10 Things About 'My Dad Wrote A Porno'

10 Things about My Dad Wrote a Porno

Imagine, if you dare, your retired elderly father shows you a manuscript that he's been working on.  As you start to read it, you realize that your father is showing you a piece of erotic fiction.  Erotic fiction is written by a man with, at best, a loose grip on human sexuality, anatomy and, really, the nature of reality in general.
As your eyes scan the pages and your mind congers up images that you will never be able to unsee, what do you do?  Do you politely compliment him on his creativity and immediately schedule a therapy session?  Do you and your mother start looking into nursing homes?  Do you very calmly, like a man shooting his rabid dog, take the paper out back and set it on fire?
Or do you, as Jamie Morton does, gather your friends together and read this confusing smut out loud while your best friends mock it and, by extension you, mercilessly and then release it on the world.
Spoiler alert, Morton did the latter.
My Dad Wrote a Porno takes the world-famous podcast about a book and returns it into book form.  Besides the literary gold that is Belinda Blinked #1, you get to enjoy Morton, James Cooper, and Alice Levine's running commentary.  The book is presented as a reading textbook in the worlds most confusingly depraved classroom.  Warning.  If you tend to read in public, as I do, you will start uncontrollably laughing and other people will as you why and you will find yourself in an incredibly awkward position.

1. Rocky Flintstone is My Writing Hero: 

The part I love most about My Dad Wrote a Porno and, indeed, the entire Balinda Blinked series is the fact that Rocky Finstone is fearless.  Like, to a frankly worrying degree.  Deep down in my writerly soul, there is a scared, insecure voice that constantly chirps at me, "What's wrong with you?  Do you think you are so smart that EVERYONE should read the horseshit you dare commit to paper?

"You are not that smart.  And, soon, everyone will know it."

"You think you are good enough to write books?  You're barely good enough to write a sign that says 'Will Work 4 Fod' which is what you will end up doing if you keep this horseshit up.

Rocky doesn't appear to have that voice.  I both envy him and love him for it.

2. It should be noted that Rocky Flinstone is as crazy as a shithouse ape: 

"His cock started to ejaculate semen which he quickly caught in his hands.  He then covered her hair with it, twisting it all into a ponytail, Belinda's long black hair mixed with translucent sperm.. the most powerful sexual symbol he knew."

I think I have made my point.

3. But The Fear is Universal:

Best selling authors that are hugely successful and that I love with all the hearty-hearts my heart can heart sometimes admit that they live in fear that they are one misstep away from total failure.  It's like they believe that they've pulled some elaborate scam trying to convince the world that they are actually awesome writers and they are perpetually one shitty sentence away from shattering that facade and being exposed as the idiotic boobs that they really are.

I feel like it's just the nature of the thing.  Writing and publishing involve overcoming a lot of Fear.  Fear of rejection, fear of pain, fear of humiliation, fear of being seen as less than, fear of failure, fear of success, fear of fear, fear of waking up in your high school gym naked while the entire class laughs at my tiny dingus.... so I've heard.

ANYHOO!

The point is. It's not something that goes away.  It's always there.  It's like a tiny imp that nests right in your medulla oblongata and cuts little bits of psyche for its lunch.

4. Keep in mind, his child and his friends mock him mercilessly:

In most realities, Rocky Flinstone is just another drop in a sea of absolute insanity that is modern self-publishing.  But, as fate would have it, Morton and his friends picked it up and, to their credit, saw an opportunity.

My Dad Wrote A Porno is basically Morton and his friends laughing hysterically at what, one can only assume, he thought was good writing.  I don't think many writers actively try to write something bad.  From everything I've heard and read about the man, he believes in his talents. Again, to a frankly worrying degree.  Which would explain why he felt compelled to hand his son this bizarre pile of smut in the first place.

Which, again, ties back to my 'Shithouse Ape' theory.

5. But is it really bad?

How does one measure success as a writer?  For me it is simple.  Do a lot of people want to read your shit?  Do they enjoy it?  Do they come back for more?

Welp, congratulations you are successful.  Here's your trophy.

And this shit.  It sold out the fucking Sydney Oprah House.  I am not entirely sure that J. K. Rowling could do that.  I'm not saying Rocky Flintstone is better than J. K. Rowling... but... just sayin...

6. So, let me say it again, Rocky is My Hero: 

So there is something... liberating about watching a person charge out into the fray, stark bolloks naked, waps and wangs flopping in the breeze with nary a fuck to be had nor given.  Especially when the writing is as objectively bad as Rocky's.  It's like watching that nude crusader riding headlong into an entire army sword and wang up for battle.

I feel like I am sitting on the battlements watching with slack-jawed amazement.  A single tear rolls down my eye and I salute muttering, "Ride on, you beautiful crazy bastard!

7. Because, again, this is some seriously fucked prose: 

"The Duchess stood up and stretched her cramped body.  Her nipples hardened with her feeling of freedom and they were now as large as the three inch rivets which had held the hull of the fateful Titanic together."

 Nuff Said.  Also... three inch?

8. I feel like I should comment on the plot but...

The story follows Belinda Blumenthal the newly hired sales director at Steels Pots and Pans.  On her quest to make Steels the foremost pots and pans producer in the world (if such a thing fucking exists) her and her clitoris -which is a character in its own right- must run the gantlet of office politics, micropeni, horny royalty and youngish voyeurs in order to...
...

To be honest,  I really don't know.

It is meant to be erotica and, as I understand the genre, plot is, at best, secondary.  But that being said...

9. The Opposite of Sex:  

....This is the most unerotic erotica that I have ever seen.  I am hardly a connoisseur of the genre, although I would be lying if I didn't admit to using my Kindle Direct subscription to occasionally satisfy my morbid curiosity.

And, for the record, Rocky Flinstone is not the worst erotica writer in the world.  But if the purpose of the Belinda Blinked series is to titillate and arouse than this is nowhere close.  I can't imagine the collection of fetishes one would need to carry in order to find Rocky's writing erotic and I really don't want to.

Although, presumably, Rocky wrote this because he finds it erotic which goes back to my 'Crazier Than A Shithouse Ape' hypothesis.

But gods help me I have laughed so hard that people on either side of me at the bar start giving me the kind of space one would give to a crazy person.  So maybe I'm not as far away from Rocky's mental state as I would care to assume.

10. Words of.... let's call it wisdom.

This from the book's protagonist, Belinda Blumenthal:

 "When you get what you want, you feel great!"

No poet has ever spoken truer words.