Finishing a book is just like you took a child out in the back yard and shot it. -- Truman Capote

We rented Capote just as soon as it came out on DVD. I'd seen it in theatrical release; Ben had not. What I remembered from my two solitary hours in the silent art house – I was the only person in the audience! – besides Philip Seymour Hoffman's amazing performance (yada yada yada) was how true the film seemed to me to be to a creative process that I can only describe as channeling.

Now, not all writing is channeling. In fact, most writing is not channeling. And most people whose livelihood depends on spinning content not only don't channel but look with some disdain upon channeling as the province of really bad writing books, Not Me But the Wind That Blows Through Me, Writing From the Pancreas and other titles of that ilk.

Writing from the outside in is craft, and I daresay most readers don't know the difference. There's isn't any difference in quality, even on the level of archetypal resonance, when you have a writer with chops who knows status detail, beats, story arc and the glue that goes between.

Writing from the inside out is a kind of madness. Not to go all Joseph Campbell on you, but it's the hero's journey.

It's an odd thing but the only writers who are interested in channeling are rank amateurs and the rare genius. First of all, there are few commercial markets for material that is larger than its author since we live in a culture where ego is currency. But secondly, it's an alchemical process that depletes the creator. It's a deal with the devil where you're the guy with the pitchfork, the contract, the blood it's signed in and the 100 million dollar pay-off simultaneously. Very few people are strong enough to survive it.

Capote certainly wasn't.

Watching the movie at home let me pay closer attention to the details. It really is a subtle thing to pull off in a movie! All those practically motionless landscape shots: if you look closely enough, there is always one thing – and only one thing – moving. A train, a car, a wind-tossed branch. This is the writer's imagination at work, plundering the landscape one detail at a time. The many shots of Capote watching, observing. The campy seduction of source material that came to him disguised as random strangers; the total identification with the central character – so much stronger and creepier than "falling in love."

The hard part, of course, is getting through the inevitable ego disintegration when this kind of project is through.

Capote couldn't.

Still, he produced one perfect book, In Cold Blood.

Of course, the big question is whether he might not have produced it anyway had he not insisted upon going mad behind it.

I don't know.

Lying To People With Money

Also this morning I had my Scarlett O'Hara meeting with Mr. Reaper, Commercial Leasing Veep and Level II flunky at the fabulous Cannery Row Company. I substituted chili-patterned socks for the green velvet curtains.

I'm not sure if the meeting was a success, a failure or what.

It certainly seemed to go on forever.

And most of that time was me rattling on and on about my imaginary Fiery Foods Festival. "We sign up fiery foods manufacturers right away! There are a ton of fiery food manufacturers up and down the central coast! San Luis Obispo, Monterey, Santa Clara, San Francisco! A ton! We get paid upfront – say five hundred dollars a booth – say we sign up fifty! That gives us an upfront advertising budget of twenty-five thousand dollars!"

And upfront advertising budget of twenty-five thousand dollars, of course, will buy you very little. I would have expected Mr. Reaper to know that. But, no. My enthusiasm seemed to be infectious. The little pinwheels in his eyeballs had started going round.

"Now, there are two models we could use as templates. The Seaport Village model is a one-day affair that's essentially a collaboration between Hot Licks and the Seaport Village commercial management. It's the smaller of the two models, draws a crowd of between 4,000 and 7,000. The Oxnard Salsa Festival is two-day affair, essentially produced by a business improvement district, draws a crowd of 40,000 people."

Where was I getting these numbers? Was I making them up? Had they come to me in a dream?

Who knows?

In the end I got him to promise me a fairly large commercial space for the festival. For free! Well. For co-branded advertising, which is as good as free. Plus the charity umbrella has to be one on which Mr. Head Honcho sits on the board.

It's an indoor space. Not optimal. But hell, we're talking about addicts here, which c'mon, is what chileheads truly are. They'll come. They'll eat hot sauce in a fucking closet.

Could I possibly pull something like this off?

Of course, I then explained, I would not be available to organize something like this unless I still had a store on Cannery Row. And I could not continue to have a store on Cannery Row at the outrageously overpriced rent they were charging me. I had no doubt the Cannery Row Company could get someone to pay that outrageously overpriced rent for a three-year term but at the end of that time, that tenant would be forced to deal with the same reality I was dealing with, to wit: the store space is invisible from the street, it is on the opposite side of the natural creep of foot traffic along the plaza, and there are always homeless guys pissing in the flower patch outside the store's front door.

At this point, I think I paused for breath.

"Well, we'd like you to stay," said Mr. Grimm. "So what numbers were you thinking?"

This stopped me dead. I had been so prepared for him to laugh in my face that I hadn't really entertained the possibility it was negotiable.

"I'll get back to you on that one," I promised.