Castle's Chessboard

Writing is No Monkey Business!

Author's Note: This was written March Musical Monkey Madness see: "Note: March Musical Monkey Madness Blogging Prompt..."

Prompt: Andre Got Fired - Why?

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You know the phrase "a Typewriting Monkey could do better"?... Andre's last employer Drivel books put that to the test.

Apparently one of the higher ups at the publishing company believed in the "Infinite Monkey Theorem"

The infinite monkey theorem states that a monkey hitting keys at random on a typewriter keyboard for an infinite amount of time will almost surely type any given text, such as the complete works of William Shakespeare. In fact, the monkey would almost surely type every possible finite text an infinite number of times.

and reasoned that the possibility of a monkey randomly churning out a bestseller had better odds than achieving success with the hacks that they were hiring lately. Sadly it did not work out very well.

To Andre's credit... he had a typing speed of 250 words per minute and a ton of ideas. Unfortunately it was hard to follow his train of thought.

During his tenure as lead monkey author for Drivel, he wrote amazing gems such as "sadfahasha knphnaorhnaslh asdgainawer gweigas sdjlka", "ADGAGAHRbhf kagarerih aha fhraoiha" and "AGDASHrahinearjhdoficrnglfhnarhihn fcergnalhrafnicadnh era b ir nfahlr" (The latter of which is a summary of his ground breaking 1573 page novel). None of them sold very well but he was recognized for his distinctive style which was present throughout almost all his work. A New York Times columnist summed up Andre's gift with words best in one of her reviews stating "I have no idea what I just read".

Andre did produce one book which didn't follow his usual pattern... a thriller which readers agreed had a Stephen King feel to it. Even the harshest of reviewers found themselves likening it to the "The Shining". As it turned out, Andre's book was a little too similar. He wound up getting fired for plagiarism!


Word Count: 312