Call My Lawyer!

March 28, 2008

Okay, okay, so I KNOW I promised a PETA rant today, but I found something else I’d rather blog about. Something kinda funny and less likely to get me attacked by rabid PETA supporters.

from News of the Weird:

A prominent British novelist (former winner of the prestigious Whitbread Prize) announced in January that she had won a settlement of the equivalent of more than $200,000 from a shoe manufacturer in the town of Totnes because fumes from its factory so sapped her creativity that she was forced to write down-market thrillers instead of literary works. Joan Brady said numbness in her hands and legs, caused by pollutants, made her settle on simpler plotlines involving violence as she worked out her aggression toward the factory owners. [The Times (London), 1-24-08]

…so my question is, why am I not cashing in on this sort of stuff?

For those of you who don’t know, I am/was an aspiring novelist. I went to college to learn how to be a writer. And now, my writing is pretty much, well…you’re reading it. Don’t get me wrong, I’ve got some graphic novel work going on (and plans to submit it somewhere this fall) but I’m not exactly a world famous published author, affecting millions of young women with my works about…stuff. And the other part of my degree, the part where I was taught to analyze literature for what it says about the author, the audience, and the prevailing attitudes of the time and place it was written/became popular? Well, apparently that doesn’t really exist, as there’s no point in doing any of that. Ever.

So, who the hell can I sue for this?

I mean, let’s face it! If it weren’t for my college beating into my head that real literary works were the goal of every writer, they wouldn’t have given me a complex that causes me to be UNABLE TO WRITE ANYTHING for publication! So I can TOTALLY sue the University of Pittsburgh for their Fiction Department being made up of massive douchebags*.

*With the exception of Chuck Kinder. That guy is fucking AWESOME.

**but without excepting my douchebag Intro to Fiction Teacher, who nearly destroyed my will to write and seemed incapable of talking to female student’s faces. He’s now teaching at an all girl’s college, which horrifies me.

Frivolous lawsuits: Now Working for Liberal Arts Majors!

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