! IN the year 2000
This is the beginning of one of the first times I tried to turn the one-off Mister Wonderful gag band “Johnny Mozart and the Jews” into a full-blown novel. I ditched it and started again from scratch a few years later. Or maybe this was the second version after the first ditching. I have commitment issues.
! We Return
Why rewrite it? Because I’m a show-off. Because I can’t do anything the simple way. Because reality is a plural noun.
! Zut
This is the blog post version of the intro to the re-do. It’s got the whole long, digressive thing going and that certainly didn’t win me any points from the Odyssey Writing Workshop committee. They said that after three pages, they didn’t really care about the character. Go figure.
Anyway, I set my life on fire and dove into writing comics as a result.
As reigning king of the indulgent run-on sentence, I shared the opening blather from the first Wonder novel (July 2003) with the column’s readers, and now inflict the same upon you. It’s truly overdone and unnecessary.
But I mean, if you’re into wicked wordy homages to the opening of Homer’s Odyssey, this is just going to make your Christmas.