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Category: famous bullshit stories

Coming Soon (Sorta) and Other Miscellany

Published by Crawford on June 2, 2024

ITEM! It’s official! Work has begun on the sequel to Fester. Granted, it’s not a lot of work, and there is no title as of yet. As I am a pantser when it comes to writing, I don’t even have a clear idea of exactly what’s going to happen. There are a number of things I can share of which I am fairly certain:

  • The timeline of the new story is set 20 years after Fester, which puts it around 2014.
  • Martin Prieboy is still Chief Constable of Fester, but is struggling with the recent loss of his spouse.
  • Billy Snyder is out of prison and living in a secluded house in the hills, where he spends his time plotting revenge.
  • Michael “Bolly” Bollinger has taken over his dad’s automotive repair shop and is a respected local businessman -but his business is in trouble.
  • The Schmidt family now teeters on the brink of destruction, their huge mansion looming over the town of Fester like something really, really symbolic.
  • Cynthia Hoegenbloeven is still running around somewhere with the remnants of the money she ran off with. Presumably she has now gotten some clothes.

There are other characters who we probably won’t see: the Plummer family moved out of town shortly after the events of Fester, and haven’t been heard from, ditto Janie Simpson. Roscoe Dirkschneider has died in prison, and Randall “Cowboy Bob” Warnke never recovered from his injuries sustained at the hands of the parishioners of Calvary Lutheran. Of course, the Top Hat families are still around, although most of the characters from Fester have gone to that Great Country Club in the Sky.

That’s what I’ve got for now. I’ll keep you posted as the story develops, although it usually takes me several years to actually write, edit and publish these books. You patience will be rewarded.

ITEM! In the course of marketing Laughingstock, I had the fortune to encounter a new book promo site called Shepherd. It’s a fascinating premise: authors are asked to list their five favorite books related to a theme of their choosing – which is presumably related to one of their own books. Then they write a short review of those books.

The theme I chose was “hilarious high weirdness,” which is a fairly regular theme in my writing. This allowed my literary eclecticism to really stretch – it was a great deal of fun! Here are the books I chose:

  • Wilt by Tom Sharpe
  • Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas by Hunter S. Thompson
  • The Book of the SubGenius by the SubGenius Foundation
  • Noir by Christopher Moore
  • The Third Policeman by Flann O’Brien

My reviews can be found at THIS LINK. Give the page – and the whole site – a good going-over – it’s a lot of fun!

ITEM! There will be an eBook promo for Fester, starting this Wednesday, June 5, running through Sunday, June 9. For this time, the eBook version of Fester will be available for a measly $0.99. Of course, it’s still too early to promote the sequel (coming Summer 2027 if I really work at it), but I wanted to take another run at the Amazon Bestseller ranking as I did with Laughingstock. I’ve pretty much come to the conclusion that these promos are the best way to get people to read what I’ve written, and that investing heavily in advertising profits nobody but the advertising platform. We’ll see how it goes!

Fester
On sale for a measly 99 cents, 6/5 through 6/9.

Covid, Comedy and the Summertime Blues

Published by Crawford on August 20, 2022
Mitch Hedberg on Conan O’Brien

Okay, first of all, I have Covid. This is crummy; I feel crummy. Not a small part of that crummy feeling is knowing that I have been as cautious as I could possibly be for the last two and a half(!) years of this plague. Fortunately, part of that caution has been getting any vaccination I could as soon as it became available, so the effects of the infection haven’t been nearly as bad as they might have been. Still crummy, though.

A big part of the crumminess is the isolation; not even being able to hug my sweet wife or squiggle the ferret (down to one now; another crummy part of the summer). You might have thought that the Covid-imposed isolation would be a boon for my writing activities. You would have thought wrong in that case. Hell, it’s a titanic struggle just getting this post committed to the page.

I have definitely hit a wall with the second draft of Laughingstock. I was jazzed when I finished up the first draft earlier this year; sat down and wrote a bunch of notes for how to improve it for the second draft; and promptly did next to nothing.

