"Use All The Crayons!"

About the Author
Chris Rodell is a Latrobe, Pennsylvania–based writer who has taught creative nonfiction at Point Park University in Pittsburgh. His offbeat travel features and essays have appeared in Esquire, msnbc.com , Cooking Light, People, Maxim, Men’s Health, Playboy, Golf, Details, and Arnold Palmer’s Kingdom magazine. He is the timeline curator for www.ArnoldPalmer.com and blogs at www.EightDaysToAmish.com. He has written for many of the most prestigious magazines in America and been rejected by the rest. He will write for anyone who’ll pay him. He is a PROSEtitute.

I thought I had gotten to know Chris Rodell fairly well from his many always lively visits to interview me at my Latrobe office, but I really hadn’t realized the true extent of his literary talents until I had a chance to see a draft of his latest book. “Use All The Crayons” is an interesting and amusing trip through precisely 501 wide-ranging tips on life surrounding thirty-three short essays that are thoughtful and insightful.

-- Golf legend and Rodell friend Arnold Palmer

Charcoal and lampblack: those were the only two colors the company that would grow to be Crayola Crayons produced when it was founded in 1864. Today the children who use Crayola products can choose from more than ninety-six different colors, including Azure, Laser Lemon, and Razzmatazz. What child isn’t glad to be alive in such a vibrant age? The company says the average child will wear down more than 730 crayons before he or she turns ten years old.

Like a box of crayons, we are all born with an astounding range of color options, from Mauvelous to Tickle Me Pink. We can paint our lives as brightly or dimly as we choose—but through life, some of us lose or wear down some of our more dazzling colors, living each and every day as if it were either charcoal or lampblack.

It doesn’t have to be that way. Nor should it. “Use All The Crayons!” is your uplifting, humorous, spiritual guidebook about how to make every day as vivacious as an Atomic Tangerine to illuminate even your most lampblack days.

Like a box of crayons, we are all born with an astounding range of color options. This effervescent guidebook promises to combine populist common sense with a healthy dose of optimism in the hopes of teaching others how to make every day as vivacious as the brightest crayon in the box. The book includes 501 hilarious and thoughtful tips and anecdotes and 33 Colorful Day Diary essays that detail what can happen to your life when you “Use All The Crayons!”

Excerpts from book:

6. Get a $75 tattoo of an $18,000 Rolex for your left wrist.
34. Ask security guards manning the airport metal detectors what would happen if a noble knight wearing a suit of armor tried to pass through. Better yet, wear a suit of armor for your next flight.
97. Celebrate March 7 by reminding everyone you call that it was on that day in 1876 that Alexander Graham Bell was issued a patent for the first telephone. Ask callers to imagine how the first phones would have sounded if Bell’s name had been Alexander Graham Horn.
115. Inflate your high school SAT scores to preposterous levels. Tell people you scored 1775. When they point out it’s impossible to score more than 1600, make up a brilliant lie to justify the impossibility.
162. Ask friends if they think Elvis would have ever reached and maintained his iconic status if the Presleys had named their son Todd?
191. Did you know a regulation No. 2 pencil like the kind you used in school contains enough pencil lead to write a straight unbroken line for thirty-five miles? Colorful people do.
223. Someday, just for the fun of it, stand on a busy street corner and bark into the cell phone, “No! No! No! The incision should be made behind the left ear! The left ear!”
277. Never fail to include in your cards to newlyweds heartfelt congratulations and this sage advice for a long and happy marriage: “Always argue naked!”
323. Remember to ask anyone who works in a crime lab if employees ever sit around singing, “Someday my prints will come!”
380. Always be open to romance, even when you’re tired. People who fake sleep to get out of lovin’ are bulldozers.
437. Tell people the only time bitch, bitch, bitch ever turns into something positive is when you’re running a robust dog-grooming business.
481. Colorful conversation starter: note that the Simon & Garfunkel song, “The Sound of Silence,” is three minutes and four seconds of titular contradiction.
498. Tell the people you love that you love them. Say it aloud. And, yes, men, say it to other men. (click here to see excerpt)

This Book is Free!!

That’s right. Free. Anyone who wants a copy mailed to his or her home, no charge, is welcome to one. Just ask. Author Chris Rodell, of course, encourages you buy it and hopes you’ll support him and the people who distribute, promote and sell books. But if you’re one of those Americans who are out of work and having a tough time or if you know a U.S. serviceman or woman who might benefit from a book that aims to brighten daily lives, then Rodell wants you to get in touch at storyteller@chrisrodell.com. He doesn’t believe a book that at its heart aims to help people be happy should be withheld from anyone over a few dollars. “It’s said the best things in life -- love, friendship, laughter -- are free,” Rodell says. “I don’t presume that this book is one of the best things in life but, by God, there’s nothing to say it can’t keep good company.”