Another quality post brought to you by Steve!
Hey, everybody!
For those of you who have never experienced the pleasure (or horror!) of collaborating with another author, it's difficult for me to recreate the experience. It is, I imagine, a bit like raising a child as both parents try to impart their values on a single individual. It is a breathtakingly beautiful, but painstakingly difficult process of melding two authors' voices perfectly, so that each is equally represented and neither is diminished. Sometimes we will pore for hours over our words, with a scalpel-sharp level of attention to detail, discussing individual commas and word choices for hours at a time.
For my latest novel I worked with Wile E. Young, a truly exceptional young author who is known for capturing with marvelous gusto the exacting language patterns of his native Southwest. Like the wind blowing through a cove of cacti, Young's prose has an uncanny, almost preternatural capacity to capture the very essence of Oklahoma, Texas, New Mexico, and the surrounding environs.
So for today's Back Jacket Hack Job I thought I would set myself a difficult, perhaps impossible task. I'm going to try to recreate the back jacket copy in my writing partner's voice. Any success I have will be solely due to his mentorship, and any failures, of course, are my own. Please feel free to let me know how I did in the comments.
YEEEEEEEEEEEEEEHAW!
Howdy, pardners and pardnerinas! My name's Wile E. Young and when I'm taking a break from throwing my ten-gallon hat up into the air and blasting it with my shooting iron, I sometimes get around to writin'. That's writin' with an apostrophe, not no fancy writin' with a "g" liking you have up New York City way.
NEW YORK CITY?
Now, when I came in the other week from shooting some new oil holes in one of the many oil fields I own, I was done approached by none other than that coyote-eating varmint Stephen Kozeniewski to work on a thick set of reading papers for folks to read out of. And we sure enough came up with a story lonesomer than a sunset down on the bayou:
But is it really perfectly fine? Well, shoot, pilgrim, if you think that, then I've got an oil field to sell you up Muskogee way! (Actually, I really am trying to sell my Muskogee oil field, so if'n you're interested, post me up some signing papers.)
But anyway, read it and I guarantee you you'll be more satisfied than a prairie dog in a corn silo, assuming corn is actually something that prairie dogs eat, which I do.
Also, there's ghosts!
YEEEEEEEEEEEEEEHAW!
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