Monday, July 26, 2010

Book me

Everyone has a book in them right? And while I personally believe that life's too short to bother with Jodi Picault and Robert Ludlam, most people disagree with me. So help me out. Which one of the following 15 books I have in me should I write first? If I die soon, which I won't, but if I did, which one would you most like to have read? Which one would you buy? Which one would you buy for your friends? I'm sure you know that you must never give gifts that suggest the need for self-improvement so some of the titles might have to be just for you:

1. What Would Sacha Do? (an exhaustive list of how to behave in any new and potentially scary situation. Most examples premised around the simple idea of take over, talk lots, leave early, send an invoice.)
2. Cucumber. You too can be cool like me. One word titles are pretty BIG right now.
3. Dogs Bite. Not really a book, more of a complete and well reasoned theory for why you shouldn't ever keep one at home with your children.
4. Cats Wee. As above at number 4.
5. The Paradox of Success. How to be enormously popular, confident, wealthy and skinny but still have nothing to wear, nowhere to go and no money for milk every day-before-pay-day.
6. Lads I've Loved. Not a very long book, but sort of a documentary coffee table book. The boy from the dairy next door, aged 5, Paul Drew, blond and so cute, aged 7....you get the idea.
7. Lads Who've Loved Me. A companion to number 6 but with a few less entries.
8. Places I Could've Been to If I'd Tried a Bit Harder. I'm thinking a pictorial book with all the classic places like Gisborne, Cape Reinga, Feilding, Masterton, Otorohanga and Wanganui.
9. Natural Beauty. A lay woman's guide to looking your best everyday. Simple step by step photoshop tools to take your headshot and transpose it onto photos of Helen Mirren, Angelina Jolie and for the intellectually able Angela Merkel. Slightly more complex tools for printing out 15 A4 sheets and sellotaping them all around you so that only an experienced eye will notice the joins.
10. Wig-a-rama. A personal favourite. My face with lots of different hair styles. It would be an interactive book. I'm thinking of giving away free crayons to colour in bows and ribbons and including scissors to scratch my eyes out.
11. Neat Freak. Capitalising on the fad for home cleaning and organising and tidying and buying storage stuff that doesn't quite fit on your existing shelves. It will obviously be a fiction title as I have no actual real life, true life, experience of the actual, real, true topic.
12. Awaken the Little Person Within. I am often likened to Tony Robbins except that he is quite a bit taller and manlier and successfuller than I am. I do have whiter teeth than him and in the motivational speaker world this counts for almost as much as having good content and being motivational. He has probably never been to Masterton either.
13. Awaken the Dog Within. This would really just be a personal note for P who has just come home from school singing "who let the dogs out? who? who?"
14. Lost in Time. This would really just be a personal note for whoever taught P such an old song. Like, it is soooo three years ago. Whatever. Not even. Shame.
15. Bargain. Again capitalizing on the one word title and keeping in mind that bookstore owners have to buy the books before the readers do. Think how much they'll save on promotional signs.

Wait, now I've got it. The best title yet:

16. Bargain, $.99c.



5 comments:

Anne said...

Totally would buy number 5! It'll be great to finally get some fine-tune-your-money-spending-skills to make sure I really can't afford the Sunday paper. I can see great potential also for all those smug people who can read the book and then say: Oh dear, those poor little souls who can't organize their finances... the shame of it all etc. etc.

aroby arby said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
aroby arby said...

With reference to your earlier blogsite posting (I keep missing posts; try as I might, I can't seem to be a successful "follower" ... where is the "leaders" section of your blogsite?):

Come on Sach, some people are indeed idiots. They are useless and deserve a degree of scorn and condescension (did I spell that right? It can be a tough one). Plain and simple. :)

But more importantly, where can I get a copy of your book Natural Beauty?

BeJolly said...

Places I could have been to... We've got a book "crap towns - the 50 worst places to live in the UK". We enjoy it immensely, as do guests to our house. So great on the coffee table. It was also used as a school reading book when R was doing his teacher training...! truly lots of potential with this sort of format... I can already see you being published by Scholastic... ;-)

Anonymous said...

"How to Find Friends When You don't have Any"