Suckers - Jack Kilborn [68]
Jeff: You once signed books at over 600 bookstores in a single summer. I think that a truly successful author could’ve just signed at the same store 600 times and made the readers come to him. Please comment.
Jack: My new novel, Afraid, is being released on March 31, 2009. Run out and buy it. In fact, everyone reading this, and everyone they know, and everyone then don’t know, needs to buy a copy. Oh, and that’s an excellent point you’ve brought up, that I’m going to ignore.
Jeff: Uh, okay then. We’re 0 for 1 so far. How about you ask me a question, even though the whole point of this was to promote Jack Kilborn’s upcoming novel Afraid?
Jack: Okay, when we wrote our collaborative novella, Suckers, did you have as much fun working with me as I did working with me?
Jeff: I had so much fun writing the good parts of Suckers that I had to be put on anti-giddy medication. But I’ve heard the occasional comment that the humor in Suckers may not reach a 100% maximum maturity level, and that perhaps it’s an entire novella of “Hee hee hee! Men have wieners!” What happened to our original plan to write an insightful deconstruction of the current political climate?
Jack: Heh heh heh. You said “weiners.” Heh heh.
Jeff: You spelled “wieners” wrong, dumb-ass.
Jack: I’ve always wanted to ask you this: Have you ever gotten so wasted you wet the bed and then tried to convince your wife that the dog must have peed on you while you were sleeping, which was the first thing that you could think of when she caught you trying to flip the mattress over? Next time, you should wait until she gets out of bed before you try to flip the mattress. Also, LySol gets out lingering odors pretty good.
Jeff: Since when does Lysol have a capital S in it? I tried that once, and my wife pointed out that we don’t own a dog. I retroactively blamed the cat, but it was unsuccessful, and then I felt guilty about incorporating an innocent cat into my web of deceit. Now we just have rubber sheets.
Jack: I see. Very intereSting.
Jeff: Next question: When I let you borrow my car to transport that dead hooker across state lines, you promised me that it would never happen again. It happened twelve more times. I’m starting to think that you aren’t succumbing to the uncontrollable urge to kill, kill, kill and are instead just using my car to return DVDs to Blockbuster so you don’t have to pay for gas. Is that true? Is it?
Jack: I swear, it was all about murder. It’s always been about murder. But on your way to work, can you return these copies of Gigli and Ernest Goes to Jail for me? Can you do that, Vern? And see if they have the next Ernest film, Ernest Gets Waterboarded. I heard it has comic hijinks.
Jeff: Jim Varney is dead, and I’ll thank you not to mock his memory. He was the dog in Toy Story, you son of a bitch!
Jack: But getting back to talking about Afraid, which comes out March 31. Afraid is a very scary book, with a very real end of March publication date. What scares Jeff Strand? I mean, other than those Publishers Weekly reviews you got? I didn’t even know that “sucktastic” was a word, but it must be, because they used it like eight times.
Jeff: You’re taking that out of context. The review says “In a world of sucktastic books like those sucktastic books written by the sucktastic J.A. Konrath, whose sucktastic Whiskey Sour, sucktastic Bloody Mary, sucktastic Rusty Nail, sucktastic Dirty Martini, and sucktastic Fuzzy Navel are pure suck, it’s refreshing to see the awesomeness of Jeff Strand.”
Jack: That sucks.
Jeff: Shot of Tequila is an insanely entertaining book, and yet you’re practically giving it away on your website. Why don’t you charge more? I’d pay at least seven bucks to read it, if you hadn’t given it to me for free. Do you think the people who you’re charging a dollar will be mad when they see this interview