I attract weirdness, apparently.

Right. So I've got this acquaintance -- I can't really say "friend" because to me that's a special designation and so far this guy has done nothing to earn that moniker -- who has resurfaced in my life after disappearing for three+ months. Not that I missed him, but anyway.

Backstory on this is: unhappily married man with two kids, a general all-round decent fella, but with some sort of magnet for bad stuff. As in, heart problems, marital difficulties, job troubles, etc. You know the kind -- sad sacks, if anything wrong happens it's always on their shift. Well, three months ago, he tells me that his wife has decided that she's a lesbian and wants a divorce. And he's acting all devastated about it, which puzzles me because not three months before that he went to see an attorney about divorcing her and here she is giving him an out (she also doesn't want the house, the cars, the kids or the 401k), but whatever. But he's going back to school to change careers completely, and somehow he's going to muddle through as a single dad. Then he drops off the face of the earth. None of our mutual acquaintances know what's happened, and I just chalk it up to this guy's flakiness and wish him the best of luck.

Catching up to recent days: I look up one day and there he is, coming into my office. The world has turned about a dozen times since then and all those plans he had have changed. Oh, he's still getting divorced and all, but that's about all that's the same. He's not going back to school as planned before, he's started a new job, and... wait for it... he's written a book.

Which, hey, would I like to edit it for him?

I get a sick feeling in my soul whenever I get this question asked of me, because what most people really want from editing is not editing but affirmation.

Oh, but it gets better.

It's "an erotic thriller."

Which he wrote during those three months when he was fumbling around in never-land, making sense of the mess that was his life.

Yikes.

The ick factor on this is through the roof as far as I'm concerned.

So I sent him out the door with recommendations for a Garner's and an Elements of Style and hopefully that will be that.



-- Mox