You Oughta Be in Novels

According to the Boston Sunday Globe, a growing number of musicians are looking to fans to help fund their albums and tours. A few sample items from one rocker’s menu: for a $200 contribution you get free admission to a year’s worth of shows; for $5,000, you get a personal concert in your home; and for $10,000, you get executive producer credit, a thank-you in the liner notes, a private concert and a song written and recorded just for you!

With that package, you can tell your neighbor with the pony tail to take his Rolling Stones “Steel Wheels” tour t-shirt and crawl back under whatever rock he came from.

Kinks groupies giving drummer Mick Avory the eye.

 

Why, I asked myself as I read the article, should rock musicians have all the fun? I don’t mean the bodacious groupies slobbering all over you and the pharmaceutical samples pressed upon you by guys who never got beyond “G-L-O-R-I-A” on their Fender Stratocasters. I mean raising venture capital from your once and future audience.

John Sholto Douglas: 8th or 9th–you make the call.

 

My next novel will be either my third or fourth, depending on who’s counting. Like John Sholto Douglas, who was either the eighth or ninth Marquess of Queensbury depending on whether you count his ancestor the Earl of Drumlanrig, who went into the kitchen one day and ate the kitchen boy.  For some reason, the family tends to leave him out of the tree whenever talk turns to genealogy.  That’s what happens when you don’t keep a well-stocked refrigerator with feeble-minded teenagers in the house.

A View of the Charles: Not available wherever books are sold.

 

I tend not to count my first novel–A View of the Charles–not because I cannibalized someone else’s work, but because it was read, like a long-distance calling plan, by friends and family only.  It’s so obscure you can’t find it with Google.  My second novel–CannaCorn–just went out of print, so no NASCAR-type sponsorship opportunities available there.

Ellis Paul: Arts marketing guru.

 

But my next one–tentatively titled Goat Fever–that’s a different story. It’s going to be a best-seller, and you can be part of it! Following the business model of long-time New England folkie Ellis Paul, I’m selling off rights to participate in everything from the first tortured imaginings of the story in the crepuscular morning hours between waking and dreaming, to the final product itself.

But, I hear you say, isn’t that somewhat–mercenary? Should novelists sell off the inner landscapes that they traverse like a time share in Boca?

Before you criticize, walk a mile in my shoes. Actually, walk two miles–one going away, one coming back. Those are my shoes, pal.

Paper: It doesn’t grow on trees, you know.

 

Consider, for a moment, what it costs to write a novel. There’s the paper and the ink cartridges. There’s the agent’s expenses for photocopies and postage. I’m sure there’s a vanilla latte or two in that monthly “agent’s fee,” too. There’s the author’s website, which The New York Times Book Review says even established writers pay for out of pocket. And I’m not too proud to admit that I’ve paid a professional editor to critique Goat Fever, which [SPOILER ALERT] is about a college football team on the rise and make it more marketable. To elderly women with cats.

” . . . but I don’t want to read a football novel.”

 

But what, you ask, is this going to cost me? Good question. Here’s today’s a la carte menu–each entree comes with small salad and a side order of ziti:

Pay the piper, call the tune:  Goat Fever was going to be a P.G. Wodehouse-style romantic comedy, albeit set in Montana, not an English country house, but I’m not wedded to that concept–at all! If you’d rather read a sort of Riders of the Purple Sage set in an Arizona +55 retirement community–with you playing the hero–let me know! $10,000 and it’s yours.

Save a character you love! Don’t you hate it when a writer makes you fall in love with a character, then proceeds to kill him or her off just for dramatic effect? Like the Ali McGraw character in Erich Segal’s Love Story.  I have been known to kill off similarly doomed but beautiful female characters, leaving their suitors bereft.  $5,000 and my protagonette survives until “The End.” Is that too high a price to pay to save a fictional human life? I don’t think so. Don’t nickel and dime me on this one, okay?

Go ahead–dump me. Write what you know, F. Scott Fitzgerald told his daughter, and there’s no doubt that an autobiographical element creeps into every work of fiction, no matter how hard a writer tries to hide behind an omniscient narrator. Without giving away too much, let me just say that there’s a male character in Goat Fever who very much resembles me, although he’s better looking and more athletic.  For $2,500, you can be the character who falls in love with that man, then breaks up with him before discovering the error of your ways, as long as you let me . . . I mean him . . . down easy.

If you want to dump him unceremoniously, it’s another five hundred bucks.