Shalampax Speaks

Are you sitting down, peeps? There’s news out of the Shalampax arts community, such as it is, that will knock your socks off. Come to think of it, maybe you should stand up because it’s much harder to knock your socks off when all of your weight is on your feet.

Anyway, my sources tell me that Rottencoconut, Shalampax’s only currently “working” author (apart, of course, from us here at Shalampax Speaks), has submitted for publication a novel of more than 1,400 pages. I’m told that, in this case, he’s not up to his old tricks of making the book look fatter by printing at most one word per page and including a lot of blank pages. Rumor has it that every one of those more than 1,400 pages is jam-packed with—wait for it—well-written words.

This is an amazing accomplishment because, to-date, no Shalampaxian has ever published a literary work of more than 1,400 words, let alone pages.

Rottencoconut has decided to use a foreign publisher. There are two reasons for this. One, foreign publishers have much better distribution channels than Shalampaxian publishers. And, two, there are no Shalampaxian publishers.

I was able to weasel out the name of the publisher. Its president agreed to speak to me on the condition of anonymity. According to her, it seems that publication is very tentative at this point.

The publisher, the first one that Rottencoconut sent his manuscript to, was initially very excited about publishing the book, which Rottencoconut is calling Patronymic Life, Love and Conflict. However, she cooled to the idea somewhat after receiving comments from reviewers who read the manuscript.

The reviewers all questioned the originality of Rottencoconut’s novel. One reviewer went so far as to run an electronic copy of Patronymic Life, Love and Conflict through a computer program. The program showed that Rottencoconut’s book differed in only three words from a popular English translation of Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace. All three of those words were misspelled.

“If there really is so much similarity—and I question that there is,” retorted Rottencoconut when challenged by the publisher, “it’s a total coincidence. There are only so many words in the English language so that sort of thing must happen all of the time entirely by chance. Besides, they were three crucial words that are essential to the plot and character development.”

My sources say that if the first publisher decides to reject the book, Rottencoconut will not give up. If necessary, he will peddle his manuscript to other publishers, preferably ones who don’t employ people who have read any Russian novels.

I’ll keep you posted if I hear more about his efforts to get his book published.