(For a reCaptcha story idea of my own, see a post from last year. I never wrote that story, either. :)

Miriam: Isn’t it funny how even level-headed writers get all attack-of-the-vapors at the thought ? I wonder if any of your picks ever got feedback like this?

(P.S. I love Libba Bray. You’ve visited her blog, right?)

marta: Great story — I think I’d have about fallen out of my chair, as they say. Please tell me you wrote back to her!

The way big-name writers now need publicity people as well as agents and editors, I know I’m much more likely to hear from (say) Don DeLillo’s “people” than from DeLillo himself. (Quite possibly enjoining me to never again mention him in a RAMH context.) Which makes me almost want to never again mention a living famous person here — the disappointment of second-hand contact would feel too much like getting a very polite “Loved it, but no thanks” rejection letter.

Here’s a story though. A while back I blogged about that The Truth about Unicorns book. The author, Bonnie Jones Reynolds, must’ve googled herself or something because one fine day I opened my email and had a comment from her.

Now she hadn’t read my novel or said anything about my writing ability, but she said how nice it was to know her novel had moved me and so on. Understand that when I was a teenager, this was my favorite novel ever. I kept it checked out from the library for weeks. Read it two times in one weekend. It took me six years of searching used bookstores to get my own copy and I jumped up and down in the aisle when I found. Literally. I screamed, jumped, and ran to the counter.

So to get this note from her–even now–made me scream, jump, and run to tell my husband. What a feeling!

I’d pretty much fall over dead if I got a letter like that from any of them.

Perhaps we (by which I mean you) should write a short story inspired exlusively by randomly generated character names.

I love Michael Chabon (although I haven’t read everything he’s written), maybe because I’m not very well-read in many areas (e.g., fiction from Continental Europe/Russia) and so miss the original source material. To me, when he’s being what I think of as “derivative” he seems to be doing so consciously — more like playing with themes and conventions, as opposed to ripping off.

Froog: That’s a nice depiction of Jane Austen, and if you could sustain it over a book’s length you might find many more readers than even the current zombified adaptation of P&P.

Of course if she actually did try it, and did turn out like that, you’d have to do a Fantasy Girlfriend post about the experience. Which would certainly give later candidates an uphill climb.

(Hmm. Auster… Austen…)

I’m afraid my own reCaptcha will never make it to a book’s spine: Mississippi uvulars.

And if we’re allowed blurbs from beyond the grave, I think I’d have to go with Tolstoy.

Or Dickens.

Or Jane Austen. She’d probably be very funny and just a little flirtatious, and I wouldn’t be confident that she wasn’t just teasing me.

Manhasset blurring, says ReCaptcha. I think I have a title for my novel!

Excellent choices (the ones I’m familiar with, which is okay; this is a choose-your-own-neighborhood sort of question). Rilke: Oooooooh! I was a little surprised not to see Ms. Phillips in your list. :)

cynth: *fanning self* Also excellent choices!

I have a feeling that an unsolicited letter of praise from Lewis Carroll might take the form of a puzzle inside of an acronym wrapped in an anagram, or something like that. A portmanteau blurb: if you tried to use it on a book cover, it would somehow fold up inside itself and land you, head spinning, in one of the blurber’s own works.

But now you’ve got me thinking about a blurb from Ogden Nash…