Sparks Notes

I Would Be SO Good at Writing Nicholas Sparks Novels

^ I wrote this piece for Hello Giggles today. 

Basically I got to try my hand at being a laughably cruddy romance writer. Unless you're a publishing company who actually likes my ideas, in which case, yes I am talented, and I'm willing to sell out for a pretty cheap price, so let's talk. 

I've put off doing my first article for HG because the site is about creating a safe internet space for young women free of the typical "boy's club humor" and I respect that. Therefore, I've been apprehensive of being condescending to the largely young, female readership when it is my nature to just be flippant about everything. Then I clearly threw caution entirely to the wind by taking on the favorite author of many a young female, Nicholas Sparks. Fortunately, it seemed that nearly everyone saw the humor in it. Take THAT Nicholas Sparks!

Then I just noticed that Hello Giggles put a poll up on its Facebook page a few hours after publishing my article that asked which Nicholas Sparks novel is their readers' favorite. Now there are dozens of girls saying "The Notebook!" and such without any irony. So alas, it looks like I haven't singlehandedly taken down Nicholas Sparks… yet*. In the meantime, I'm going to keep checking back to the Facebook poll until I see one of the young ladies mention one of my Nicholas Sparks books as her favorite. 

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* No, but really, we should take Nicholas Sparks down. In this interview, he puts down romance novelists for being repetitive with their stories, but then differentiates himself from them by saying he is a fiction writer on par with Shakespeare and Hemingway. Sparks also insists, "There are no authors in my genre. No one is doing what I do," and cites his own book as the all-time best coming-of-age tale. DOUCHE DOUCHE DOUCHE!