After 30 years toiling in the public relations field, I make the monumental decision to return to my first love, writing. I thought about writing the Great American Novel, but great authors are troubled by deep, meaningful, philosophical or personal issues that drive them to explore the depths of the human condition.
I'm not that interesting. I wish I were more angst ridden, but I just don't have the attention span. Forget about mutli-tasking, I find single-tasking challenging enough. But I am drawn to humor, satire, and parody.
For example, current novel: Down-on-his-luck reporter, writing for a supermarket tabloid, stumbles onto a national conspiracy involving virtual every federal agency--the White House, DOJ, DOD, Ag, Homeland Security, U.S. Trade Representative, CIA, and FBI--and the biotech and organic food industries. Someone sends an Italian wannabe hit man who's really a Philadelphia Main Line rich kid homosexsual to kill him. (Obviously it fails. Having your hero killed off halfway through a book is not a good thing if you want to get published.)
There are a host of absurd, unbelievable, unreasonable situations. At least, I try to make them as absurd as I can. What happens?
Davos, 2005: Where the powerful, the elite, the decision makers assemble every year to debate and, one hopes, eventual resolve the major problems of the planet. And who shows up? Richard Gere, Sharon Stone, Angelina Jolie, and Gerard Depardieu, among other celebrities. Celebrities? Why would anyone in their right mind put Jolie on a panel? And why would anyone want to listen?
How can any self-respecting parodist (is that a word?) go about his craft when the world insists on doing things he'd never put in a book? If I wrote about Davos and had Sharon Stone there standing up and offering $15,000 (whoa, Sharon, that's some generosity) for some poverty program, encouraging others to kick in, my editor--if I ever got one--would throw the manuscript into that vast black hole where rejected manuscripts go.
"Parody's one thing," he say with a sneer, 'but it has to have some touch with reality. This is just stupid." And he'd be right.
Oh well, we trundle on. Maybe I'll make those four "celebrities" part of the vast conspiracy...nah, too absurd.
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