iterations before he finally got frustrated and wondered what the dang cat was up to. His wife Ginny responded “Oh, he’s just looking for the door into summer.” Heinlein sat bolt upright and exclaimed “Don’t say another word!” and immediately proceeded to hammer out the classic SF novel Door into Summer.

Just started on trump’s new memoir; ’’I’m great, aren’t I?’’

Not bad, if you remember to take a dose of anti nausea meds first.

Fake muse!

Does he also have an uncle muse?

The all-time best selling book is the Holy Bible. Took a little longer than two weeks to write.

“Write about dogs!”, eh Wiley?

I don’t have a muse just that little voice inside, my brain.

So, Mr. Miller had writers’ block. Spent a LOT of time sketching. Finally landed on a punchline. Good job, Sir.

I rather enjoyed writing assignments in school, starting in sixth grade. I even used some extra college credits to take a course in Advanced Creative Writing. (I was the only non-English major in class. They all looked at me and asked,“What are you doing here?” — Especially the ones who knew I was a biology major.) Anyway, I often had trouble with deadlines because it just takes time for ideas to percolate and for the words and phrases to coalesce. I could never be a journalist I guess.

My favorite is still the novel with just six words.“For sale.Baby shoes.Never worn.”—-E. Hemingway

Log on to ChatGPT and all it takes is 30 characters, including spaces and the Enter key.

Then again, it took over 2,000 years to write the Bi-Bull.

They kept getting hung up on the Sex Scenes, especially the Begats.

She’s the type of girl who plants you right back on your feet …