For a while now I have been learning the hard way that being a writer means selling lies for a living, and you only get paid in imaginary money. I mean, I-Universe has a payment policy of 10% royalties, but they only send you a check when they reach $25 dollars that they owe you. So, the $16 dollars they owe me for book sales in 2014 is still in their bank account. Blogging on the internet (what I am supposedly doing as a professional author here on WordPress with a site set up for me by I-Universe) pays in reader appreciation, likes, and shares. I get paid diddly-zilch for that.
So, I have decided to open an online imaginary store. I found a couple of partners, Junius Scheakenschifter the business entrepreneur, and Sam the Banana Man, a cartoonist like me (but a little more loony). The thing that makes them difficult to work with is that both of them are completely fictional people, existing only in my imagination. But that’s okay. The store is made up of entire lines of imaginary inventory and I only charge a little appreciation and some fantasy money for each item.
Let me make a list for you of the best-selling items in my store.
The patent for this alien technology actually belongs to the ruling council of the Telleron Star Empire.
After the failed alien invasion in my second published novel, Catch a Falling Star, I had a number of these alien ray pistols in my possession. They are called Skortch Rays by the Tellerons (Who speak Galactic English just like we do as they learned it from watching I Love Lucy episodes from the television signals that have already traveled to the nearest stars). Testing them out on rats and people who annoy me, I have determined that they are basically molecular disintegration rays that turn solid objects… and rats and annoying people… into loose, free-floating atoms and clouds of gas. This is particularly useful for those people who annoy you, as no physical evidence is left of the skortching for the local authorities to find and give you disapproving stares over. Of course, since it really only works on the imaginary people who annoy you, you probably don’t have to worry about the moral aspects of the things anyway. I believe these items are worth somewhere in the neighborhood of billions and billions of dollars, but I am offering them at the sale price of one imaginary wooden nickel apiece. Surely you can afford that. And they work really well on exterminating imaginary rats.
4th Dimensional Hoola Hoops can be hazardous to your health, so I recommend you read the enclosed user’s manual from cover to cover.
The Fourth-Dimensional Hoola Hoop is really hard to imagine a practical application for, but I think it is obvious that it represents hours and hours of mildly radioactive fun. I am told that the longer you hula with the hoops, the farther your top part gets from the bottom part. I am told this by Mr. Scheakenschifter who tested it himself. But I can’t prove his claims are true because he is still hooping, and the top half of him in the A-ring claims that the bottom half of him in the B-ring is now hooping along the north shores of the Hudson Bay. I am waiting for the news footage of a wandering pair of legs wearing a hoop to be posted on one of the many conspiracy-theory websites I follow. (What do you mean that wouldn’t be valid evidence? I believe them about the crop circles and UFO sightings, don’t I?) We will happily sell you a 4th-Dimensional Hoola Hoop for the low, low price of one thousand Trans-Orgonian Bleeb-chuckers, the standard transactional currency used on the third planet of the Trans-Orgonia Star System. The natives there give Bleeb-chuckers away for free, so all you have to do is make a trip there and collect them. (I also have a special deal available on Earth-to-Trans-Orgonia starships of the imaginary and dream-works variety.)
Moosewinkles are easy to care for and train because they only eat imaginary sauerkraut and speak English particularly well for a moose.
The last item I would like to tempt you with today is a Moosewinkle. These cartoon mooses… er, moosi… er, meese… are the perfect item to use as you discover the strenuous sport of Moose Bowling. Moose Bowling is good for your heart because a moose weighs in the neighborhood of half a ton. Throwing one down a lane in a bowling alley takes strength, determination, considerable skill, and… moose muscles. If you can roll a moose down the lane, you are practically guaranteed a strike on every ball. The moose tends to knock down all the pins whether you hit the head pin or not. In fact, it will probably record a strike in the lanes on either side as well. Wouldn’t it be fun to roll a score of 300 every time you go bowling? Maybe even 900 if you keep score on both sides of your lane at the same time. So please buy my Moosewinkle. In fact, I will send him to you free. He has already grazed on all the grass and flowers in our yard, and most of the curtains in the house too. So, where do you live? I’ll pay the postage and handling myself.
I now stand ready to start raking in the imaginary money. And I will get rich this way just as quickly as I will by being a novelist with I-Universe publishers.
Made-Up People
I often get criticized for talking to people who are basically invisible, probably imaginary, and definitely not real people, no matter what else they may be.
The unfinished cover picture is from the novel The Bicycle-Wheel Genius which I just finished the final rewrite and edit for. All of the characters in that book are fictional. Even though some of them strongly resemble the real people who inspired me to create them, they are fictional people doing fictional and sometimes impossible things. And yet, they are all people who I have lived with as walking, talking, fictional people for many years. Most of those people have been talking to me since the 1970’s. I know some of them far better than any of the real people who are a part of my life.
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These, of course, are only a few of my imaginary friends. Some I spend time with a lot. Some I haven’t seen or heard from in quite a while. And I do know they are not real people. Mandy is a cartoon panda bear, and Anneliese is a living gingerbread cookie. I do understand I made these people up in my stupid little head.
But it seems to me that the people in the world around us are really no less imaginary, ephemeral, and unreal. Look at the current Presidentumb of the Disunited States. He is an evil cartoon James Bond villain if there ever was one.
Animated cast of OUR CARTOON PRESIDENT. Photo: Courtesy of SHOWTIME
People in the real world create an imaginary person in their own stupid little heads, and pretend real hard that that imaginary person is really them in real life. And of course, nobody sees anybody else in the same way that they see themselves. Everybody thinks they are a somebody who is different from anybody else who thinks they are a somebody too, and really they are telling themselves, and each other, lies about who somebody really is, and it is all very confusing, and if you can follow this sentence, you must be a far better reader than I am a writer, because none of it really makes sense to me. I think everybody is imaginary in some sense of the word.
So, if you happen to see me talking to a big white rabbit-man who used to be a pet white rabbit, but got changed into a rabbit-man through futuristic genetic science and metal carrots, don’t panic and call the police. I am just talking to another fictional character from a book I just finished writing. And why are you looking inside my head, anyway? There’s an awful lot of personal stuff going on in there. Of course, you only see that because I wrote about it in this essay. So it is not an invasion of privacy. It is just me writing down stuff I probably should keep in my own stupid little head. My bad.
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Tagged as characters, imagination, the Bicycle-Wheel Genius