Of course! It all clicked into place with this helpful little checklist.

Do I have a tendency to overanalyze things? You betcha!

Do new places and experiences give me anxiety? Uhuh.

Are my expectations too high? I’ll answer that question with one of my own. What’s wrong with holding out for that someone special who has the body of a supermodel and personality of a saint halfway through canonization, but, you know, who is still living?

Has it been said that I like neat resolutions? Well, sure. I mean, who doesn’t? The “How I Met Your Mother” series finale sent me into an absolute tailspin last night. How could they do that with

***SPOILER ALERT***

The next thing I knew it was 2 am and I was outside and cold and had apparently wandered into traffic. And I don’t even watch “How I Met Your Mother.”

How could it be, you ask, that someone as amazing as me has had a few dating problems? Simple: I’m a book lover.

Does any of this sound familiar? Has reading ruined your life or storytelling given you unrealistic expectations and the inability to cope with loose ends?

Then, for our own well being, I prescribe that we stop reading, starting now.

THE END

(Afterword for those still reading despite my proposal: if this doesn’t work we may have to eat our children. Let’s call that Plan B.)

No, I wasn’t stranded on a desert island. Quite the opposite actually: I moved to Manhattan. Granted, moving into a tiny apartment in Manhattan isn’t on the same level, hardship-wise, but coming from a spacious place in the suburbs certainly made things difficult, especially when it came to choosing what books to bring.

Smaller room = less shelf space = the fewer books I can bring. It’s that simple; yet, you find yourself considering some difficult choices. Do you bring that book you’ve read dozens of times with the hundreds of dog-eared pages and even greater number of coffee stains? Or do you bring leave those behind, as painful as that is, to make room for those new books you recently acquired (say at BEA, maybe) and haven’t had the chance to read yet?

In the end, I cheated. One conference call with my soon-to-be roommates, and we worked out a way to put together a respectable library. John brings the Hemingway, while Ryan is in charge of all non-fiction. We managed to make room for everything, from the favorites like Infinite Jest right down to your political thrillers, such as a couple of Vince Flynn’s Mitch Rapp books. Oh yeah, and we have Kindles too…

What would you bring?

It’s not just editors.  Ms. Parker is also the patron saint of agents who have to sift through unreadable queries (see Jim’s blog posts on this topic), spend their evenings with manuscripts so flawed you literally don’t know where to begin pointing out problems, and stare agape at vicious e-mails from authors who did not take kindly to their form letter rejection or clients who took even less kindly to their attempts at righting their sinking ships.  I think all of us here at DGLM have at one time or another crafted bitingly sarcastic, splendidly caustic, unimaginably cruel letters in response to an offensive query or manuscript.  And, then, we’ve hit “delete” and taken the high, boring, inoffensive road.

In fact, I think all intelligent readers have a bit of Dorothy Parker in them.  How often have you wanted to throw a book across the room in bitter disappointment or indulged in homicidal fantasies about a bestselling author you’re convinced was taught to write by feral monkeys?  How about when, as Jane recently mused, you plod through a book everyone has touted as the best thing since Nutella only to find that you hate, hate, hate it (The Help, anyone)?

Unfortunately, in this era of political correctness and “everybody wins” thinking, Ms. Parker’s take-no-prisoners approach to criticism is becoming obsolete.  Which is why we should treasure every snarky word and phrase…like these.

C’mon, get mean.  Share some imaginary putdowns you’d throw out about a book or author you just can’t stand.

It’s hard not to be amused by the SarcMark and the notion that writers need a symbol to express sarcasm. And yet, I worry that this new emoticon (someone’s already peddling the software that will add it seamlessly to your happy/sad face repertoire) is just another way to dumb down the writing process. If you can’t convey sarcasm on the page (or the screen) with the right combination of syntactical elements such as repetition, hyperbole, and oppositional concepts–and a dash of general mean spiritedness–well then you probably should just resort to being earnest.

Can you imagine these people using a SarcMark?

“No, Groucho is not my real name. I am breaking it in for a friend.” – Groucho Marx

“You have delighted us long enough.” – Jane Austen

“He has all of the virtues I dislike and none of the vices I admire.” – Winston Churchill

“Reader, suppose you were an idiot. And suppose you were a member of Congress. But I repeat myself.” – Mark Twain.

“He has never been known to use a word that might send a reader to the dictionary.” – William Faulkner (about Ernest Hemingway)

“Poor Faulkner. Does he really think big emotions come from big words?” – Ernest Hemingway