July 21: On This Day ...

In 1796, Scottish poet Robert Burns stopped writing the hard way, and began the more rewarding task of being a national hero. He wrote the world's most famous drinking song.

In 1899, poet Hart Crane began his lifelong struggle with being the second-most famous writer born on July 21, 1899. He eventually committed suicide in characteristically cryptic fashion, and still his nemesis found a way to overshadow him.

In 1899, friend of the bottle and enemy of the bull Ernest Hemingway was born. His parents put him in a dress for his first baby pictures, and he spent the rest of his life slaughtering wild animals, punching drunks, volunteering for foreign wars and eliminating faggy adjectives from his prose to make up for it. He later won the Pulitzer Prize and Nobel Prize for Literature for a short story (which he padded out to over a hundred pages) about a guy who caught a fish -- but back then they were practically giving them away. He put the final full stop through his brain in 1961.

In 1933, novelist and literary critic John Gardner was born. As well as writing the best damn story about Grendel for more than a thousand years, he is most famous for his book On Moral Fiction, in which he argued that all fiction should strive to explore universal human values. (Bet you're glad he's not in charge of the pens and paper.)

In 1969, the Golden Age of science fiction reached its zenith when Edwin 'Buzzkill' Aldrin stepped onto the surface of the Moon and declared it "magnificent desolation", moments after Neil Armstrong flubbed his famous "One small step for (a) man" line. The genre began a rapid decline when people realised that the long promised little green men were just as fictional as the "magnificent".

In 2007, the much ballyhooed "Fantasy Boom" ended with a whimper as children (and adults with the critical faculties of children) rushed out to purchase the seventh and final Harry Potter novel at a ridiculous discount from chain bookstores trying to compete with supermarkets, skipped to the ending, wondered for a moment what they were going to read now, then went back to watching television.

July 18: On This Day ...

in 64AD, one of the earliest recorded Slushpile Bonfire Days gets out of control and torches almost a third of Rome over the next week. Historian Suetonius declares the occasion a qualified success, disposing of hundreds of stories about some Jew with magic powers. After the rubble is cleared, Emperor Nero builds the world's largest Barnes & Noble.

In 1811, author William Makepeace Thackeray began his sacred mission to satirise the upper-class twits of English Society. The upper-class twits responded with their long-proven tactic to silence critics, blunting his satire with large quantities of cash.

In 1817, novelist Jane Austen stopped writing, in the most disagreeable fashion.

In 1899, novelist Horatio Alger Jr. finally gave up writing for dimes.

In 1925, the world's biggest party pooper Adolf Hitler publishes the first volume of his whiny me-me-me moanfest Mein Kampf. Dictated while Hitler was in prison, the original manuscript contained several chapters which explained how he came to loathe large, hairy gypsies, and love men in leather uniforms.

In 1937, gonzo journalist Hunter S. Thompson began the long, exhausting process of drinking, smoking and injecting himself to death.

In 1938, renowned biblical scholar Paul Verhoeven was born. His blockbuster movies Robocop, Total Recall, Starship Troopers, Basic Instinct and Showgirls have built an elegant literary foundation for his forthcoming book Jesus The Man, a project he's apparently been working on for a decade. (I wish I was kidding.)

In 2001, Bush critic and James Bond fanfic author James Hatfield quit pretending that he wasn't a convicted felon. (His life story is like an abridged version of A Confederacy of Dunces.)

July 11: On This Day ...

In 1754, English censor Thomas Bowdler was born. He was the author of Family Shakespeare, a clean, kid-friendly version of the Bard's filthy, porn-drenched original works. This Good Parts version did more to popularise Shakespeare amongst the easily upset than Leonardo diCaprio and Mel Gibson combined. To this day, the term 'bowdlerise' means that someone cared enough about a work of artistic smut to make it palatable, and available in supermarkets.

In 1859, Charles Dickens' A Tale of Two Cities was published. You will never be this good.

In 1899, style guru E. B. White was born. He was the White in Strunk & White. If you had to click on that link to find out what Strunk & White means, stop writing.

