Heed them well. Here are her first three:
1. Amazing McTechnoThing: Your novel features a fantastic gadget, method of transportation or scientifical process which, if it actually existed, would make you the coolest, wealthiest, most admired, and most sexually active person on earth for inventing it (like Bill Gates with a harem of Dallas Cowboy Cheerleaders.)
2. Brother McVampires: Your vampire fiction novel features a manly, aggressive, somewhat homoerotic group of male vampires controlled by a female deity who passes off torture and mind games as wisdom and guidance; your protagonist will defy the female deity at least once during the story. Bonus Mcpoints: you claim the novel is entirely your invention and has nothing to do with that other Brother McVampire series which you of course simply haven’t had time to read yet.
3. Dark and Stormy McNight: Your novel opens with a description of the weather, night, day, the sky or the aftermath of the weather which, while very prettily written and engaging all five of the human senses, has zero to do with the story.
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Have any others you could add? I could bring up the Side McKick: The protagonist’s most constant companion has no viable skills other than providing a laugh track to the story, getting into trouble so the hero can show off by rescuing them, and otherwise getting drunk, slapped by women and accidentally spilling vital details of the hero’s rescue plan to nefarious persons, of whom they are far too trusting.
Also the Self McHelp: The central piece of advice in this life-changing diatribe is either a pile of warm, pink, fuzzy philosophies that have no substance at all other than making people realize why they need to build a shrine to themselves in the bedroom closet (shrine available from the author’s website for $499-some assembly required), or the book sets up such ridiculously impossible standards that the reader ends up hiding in that same closet while flogging themselves out of self-hatred. Either way, the author gets the royalties.
McNovel – what a lovely term. Sadly, it doesn’t translate very well – Mc[Something in Danish] just doesn’t sound right.
I do have one McStory to add. The McBiography: You have once been mentioned in the local newspaper, you have a homepage, and you have at least ten readers of your blog (including your aunt Elisabeth). Therefore you are famous enough to write a biography about your ordinary and uneventfull life.
Or its close cousin, the Celebrity McBiography, in which Famous Person reveals all the sordid details of their life/sports career/scandals, etc, in an attempt to bring themselves back into the public eye. This biography is not necessarily written by the Famous Person, but is ghostwritten.
Yes, definitely. There are already too many of those self-promotional biographies out there. Speaking of using a biography for (self)promotion, a few years back the danish businessman Lars Larsen wrote his biography (or had it written, I can’t remember which) and mailed a free copy to every household in Denmark. I believe it was meant as a promotion for his chain of stores, but anyway, I think this is the ultimate way to use a biography for self-promotion (somehow I find it a bit tasteless too). It is probably the danish biography with the highest number of distributed copies ever. I don’t know how many people have actually read thed book, but many Danes do at least remember his book-stunt. I thumpet though it myself, read a few paragraphs, and then put it aside, as it didn’t look very interesting to me.