Saturday, June 30, 2007

Virgin #1093 Always Bagged Her Own Groceries

Through my continued obsessive Googling of Life As We Knew It, I recently found that Barnes & Noble doesn't think LAWKI is going to win the highly coveted (by me at least) Quill Book Award.

I discovered this heartbreaking fact by following the Barnes & Noble LAWKI Quill link to three pages of Quill nominees. In each category, one nominee was featured, complete with minature book cover, and the other four (LAWKI, alas, included) were casually listed to the right, under Oh Yeah Other Nominees.

Barnes & Noble! Which shares a common ancestor with the dead & the gone on their & side.

Naturally enough, my thoughts immediately went to St. Ursula and the 11,000 Virgins. For those of you who failed to take (or took and failed) Northern Renaissance Art First Semester, here's the story of St. Ursula and the 11,000 Virgins.

Way back in the fourth century, the father of the then Princess Ursula sent her off to marry Conan Meriadoc of Amorica. Ursula and her 11,000 BFFs (who, based on the phototgraphs I've seen, looked just like St. Ursula only a lot smaller) packed their bags and left. After a few adventures more interesting to them than me, their boat crashed, and they met some Huns, who, prepping up for the 20th century, beheaded them all. Only Ursula got to be a saint, because she was the only one with a first name. The other 11,000 virgins, every bit as saintly as Ursula, simply became Oh Yeah Other Martyrs.

If you ask me, and the Vatican has not, the real saint in this story is Conan Meriadoc of Amorica, who was willing to have his future wife's 11,000 girlfriends move in with him. Even if he'd arranged marriages between them and his 11,000 best buds, there were still bound to be problems. What if Best Bud #9024 married Virgin #2872 but really loved #4467? What if Best Bud #876 really loved Best Bud #5599? And why hasn't HBO turned this into a series?

Writers, with the possible exception of Emily Dickinson, don't go into the business to become Oh Yeah Other Anythings. We all want to be St. Ursula, only not beheaded. It's bad enough being reviewed by Kirkus.

Because of my extraordinary maturity and winsome desperation, I am willing to negotiate with Barnes & Noble. If they feature LAWKI on their Quill page, I will rename its companion volume, the dead & the noble.

That's what Conan Meriadoc of Amorica would want me to do.

1 comment:

Marci said...

Aggie De Mille took the story, shortened it to 7 virgins and made them dance. She always said about the boys "I made them use their backs!"

If she had been in the boat with Ursula, she would have had those Huns using their backs and no one would have been beheaded. And St. Ursula, would just be Ursula the Hun, mother of Atila, or something like that, which is better than being beheaded. Unless of course you want to be a saint, which maybe she did. And Meriadoc was immortalized as a Hobbit by Tolkien, so he did okay!

Barnes & Noble got paid off! Call Harcourt and tell them to open their wallets and get your book featured!