Operation Enduring Digitarti

Billy Jones continues the story of how one starving poet almost went from rags to riches to become the sole leader of the literary world using the worst plot you’ll never read.

Photo by Anne Nygård on Unsplash

*Previously, Entry 547*

Today out hero… er, I meant, wackjob, stamps the reinforcements. You know, nuts.

Entry 1505

It was a giant book, a writer's bible, the holy grail of how to become a successful writer. Surely, he thought, there will be lots of advice that will put me in the forefront of writers everywhere. So he spent his hard earned cash and awaited the arrival of his paper tomb in the mail.

He heard the mail carrier curse when he lugged the 700 page brick up the steps to the stoop, “Damn writers,” he complained, “what a bunch of dopes. Oh my aching back.”

Rather than get in an argument he allowed the carrier to leave before going out to gather his beloved guide to success. In it he found all sorts of advice like, “Ad Space is negotiable…” but when he tried to negotiate better rates in his local newspaper they laughed at the prospect.

He tried to get on the daytime talk shows but no one answered his letters or returned his telephone calls.

He wrote cereal fiction. That’s right, cereal fiction. You know, Alphabets. He covered entire rooms with cereal nobody wanted to eat.

He tried mailing letters to the hundreds of addresses he had collected, but 1000 first class stamps comes to over $5,800.oo these days, and left him with no money to buy paper and envelopes. Have you ever tried to address a stamp? He did. Well, he tried.

He did manage to get himself on the evening news because of a car crash many said was deliberate, but even though he mentioned his book well over 100 times during the course of the interview he was unaware of the fact that every mention would be edited out before the story ran on local television. “Damn media, always hiding the truth.”

He followed the advice in the book and managed to get himself on a local radio talk show. The show aired at 3:00 am on Monday morning but he did manage to give out his telephone sales number a couple of times. Despite nothing but crank calls and death threats he thought, This it it! This his will sell books and Operation Enduring Digitarti will become a great success! He ordered a million copies of his own book in an attempt to get on the New York Times best seller list.

Six weeks later a bill collector called saying he had ten days before the printing company took him to court. “Wow, that sucks.”

The books were still on a loading dock somewhere.

I told you you’d never read it.

*To be continued in Entry 1511 if they don’t catch me first.*