Greetings, dear publisher!

I’m writing to pitch a concept for an adult coloring book, called Grow the Fuck Up!

This morning, I read in Publisher’s Weekly that adult coloring books are mostly responsible for the 31% jump in trade paperback sales compared to last year. In “The Big Business Behind the Adult Coloring Book Craze” (Washington Post, 10 March 2016), Sarah Halzack notes that over 12 million coloring books were sold in 2015 — twelvuptifying the previous year’s paltry 1 million published. Unless 11 million children suddenly dropped their cellphones and picked up crayons, one can only conclude that 11 million adults popped an Ambien and got chill with Crayola.

Although I sympathize with anyone who wants to relax with a good book, baby boomers have taken their namesake way too seriously. What’s next? Gourmet Gerbers?

Coloring books do offer therapeutic benefits, and provide adults with safe alternatives to other regressive babyish behaviors like smoking cigars or nursing a baby bottle full of rum. But I think most people who actually read books instead of just scribbling in them will agree with me that this has totally spun out of control, and in a year or two we will all look back, wipe the drool from our cultural chin, and realize just how childish we have let ourselves become. It is time to abort our inner child and tear our adult pages down from their precious spots on our children’s refrigerators.

It is time for my book, Grow the Fuck Up!

Since colorers are not exactly readers, the book is itself a coloring book, delivering the message they need to hear in therapeutically affirming ways. Page after page is devoted to “coming of age” images of the rites of adulthood in black-and-white outline, awaiting a waxy artist to fill in the blanks until the concepts take shape in their mind and they realize they are frittering their lives away. From the house crumbling in disrepair (beneath the title “This is Called a Mortgage”) to the genuinely “adult” sexual line drawings (“Rated R for Randy”), the book beckons the stunted to grow the fuck up by affirming what they both fear and lust for, but cringe and cower from on a daily basis in their annoyingly regressive ways. The final page will be a giant ticking clockface perched like a memorial stone, leaning forward over their grave.

Thank you for considering my book proposal. If you do not have a designer in house, I might receive permission to draw the images myself in Mrs. Doneghy’s 5th period Art class.

Sincerely,
Mikey Arnzen