Eratosphere - Competition: Blurb

Competition
Wednesday, 31st March 2010
Lucy Vickery presents the latest competition
In Competition No. 2640 you were invited to provide the publicity blurb for one of the following implausibly titled but real books: I was Tortured by the Pygmy Love Queen; How to Write a How to Write Book, or Afterthoughts of a Worm Hunter. These enticingly titled tomes have all, at one time or another, been shortlisted for the annual Bookseller/Diagram Prize for Oddest Title of the Year, previous nominees for which include The 2009–2014 World Outlook for 60-Milligram Containers of Fromage Frais and Oral Sadism and the Vegetarian Personality. The award, dreamed up in 1978 to fend off boredom at the Frankfurt book fair, attracted a record-breaking number of entries this year. In the face of stiff competition, Crocheting Adventures with Hyperbolic Planes stormed home to take the title.
While Afterthoughts of a Worm Hunter left the reading public cold — as of mid-February it had failed to sell a single copy in the UK or US — it was top choice with competitors, though tough to do justice to.
David Mackie, P.C. Parrish and Josh Ekroy were narrowly outflanked by the winners, printed below, who earn £25 each. Patrick Smith pockets the bonus fiver.

Like an earthworm with a sense of humour, this eagerly awaited third volume of Doug Leaflitter’s writhingly honest autobiography is, by turns, hilarious and deeply moving. An uplifting, unputdownable follow-up to The Nematode Road and the Brandling Prize-short listed Pupate on a String, this latest segment begins with Doug’s life at a crossroads. His passion for all things vermiform has now become a destructive obsession, driving Lotte, his wife of 20 years, to leave him. When he is ‘outed’ as a trafficker of lobworms by animal rights activists, public opprobrium forces him finally to acknowledge the depth of the hole he has dug for himself. This heartwarming confessional is a wryly reflective, often achingly funny account of how he hauls himself, inch-by-inch, back to the surface and to ultimate redemption as the all-time champion maggot-swallower on TV’s I’m a celebrity…
‘Larvally grub!’ The Sun
‘Mr Leaflitter-ature does it again.’ TLS
Patrick Smith

Your novels have been compared to Tolstoy and Dickens. People constantly ask you, ‘How do you do it?’ You’d like to explain, but when you try to write your how-to book on writing, the blank page mocks your every effort.
Sound familiar? Now, at long last, comes a guide to guide you in writing your guide to guide others. Learn all about:
• the power of bulleted lists to drive home a point,
• the use of bold fonts,
• and when, if ever, to combine bold and italic fonts within bulleted list items.
Have you written a single paragraph that says everything that needs to be said? Learn how to expand that paragraph to fill chapter after chapter.
Congratulations on the critical acclaim your novels have garnered. But isn’t it time you started to make some real money?
Robert Schechter

Published in tandem with her equally startling How Not to Write a How Not to Write Book (for advanced beginners), Dr. M. Leigh Bronteigh’s new classic is a must-have for lecturers in creative writing, and for their students. In a virtuoso display, she shows would-be manual-makers how to divide work into chapters, how to vary their lengths, where (and whether) to include indices, and how to avoid patronising readers while also goading them. The whole shebang is made entertaining by Bronteigh’s inclusion of three very, very badly written chapters, in what is the first post-modern approach to helping aspiring writers to get a life. The chapter ‘There’s No Consolation’ has already received generous praise from established writers. ‘I think this is eminently and utterly putdownable’ — Tom Paulin. ‘If I had known then what I know now, right, I would not of stopped learning to write how to write books’ — Lily Allen.
Bill Greenwell

How to write an endorsement of How to Write a How to Write Book? How trite this might become in the hands of one who thinks he knows how to write but for whom by definition the book was written. Too right that knowing how to write involves a rite of passage — the passage in question being the introduction to this book, which goes right to the heart of writing, righting the wrongs so frequently committed by those whose efforts to write a How to Write book have rightly been written off. But it would not be right to dwell on the deficiencies of previous attempts in this genre. Welcome instead this fascinating volume of advice to advisers, the self-explanatory clarity of whose title is not the least of its remarkable virtues. Highly recommended: the expression ‘style guru’ might have been created for its talented author...
Mary Holtby

Emerging unscathed from Sexton’s previous novel, I Nearly Had It with a Big Baboon, our intrepid hero, Algernon Carruthers, adventurer and palaeontologist, stumbles into a clearing after weeks of wandering through dense, steamy jungle. Pounced upon by a pack of excited Pygmy women, he is taken to their leader, the voluptuous Amber. Starved not of food but the food of love, Carruthers begs for her favours but is callously rejected. Night after night from the shadows he gazes upon her, his hungry eyes feeding on beauty beyond his reach as she sheds what little clothing she has and slips contentedly into her bed. Yet again Sexton and his publisher, Viagra Books, have produced a sizzling potboiler with I Was Tortured by a Pygmy Love Queen. Must Algernon’s natural desires remain unrequited? Will there be any end to his torment? Prepare yourselves for the explosive ending when all is finally revealed.
Alan Millard