Eight Minutes

I am presently participating in a writing class offered through the Literary Kitchen and one of my writing mentors, Ariel Gore. Among our assignments each week is a ‘Quick Write’ exercise, which is to be completed in eight minutes or less, in response to a prompt. For this week’s QW, the prompt was ‘What can happen eight minutes?’ Here’s my tongue-in-cheek QW#3 entry:

What can happen in eight minutes? You can seriously further my writing life!

In eight minutes, you could go to Amazon.com and order a copy of my book Big Buts of the Bible: A Revealing Look at Jesus Christ. Did you know that as soon as you hit ‘purchase’ my sales rank improves like a million spots? A handful of your friends join you and, voila!—I’m a best-seller.

Or, if you’ve read a copy, you can go to Amazon.com and write a stellar review for me. That can have a tremendous effect on my book’s visibility. It helps those sales numbers all the more. I’ll be a whore about it—I’ll reciprocate! I’ll tell the world what a literary genius you are, too.

In eight minutes you could follow @Big_Buts on Twitter. Join the thousands who have a thing for big buts! Then you could retweet me—nothing like showing your but to your friends.

In the same eight minutes you could like Big Buts on Facebook. Won’t it be fun when your FB crowd sees “Ariel likes big buts!” come across the news feed? And oh, the fun you’ll have, explaining that it’s buts with one ‘t’, not butts with two. You could even sing ‘Conjunction Junction, what’s your function…’

In so doing you’re helping grow my platform. Thank you. I am, after all, the world’s foremost expert on buts. Says so on my LinkedIn page, so it must be true.

In eight minutes you could tell several of your friends, “I know this guy who likes buts buts!” Toss them my links. Can’t hurt, right? I think that’s how Sir-Mix-A-Lot did it in the 80s.

In eight minutes you could visit my writing website and either follow via email or subscribe to the RSS feed. While you’re at it, you could look at my Big Buts website, too. Chock-full-o-buts, it is! darinmichaelshaw.com & bigbutsofthebible.com … And GO!

In less than eight minutes you can go to iTunes and become somewhere around the 12,000th subscriber to my podcasts. Search Darin Michael Shaw in the iTunes store. Make me famous. Maybe some day an agent or a publisher will give a damn.

Can you spare a wannabe author like me eight minutes?

And last, but not least, you can type as completely self-centered and self-serving a piece as I just did—all in under eight minutes. I know. I’m good!