l (your) fao

I first read Michael Gerber's Freshman, a bizarre, over-the-top parody of college life, the summer before I started college.

Terrible idea. Instead of making me excited for college, it made me depressed that my college experience would totally never compare.

What I would compare Freshman to is Scrubs. Granted, Scrubs is funny and Freshman is hysterical, but both are comedies that parody an establishment (hospital, Ivy League college) using bizarre scenarios (see the clip, read the book), but still manage to have complex, likable characters and hit upon real truths.

For a taste of the hilarity, check out the Stutts University (the setting of the book) website. It's also laugh-out-loud hilarious.

And now, as promised, my small contribution to try to garner interest for my favorite at-risk books: copying and pasting a review I already wrote about the book for a publishing interview. I know, I know. It's too much effort, it borders on heroic... but please, hold your applause.

"When Hart Fox’s acceptance at prestigious, Ivy League Stutts University is hijacked by local millionaire Burlington Darling, who buys a new boathouse in exchange for his son Trip’s acceptance, Hart is forced into a raw deal to attend his dream school. Mr. Darling will get him in and pay his way, but Hart must keep blockhead Trip out of trouble and take all his classes so that Trip won’t ruin his father’s bid for governor. Yet Trip is only a part of Hart’s bizarre freshman year; Hart must learn to navigate the strange Stutts culture, his first relationship, and help his new friends resurrect a scorned and almost obsolete humor magazine.

Freshman is laugh-out-loud hilarious, a strength so overpowering that one might at first not realize the numerous other merits that not only make the novel so funny, but give it satisfying substance: blunt, deft prose, a fully formed plot, and complex, well-drawn characters. Freshman’s humor often manifests itself in the bizarre, but not to the point of throwing readers out of the story, for two reasons: matter-of-fact prose and truths that underlie even the most off-the-wall situations, such as the fact that Mr. Darling’s political opponent is a dog due to a paperwork error. Gerber’s blunt style never acknowledges the impossibility of the events, firmly establishing the rules of the world in which the story takes place: “Mr. Darling entered the race thinking that it would be a slam dunk, but the dog, a Boston Terrier, was awfully cute” (27). The truths hidden in each wacky scenario continue to assuage skepticism, as well as making the impossible plot relatable (and more funny for it).The truths regard society (like the public’s love for cute animals), friendship (when angry with his best friend, a character cheers himself by pondering his friend’s numerous failings), and, of course, the university system. Stutts’ campus is crumbling because of the effort to make it look older (an effort only applied after mass time travel failed), there is a building named “Center for People Who Give Us Money,” and Trip’s fraternity is Comma Comma Apostrophe. Though no college student can literally have the Stutts experience, most can relate to Gerber’s hilarious definition of a safety school, “Someplace you’d rather kill yourself than attend, but your parents make you apply to anyway” (11), Hart’s disgust with running into now-chummy high school enemies over break, and obnoxious housemates.

The plot keeps driving to the end, making the reader want to keep reading not only for amusement, but to find out what happens to Hart, his friends, and their humor magazine. The characters aid in this, for while some are caricatured for humor, the main characters are complex, fully developed, and easy to care about. Smart, funny, and polite Hart desires to belong, worries that he cares more about his girlfriend than she does for him, and is desperate to hang onto his friends and life at Stutts. Hart’s best friend, Peter, is in a wheelchair after a high school football accident, and is still dealing with his situation underneath his witty, irreverent, devil-may-care attitude (like not being able to play football at Stutts, and not being able to get a date due to his disability). Yet part of him is glad that the accident occurred, for it saved him from the clichéd path of his successful but ultimately unhappy upper-class family, though Peter himself takes his extreme wealth for granted. Even Biff and Beekman, freshmen who attempt to murder Hart multiple times to win a bet, are impossible to dislike, with hilarious neuroses and situations that make their actions almost understandable.

Michael Gerber’s fully formed plot, complex, well-drawn characters, blunt, clever prose, and flowing structure, make Freshman a must-read, even if you will lament that your college experience didn’t compare."

And remember: comment or email about your favorite mid-list authors/books, and spread the word!

so, i guess i'm an activist now...

It all started with a crush.

Whether you think that's beautiful, poetic, cheesy, melodramatic, or oh-so-very-middle-school (I'm leaning toward that, myself, though I suppose in that case melodrama is implied), that's really the heart (no pun intended) of the matter for me. (So stay with me, here. There's some explanation to get to the issue, but it's all important, and for me, maybe a little bit romantic.)

