Hybrid Vigor?
Mar. 7th, 2003 12:13 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
mallorys_cameraBusy, busy, busy but all of it internally generated.
Lucius thinks he might be interested in collaborating on the Dalia Lama cloning novel. (Ben rolled his eyes when I told him.) Upside to this: Lucius already has a Big Name agent to whom he has proved a continuing disappointment over the years in the commercial marketplace but who – for whatever reasons – still hasn't dropped him. Also, Lucius has actually been to Katmandu and Mustang, thus we can lard up those all-important opening chapters with status details which I would otherwise have to make up or plagerize. Plus Lucius already has a cult following, people who would buy the book on the basis of the Lucius brand. And he's a great writer, though a different sort of writer than me – he has that Conradian thing going whereas I am forever fusing crazy metaphor from disparate life encounters. We're both good with dialogue. The hybrid might work.
Downside: Lucius is kind of like a speed freak without an amphetamine prescription – he gets caught up in strange segues that go on for pages and pages, will spend hours rearranging commas in a phrase, and is generally unreliable when it comes to deadlines or other types of expectations. He would be there at the beginning but could be orbiting Alpha Centauri on a hang glider by the end. Much of the grunt work would fall to me, and I'm not sure I have the writing chops to pull off a really first-rate – meaning Thomas Harris or Michael Gruber-like – thriller.
Also, neither of us can plot our way out of a plastic bag. My way has always been the Hitchcock way – come up with a handful of images that excite me emotionally, and then figure out a linear narrative that strings them all together. Alas, this is how painted myself into a corner I could not get out of with Saturday Night.
To remedy this, at Ben's suggestion, I am spending Tuesday with Morgan Hua, our old Clarion buddy, the king of mechanical plotting. Graph paper! Index cards! The engineering mind at work.
In other news, I wrote away to Frank Gibson for the financials on the bookstore. As recently as 2001, it had gross sales well in excess of a million bucks but I would be surprised if it hit 700 K this year, and of course, bookselling is typically a low margin business – typically, net income before taxes runs 3%. I've completed a 60 page business plan which proves conclusively that I can turn the business around. But Gibson is asking waaaaaaay too much money for it, I'm only prepared to offer him half, and I'm scared of what happens when his steely expressionless eyes meet mine and he says in a flat voice, "I want more money."
Lucius thinks he might be interested in collaborating on the Dalia Lama cloning novel. (Ben rolled his eyes when I told him.) Upside to this: Lucius already has a Big Name agent to whom he has proved a continuing disappointment over the years in the commercial marketplace but who – for whatever reasons – still hasn't dropped him. Also, Lucius has actually been to Katmandu and Mustang, thus we can lard up those all-important opening chapters with status details which I would otherwise have to make up or plagerize. Plus Lucius already has a cult following, people who would buy the book on the basis of the Lucius brand. And he's a great writer, though a different sort of writer than me – he has that Conradian thing going whereas I am forever fusing crazy metaphor from disparate life encounters. We're both good with dialogue. The hybrid might work.
Downside: Lucius is kind of like a speed freak without an amphetamine prescription – he gets caught up in strange segues that go on for pages and pages, will spend hours rearranging commas in a phrase, and is generally unreliable when it comes to deadlines or other types of expectations. He would be there at the beginning but could be orbiting Alpha Centauri on a hang glider by the end. Much of the grunt work would fall to me, and I'm not sure I have the writing chops to pull off a really first-rate – meaning Thomas Harris or Michael Gruber-like – thriller.
Also, neither of us can plot our way out of a plastic bag. My way has always been the Hitchcock way – come up with a handful of images that excite me emotionally, and then figure out a linear narrative that strings them all together. Alas, this is how painted myself into a corner I could not get out of with Saturday Night.
To remedy this, at Ben's suggestion, I am spending Tuesday with Morgan Hua, our old Clarion buddy, the king of mechanical plotting. Graph paper! Index cards! The engineering mind at work.
In other news, I wrote away to Frank Gibson for the financials on the bookstore. As recently as 2001, it had gross sales well in excess of a million bucks but I would be surprised if it hit 700 K this year, and of course, bookselling is typically a low margin business – typically, net income before taxes runs 3%. I've completed a 60 page business plan which proves conclusively that I can turn the business around. But Gibson is asking waaaaaaay too much money for it, I'm only prepared to offer him half, and I'm scared of what happens when his steely expressionless eyes meet mine and he says in a flat voice, "I want more money."
