How To Write A Book With Someone Who Died In 1799

I write about marketing and illustration on this blog, but I also write humor pieces which I publish on the Medium platform.

I have a new one about bestselling author James Patterson. Here are a few excerpts. You can read the whole thing here.

James Patterson— how many books has that guy written, anyway?? They’re full of sex and murder and the plots are absurd, but they sell a billion-jillion copies, and you can’t wait for the next one because they’re so much easier to read than Ulysses or War and Peace.

Mr. Patterson teamed up with former president Bill Clinton to write The President Is Missing. A stylometric analysis indicates the President really was missing when the book was being written. Patterson did most of the work…

It occurs to me that Patterson’s sitting on a gold mine. I mean in addition to the thirty-four he already owns… he needs to find a time machine and go back in American history and team up with some of the early chief execs. I’ve already written the blurbs for him, he just needs to add the filler. OK, here we go…

President George Washcloth must gird his wig and go undercover to foil a Loyalist plot. The King George Fan Club (Philadelphia chapter) has kidnapped Ben Franklin and plans to use his Kite Zapper Thing to blow up all the state capitols.

Amabel “Mabel” Winsome, orphaned during the war and now an attractive self-taught cipher expert, has found details of the plot encrypted in Poor Richard’s Almanack. Washcloth takes out his wooden dentures and loads a derringer, a jackknife, a compass, and a breath mint into the secret compartments…