Josh Kilmer-Purcell‘s new novel, Candy Everybody Wants, starts off with a gay teen in a small town who dreams of making it big in Hollywood. (“I swear to god this is fiction,” Kilmer-Purcell quips on his MySpace blog.) In the opening chapter, Jayson ropes some of his friends into acting in a television pilot he’s creating called Dallasty!—yep, this book’s set in the ’80s. Anyway, Kilmer-Purcell and Harper Perennial are running a contest: he’s posted a script for a Dallasty! cliffhanger on his blog, and “your task is to film yourself on your computer camera (or video camera) PLAYING EVERY ROLE YOURSELF,” he explains, after which he’ll edit together the best peformances into one video. His big advice for the actors? “You just have to be UBER-DRAMATIC.”
In addition to handing out copies of Candy Everybody Wants to the finalists, Perennial is also bundling a bunch of other books for the grand prize winners, from authors ranging from Lambda winner Robert Westfield to Sebastian Horsley, infamous threat to American national security.