This fact is painfully obvious. Just visit the sci-fi/Fantasy section of your local Barnes and Nobles bookstore. The shelves are piled high with flouncing elves and Keith Parkinson cover art, forcing sci-fi authors to fight for space amid the Japanese manga fanboy shelves. It’s getting to the point that new sci-fi books are genuinely hard to come across, whereas any college dropout hack can hammer together a fantasy world and ride it’s sequels to fame, fortune, and bevies of convention babes.

Ladies and gentlemen, I am pleased to present you with your hack.

I want the money. The long hair book babes. A Porch Boxter used for the sole purpose of driving down my excessively long driveway to check my mail. The godlike feeling that comes with hundreds of thousands of people spending their free time reading your own bloated voluminous work.

However, writing takes some things I’ve never had a great supply of. Mainly, talent and time. Therefore, in the great literature tradition of plagiarism, I’ve decided to draw inspiration from the great contemporary (read: Best-selling) fantasy series currently hogging all of the prime retail space at the local bookstore.

Now, obviously, the most important ingredient in any good (read: profitable) fantasy series is for it to meander over hundreds of thousands of pages, collected in immense, eight dollar volumes, each of which must be read in series in order to make any sense of the storyline. The current master of the art of bloated storytelling is, without a doubt, Robert Jordan, author of the much beloved (read: followed with sheep-like devotion) Wheel of Time series.

Literally billions upon billions of pages have been dedicated to this series, and if collected into one massive pile, would outweigh the Earth itself, stripping my planet of it’s atmosphere as I become but a mere satellite to this pulpy planetoid of literary banality. It is a well known fact that the vast majority of the Pacific Northwest deciduous forest has been dedicated solely to the printing of current and future Wheel of Time works. The publication of the various volumes through the past decade has in itself lead to a thirty degree rise in average temperature worldwide thanks to global warming and C02 emissions. Truly, the Wheel of Time is an epic for the masses, a literary masterpiece of rambling tedium with no clear end in sight. It’s combined sales would be more than enough to purchase a largish European or Asian nation, such as Spain or Mongolia. It’s obvious that Jordan has stumbled upon the key to literary longevity: Don’t dare let anything ever happen.

Complete and total inactivity has been a basic tenant of the Wheel of Time series since it’s inception. It’s truly staggering to think, and a testament to the genius of Jordan that over the terabits of information that the WoT series spans that nothing of any importance has ever happened, ever. In fact, this is the very key to the success of the series. People are sucked in quite easily over the first three books, sticking around to see the storyline until the fourth or fifth volume, by which time they have committed so much time and effort to the series that they are compelled to read the remaining books in a futile, maddening effort to see if the plot has actually progressed over the past forty thousand pages. The combination of tedium and addiction is truly a work of genius on Jordan’s part, and has managed to create a mental trauma in the majority of his readers so great it borders on brainwashing. In fact, the Wheel of Time works very much like an infectious disease, it’s millions upon millions of loyal, drooling, half-witted fans managing to convince others to read “just the first book”. Upon which time the neophyte reader is sucked into the massive monstrous maw of the series, never to be sane again. In such fashion, the series continues it’s readership base, replacing those burned out and left addle-minded by the seer tedium of it all, and thus insuring the continued success of the franchise.

Adding to Jordan’s diabolical plot is a cast of characters larger than the population of most North American cities, all involved in intertwining “plots”, thus confusing the reader and forcing them to read entire chapters three times over just to make sense of the current storyline in an attempt to reconcile it with the massive volumes of events already presented. However, Wheel of Time books are notorious for disintegrating as you read them, the front cover and spine peeling away from it’s glue, entire chapters of the book often becoming separated from the binding itself. In this manner, Jordan forces his readers not to buy just one copy of each volume of work, but in some cases two or three of each! Truly both an ingenious and insidious plan, forcing his masses of easily coerced readers into economic slavery.

