Help me choose the cover for my new book



[Click here to jump straight to the poll]


Hey, followers and newbies. Fresh from the triumph that occurred in my head of my hilarious first book, “A Slow, Painful Death…”

(—the title of my book is exactly the same as the name of this blog. But it’s so long I can’t be bothered to write the whole thing out, even though it was my idea and I insisted on it!

You see how stubborn I am? All right, already! After five years, I admit it! The title’s too long! Are you happy now, Gloat-zilla?

(Never mind. It will have its real, not-just-in-my-head triumph when it’s my back catalogue. Honestly, it’s really good and deserves a huge audience, starting with, or maybe even only, Oprah.)

What was I saying? Oh, yes. Fresh from that triumph, like, where I wrote the book and neglected to publicize it, I’m forging ahead with a second collection of my writing, culled mainly from this blog, but with some key pieces specially written for it.

And this time I’m crowdsourcing and Patreon-izing the heck out of it, so I can actually have more than just me in twelve different hats working on the damned thing.

I’d like a publicist for starters.

And you know who else? A barista.

RANDOMNESS OF TITLE AND BRIEF EXPLANATION

My title for this next collection is:

“Sorry Looking for Now LOL”.

The title is seriously random but it makes me laugh, so probably one other person will also find it funny. It’s like when I was twelve and I thought,

“Hmm… I wonder if there’s another one of me somewhere, you know, someone who isn’t interested in girls or sports and prefers being alone and actively disappoints everyone within reach just by existing— I simply must hunt them down!”

This, by the way, is called “finding your niche”. Thank god for my PhD in Marketing!

“Looking for now,” with the emphasis on the “now”, is a gay thing. It’s not “Looking, for now”, which would mean, “I’m just looking, thanks!” It’s, “Looking for NOW,” meaning, “It’s urgent that I hook up with someone right now!”.

Jeez. Listen to me explaining the goldarn heck out of this really very simple title. Are you always this high-maintenance?

So anyway, you might reasonably assume that the gay men in question—in this case heartless millennials with LCD screens for eyes and a 404 Not Found page where their emotional intelligence ought to be—actually intend, after all that “looking”, to follow through with in-person, skin-on-skin contact.

But, and this is the big reveal, you would be assuming wrongly. They do not intend to follow through and meet with a real, flesh and blood human gay person. Gay men are pretending to hook up online and won’t admit that the online chase is the entire point, not the actual meeting in person, which, face it, always tends to disappoint and means you might actually have to get out of bed and maybe take a Xanax.

A TYPICAL SCENARIO

So what happens is, one of them says,

“Come over to my place and we’ll fool around in my playroom! I live in Riverdale!” and you say,

“Sounds good! I’m downtown, so I’ll just have a quick shower and hop in a cab—I’ll be there in, say, an hour!” and they reply,

An HOUR? Sorry, looking for now.

In other words, any time lapse between your last text message and arriving at their place is unacceptable. You have to be instantly there.

They are looking for NOW, baby, do you not capisce this? Understanden Sie nicht the urgentesse?

The only solution that I’ve been able to work out which would satisfy their surreal demand for, basically, teleportation, would be to kill myself, then get reincarnated as the infant son of some girl roommate of his, at which point I grow up in the same house for 18 years until I’m legal. Which would be almost the perfect strategy for a person with patience, staying power, and focus, except I am not that person.

And even if I were that person, what the other guy is saying with this is, effectively, anyone will do who is immediately available. Your hours in the gym were wasted, girl. He doesn’t care about your giant biceps or your thighs like thunder. You are not his fantasy.

His fantasy is of someone who can form out of the gloopy ectoplasm the instant he’s horny and wants to get off. Then, having materialized in his bed, this undifferentiated ecto-lover does something nasty to him involving double-A batteries and a black rubber sheet, then vanishes, leaving a breath mint on the bedside table.

And believe me, you’ll need one, because in a ballroom filled with one thousand gay men, nine hundred and ninety-nine of them’s fantasy will be, “get gangbanged by bikers, and you have to do all the text messaging.”

The other cockroach in the KY is my insistence on clinging to my worthless but still undeniably fabulous life. Like, I would never kill myself. I’m too much of a Nosy Parker about what might happen tomorrow and wondering if it could possibly be as bad as today.

In case you were wondering but are too shy to ask: Of course it couldn’t! That’s why I’m a considered a cock-eyed optimist.

Who was it who said that gay men were less weird and senseless than most other people? Certainly not I!


My Designs and the Poll

Anyway. Here are the three designs I’ve created, you can click on the images for a larger view and to scroll through them:

I’ll probably leave the poll up until the end of September. Looking forward to your input.



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Tell us what you think. Keep it civil, yet interesting.