“It was a dark and balmy night…”

I’ll begin by apologizing because I make no pretense about being a writer… I only write to keep from talking to much… (sorry Mal… long story short and all that… )

I was going to make the statement that “No major novel” will ever start with that line. But if it did, it would have been written by Ernest Hemingway… and then I started thinking, what would Hemingway have thought about Fifty Shades of Grey?

Would he have predicted Fifty Shades of Grey?

Someone once said that if you have an infinite amount of time and an infinite number of monkeys on keyboards, eventually one of them will accidentally write Hamlet.

Still waiting?

We are now approaching 7 billion cell phone subscriptions world wide… Where is the story?

So I was trying to think of clever titles for a book… Because if the title isn’t there, no one picks it off the shelf… or downloads it to their Kindle… Everything starts with the title… (“50 Shades of Anachromatic Color” wouldn’t have been a best seller…)

How about:

“Dummmmed Doownnn” – Title of a possible expose on education…

“How I Became a Millionaire Driving a Cab on Roatan” – (or how I ran a successful business on Roatan by starting with a Billion… )

“Not All Radio People are Annoying… Some are Dead”- (my biograpy…)

“Moby Bob”- The Untold Story of Southern Whaling…

I bring up the last title because I’m halfway through with Moby Dick.

I started it 40 years ago.

I’m of the belief that Ernest Hemingway would have written Moby Dick in 12 pages.

That’s my style. Short words, easy to read.

But the title just gets you to open the book… It’s the first line that makes you take it home.

For instance… The perfect Hemingway line…

“In the late summer of that year we lived in a house in a village that looked across the river and the plain to the mountains.”
– A Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway

“In the early winter of that year we listened to the rain pound a 21 day beat on the roof of the brown house between the rust-stained white church and the white-stained rust coral of Mangrove Bight.”
– “Untitled” by Yers Truly

“It was a dark and stormy night…”
– Snoopy

I always liked that the last line was written by a dog named Snoopy with a typewriter… and often felt that it would have been perfectly suited to Ernest Hemingway…

But Lord, it would be so much more fun if that was accidentally written by a monkey on an iPhone.