To the Editors, Random House & Associates

To whom this interests.

Twilight, as I’m sure you are no doubt aware, is a highly successful series of novels about a young woman who must make one of life's most painful decisions: whether to give her precious flower to a sulky vampire, or an angry moon-puppy. It is a situation that most young women can relate to. These books are the reason I became a writer in the first place, and in the second place, a waiter. The series has spawned many imitations, and publishers such as yourself are now slathering to find the next big semi-adult, supernatural-forbidden-love franchise.

Below are my ideas. Please get in touch by phone or send me a fax.

IDEAS:

1. Phantasm of the Human Heart

Jenny, a young woman on the brink of sexual maturity is forced to move to a small mountain town where she has no friends (just the school janitor, Custer, who follows her everywhere.) She does meet another lonely outsider, Mark, who turns out to be a ghost. The pair fall in love, but are unable to consummate their relationship due to Mark’s nebulousness (which is a metaphor for all teenage boys.) Mark has the idea that he will inhabit other physical objects (table, lamp, draft-mule) and then Jenny can make out with them, but she’s not into it. Their love ends tragically one night when Mark is secretly watching her shave her legs and experiences a poltergasm which makes her house fall down.

2. The King of the Mountain Kings.

Tina, a young woman on the brink of sexual achievement is forced to go inside a mountain and live with a tribe of dwarfs -- for reasons I won’t go into. She has no friends; the dwarfs are surly and antisemitic. They have a lust for the ancient ‘black gold’ buried in the mountain and become angry when Tina points out that it is coal. On the precipice of despair, Tina sees that a tall, bearded stranger has arrived in town. When she asks about him she is told his name is Lord Sweathammer. She eventually discovers that her Lord is really one dwarf riding on another’s shoulders, but unfortunately not before the wedding.

3. Boy-Mummy.

I’m still sketching this one out and it obviously needs a better title. Mathilda is a young girl who is forced to go on holiday to Egypt with her archeologist, divorcee Dad. While wandering alone in a tomb she encounters a 4000-year-old teenaged Pharaoh, Max. Max is withdrawn, listless, unresponsive to Mathilda’s advances, and, on closer inspection, dead. When Clara asks a local wise man if anything can be done to revive the mysterious Max, the man replies, “Oh that’s just tourist shit. I will show you a resurrection.” Then it all goes a bit weird, and that’s when I wake up. Oh, I forgot to say this idea is based on a dream. 

4. The Mysterious One

Kylie, a young woman on the brink of sexual magnificence, goes into the witness protection program. She meets another lonely outsider, Josh. Josh is a mysterious boy: moody, sullen, brooding, and with a fiery temper. Kylie tries to get close to him, hoping to learn the terrible secret of who he really is. Vampire? Werewolf? or something even stranger? In the end it turns out he’s just a dick.

My Fabulous Fashion Life

Here is an article excerpting my experiences as a glamorous international fashion blogger.

Descent of Species

David Eagleman:

"In the afterlife, you are treated to a generous opportunity: you can choose whatever you would like to be in the next life. Would you like to be a member of the opposite sex? Born into royalty? A philosopher with bottomless profundity? A soldier facing triumphant battles?

But perhaps you've just returned here from a hard life. Perhaps you were tortured by the enormity of the decisions and responsibilities that surrounded you, and now there's only one thing you yearn for: simplicity. That's permissible. So for the next round, you choose to be a horse. You covet the bliss of that simple life: afternoons of grazing in grassy fields, the handsome angles of your skeleton and the prominence of your muscles, the peace of the slow-flicking tail or the steam rifling through your nostrils as you lope across snow-blanketed plains.

You announce your decision. Incantations are muttered, a wand is waved, and your body begins to metamorphose into a horse. Your muscles start to bulge; a mat of strong hair erupts to cover you like a comfortable blanket in winter. The thickening and lengthening of your neck immediately feels normal as it comes about. Your carotid arteries grow in diameter, your fingers blend hoofward, your knees stiffen, your hips strengthen, and meanwhile, as your skull lengthens into its new shape, your brain races in its changes: your cortex retreats as your cerebellum grows, the homunculus melts man to horse, neurons redirect, synapses unplug and replug on their way to equestrian patterns, and your dream of understanding what it is like to be a horse gallops toward you from the distance. Your concern about human affairs begins to slip away, your cynicism about human behavior melts, and even your human way of thinking begins to drift away from you.

Suddenly, for just a moment, you are aware of the problem you overlooked. The more you become a horse, the more you forget the original wish. You forget what it was like to be a human wondering what it was like to be a horse.

This moment of lucidity does not last long. But it serves as the punishment for your sins, a Promethean entrails-pecking moment, crouching half-horse half-man, with the knowledge that you cannot appreciate the destination without knowing the starting point; you cannot revel in the simplicity unless you remember the alternatives. And that's not the worst of your revelation. You realize that the next time you return here, with your thick horse brain, you won't have the capacity to ask to become a human again. You won't understand what a human is. Your choice to slide down the intelligence ladder is irreversible. And just before you lose your final human faculties, you painfully ponder what magnificent extraterrestrial creature, enthralled with the idea of finding a simpler life, chose in the last round to become a human."

Excerpted from SUM: Forty Tales from the Afterlives by David Eagleman, copyright © 2008 by David Eagleman.