His name is Fisk, and he isn't real. He's one of the two main characters in Hilari Bell's Knight and Rouge series. He's hardly the first literary crush I've had, and while I'd say he comes close, he isn't even the fictional character I'm most in love with (that's a tie between Fred and George Weasley, and do not even talk to me about the seventh book. Yes, it's been years, but denial is still the only thing that gets me through the day.)

I'm aware that my love for Fred and George might be a little excessive, but I don't think I sound crazy here, at least not to fellow avid readers and/or writers. Books are meant to be engaging. You're meant to lose yourself in them, and think that the people you're reading about are real, even if you know they're fiction. Personally, I can't even read a book if I don't care about the characters. It could be the most fascinating plot in the world, but if I don't care about who it's happening to, I'm bored. People enjoy books because of emotional investment. Emotional investment can come from writing, style, tone, characterization, plot, or a myriad of other reasons, craft or otherwise, but in the end, people only like the books they're invested in. And I get invested in books because of characters. That's all reliant on how the author writes them, of course, but that's not the point.

The point is that I have a huge crush on Fisk, and unless something changes, I may never get to find out what happens to him.

A little less than a week ago, I finished Player's Ruse, the third book in the Knight and Rouge series. I've liked him since the first book, and I only liked him more as I kept reading. Since I don't want to add any spoilers, suffice it to say that the book ended with a taste of discovery about Fisk's past, which I've been insanely curious about. It was one of the most emotional, fantastic scenes I've ever read, but I wanted more. The situation was hinted at but not fully explained, the emotions not fully explored. It was wonderful and awful and heartbreaking and heartwarming and a million other things, and I needed to discuss it with someone.

I love book discussions. The convenient thing about reading bestselling books (A-list books, if you will) is that those are always at hand. After every Harry Potter book I had discussions with tons of different friends, though by the time the later books came out I probably could've stopped any stranger on the street. J.K. Rowling is an A-list author, along with people such as Stephen King, Candace Bushnell, Stephenie Meyer, Dan Brown, and Meg Cabot. Hilari Bell, and many authors I read, are mid-list authors. No one that I knew had read Player's Ruse, and so I went straight to the top. I couldn't get any closure until I shared my thoughts, and so I wrote an email to the author herself.

I'm a little embarrassed about the email. Not because of what I wrote, but how I wrote it. I was so excited, and had so many things to say, that I didn't bother to go back and check for run-on sentences or other grammar things. (I also spent an entire paragraph explaining what I wanted to see in regards to Fisk's blast from the past in future books, because what had happened clearly wasn't the end of that plot line, and concluded it, "I'm not trying to tell you how to write your books, but..." I mean, really? Of course I was. The implication that I would violently hurl the book against the wall and hold a bitter grudge against her if things didn't work out the way I wanted to for him was probably far more prominent than intended.)

In spite of all that, she wrote back less than 24 hours later. She thanked me, and said that she'd planned for the series to be six books long. Three more for me to read, and the next one was going to focus on the exact thing I wanted it to. I was ecstatic, until about two lines later.

This may not be news to anyone, but it was news to me, which could either make me an idiot, or an intellectual (because, you know, I've clearly been too busy reading and writing to pay attention to the news... what? That facebook tab on my computer? Not mine...). Or maybe it is news to everyone, in which case the problem is a little more severe, because no one can stop a problem they don't know is happening. In either case, here's the situation:

The economy sucks. (Surprise! Bet you didn't know that one!) As such, chain bookstores like Barnes and Noble and Borders are now competing with the book sections in places like Target and Wal-Mart. In order to do so, they're pulling mid-list authors off the shelves. They only want the best sellers, in hopes that they'll actually sell.

This is problematic for a number of reasons. How can we discover new books in a greatly decreased collection? It worries me as a writer as well as a reader. Publishers will of course fight to get their authors' books on the shelves (after all, they need to make money, too), but that means it'll be harder to convince publishers to fight for you, and the odds that an author is going to be the next J.K. Rowling, Stephen King, Candace Bushnell, Stephenie Meyer, Dan Brown, or Meg Cabot are pretty slim. That means that it'll be harder to stay on the shelves, and make it doing what you love. In the long term, this may be what upsets me most. In the short term, all I care about is Fisk.

Ms. Bell wrote that she was one of the authors being pulled from the shelves. While the first book in series, before the crash, sold well, the second and third, post crash, did not. She has some other books coming out that her publishers are going to fight to get on the shelves, but even though the Knight and Rogue series has many fans, and she has said that the protagonists are her favorite characters to write, "barring a miracle, there may not be more Knight & Rogue books for a long time."

