its me ya boi

You look pretty terrifying in that get up. What happened to the pretty little girl dresses? I outgrew them.

This gave a bunch of sci-fi and fantasy writers a wicked idea. Under the direction of James D. McDonald, a fantasy author known for his campaigns to educate other authors about scams, this group collaborated to create the worst possible novel. They called it Atlanta Nights. It contains, among other flaws, egregious grammar and spelling mistakes, characters that abruptly change gender without explanation, two chapters that are completely identical, two different chapters that were written from the same outline, and a huge list of characters whose initials, if properly arranged, spell out “PublishAmerica is a vanity press.”

They then submitted this monstrosity to PublishAmerica.

Of course, PublishAmerica accepted the manuscript—as only a vanity press would—and after they did so, the hoax was revealed. And of course, PublishAmerica then quickly said “wait, no, we reject this actually!”, but it was too late for that.

The resulting book is—to me, as a writer—one of the funniest things I’ve ever read. The authors involved in its creation made it spectacularly bad. The literary pratfalls on display make me giggle nonstop. It’s a masterpiece.