More than 48 hours of 2012 have already passed, but we know that a New Year has never truly dawned without announcement of something that James Franco is doing—the commencement of another Franco project ending that uncertain limbo between Franco projects that we now use to mark time. Thankfully you can all finally kiss your dates and play “Auld Lang Syne” and then have drag queens spit on you: Franco is prepping a novel—his first work of fiction since the poorly-received-by-pop-addled-idiots short story collection Palo Alto—and has just sold its publishing rights to Amazon, whose recently emboldened attempt to grow its own imprint threatens to upend traditional publishing models forever, which is something they probably said to James Franco, probably in a wild-eyed and flamboyant manner they thought he might find attractive.
The New York Observer reports that the book, titled Actors Anonymous (because aren’t they all, really?), will be “a fictionalized version of Mr. Franco’s experiences as an actor,” i.e. fictionalized plays on his real-life experiences, which are already fictionalized plays on what it means to be “actor James Franco,” which is an existential truth that this new fiction will no doubt reveal, through fiction. Of course, Franco has yet to explain to Amazon that his Franco “novel” is actually just his life, that every day is but a new chapter, and that we are all already reading it, but they’ll probably be really excited when they hear about it.