The Worst Romance Novel Ever Written Read Online Free

pennies and sweep and mop before you go home.
    Once again, Johnny didn’t have enough information to fill a book, so he set out to write the next best thing—a diet book called The Pizza Diet. Unfortunately, he could only come up with one recipe that made any sense to him. It contained all the food groups, was easy to prepare, and was more cost-effective than any other diet plan:
    THE RECIPE: Thin crust, light sauce, low fat mozzarella, pineapple, lean hamburger, green peppers, onions, banana peppers, mushroom, olives—whatever floats your boat—as long as you don’t use anchovies because anchovies are nasty and will give you cancer from the toxins that flow daily into our lakes, rivers, bays, and oceans.
    DAILY ROUTINE: Make pizza in the morning. Cook until the cheese melts and the meats look less alive. Cut into twelve slices. Eat four slices for each meal, which is about eight ounces of food. Exercise if you want to—or don’t. Don’t eat anything else but this pizza. Drink a lot of water. You should lose weight, but if you don’t, you’re cheating or have a gland problem. As with any diet, see your doctor before beginning one. It’s his or her way to make a buck off you trying to get healthier without his or her ridiculously expensive help.
    Since his diet book only filled a page and had no television show tie-in, Johnny then attempted to write a “Family Saga” only to realize he knew nothing about genealogy, geography, or technology. He also got tired of writing the same thing again and again …
    The Pilgrims came to town …
    The Iroquois came to town …
    The British came to town …
    George Washington came to town …
    George Washington’s mistress, Sally Hemings, came to town …
    The gypsies came to town …
    The dad-blasted Yankees came to town …
    Abraham Lincoln came to town …
    The Pony Express came to town …
    The Iron Horse came to town …
    The horseless carriage came to town …
    Murderous thieving scum came to town …
    The dad-blasted Yankees returned to town …
    The cholera came to town …
    The Diphtheria came to town …
    The influenza came to town …
    The interstate highway didn’t come to town …
    Hicksville, Virginia, Johnny’s town, never thrived or even grew, but folks and their transportation devices still streamed in anyway. After fifty pages, he couldn’t remember the name of the original patriarch, who came over from Scotland in 1770 just in time to earn some buckshot during the Boston Massacre, participate in the Boston Tea Party, and manually cure Paul Revere’s constipated horse before Revere’s midnight ride.
    Johnny’s disgust at such a thought, naturally, caused him to void the family saga and write a fantasy, his cast of misfits sounding like Smurfs on steroids:
    Flutterby was a tree-hugging wood nymph with magical powers. Though she was only eleven inches tall, she could transform into a blue whale whenever she wanted to, as long as there was plenty of water around for her massive body.
    Flutterby enjoyed casting spells on the other wood nymphs. It was her thing. It empowered her. It made her feel taller. It made her forget she smelled like a blue whale. Her favorite spell caused all the other wood nymphs to have really bad eczema, and since Flutterby also made anti-itch potion out of the magic plant gronwynwyn, she was very rich.
    One day, Flutterby got some bad news. The really bad, uptight Tree People of Salem Wood were on the march to destroy her gronwynwyn fields because they believed gronwynwyn was habit-forming, led to harder drugs like aspirin, and smelled faintly like blue whale. She had to get some muscle, so she summoned Pew the Pepe, Fog Leg Horn, and Martian the Marvin …
    Johnny gave up on this story soon after. He hated writing about two-dimensional, cartoon-ish characters, and he was not about to start. Leave that kind of writing to prime-time television, he had thought.
    He was too afraid to finish the first sentence of his horror novel: