Jolt Country

Ben, I noticed, buried on the hidden part of your board at http://www.moltobenny.com/pwc2/coasterlist.html you mention how you ride a lot of rollercoasters. I notice one you gave a +4 to was The Raptor at Cedar Point. As it turns out, I have a story that I included in my book Instrument of God, of which the 3 meg, 740 page book can be downloaded here.

So here's the story:

My sister and brother went out to Cedar Point Amusement Park, in Ohio, when they went on vacation together on earth. They rode the toughest, strongest roller coaster there. Now, they'd been crossing the country stopping at amusement parks, and had been on many coasters, but the one they had there made them sick. Really sick. Especially my sister.

She was so sick, she was in the ladies' room next to the coaster, hunched over a commode, puking her guts out into the toilet. But the story here is what happened behind her, two women come in, one of them escorting the other who was probably her mother or grandmother, very elderly lady. They both are discussing how they had just ridden the coaster my sister had just gotten off of and was providing the toilet with her opinion of its strength.

I don't remember if this is the right name, but let's call that coaster the Raptor for the sake of argument. Well, anyway, the first woman says to her grandmother, ‘So, did you think I was right about the Raptor?'

‘Yeah, I know. You told me I wouldn't like it, and you were right.'

‘I don't think we're going to want to come back to this amusement park any more in view of the ride we had on the Raptor.'

Her grandmother apparently was in agreement. ‘Yeah, it's not really fun here any more, the rollercoasters here, especially the Raptor, are just too tame. We need to find even more exciting ones. I'm only 85, I'd like to have some excitement in my life instead of these weak coasters they have here.'

After my sister finished emptying her stomach, she - and my brother - spent the rest of the day lying on the beds in their expensive hotel room commiserating how sick that ‘tame' and ‘weak' coaster had made them. In effect, they paid for admission to the park, and a whole day's hotel room rent, to get to ride one roller coaster that made them dreadfully sick. You could say that it was one really expensive coaster ride.

I would have expected this story to be in puke green.

Are...

...are all 740 pages like that?

pinback wrote:Are all 740 pages like that?

Like what?

In blue.

Commander, have you approached an editor with your tome?

Also, I'll try to read the first 20 pages this weekend. Not because of imagined quality, but because 20 pages a weekend is what I average these days.

I am currently skimming through page xxiv and I HIGHLY RECOMMEND everyone look at this tome. I haven't been this flabbergasted since cheeseburgers were made in High Definition.

ICJ wrote:Commander, have you approached an editor with your tome?

The book industry is almost literally a Catch 22 in that editors won't touch authors who don't have an agent, while agents won't accept new clients who aren't already published.

Tdarcos wrote:The book industry is almost literally a Catch 22 in that editors won't touch authors who don't have an agent, while agents won't accept new clients who aren't already published.

So have represented authors cracked the dark secrets of immortality but change their names every few decades to keep us from catching on? Where do new agents come from, or are they immortal as well?

Coaster Expert, is that you?

ChainGangGuy wrote:Coaster Expert, is that you?

Like too many other people, you're not reading what I wrote. I just repeated the story, it was my brother and sister who went around the country riding coasters. (My sister scheduled her vacation to when CVS Drug gave my brother his vacation so that they both could hit the coasters,)

I don't particularly care to ride coasters myself.

The Happiness Engine wrote:

Tdarcos wrote:The book industry is almost literally a Catch 22 in that editors won't touch authors who don't have an agent, while agents won't accept new clients who aren't already published.

So have represented authors cracked the dark secrets of immortality but change their names every few decades to keep us from catching on? Where do new agents come from, or are they immortal as well?

As I see it, after you've been able to get articles in magazines often enough you can then use it possibly to find an agent or the name recognition can then get you recognized enough that an editor might look at something. Or you hit the book circuit and go to trade meetings to meet editors and you might be able to talk one into reading a piece of what you have done.

Not much of this is possible (as well as for financial reasons) for a disabled man such as myself.

So, not disabled enough to write 800 pages, too disabled to submit 1000 words?