Part of the reason for that is I’m trying a new piece of writing software called Scrivener, after having used boring ol’ MS Word for umpteen years. The problem is that Scrivener is just too cool for school. It’s got all sorts of neat little authorial bells and whistles and features and stuff, and as a techno-geek of the old school, I can’t resist playing with them all – even if I’m certain that I will only use these features for a short time if at all. Scrivener has a lot of rabbit holes to go down.

Of course, that’s really only an excuse – and not a particularly good one at that. Not nearly as good as, say, getting a disease.

To lift my diseased spirits and try to provide some inspiration for continuation of Laughingstock, I’ve been listening to a lot of comedy. I’ve been a comedy geek for nearly as long as I’ve been a techno-geek (I’m into a lot of geekery; I’m somewhat of a Renaissance geek).

Last week, I was listening to Mitch Hedberg. If you’ve never done so, I’d recommend it. His was a unique voice, and it still makes me sad that a drug overdose cut that voice back in 2005. His comedy is not for everyone – he employs a lot of nonsequiturs and unexpected wordplay. That’s what I find so appealing.

As I learned from Mitch’s Wikipedia entry, he also employs a figure of speech called a paraprosdokian. According to Merriam-Webster, this is “a figure of speech in which the end of the sentence is surprising, or causes the reader to reinterpret the first part.” This is a useful tool in the comedian’s toolbox, as evidenced by Henny Youngman’s famous line “Take my wife – please!”

I was pleased to learn the word paraprosokian, because I had encountered on in the form of a bumper-sticker about a year ago. I was taking a walk in the neighborhood and my eyes glanced over a bumper-sticker on a parked minivan. I took two more steps while my brain processed what I had read, then I doubled over laughing. Here it is:

I suppose you have to get a laugh wherever you can these days; it’s good to know they’re all around if you have the right eye. Meanwhile, I’m back to the recuperation lounge with a huge freakin’ Ken Follett novel about cathedrals.

Fester
A perfect late-summer read!

The Sweet Weasel Story

Published by Crawford on March 18, 2021
The new Sweet Weasel Words logo

As part of the upcoming “media blitz” for Powwows and Fester, I decided that it was time to update the logo. I trimmed the original image down to the face, and added an endless knot style border. As I was staring – for hours – at that sweet weasel face, it occurred to me that I had never told the story of how the name Sweet Weasel Words came about. So I will now.

First, the sweet face is not a weasel, but a ferret. Pet ferrets were a status symbol in 17th and 18th century Britain. Queen Elizabeth I had a pet ferret named Rascal and included him in one of her royal portraits.

Elizabeth I and Rascal

Nearly a century later, Queen Anne did Elizabeth one better by having portraits painted of her own pet ferrets, and insisting that they hang in the National Portrait Gallery. The paintings are remarkable for their time due to the use of a special green pigment in the paint, which could only be made from guano from one of the Galapagos Islands (the small one). The paintings themselves are rather small (~1 1/2″ x 2 1/2″), so I guess not a lot of special guano was required.

Queen Anne’s ferrets were named Chauncy and Impertinence. Chauncy has a sorta “huh?” look about him in his painting.

Chauncy

Impertinence looks exactly like her name in her portrait.

Impertinence

Queen Anne doted on Chauncy and Impertinence, and called them her “sweet weasels.” She insisted on the pictures being hung in the British National Portrait Gallery. There was a fuss about it at first, with many feeling it was inappropriate. The curators of the gallery waited until they figured that Queen Anne wasn’t looking, and then they moved the ferret pictures into the corner by the trash can.

I’ve always thought that the picture of Impertinence was very fetching, and I’ve always enjoyed the phrase “weasel words.” When it came time to put a name to my enterprise, the two random memories just sort of flew together and combined, making a wet slap sound. Thus the name Sweet Weasel Words was born.

That’s my story and I’m sticking to it.