“You just don’t understand,” Jack, the public relations guru said to the copywriter. “We must be sure readers know our man wrote poetry!”
“Seems easy enough,” his underling, Shill, replied. “We’ll call him a poet. What’s wrong with that?”
“I’ll tell you what’s wrong with that,” snapped the boss. “We have to let readers know he also wrote other stuff, including articles about Hollywood and film making.”
“So he’s a poet and a journalist, okay?” Shll replied.
“No, no, no.” Jack wailed, his face transitioning in frustration from standard Caucasian to a pinkish hue, common to most of humanity when playing a high stakes game. “He wrote more than that. He wrote a book about walking through Georgia. He wrote a book about his childhood heros, a vitual litany and, yada yada yada. You can’t pigeonhole this guy.”
“Easy enough,” said Shill. “Since we can’t be too specific, let’s just all him a writer, okay?”
“NOT okay by a long shot,” Jack replied as his face brightened into an almost-luminescent red. Even amateurs earn the right to be described as ‘poets,” even if they’ve only written three or more poems, but our man wrote books of poetry too. He was published, fagadsache. We don’t want people stumbing onto a book by him in and dropping it onto the floor when they discover poetry. There’s a ‘truth in advertising’ consideration at play here, don’t you see? And your ‘writer’ suggestion may be fine for bloggers, and other girls who keep diaries and do the Twitter thing, but this guy has real gravitas in the literary world. We need a heftier apellation, and we need it now!”
silence for at least two double spaces . . . . . .
“I’ve got something,” Shill shyly shuggested. How about ‘poet and AUTHOR?’”
“That’s IT!” Jack shouted. EPIPHANY CITY!”
Shill silently ex. . .haled for the first time in 298 words . . . .
“Man, I tell ya,” Jack said with a voice resembling the cluck of a hen settling onto a newly desposited egg. “Sometimes, I think I’m a frikkin’ genius!
Write well . . . . and properly.
I love this line, I’m still laughing while I’m quoting it in the comment:
“And your ‘writer’ suggestion may be fine for bloggers, and other girls who keep diaries and do the Twitter thing, but this guy has real gravitas in the literary world.”