One of the cooler things that’s happened to me in the last few days was Changing Hands Bookstore in Tempe, Arizona offering me 300 words in their newsletter to answer the essay: Why You Should Buy My Book and Come to My Event at Changing Hands.
The main reason I thought it was cool was the unnecessarily lengthy essay title. I have a particular affinity towards unnecessarily lengthy titles (the original title of World Leader Pretend was The Strangely Peaceful Citadel of Blue Orcs…), so I was immediately attracted to the writing of the essay.
Unfortunately, in an attempt to savor the writing of it, I planned on waiting until this weekend to write it. Well, to make a long story short, the calendar editor at the bookstore had gotten the deadline dates wrong and told me yesterday that he needed it done by this morning. I hadn’t started.
So this morning, a little jagged from my book release party last night, I wrote this:
(I’m worried that I’m still a bit tipsy…)
You should buy World Leader Pretend because it’s weird. Good weird. It’s about a two-headed boy, a man who pretends to be a girl, a girl who pretends to be a man, a coyote, a century plant, a saguaro that says “Good,” mountain biking, an electric baby, a poetry slam gone awry, an Antarctic welder who does stupid penguin tricks, and the untimely demise of a dragon. Who writes books about those things? Nobody.
You should also buy my book because it’s important. It’s about how the Internet has altered human society: how it has made us friends with people continents away and strangers to the people next door. It’s also about a young man who is a little like Caesar, a young man who would rather be first in command in a small village in Gaul then second in command in Rome–a young man who feels a bit stifled in 21st century America, where all important decisions are made by some distant talking head on TV. It’s about how this young man turns to an online game where he can be a king.
So that’s why you should buy my book. You should come to my reading for completely different reasons. You should come to my reading because I am terrified of public speaking and it will be a cliffhanger as to whether I get through the reading at all. It’ll be live human drama.
Also, you should come because you can be a Cover Artist Pretend. There will be a table with Sharpies on it, and stickers with my alternative cover art, and you can color your own cover for the book. After you’ve designed it, I will sign your book and officially approve the cover, and then you can go home and add Book Cover Artist to your resume. How cool is that!