The results are in.

The winner of The Amazon Breakthrough Novel contest is Bill Loehfelm, a guy. He's a male guy who's also a male white guy. He's been called, breathlessly, the "new" Dennis LeHane. His novel, Fresh Kills, is set against the gritty background of Staten Island (which could be seen as similar to the gritty background of South Boston) and is about an estranged son (is there any other kind?) coming to terms with the secrets of his father's violent past in a coming-of-age novel (and when was the last time we heard about one of those, huh?) This sounds very much like the current Dennis LeHane, whose work I very much like, and I'm sure it's a really good novel and I'll enjoy it immensely when I read it, which I intend to do.

The first runner up is also a guy, who also is a white male guy called Harry Dolan whose novel is about another guy who is living a quiet life after putting to rest his own violent past when suddenly -- wouldn't you know? -- secrets from the past start to bubble up. It's called Bad Things Happen, and I'm sure that they do, in a good way.

The other runner up is also a guy, but an Asian-American guy, Dwight Okita. His premise for a story truly is fresh. The Prospect of My Arrival is about a person so new he isn't even a person yet. And yet, through the machinations of the Pre-Born Project, Prospect is able to communicate... dark secrets about a serial killer and a piano tuner.

It's no dark secret why none of these three is a woman.

But in case you don't know, it's because women can't write.

I mean, they do write, but they can't write.

In fact, I had to write this blog twice because my male and female children interfered with my writing so much -- with their pestilent needs for food, cough medicine and the answers to questions such as the meaning of "quorum," -- that I actually erased the first version of it. If I were a man, I wouldn't have noticed.

That's the essence of the difference between writing by men and writing by women.

Norman Mailer (the "new" Ernest Heminway) once, in a way that was well.. inimitable, described the "smell" of the women writers with adjectives such as ditsy, itsy-bitsy and a little psychotic.

And the original Ernest Hemingway said that only one woman was suited to win the Nobel Prize and that was "Bror's wife" (aka Isak Dinesen, aka Karin Blixen, aka the author of Out of Africa). And who better to judge? Hemingway wrote the kind of prose we love. We describe it as "muscular" and "virile." We don't describe it as "female" and "fertile." Catcher of fish, marry-er of many, sex-er of many more, shooter of lions, shooter of himself, come to that, Hemingway knew what he was talking about.

Or not talking about.

You see, if you want to be a famous writer, the first rule is that when apocalyptic things (or even just dark, secret things buried in the past) arise, true writers don't cry out, "What the hell?" or "For heaven's sake!" or even "God wot!" They cry out .. nothing.

they cry out nothing in sentences that have no punctuation or capitalization because that is sissy

Or they cry out. They cry out that what they see is wrong and not just and cruel but that it is wrong and not just and cruel in words with only one syllable for if they had more than one syllable, it would be bad. It would be bad and wrong and sissy.

This is how sons get estranged. They say nothing for so long that all their kin (and even their kith) figure they have nothing to say when in fact they have so much to say that they've repressed it and cannot even speak of it but only shoot or beat people up over it who understand this truculence and later shoot and beat them up also after which they have sex -- but not together, despite what you hear...

They have sex with girls who have breasts with nipples that point up at the tropical sky and legs that point up at the rest of the girls. They remain girls until they turn 38 after which they becoming frightening scary hags. The girls say things such as "Take me" and "Hold me" and "Save me" and "Clutch me," but little else because they're mostly breasts and legs and there's not much for a breast or a leg to say.

Now, although Dwight Okita points to Alice Seebold as one of his influences, he's just being nice because Alice Seebold, while very famous, is famous in an Oprah-way but not in a Bror's-wife way. In her books, people feel and think and even say things about the things they feel which is what ruins everything. This is probably why not even one woman among the 50 finalists in the Amazon Breakthrough Novel contest was able to break through -- what with all that talking and thinking and feeling and recognizing feelings as such which is, as everyone knows, almost as itsy and ditsy as it gets.

As far back as Nathaniel Hawthorne was pacing the ridge above his house in Salem, ripping off his wife's ideas for stories and complaining that "scribblers" such as that itsy-bitsy little Charlotte Bronte should be allowed to write at all because they hadn't got the constitution for it -- despite that she was out-selling and out-writing him, and in cleaner prose (talk about your dark secrets and violent pasts!) along with her sisters -- it's been a well-known truth.

Women may buy more books and even read more books. They may even write more books.

But they have no business doing so.

Just let the record speak for itself.

In short sentences.

Nearly 800 people have won the Nobel Prize. Nearly 800 people have won the Nobel Prize for science, literature, economics, peace and such-like. Nearly 35 of them have been women.

800. (Nearly).

35.

See the difference between those two numbers?

Or not?

What are you, a woman or something?