In 1930, literary critic Harold Bloom was born, and immediately published a scathing review of the obstetrician's cold hands.

In 1955, (according to Wikipedia), the phrase In God We Trust was added to US currency, replacing the Latin motto E Pluribus Unum ("out of many, one"), which was subsequently adopted as a motto by slush readers.

In 1960, Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird was published. You will never be this good (and even Harper Lee knew it).

In 1971, Astounding Science Fiction editor John W. Campbell finally succumbed to the slushpile. Campbell was hailed as a leading proponent of the genre, and an intolerable crackpot, often by the same people.

In 1983, crime writer Ross McDonald stopped writing, the hard-boiled way.

June 9: On This Day ...

68AD: Roman Emperor Nero commits suicide, amidst the controversy over the publication of his memoir of the Great Fire of Rome, entitled If I Did It.

1860: The first dime novel was published to a public sick to death of paying retail for hardcovers. Most of the early dime novels were reprints of stories serialised in newspapers, so the authors wouldn't have even seen a dime from them.

1870: Charles Dickens was crushed to death by the weight of his immense popularity, and the great expectations.

Born on this day:

• Charles Webb, author of The Graduate, who didn't even get a kiss before he got fscked over the film rights. There are rumours that a sequel will be published this month, but if the lack of news is any indication ...
• Joe Haldeman, statue-collecting SF writer, one of the first to get paid for writing Star Trek fan fiction.
• Patricia Cornwell, uber-successful crime fiction author and the current holder of the Worst Jack The Ripper Theory award. (Seriously, Portrait of a Killer is so bad it almost works as a parody of Ripper theories. It makes Alan Moore's From Hell seem plausible.)
• Aaron Sorkin, playwright and screenwriter, who for the first few years of this century allowed us to entertain the fantasy of an intelligent, moral President. Like Brian de Palma, his best work is on cocaine.

June 7: On This Day ...

1967: Dorothy Parker found out, the hard way, exactly what fresh hell this is. She is widely blamed for boosting Harlan Ellison's career with an uncharacteristically positive review. This was back when people who made decisions actually read reviews.

1970: E.M. Forster gave his publisher the go-ahead to release his posthumous novel. Forster was a closet homosexual, but people really should have figured it out after the publication of Howard's End and A Passage to India.

1980: Henry Miller finally gave up waiting for American culture to catch up with him. When several of his novels were banned in the US for decades, Miller pioneered the 'smuggling' distribution model. George Orwell said of him: "he is a completely negative, unconstructive, amoral writer". Coming from George, that's a compliment. 

ISBD: On This Day ...

1669: Renowned diarist Samuel Pepys had the good sense to stop writing when his eyesight failed, unlike many other famous writers who kept on pushing the pen long after the cancer ate their talent. He wrote about one of the early Slushpile Bonfire Days that got out of control.

1790: The United States signs the first "Fsck You Fanficcers!" bill into law, forcing homobsessed hacks to wait 14 years before peddling their derivative smut. Unless the work was first published outside the US. In the first knockoff edition of Oliver Twist, "Fagin" was a verb.

1977: Legendary schockmeister William Castle finally stopped making terrible movies, and marketing them with spectacularly awful gimmick campaigns like "Illusion-O" and the "Fright Break".

2000: International Slushpile Bonfire Day staves off criticism about pollution by trading carbon credits with World No Tobacco Day. 

2005: Former FBI Deputy Director W. Mark Felt ruins a perfectly good mystery by admitting he was "Deep Throat" in the Watergate scandal.

On This Day ...

... in 2002, Paul Riddell stopped writing.

Apart from a few partial lapses that threatened to lure him back to the Futile Pursuit, he hasn't written professionally since. (For the irritating pedants out there: no, he didn't completely abandon placing words in order to communicate meaning in a tangible, non-vocal form. If you're one of the irritating pedants who instinctively wanted to argue over this definition, stop writing. You can take that literally.)

