Everything I think of that’s plausible enough to be a convincing April Fool’s Day prank is also something I don’t want to joke about. Like, I could tell you I slipped in the shower last night and ripped out the stitches that are holding my ligament in place so I’m headed back to the hospital today for another surgery — but dude, NOT FUNNY. And if I can’t amuse myself with a joke, what’s the point?
I hope you all are having fun fooling each other today, though.
I, for one, am very glad you have done no new damage to your ankle.
Oh that’s so horrible–I hope they can secure it for you so you can heal fast.
Why not claim that you’ve been experimenting with formats and you’ve decided your next book works best in lolcat-ese? or that you will be leaving us for all time as you have joined the sacred church of the Luddites and are preparing to destroy your sinful computer and run off to worship the sacred non-mechanized loom?
See below for my thoughts on what makes a good April Fool’s Day post. I don’t have any suitable ideas for Type #1, and Type #2 isn’t really my speed.
I stick to type two, ever since I broke up with an ex-boyfriend on April fools day, without realizing what day it was and he spent a week trying to figure out why I wasn’t kissing him anymore (Such is high school). I just sent my critique partners a really silly false chapter, for example. I really HOPE they weren’t fooled.
That’s why I hate April Fool’s Day: because a lot of people don’t have that “wait, that’s a shitty thing to trick people into believing” sense. And a lot of the “this is a really obvious joke” posts are too obvious to strike me as funny.
To my mind, there are two kinds of good April Fool’s jokes. One is the sort that actually suckers you in for a moment (or longer), without being mean-spirited. But those are really hard to pull off. The other is like this — a sustained joke that doesn’t fool you at all, but does enough to be funny in its own right. (Google’s “Pigeon Rank” thing a few years back is another of that type.) I do enjoy the latter, when they happen.
The other thing that bugs me about this day is, I find myself reluctant to post anything at all, because I don’t want it to be lost in the noise of false posts. (Not that I see many of them on my flist today, I must admit.)
I have that reluctance myself. But happily nobody seems to have taken my book post that way.
Ditto.
