18 May 2020: Chris Stark wrote a saucy novel and became Joe Jonas for The Demon Head Mistress

Scott and Chris were away for another week and the podcast returned to old material.

This time the focus was one of Chris’s attempts to prove that a job he had just encountered could not really be that difficult.

During a period in which he had agreed to say yes to almost anything, Chris had ended up shopping with two women he did not know particularly well.

The trip took them into the chick-lit section of a bookshop.

Chris looked at the covers, read some of the descriptions and reached a dangerous conclusion.

He could write one of these.

Before Chris’s own work was revealed, Beccy read examples of highly charged romantic prose.

There were descriptions involving lug nuts, fountains of desire and a wolf-bite scar.

The language was so spectacularly overdone that Chris became even more confident.

If this was the standard, he was ready to become a novelist.

Scott’s challenge was simple: stop claiming it was easy and actually write something.

Chris returned with a title:

The Demon Head Mistress.

He also gave himself a pen name which displayed similar literary seriousness:

Joe Jonas.

The extract followed a woman in a tight red dress and was packed with food, furniture and car-part metaphors.

A character was described as more Fillet-O-Fish than Chicken McNuggets.

Skin was bronzed like a teak or mahogany bench.

The dress clung like a leech.

And, inevitably after Beccy’s example, there were massive lug nuts.

The joke should have been that Chris had produced something unreadable.

Instead, Scott and Beccy found themselves enjoying how committed he was to it.

The metaphors were ridiculous, but they kept coming.

Chris had understood that the quickest route to the tone he wanted was to make every sentence slightly more excessive than the one before it.

At one point the writing declared somebody “more hot than dog, more steak than sandwich”.

It was nonsense delivered with complete confidence.

Chris was a huge fan of The Streets.

So the programme took his breathy reading of *The Demon Head Mistress* and put it over music in the style of his favourite act.

That transformed the segment from a writing challenge into the closest thing Chris had to his own Streets record.

For him, that was a much better prize than getting the book into a shop.

The archive edition ended with the surprising conclusion that Chris’s novel had found its ideal format.

Not paperback.

Remix.