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The Stupid 365 Project, Day 43: The Fannies November 13th, 2010
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The Stupid 365 Project, Day 43: The Fannies November 13th, 2010 
I have a confession to make. Back in the old, bad days, I wrote for the fannies. And I don’t mean the upscale fannies like Entertainment Weekly or Vanity Fair. I mean the down-and-dirty, crowded-cover, primary-color, bare-chested teen idol fannies. Fannies like Tiger Beat. Fannies like the one in the awful scene in Skin Deep in which Toby Vane humiliates and sexually harasses the young female editor who’s come to do a photo session with him. At the time, I was still in college and working in the promotion department of a local rock radio station which shall remain nameless. My boss was a very strange individual who shaved his head, had a Fu Manchu mustache that ran all the way on either side of his mouth down to his jawline, wore Nehru jackets, ate Pepto-Bismol tablets literally by the handful, and was writing a musical based on the relationship between Adolf Hitler and his teenage niece, Geli Raubel, to be set to a score (he hoped) by Joni Mitchell. Hitler being at heart a flower child and all. He twice showed me an interminable slide show of Hitler, interspersed with pictures of Young Things With Bare Breasts Through the Ages, set to “Ladies of the Canyon.” This is all true. So, Mr. X — we’ll call him Doug — called me into his office one day and said he had an assignment for me. I was to write a story about some teenage idol, no fewer than 1200 words and no more than 1500. I said, “What’s it about?” Doug said, “Anything. Bobby Cries, Don’t Forget Me.” I said, “Excuse me?” “That’s your headline,” Doug said. ”Write it.” So I wrote it and gave it to him and he gave me three more headlines and I wrote three more stories and he gave me $400, for what was essentially 90 minutes’ work, minutes for which I was already being paid by the radio station that shall remain nameless. From then on, I wrote six to eight a month until Doug got fired for many, many things, and a few days later the phone rang and it was someone at Tiger Beat or one of the others (I’ve always remembered Tiger Beat because it’s so totally meaningless) asking for Doug and telling me, when I said Doug was no longer among the corporate living, that he needed to reach Doug about doing his stories for the month. I said, “I’ve been writing all of those.” The person on the other end of the line said, “Oh. Well, we need six.” And I wrote them and they paid me not $100 but $500 for each of them, and six months later I was writing full-length novels, mostly teenage love stories (I was something of an expert on teenage love at the time). For the novels, I developed a set of work habits that would get me through a few dozen novels, first for teens and, later, for adult detective series published as paperback originals. (If I’ve written about this before, please forgive me. It’s getting hard to know, with this one-a-day scheme, what I’ve written before.) They would call me and we’d settle on a title over the phone. Then they’d give me eight weeks or three months to write the book. Then I’d forget all about the book until the Friday before the Monday it was due, at which time I would tear my house (Simeon’s Topanga shack) to pieces looking for the title, and then go down to the Fernwood Market and buy two gallon jugs of Gallo Hearty Burgundy and a carton of Marlboro Lights. On the way back up, I’d stop at the home of a free-enterprise pharmaceutical salesman to pick up some speedos, and I don’t mean swimming trunks. Get home, open a ream of paper, fire up the Selectric, pop a speedo, light up, and think of five words in a row that seemed to go somewhere. Forty-eight hours later, red-eyed, seeing triple, and reeking of cigarettes, I’d drive into LA, drop the manuscript off, and go home and sleep for two days. Once in a while I’d get a call from the editor, demanding, “Who the hell is Edith?” and after we talked for a while — since I had no recollection of anything about the book, and certainly nothing about anyone called Edith — we’d determine that Edith was the female lead, who had been called Ellen for the first 140 pages but had been transformed into Edith by some of that speedo. I actually learned a lot about storytelling doing this, although it took me several years to remember what it was. And every time I heard the Beatles’ “Paperback Writer,” I knew exactly what they were talking about.
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