balding angrily

In the tradition of The Rural Juror, I present the following list of titles that, strangely, make my mouth happy. Feel free to use them for your next project.

• Seaside Suicide - I see this as a Pat Conroy novel. A blonde, forty-seven-year-old, divorcée goes to her shoreline vacation bungalow to write her memoirs. She meets and falls in love with a local gardener that dispels wisdom, masked as planting tips. Interspersed throughout the love story are the memoirs she’s writing detailing her childhood abuse and its subsequent effect on her failed marriage. At some point in her past, she was considered a “suicide blonde.”
• Hornswoggled and Swaddled, Flabbergasted and Gas-Attacked, Clusterfucked and Up-Chucked - A trilogy of modern-day-dress fantasy novels that would sit comfortably next to a Piers Anthony series. Each novel concerns the adventures of a pair of unlikely heroes - sometimes human, sometimes mythical - that come together unwillingly but find themselves fast friends by the end. The pairs of words would be the names of the two unlikely heroes and also a point in the plot. For example, Hornswoggled would be a nasty, foul-mouthed giant that would be tricked by Swaddled, a kindly elf. At some point they would be bound with bandages to some sort of death machine.
• Chronology, Lounging - This is not so much a novel as a character-driven meditation. Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance for the new millennium. Time/Space. Relativity. Free-Time. All explored by an office-worker, trapped in a dreary job, obsessed with the ticking clock. Masters Theses will be written about this book. It will be puzzled over for the next twenty years.
• Severance Reverberant - An attempt at a sequel to Chronology, Lounging. This will concern the physics of sound. The office-worker will quit his dead-end job and join a jazz ensemble. It will fail. It will be John Knowles’ Peace Breaks Out to his A Separate Peace.

The ball’s in your court, M.R.