And honest to Elvis, he's happy about it. He's healthier, wealthier, better adjusted and better looking. He has a loving wife, spare time, disposable income and the kind of hobbies that don't result in RSI, empty bank accounts, a shattered ego and a garage full of mouldy contributor's copies from defunct magazines even the editors didn't bother to collect.

And like me, he genuinely wants to help you get your life back.

Since stumbling on 101 Reasons, he's become a kind of unofficial Contributing Editor, providing informed commentary and a series of articles on the evils of writing, as only a man who has walked on the dark side of the street could.

Why should you care? Because Paul lived the writer's life, and lived to tell the tale. His example should serve as a warning to you all.

It's not like he was a failure as a writer. He had the kind of freelance career that many writers aspire to. Editors paid him to write. Editors begged him to contribute. Some still do, defying (or more likely, not bothering to read) the warning on his blog that he will only accept commissions on the condition of "the right to punch the editor AND publisher in the mouth for a solid hour." Old friends and even relatives continue to pester him to return to writing, despite his repeated warnings that he would rather evacuate the contents of his skull with a large-calibre projectile weapon than than ever sit around waiting for a small-press editor to pull a contracted payment out from under all the werewolf porn.

If you've read his writings, then you know the man has talent. The only real weakness I've noticed in his writing is a tendency to fall back on a set of all-purpose gags. When I pointed this out to him, he observed, "They may be cliches, but they're my cliches, dammit." It's more like a trademark, really. When you read his work, you're secretly hoping he'll work in a reference to Hunter S. Thompson or black tar heroin, the same way you secretly hope that Steve Martin will sing "King Tut" one more time.

The fact that a decade and a half pursuing a writing career left him miserable and broken is testament to two important truths, that 101 Reasons will elaborate on in the future:

1. Talent is not enough.
2. People who say "you should be a writer" have no idea what they're saying, unless they have a cheque made out to you in their hand.

If you don't learn these lessons now, you are doomed to eventually find yourself sitting on a barstool at a writing/genre convention, crying into your domestic beer that absolutely everyone you've spent the weekend asskissing has already fscked you over at least once. (And that's if you have talent.)

This Friday, Paul's throwing a party to celebrate the fifth anniversary of quitting writing. Wherever you are in the world, raise a glass to the guy and promise yourself that you'll learn from his example. It could save you years.

On This Day ...

1860: J.M. Barrie, author of Peter Pan, began the process of growing up. Despite a recent biographical movie to the contrary, he looked nothing at all like Johnny Depp, and in fact won every Edgar Allan Poe lookalike contest he ever entered. He was a notorious fanboy, corresponding with Robert Louis Stephenson, co-writing a musical with Arthur Conan Doyle(!), writing and directing a Western(!) which features George Bernard Shaw(!), and playing cricket with H.G. Wells, G.K. Chesterton and A.A. Milne. He also co-founded the Three Names Club, specifically to exclude Thomas Hardy.

1945: The Germans finally agreed to cease and desist their overly aggressive marketing of Hitler's Mein Kampf to a disinterested Europe. Later that year, the Japanese would come to accept that Asia just wasn't into Kabuki.

1950: L. Ron Hubbard unleashes Dianetics, subsequently solving all problems. This is the only book in history to have sold more copies than the number of people who have bought it. (Some people, obviously worried that a single copy might wear out, buy it "by the armful".)

1955: Your parents tuned in to the first appearance of a sock puppet who is more successful than you will ever be.

1976: Norwegian novelist and playwright Jens Bjørneboe proved he really was a nihilist, dude. Ulrike Meinhof, who was just as bad a terrorist as she was a writer, tried the Sylvia Plath technique for raising the bid on the print rights for her memoirs.

On This Day

In 1933, Mahatma Gandhi began a 21-day fast to protest the first recorded use of the "Ma Hat Ma Coat" gag, and the unethical treatment of animals in the year's blockbuster hit King Kong.