God bless Robert Jordan. This is obviously not only the most lucrative fantasy series ever created, but perhaps the most genuinely evil as well. Therefore, I will be using his same basic outline, with three halfway decent volumes to start, with each successive book needing less and less plot, story, or even coherent sentence structure. My master plan consists of turning the entire writing task over to a random computer generated string of words by the fourth book, chopping the text up in random intervals into paragraphs and chapters. It’s my firm belief that the majority of the sheep brained masses.. er, I mean, valued readers, will have read through most of the sixth book before realizing anything is amiss. However, they will be so frightened of the prospect of reading back though the rest of the series that they will instead continue to slog through, in the desperate, futile attempt to see anything of consequence ever happen in the storyline.

Of course, the problem with this scenario is getting people to read the first three books in the first place. So I’ll unfortunately be forced to write a halfway decent storyline until such point that I’ve managed successfully brainwashed my readerbase. Or, failing that, distracting them from the lack of storyline until it’s too late for the readers to realize this.

Sex sells. Violence sells. Sex and violence together sells better than cheap gin in Alabama. Therefore, my series will be filled with lengthy scenes of both. Fortunately, I already have a pair of fantasy authors that manage to write about both of these things quite well to draw inspiration from. Terry Goodkind’s Sword of Truth and RR Martin’s Song of Fire and Ice are chock full of graphic violence and lewd sexual conduct. Whereas other authors might only offer tantalizing hints about what may go on under the sheets, Goodkind and Martin go into full, often disgusting detail of the sexual prowess of their characters. Goodkind has even dedicated entire chapters to his own BDSM sex fantasies. Martin, meanwhile, is renown the world over for his explicit detail in dealing with the sexual habits of misshapen midgets. And neither of these authors are slouches in the horrific violence department. Martin is able to offer, in gut wrenching detail, every horrific wound, maiming, decapitation, arrow wound, mace blow, and involuntary bowl movement to be found on the dark age battlefield, while Goodkind is remarkable in his graphic descriptions of people having their innards eaten out by angry rats. I should also note that Martin has proven to us that fantasy figures can and do swear, and most all will do so with the healthy proficiency and imagination of a Bangkok hooker. With prolific use of cussing, violence, and graphic sex, I can often fill entire pages of content without having to actually advance the storyline one whit, while at the same time distracting and entertaining my readers immensely.

Of course, unless you’re Ann Rice, it’s very difficult to fill an entire volume of work with nothing but explicit sexual masterbatory fantasy. At some point, you do need a storyline, or, better yet, the mere impression of a storyline. I shall accomplish these things by using the tricks of two other popular fantasy writers, Stephan Donaldson, and Guy Gavriel Kay. Mainly, I intend to fully confuse my readers, by making them hate and despise their hero. By the time my readers have caught onto the idea that the antagonist is the good guy in the series, they will be so distracted by gratuitous violence and sex to the point that they don’t really care anymore; Only reading the book for the sole purpose of advancing to the next horrific maiming and/or bondage scene.

But no matter how many books one may sell, a person does not achieve true success in the entertainment world until they’ve had a Burger King glass dedicated in their honor. Let’s face it, no matter how many millions of books Jordan and Martin and company have sold, you don’t see a single one of their character’s with an action figure or their faces on lunchboxes. No, for my series achieve true success, it needs a single, very important thing.

Endorsement contracts.

Seeing as how it’s pretty much impossible to put a 12,000 page long literary work into movie form, it will instead become necessary for my series to adopt corporate sponsors inside the book itself . Instead of mead and wine, my characters will quaff their thirst with Red Bull and Heineken, wear official Nike chainmail sports bras, and lodge for the night with Quality Inns and Suites. Of course, the purists will balk at this barrage of thinly veiled advertisement, but imagine the mass marketing possibilities. We can bring capes back into style, people will wield Calloway Big Bertha Longswords, and the stiletto will once again appear on fine dining silverware sets.

So there you have it, my detailed plan for mass-media dominance via the fast-growing field of fantasy literature. Disgusting? Probably. Immoral? Defiantly. However, I prefer to look at the big picture.

Hobbit Tossing. On ESPN2. Count on it.

[ 12-19-2001: Message edited by: Rolzt ]