Blog Project #3

Okay, you guys know the deal, a story of less than 1,000 words that has a blog in it. With that, I give you:

The Best Blog Story . . . Ever




He’d always dreamed he’d be a writer. Tapping away at the keys like Hemingway or Fitzgerald, and surrounded by a cloud of cigarette smoke and a glass of whiskey next to the computer. The first time he wrote a novel, the agent he submitted to actually wrote “LOL” in his rejection letter. But the agent just didn’t get it. Didn’t get that a romance novel with Robert Frost and Langston Hughes sleeping together was about more than just gay love, it was about how we all could live peacefully with each other.

His second novel was a little better received, rejected by one hundred and twenty-seven agents, but no “LOLs”. After being rejected thirty-two times on his third novel, he was about to give up. People weren’t interested in Nabakov saving the world from underground vampires. Or Charles Dickens solving the Jack the Ripper case by using time travel. They were brilliant ideas, the world just wasn’t ready for them.

And then, on a Tuesday morning last fall, he surfed the internet and found one of those blog things. He’d read them before and always thought they were less than any other form of literacy in the United States. They were ways to spread rumor and misfortune.

But the blog he stumbled on was different, it was telling a story.

The blog was called “The True Tales of Alistair Finch,” and told of a man who traveled the world saving people from fires, world hunger, and the Irish Potato Famine. Each day Alistair Finch had another adventure and each adventure was thrilling (save Wacky Wednesday day where Alistair rested and his pal Johnny Random got involved in gangland crime). It was brilliant. It was exactly what he wanted to do.

Well, not exactly.

He immediately started his own blog (The Best Blog Ever) and in serial fashion re-wrote his three novels. It took weeks, hell months, but he finally started getting notice when Dickens picked up Emily Dickinson and they shared a torrid love affair across the centuries (Dickens uttering that now famous line, “See, Emily? There is a world that is more than just outside your window. It’s not just children looking for jars of jam.”). That’s when people finally started to notice him. He was getting comments upon comments. And when Dickens finally unmasked the Ripper (it was John Milton, of course. That devil had fashioned his own time machine). The blog was being mentioned on Gawker and Galleycat daily.

But once A Tale of Two Times was finished, he didn’t know what to do next. The hits on his blog were dwindling as writers’ block stumped him. What authors could he tell tales about? More Nabakov? Too boring. Chekov? Too Star Trek. John Irving, Martin Amis and Phillip Roth were shit and no one would care. And people might actually believe a novel about Edgar Allen Poe kidnapping Teddy Roosevelt.

People were going away, he was becoming a story of the past. That crazy lady at Galleycat only wrote one “What will Randy Clampton write next?” post. And really, what did she know? Clampton should have been a headline each day. He was that good. But without a new story, he’d become a has been.

And that was not going to happen. No more agent letters laughing at him. No more rejection letters. The world had accepted his new genre: “Blog As Literature.”

Randy Clampton scoured his library and three weeks later, just as his fifteen minutes were about to end, he found it. Jane Austen: Hooker. Oh, it would be brilliant! Jane would do her thing and Percy Bysshe Shelly could be her pimp. People would eat it up!

He sat to write it, the first scene, Austen sleeping with –
****
“Hey Dave?”
“Yeah, what’s up?”
“You finish your blog story yet?”
“Yeah, I’m writng the last line now.”
“What’s it about?”
I waited while my roommate read the story.
He laughed. “You have way too much time on your hands.”
I shrugged. “It was all I could come up with. Either that or Jackson Donne starts a blog.”
“That might have been cool.”
“Yeah, right. ‘Today I drank a beer with Artie. I miss Jeanne.’”
“Or you could have just said no to the whole thing.”
I sat for a second. “Yeah, that’s true.”
Without another thought, I turned off the computer and walked away. Not doing it would be better that publishing the trash I’d written.
****
"NO!" Dave's teacher yelled, slamming the paper back on his desk. "You can't do that! That's like saying it was all a dream!"

"BUT--"

"No, 'buts.' Do you want to fail? You can't just have the writer decide not the finish the story. All that does is make a reader mad. You're not following the rules."

"But I don't know how to end it!"

"Figure one out!"

The teacher walked away leaving Dave to agonize over how to the end story. He pressed his pen to paper. He liked the ending, the adult version of Dave being distracted by a roommate. What was it with teachers wanting to make you work harder?

He put his pen to paper and looked at his watch. Ten minutes until the bell. He could fake writer's block until then.
***
Dave White woke up in his bed.

You gotta be kidding me, he thought. It was all a dream?

What a ripoff.