Tag: humor

Clippy Must Die

My father and I were talking on the phone when he suddenly discovered that his smartwatch had managed to turn back on its coaching function, telling him to stand up and walk around. We started talking about annoying “assistance” from our digital devices. I have all the coaching on my smartwatch turned off, even the “Yeah! you’ve reached X goal.” Recently, I switched my bedtime listen from Audible to an audiobook that I had on Apple Books from way back – and I started getting notices that I had “reached my reading goal for the day.” Okay, first I wasn’t actually reading, second I hadn’t set a goal that I know of, and third, just stop! (I did find the setting and put and end to that). But all that reminded me of this Classic from “Wait, wait, don’t tell me!” on NPR, a flash from the past that I just had to pass along: “Clippy Must Die!”

Clippy Must Die

So you want to write a novel…

I thought I would pair up a couple of things. First, a little writing humor about a complete lack of realism when approaching writing/selling/publishing a novel via a YouTube video (alas, the embed didn’t work, so I’ve linked it instead.

And second, a marvelous interview with Bonnie Garmus, author of Lessons in Chemistry, whose “practice novel” was rejected 98 times (but with the 98th rejection came some useful insight):

Finally, agent number 98 said that she would read part of it—and she did. She wrote back the next day and said, ‘You write well, but you don’t understand this industry…’ The email was pretty nasty, but it was also a very big help. She said, ‘No one’s going to look at a debut author’s 700-page novel—ever. Do yourself a favor and write a novel of appropriate length, and you can send me that when you finish’—which I never did. But that all turned into Lessons in Chemistry. I started completely new. I felt like I couldn’t change the story [of the first novel] because it was very tightly structured. So I thought, that’s my practice novel, and I put it away. I’m borrowing a few things from it for my book that I’m working on now.

The whole interview is a great read. I haven’t yet read Lessons in Chemistry, but it’s now on my TBR (to be read) list.Â