I know I risk alienating a large portion of my readers by continuing to post updates on my life. Who wants to hear that kind of stuff, right? You want intrigue, sex, scandal, and violence, right? You want the sordid details of my adventures on Skid Row, or the story of my run-ins with celebrity and pseudo-celebrity, not the minute and crinkling musings regarding the completion of my first major novel without going completely mad, whilst editing a feature Ethiopian film in the hope of getting it into Sundance this year and forging a bi-coastal relationship with the best girlfriend I could have ever hoped for–all without starving myself or losing too much sleep and risking turning into a smelly, decrepit, shell of my former self, which incidentally, may have been a shell of its former self. So really, when I put it in those terms, I’ve got quite an exciting life.
It plays like an episode of Giada De Laurentiis’ Everyday Italian, unfortunately. If my life was a television show, it wouldn’t make it past the pitch.
Speaking of pitches, I came back from my pitch meeting on Friday wondering if I had stepped into some Bizarro World where high concept commercial plots are dismissed out-of-hand, and B-Grade material is substituted like Splenda for sugar. Then I realized it was just Hollywood, and so my faith in the system was restored. Can’t talk too much about what happened, but I will say there is a difference in philosophy when it comes to entertainment in the movies. I tend to derive pleasure out of well-plotted stories with good subplots, exciting supernatural drama, tantalizing mystery, and thrilling climaxes. Other people prefer stories involving this band of killer circus freaks that travel around the country leaving bodies in their wake. The characters, there’s this seven-hundred-pound fat lady who has a way of seducing guys, gets them in her trailer– (Get the reference? Leave a comment.)
But seriously, that’s what it was like. I didn’t quite know how to respond, so I came back and played Mario Kart 64, which always has a way of recentering me. Thanks, Nintendo!
Because I was sick last week, I did not meet my goal of finishing my book by the end of August. I think it was the fear of finishing that put me under. Really, what do I have left after it’s done? Editing, but what’s that? A few weeks? Then what?
Oh yes, query letters. To New York agents. People who hold the power of the sun in the palm of their hand. People who have the ability to ignore my pleas with little more than a tight lipped response to their assistant that they’re done with the recycling for the day, send the rest of it to the incinerator. Yet I am hopeful. The biggest push for me is to finish, which I shall do within this week, and then a few weeks of editing and careful perusal for typographicals, then a print run of a dozen, which I will then begin to use for marketing myself as the next genius futurist writer.
That’s the plan, but I will of course offer it for sale–the full book, for sale at a low, low price, complete with custom cover art and a brand new forward. I’m even considering illustrations. Just a few maps, maybe a few inserts. Not sure quite how I want to proceed. But it’s really going to be huge. Not huge like Janet Jackson nipple huge, but pretty big. Like Boise, Idaho big.
Seriously, I think you’ll love it. And I’ll love you for buying it.
Oh, speaking of celebrity sightings, I went to a new church this weekend. There I met Danny Bonaduce, the grizzled former Partridge Family member who has apparently a dozen black belts in various martial arts disciplines and recently spent time as a victim/corpse in the season opener of CSI. Not sure which variety of CSI. Maybe Des Moines. I was amused when he stepped outside to take a smoke. I think he may be a Christian.
You gotta love Hollywood.