WHAT?

The problem is that when books are pulled from the shelves, sales fall. Readers can only purchase them online, which generally means they're specifically searching for a book. And if they aren't making any money, publishers aren't going to pay to continue publishing a series.

Apparently, no one cares about the fans who are going to go insane if they don't find out what happens. It would be upsetting for a writer, too. I write because I have a story to tell about specific characters, and to have their story cut short....

After my rage abated a little, more pieces started falling into place for me. One of my favorite books of all time is Freshman by Michael Gerber. It is without a doubt the funniest book on the face of the planet. It was almost depressing, because funny books are something I'd love to write, and I can never surpass Freshman. For awhile, I was practically his unpaid publicist, because I told every single person I talked to about how great this book was, and even got some people to read it.

Apparently, I did a pretty terrible job.

I found Freshman in a Borders in the summer of 2006. I got it from the library, laughed from copyright page to finish (yes... the COPYRIGHT page is funny), and eagerly awaited Sophomore, Junior, and Senior. Sophomore apparently came out in December of 2006, but I didn't find out until October of 2007, when I was doing one of my many searches on the Barnes and Noble website for books I was waiting for. I looked it up in the library database, but it wasn't there. That was pretty weird, considering the library database in my hometown is comprised of about 15 libraries in the area, who will mail books to your home library for pickup if you put them on reserve. I wasn't about to wait, however, so I went to several bookstores to attempt to purchase the book.

Nada. It wasn't in the comedy or young adult sections, both places where I had seen Freshman the previous year... except that Freshman wasn't there either. In the end, I bought both books online, and then waited for Junior.

It wasn't until Ms. Bell's email than I realized that Michael Gerber wasn't just a slow writer. His book was pulled from the shelves, sales dropped, and now I'm stuck wondering how the last two years of protagonist Hart Fox's college experience went (and the college experience of his best friend, Peter, who-- you guessed it-- I have a little bit of a crush on).

In fact, it goes all the way back to middle school, when I read the first two books of The Tales of the Nine Charms trilogy by Erica Farber and J.R. Sansevere. I had a crush on a character, then too, Niko. A few years ago, I tried to re-read the first book, Circle of Three, and found that I wasn't that interested now that I was older, but it doesn't change the fact that I loved the series when I was in middle school, and even though the first two were both published in 2001, the third one never came out. I looked them up on the Barnes and Noble website to get the authors rather than digging out my copies from wherever I put them, and you couldn't even look them up by their titles. I put in the exact title for the first book, and it wasn't even in the top 100 matches, even though there were exactly zero other books with an identical title. I ended up finding them, but I had to be creative about it... way more creative than some kid looking for a new read would ever bother to be.

After all, a kid would probably just go to a bookstore. That's where the books are supposed to be, right?

And now, finally, I tie together my title with my post. I care about books. I care about the publishing industry. I care about authors. And I care about Fisk and Peter. I don't want what happened to The Tales of the Nine Charms series to happen to the characters and books that I love so much now. I don't want to wait forever for the end of their stories, and I don't want to wait for a miracle to solve the problem.

What can be done? As for the miracle, the big movement, I'm not quite sure. For now, I'm writing this blog in an attempt to get publicity for the problem. I'm going to write to publishers and chain bookstores, and maybe even the corporations like Target and Wal-Mart, to see if they'll expand their collections. I'm going to talk up the books that I love in the hopes that I can garner interest (and thus sales, putting them back on the shelves and encouraging publishers to finish what they've started) and I'm also going to post book reviews and info on this blog. I'll start with the series' I've discussed in this post, and move on to other books by mid-list authors that I love.

What can you do? Talk up books that you love. Make fan websites. Create Facebook fan pages. Write letters. Get the word out. And if you email me reviews of books by mid-list authors that you love at doingitwrite@gmail.com (remember-- not the bestsellers) I'll see if I can post some of them on here.

Why should you do something? Do it so you can pick out what you read out of a variety, not just get spoon-fed what's on the bestseller list (not that there's anything wrong with the bestseller list-- I've made my love for Harry Potter pretty plain, but there's so much more than that). Do it for your favorite mid-list books. Do it for a series by a mid-list author that you may never get to finish. Writers, do it for your current or future careers.

As for me, I'll do it for Peter and Fisk. A little bit crazy, maybe, but crushes are like that.