Tuesday, May 20, 2008

Freeballin It

So I'm sitting. Sitting and blogging. Sitting, satting, sat. *sigh*

I'm in one of those moods where I want to write but my mind is such a mess that it'll be hard to settle on any concrete topic. Maybe.

So what's going on with me? Hmm.

Torn between friends again. Surprise! No, I don't feel like going into details. Too much anger floating around. Unnecessary, unhealthy anger. I don't deal well with that. Anger is a monkey I beat off of my back years ago, and I sometimes have trouble understanding why others hold onto it so strongly for so long. Anger is not a security blanket. Anger is a sickness.

I'm poor. Creeping up on cardboard box poor. Drowning in debt like the rest of America. My job is teetering on the brink of oblivion. I told my friend Kim that the company I work for was climbing a string. The string could break at any second, plunging us all into darkness (and bankruptcy), but...if they manage to successfully climb that string...there's a pot of gold waiting at the top. So, basically I'm holding on by my fingertips to a job that's either going to screw me over or make me rich within the next year. Yeah, I'm playing russian roulette with my bank account. Every month I pull the trigger and hope for that click.

And then there's my financial trump card, which I've been trying to play for three years now. My novel, The Pull. For those of you that don't know, The Pull is the first book in a five volume series I've been working on since I was fourteen. It's about a guy named Nick who wakes up in the woods one day with no memory. All he has to go on is a pull...a sensation that there's somewhere he's supposed to be. So he follows the pull, makes new friends, gets stalked by a demon, runs afoul of the criminal underworld, and gets labled a super-hero by the media. Yada yada yada. It's like Harry Potter minus the wands and with a lot more angst. Bullshit, it's nothing like Harry Potter. Or anything else for that matter, hence my problem with getting it published.

Publishers and agents alike seem to be terrified of this thing. It's a multi-volume epic, just like the money makers like Harry Potter or Lord of the Rings, but the young adult market (the kids and parents who have been fueling the industry for the past five to ten years) won't embrace it because it isn't PG-13. And the housewives (the ones who fueled the market pre-Harry Potter) won't want it either because there's too much violence.

So...I've got a long list of publishers who love it...but don't know what the hell to do with it. Ace, one of the major imprints of Penguin, tossed it around for quite a while. They had board meetings, apparently they had arguments, and then they passed. They passed because the higher-ups didn't want to take a chance with it. It could have made them a titanic amount of money...but it wasn't a guaranteed sell like the Eragons and the Lemony Snicketts and the Twilights that are raking in the dough now. It aint Faulkner, but it aint JK Rowling, nor is it a memoir about the time some guy was so coked up he tried to bite off his own hand...so the publishers won't touch it, and the agents don't want to invest their time in it.

So here I am, with years and years of work and a story I have the utmost faith could blow the socks off of people...and I have to sit on it because no one wants to take a chance. Ah, how my faith in the formulaic and cowardly entertainment industry swells.

Gah, enough bitching and mental masturbation. Time for the real thing. Kidding. I have work to do.