Dreaming Hour

It was overwhelming chaos that met Kara Erickson's announcement on the 21st of September, 2013. Tensions have been high since April, when uncertainty of the future began to stain our horizons following the acquisition by Amazon. I don't think anyone was quite prepared for the reckoning with which Mr. Reader's first words, under a different name, began to appear on the internet. To say, Mr. Reader, that you were a harbinger of doom, would be giving you far too much credit. But a storm did break when you appeared on the scene, perhaps you would agree that you are bad news: that you are somewhat unscrupulous and prone to consuming far more Coffea arabica than is wholesome. Unwed women - and men, for that matter - would be best kept away from you, lest you poison their minds with your wildly disproportionate ideas of social justice and free speech. I will allow this much sentiment to shine through: were it not for your first foray into the world of authorial misconduct on October 12th, we might not have known what to do with the swell of creativity on our shores of the prior few weeks and months.

I find myself changed in the aftermath of your book being published, Mr. Reader; perhaps it was the long nights, the legal team you had working around the clock, the untrained monkey who did relentless searches for images in the creative commons or your sock puppets. Whether this is an improvement upon my state or not, I will let my therapist decide.

Mr. Reader, I would like to interject a quote from the annals of British parliament, from Winston Churchill himself, in a speech given in the House of Commons on the 10th of December, 1936.

"Nothing is more certain or more obvious than that recrimination or controversy at this time would be not only useless but harmful and wrong. What is done is done. What has been done or left undone belongs to history, and to history, so far as I am concerned, it shall be left."

We should have been unlucky to remember these words one score and two days ago when your labor began, Mr. Reader. Due to impropriety and pretension on, I'll admit it, all our parts, you have curated a mixed bag of trophies and truffles, almost all easily found elsewhere, written by internet-famous personages, impeccably organized and with not enough run on sentences, and I cannot, in good conscience, rate it less than five stars. (Did not you yourself suggest in a drunken stupor that we rate books on a curve, Mr. Reader?)

Congratulations on your birth, I will send a baby shower gift with the next messenger pigeon, provided my copy of the book, ordered from lulu.com, arrives unscathed. Further, I will recommend my friends share the book freely as you so eloquently suggested in your email of the 3nd of November, 2013, received at 3:41 in the morning. Mr. Reader, you will forever live in infamy thanks to the toiling efforts of men and women (and monkeys) across the globe: I hope to God you can live with what you have done.

A Message from Mr. Reader's Untrained Monkey: The book can be found for free by those as unscrupulous as I [The Monkey] and could not be sold on Lulu's servers for less than the given price. This is a tragedy of the capitalistic world we live in, but one which one as unscrupulous as I [The Monkey] can benefit [buy more bananas].

Mr. Reader himself has declined to comment. Considering the barrage of emails I was receiving from him as recently as two hours ago, it is in keeping with his character. I also seem to have run out of bananas.

Too Long; Didn't Read 
Mr. Reader is a biased editor who is overly fond of Greek legends; his opinions are one-sided, his taste is common and he did not pay me!