Nothing to see here. Move along.

Okay, it’s not really like that, but it was the same kind of near-shock when the only time my by-line ever appeared in a real book (as one of dozens of contributing authors, and under a different first name than Wendell) came back from the literary dead and earned a mention in the Trendy 2.0 blog Boing Boing. For long-time readers of the Wendellblog (both of you), yes this is the same book I referred to in “The Sex Life of Schopenhauer”. I am immediately buying The Intimate Sex Lives of Famous People, since my copy of the Original Edition has been lost due to past lifestyle disasters (some related to my own intimate sex life, kind of) and will make sure my credit is still there (to protect my rep as a mostly-truthful blogger) and see if it brings back any more memories of my Early Writing Career, since the Schopenhauer debacle overwhelmed everything else.

And to get up to Amazon.com’s $25 free-shipping level, I’m also going to buy this DVD collection of truly ancient TV history (from before even I was born!), which comes strongly recommended by Mark Evanier (who I want to grow up to be like someday), and has been fluctuating in price from $10 to $20 and I can grab right now at $12.99 (who knows what its price will be when you read this).

And as long as I’m whoring myself out with Amazon Affiliate Links (for which I get a commission if you lovely readers use them to buy ANYTHING there), I see that in the days leading up to its well-hyped release, Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog is dropping in price (from $14.99 to $13.49 to now $9.99), and don’t forget the bargains at Amazon’s MP3 store, where I currently acquire most of my new noise to bother the neighbors withmusic.

Before 1980, my pursuit of a professional writing career included checking the Los Angeles Times classified ads under “W”. There I discovered an ad from “The People’s Almanac” (the series of pop reference books edited by Irving Wallace and his family) soliciting ideas for “The Book of Lists”. I ended up getting paid for two lists (one of “crown princes” and the other of “musicians famous for something else”) that never got published, and was definately on their “B” list of contributors when they sent me a letter asking if I’d be interested in writing for a new project of theirs: “The People’s Almanac Presents the Intimate Sex Lives of Famous People”.

The “Famous People” of the title were all deceased (avoiding various legal issues), and most were historically so. My first assignment was the pessimist philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer, and the editors provided me with research material – two biographies, 50 to 75 years old at the time. Being written long before anyone thought of publishing “Intimate Sex Lives” books, both volumes required a lot of ‘reading between the lines’ to extract much of a sexual biography. And a couple weeks after I sent in my thousand words, I got back a tactfully worded request to rewrite it, in which the Assistant Editor (no relative of Irving Wallace) pointed out that I had failed to note that Schopenhauer had died of complications from syphillis.

Obviously, I hadn’t read nearly enough between the lines. I felt like I had just flunked History, Philosophy, Creative Writing and Sex Education on the same day.