Excerpts From Nonexistent Books

“I see it as if I’m falling down a long shaft. Maybe a cave, I dunno, but it’s dark. Eventually, I see the floor, but it’s not lit by anything, it just sort of…glows, a bit. It looks smooth, manmade I guess, with lines almost like an oyster shell. There’s a little curve to it. The dream always ends before I reach it, but as I get closer, I hear more voices. I can’t understand what they’re saying, it’s like a bad radio connection, but it gets better as I go down.”

Maria kept her shoulders slumped once she finished.

“You think it’s down there?” Candi said. “In the catacombs?”

“I think whatever it is, it’s dangerous.” Maria looked at her hands. “I think whatever it is, it’s going to kill everybody.”

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The Dibner is the most notable of all Australian big game hunters. The Dibner is always out in the outback, hunting alone, or sitting in a corner of Bingo’s Bar with his rifle, Jolene. The Dibner always has a Tooheys Extra Dry, and Jolene always has mineral oil.

The Dibner will not acknowledge you if you approach him. The Dibner will nod curtly if you buy him a beer, offer a manly wink if you favor Jolene with a spot of polish. The Dibner only speaks to the worthy, though, and only The Dibner decides who that is.

The Dibner’s stories are spoken of in whispers, reverently repeated yet always lacking the spice of the original. The Dibner tracked a wily walleroo across a hundred clicks after it stole his water. The Dibner claimed five dingoes of a pack of six with a well-placed bait and a better-placed shot.

The Dibner will not stop until he has hunted one of every animal on the Australian continent. The Dibner only smiles when asked if this includes human beings. The Dibner has hunted insects, spiders, and scorpions with Jolene; there is usually very little left. The Dibner is not an entomologist.

The Dibner is, however, and amateur paleontologist. The Dibner hunts fossils, those most elusive of game animals, that he may shoot them and complete his hunt. The Dibner appreciates the challenge of finding them, even if Jolene finds no challenge in shooting them.

The Dibner has plans for an ark once his hunt is complete. The Dibner may be in the midst of a ritual to be reborn as an Australian godhead as spoken of in the Dreamtime. The Dibner will soon encompass the entire continent. The Dibner will be all, and all will be the Dibner, and all will be well.

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Presentations Roundtable
The National Book Association had too many conference proposals and not enough room or interest. So, to cram all these proposals in and pocket the attendees’ fees, this roundtable will allow all presenters a five minute presentation with an audience. Granted, the audience will consist of four other presenters, all crammed at the same tiny table, and there will be 3-6 such tables in the conference room, so everyone will be talking at once. But just think how good it’ll look on your CV!

Gala Banquet
Enjoy our expensive, paid speaker give the same speech they have given to hundreds of other large groups regardless of context! While you listen, you’ll dine on the finest Sysco frozen meals that our catering crew can thaw with the staff and time allotted–at a 500% markup, of course.

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Audibility of the Spoken Word in Varied Environs
The speaker for this program has a very soft voice, and has put their microphone on wrong. So you’ll be straining to hear every other word, and every time they move, the sound of fabric scraping against the fuzzy bit of the mic will echo through the hall like a thunderclap.

Close-Quarters Reading: The Ideal Capacity for a Seminar
Because the organizers have no clue, this session with Derek G. Wootzel, Mr. Book himself, is in a small conference room in the Marriott that has room for about 30 people. Across the conference center, there is probably another speaker talking to a gigantic hall with three audience members and someone who snuck in for the free food.

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Engaging Readers Regardless of Age Level: A Foolproof and Scientifically Sound Method
Sorry, this session will be spent entirely wrangling with the computer and projector, which will refuse to speak to each other. The presentation is on the speaker’s MacBook, and the venue has NO WAY to connect it except via wireless, which doesn’t seem to be working. 50 of the 60 minutes in this session will be spent trying to fix the issue, while the last 10 will be spent in a desperate attempt to cram it all in once an alternate projector is wheeled in.

Time Management Issues in Information, Presentation, and Communication Venues
We have three speakers scheduled for this session, but you’re only going to get to hear two of them. First, the moderator is going to take 15 minutes to introduce them and lay down the ground rules for civilized discourse, and then the first speaker is going to drone on for double their allotted time, forcing the other two to scramble through a Cliff Notes version of their speil!