In 1937, Thomas Pynchon, second only to J.D. Salinger in the popularising of not writing for years at a time, was born. True to form, he didn't publish anything for the first 26 years, his next best effort the 17 years between Gravity's Rainbow (1973) and Vineland (1990). Literary scientists have observed a correlation between the financial success of each of his novels, the length of time until publication of the next novel, and the average street price of LSD and green origami paper. They predict that his next novel will be published in 2018. If you want him to write faster, buy all the green origami paper you can. Although he rarely publishes under his own name, he has diligently maintained his J.D. Salinger fansite on Angelfire since 1996.

In 1984, Reader's Digest founder Lila Bell Wallace finally stopped publishing those execrable "Condensed Books" (which sold unusually well in Florida, where time is both precious and intolerable).

In 1985, Theodore Sturgeon terminated the experiment to test his theory that 90% of life is crap. Sturgeon's tactic of defending the endemic awfulness of science fiction by saying that everything else was just as proportionately awful has given comfort to the 90% of science fiction writers who have only heard of Theodore Sturgeon because he coined the 90% rule. (I'm in the top 10%, who also know that he allegedly overheard L. Ron Hubbard say that the way to make a million dollars was to start your own religion, but never publicly confirmed it.)

In 1988, Robert Heinlein conclusively proved that time travel is not (and will not be) possible, by fsckin' dying. He was part of the "Golden Triangle" of science fiction writers with Isaac Asimov and Arthur C. Clarke. Asimov and Clarke continued on as the "Golden Line" until 1992, when Asimov gave up waiting for people to build cool robots. Clarke survives as the "Golden Point", watching his predictive science fiction writing become increasingly inaccurate.

On This Day ...

In 373, Athanasius of Alexandria met the author of his favorite book. He is thought to be the first bishop to determine the list of books that would eventually become the canonical New Testament, leaving out the Gospel of Judas, which they never finished editing (for plot inconsistencies), and the lesser known Gospel of St. Trinians.

In 1519, Leonardo da Vinci stopped writing, drawing, painting, sculpting, inventing, observing, experimenting and philosophising. The world's most famous lefty and arguably the most successful unpublished science fiction writer, Leonardo left behind only 15 paintings but 13,000 pages of notes, drawings, a really excellent recipe for pesto, and a sketch for a distributed network of information retrieval devices he labelled "la Internetta". There are university alumni who collectively have less talent. Until all human knowledge is reset to zero, no-one will ever be this good again.

And three dreadful writers who won't be missed:

• In 1945, Martin Bormann held the title of Germany's Biggest Asshole for two days. He is widely credited with reinventing the genre now known as "Dictator Slash", with his posthumously published collections entitled My Dark Days in the Bunker and Hitler's End.
• In 1957, Senator Joseph McCarthy finally stopped making shit up about Communists in the State Department, succumbing to cirrhosis, hepatitis and a terminal case of hyperbole. It's only recently come to light that for many years he wrote bondage-laden erotica under the pseudonym "Rex Longfellow".
• In 1972, J. Edgar Hoover stopped claiming that "there is no such thing as organized crime fiction in America". He reportedly died during a private screening of The Godfather. His four novels featuring a gay FBI agent called Gee Mann were universally rejected by publishers as "unrealistic", and remain unpublished. On his deathbed, he is alleged to have claimed he was a ghostwriter for Mickey Spillane.

On This Day ...

In 1616, Miguel de Cervantes and William Shakespeare and stopped writing, the hard way. Two of the fathers of Western literature, the greatest writers in the history of the Spanish and English languages. Peruvian poet Inca Garcilaso de la Vega also turned in his final draft. That was a really bad day.

(Actually, England still used the Julian Calendar in 1616, so technically the anniversary of Shakespeare's death is on May 3. "April 23" was the date of his last blog post, in which he ranted about ThySpace, called Christopher Marlowe an "overrated twat" and claimed to be working on a "more upbeat" ending to Hamlet.)

In 1850, William Wordsworth dipped his quill for the last time. He also stopped writing.

UNESCO says it's World Book and Copyright Day, the annual event where the United Nations say "Fsck you!" to fanficcers.