How I Became a Famous Novelist by Steve Hely Read Free Book Online

wrapped up and gave as presents, which moved from store shelves to home shelves to used-book sales unread, as money flowed authorward. That was the cash pie of which I wanted a slice.
    In the second-floor café I ordered a coffee served in a cup as big as a dog’s head, opened the Book Review to the Best Sellers list, and got to work. By the time I was done shoveling in sugar, I had another rule.
    Rule 4: Must include a murder.
    Sixty percent of that week’s best-selling novels involved killings. Glancing around the bookstore, I estimated that fifty thousand fictional characters are murdered every year. Not including a murder in your book is like insisting on playing tennis with a wooden racket. Noble perhaps in some stubborn way, but why handicap yourself?
    Many types of best sellers had to be eliminated from contention. Thrillers, mysteries, fantasy, and sci-fi all require intricate construction and research. I had no intention of spending my nights on ride-alongs with homicide cops, or mapping magical empires and populating them with orcs.
    Writing an updated version of some public domain story seemed like a worry-free route to literary success. A ready-made plot would keep my mental effort to a minimum. It would just be gussying up the SparkNotes, really. In my notebook I wrote down a few ideas: Oliver Twist in exclusive San Diego gated community? Huckleberry Finn with a hovercraft? Hamlet but he loves sudoku? Iliad among Hawaiian surfer chicks? But these all seemed tough to maintain past the first hundred pages.
    Most of my scattered impressions gleaned from the bestseller list gelled all at once, in a flash, when I gazed up and saw the Crazy Muffin Ripper.
    Rule 5: Must include a club, secrets / mysterious missions, shy characters, characters whose lives are changed suddenly, surprising love affairs, women who’ve given up on love but turn out to be beautiful (MUFFIN RIPPER RULE).
    The only other customer at the coffee bar was an electric-haired woman of about fifty. If I had to guess I’d say that she maybeworked in an art supply store? Probably in the back. She was tearing apart a cranberry-raisin muffin with frantic violence. Crumbs were strewn across her open copy of The Jane Austen Women’s Investigators Club.
    And this woman, I decided, who sits at a bookstore and assaults muffins and reads, was my target audience.
    Of course such a woman would be enthralled by the idea of a club. All lonely people wish they were in a cool club. I certainly do—we’d have neat jackets and nicknames. That’s why readers are the top club-formers of America.
    Of course she’d like secrets and mysterious missions. For loners, the next best thing to belonging to a club is guarding a dark secret or a mission, which makes shyness a heroic necessity. Perhaps she had a dark secret of her own—a house full of cat bodies stacked like firewood.
    Of course she’d like sudden love stories. The Muffin Ripper wasn’t spending Thursdays fending off dudes at José McIntyre’s Margarita Night. For a love story to be plausible to her, it had to arrive suddenly, and the man needed to be bundled with another dose of dark secrets, to explain what took him so long. The best-seller list is always peopled with divorcées and wounded women who, on storm-tossed islands or the hills of Italy, find to their surprise that olive-toned men want to make careful Cambrian love to them.
    If that’s what she wanted, I’d give it to her.
    Tipping my cup to the woman who’d set my mind ablaze, twitching with creativity and caffeine, I folded up my book review and headed for the aisles.
    I wasn’t so arrogant as to think my own first effort would stay on the best-seller list. Not for more than a week or two. I had a more realistic objective: getting hired as the writingprofessor at a prestigious college. Williams, or Princeton, someplace kinda away from it all seemed nice. I’d read enough campus novels to expect sexual frolicking and light work.
    But