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The Blame Game: Complaining About Your Profession for 60-90 Minutes
This is less a discussion group or roundtable than it is a confessional, or therapy, as our loudest and most assertive members repeatedly bring the focus back to themselves and the problems they have as members of our profession. By the end, you’ll wonder why they haven’t resigned to do literally anything else—if you can get a thought in edgewise!

We Forgot to Mention Grade Level: Information Only Applicable to 4-Year-Olds
You might think that we have something interesting to say as an adult bookseller, a publisher, or even a librarian. But we’re actually just here to talk about 4-year-olds and issues that affect them! Sorry if we led you on, but if we put that on the box no one would come.

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Memes and Paradigms: Actualizing Intergenerational Communications through Guided Human Computer Interactions
Ha! We really lured you in with that buzzwords title, didn’t we? Anyway, this presentation is about geriatric specialty librarians teaching senior citizens how to use Skype, and the doors are now locked. They scheduled us against the Mister Book presentation in Lexington Suites, so we got desperate.

Free Ebooks and Articles: How to Make Open Source Resources Work For You
We really ought to have called this presentations “Definitions, Definitions, Definitions!” because that’s what you’re going to get! We’ll define everything from “ebook” to “open source!” And since none of our three panelists coordinated with each other or practiced, definitions is all you will get in each of our 20-minute blocs!

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Jainkoa’s third and final assassination was, unlike the others, coordinated with his enemies external. Rebels forces within Teramyt struck at the same time as external forces from an alliance of five rival empires invaded.

The assassination itself was simple; a heavy part of the roof was collapsed on Jainkoa’s throne, shattering the crystal vessel that held his essence. It was believed that the god-king’s death, along with simultaneous attacks against his already demoralized troops, would lead to minimal bloodshed.

Instead, after initial gains, both the rebels and the invaders noticed that the Teramyt soldiers had begun fanatically resisting, to the point of charging enemy line unarmed. The next day, orders written in Jainkoa’s hand, and familiar to those who knew him, appeared in the dead clutches of his men. They were resisting not out of loyalty, but out of terror. The initial fear was that the King of Murder was being impersonated, but it soon became apparent that this was not the case.

After nearly a week of fierce battles, the orders were traced back to a barracks where they were being written by an unknown young man—perhaps one of the many that had been sacrificed For this purpose. Rebels of Teramyt found him and, seeing in him the manners and aspect of the hated Jainkoa, struck him down.

What happened next is not entirely clear, but it seems that, at the last extremity, Jainkoa the King of Murder had been able to move his spirit into the bodies of others, and had attempted to use this to escape his fate. As a result, the rebels appear to have bound and poisoned one of their own, suspected of harboring the king’s tainted spirit, and murdered everyone in a mile’s radius, returning only to commit suicide themselves.

It is believed that the King of Murder’s spirit perished, or dissipated, or was otherwise lost, in that last burst of blood and violence.

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After nearly a decade of ruling as an all but immobile corpse, Jainkoa of Teramyt had stopped raising the slain back to life as warriors—allegedly because he feared that they might challenge him for immortal primacy. Every last raised soldier was put to final death, as was every sorcerer with knowledge of the process, in an orgy of blood known thereafter as the Night of Eternal Death.

To this day, the knowledge has not been recovered.

Not long afterward, Jainkoa was assassinated a second time. A massive explosion rippled though his palace, likely caused by the remaining necromancers fearing for their lives. Jainkoa’s physical form was shattered by the blast, but he survived thanks to an arcane contingency. His tainted spirit found refuge in a beautiful crystalline vessel concealed in his throne, and from there he could speak and even cause pain at a distance.

Every sorcerer, every necormancer, every practitioner of the arcane arts that was associated with the palace was killed after this. Jainkoa recruited replacements, kidnapping them when neccessary from abroad, putting increasingly impossible demands on them for a new, immortal, physical body.

During this time, the neighboring principalities which had once cowered in fear before Teramyt’s might began to plot against it, aided by the populace which had grown restive with Jainkoa’s increasingly unstable rule. They were aided by the god-king’s increasingly myopic focus on his immortality, which began to require a steady string of sacrifices around this time. Many young and healthy subjects of Teramyt were taken by force from their families, either as failed host bodies for Jainkoa’s spirit or as test subjects for increasingly brutal experiments.

The rumor that Jainkoa and his sages were close to being able to transfer his essence to another living body precipitated his third assassination.

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