On writing a book: me and Spongebob

There's an episode of Spongebob Squarepants where he visits the Hamburger Museum, pulls King Neptune's Golden Spatula from an ancient keg of congealed grease and becomes the Greatest Fry Cook Ever.

Rather, he would get that magical power, were it not for the fact that King Neptune shows up and demands that Spongebob prove himself worthy in a cook-off. In the middle of a ring set up at the Posidendome, they do battle to see who can make the most burgers.

King Neptune, using his magical powers, conjures hundreds and hundreds of burgers, flipping and frying them in their massed ranks on giant grills. Spongebob anxiously waits for one burger to cook over a hibachi grill. King Neptune laughs in triumph.

King Neptune slices barrels of potatoes and onion in an instant, bushel baskets of lettuce and tomatoes rendered into thousands of perfect slices. Spongebob carefully slices one tomato. King Neptune laughs in triumph.

King Neptune causes waves of ketchup and mustard to slosh over his burgers, stacking them into a giant pyramid as they fall from the sky, fully assembled. Spongebob gently squirts his ketchup in little smiley faces on each of the two pickles, pulls a single piece of lettuce up to tuck the pickles in to bed. The counter overhead reads NEPTUNE: 1000, VISITOR: 0001 King Neptune laughs in triumph.

King Neptune waves his trident, and the burgers fly out into the hands of the cheering crowd. Spongebob reads his burger a bedtime story, gives it a kiss and gently says goodnight. King Neptune laughs in triumph.

As one, the cheering crowd bites into their burgers and chews for a moment. Then, as one, every single person in the crowd spits out the burgers King Neptune made so quickly and easily. The burgers are clearly so wretched that not one of them is edible. The crowd boos. The counter overhead resets itself to NEPTUNE: 0000, VISITOR: 0001 King Neptune howls with rage.

King Neptune grabs Spongebob's burger in a fury and is going to destroy it and him. Before he can do so, however, he smells the burger. Entranced by its aroma, he gobbles it up. The burger is so delicious, he eats it twice. Spongebob wins.

This blog post is already pretty long, so I guess I don't have space to explain why I'm taking so freaking long to write "Goodbye Grammarian", especially when it seems like other people can write a new book in a month. However, you are all clever folks, so I'll leave it to you to work out the analogy.

Note: this is the episode, but it's playing in reverse... because I got it off the Internet. Go figure.


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