Something That Would Be Fun
I don't have the will anymore to develop a new main character and her story. It's not that I couldn't do it; I just don't want to. What I was thinking would be fun, though, would be to write a nonsense novel. I was inspired by a recent Writer Beware article, which linked to the Atlanta Nights hoax, a collaborative effort by a group of authors to write a truly bad novel to test whether a vanity publisher would accept it. (Of course it would. Is there a vanity publisher that turns anything down? I doubt it.)
While I would enjoy the undertaking, I wouldn't want my resulting work to just sit on Amazon's shelf with zero buyers/readers. So, even a purposely bad story would still need to be engaging enough to attract interest, or else what fun is it?
A genre parody would be an obvious choice, but I don't know enough about other genres to satirize them. That said, I'd love to write a bad romance novel; I just don't want to have to read a bunch of them to figure out my roadmap. And I certainly wouldn't pay to read them. I suppose I could grab some for free via FreeBooksy or free Kindle promotions. NOTE TO ROMANCE AUTHORS: Please don't take this as disrespect. I'm old enough to remember when Carol Burnett satirized soap operas, but that didn't mean she hated them. One must admit, though, that romance would be easy to parody.
Naturally, I'd have to publish my book under a (different) pen name.
But even writing nonsense is difficult---maybe even more difficult than writing a "good" novel. I penned my 2026 Writers' Astrology Forecast pretty quickly, but I still had to go back into it repeatedly to tweak it.
Then there's the whole subgenre issue. From what I've accidentally seen on Amazon, there are a bunch of "billionaire" romances (boring), and for some reason, hockey romances (I'm not a big sports fan). I wouldn't go with "small town" romance, because small towns are my specialty, and I would never satirize them. I think I'd like to write a workplace romance, because that would be ripe with ridiculous possibilities. And at least workplaces are something I know about, unlike hockey...or billionaires.
Still, I'm completely unfamiliar with a romance novel's flow (or I guess, "progression"), and I'm aware that there are rigid rules. So, I'd have to read at least one. And I'm not a big reader these days.
Plus, are they written in first person or third? Do they always having alternate (male/female) narration?
So many questions.
I'll just add this to my lengthy to-do list, which keeps getting longer, with nothing being crossed off.

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