Blah!

As regular reader of this blog and my more celebrated cubist period know, I've been trying to crack the mass-media publication thing for a while now. I've tried just about everything from standard shotgun-style submissions to literary magazines, pitching ideas to editors, self-publishing, self-generated letter writing campaigns to publishing houses, soft-sell begging, hard-sell cursing of descendents, voodoo, central Slavic folk magic, blood sacrifice, billboards, stalking, semi-nude busking and, finally, heroin. I don't know why these lists always end with heroin. Our high school guidance counselors, it turned out, really knew what they were talking about. And, probably, where to get some really good heroin.

At last, I think I'm on to a course of action that seems like it may yield more promising results. It's going to sound crazy, but here it is: I'm going to come up with a good idea.

No, wait! I'm not finished! After the idea is had, I will then craft that idea into story/screenplay/stage play/greeting card form and then attempt to interest a buyer/publisher/dealer.

I have, it turns out, been going about this exactly backwards. Proclaiming your unassailable historic greatness and to secure monetary recompense before producing something of promised, correlative worth seems like a good plan, but now, yes, I get that publishers and literary agents would have very long days indeed if they simply took in potentia writers' words for it. Seeing something up front to judge an applicant's talents probably speeds up the winnowing process by an order of magnitude. Math hasn't always been my thing.

But OK, now that I'm on my new path (writing, then publishing), you would think I'd be stuck, but no, I'm already way past step 1: I have An Idea.

I'm giddy. My hands tremble as I type. The best course of action would be to keep it to myself, but the excitement of it, the potential of it, the sheer originality of it is so overwhelming that it can hardly be contained anymore than one might contain a supernova or a herpes outbreak: all one can really expect to do is stand back and watch, mouth agape at the wondrous, limitless scope of nature. Itchy, itchy nature.

OK, here it is: my idea: I will list it now: It is: Vampires.

Awesome, right?

Some of you might be confused, so I will explain. Vampires (and I haven't decided yet, I may go with "vampyres" because extra Y automatically equals extra awesome). Vampi/yres are immortal creatures who walk the earth for eternity, usually lightly clothed in flowing linen and velvet and with bitchin' mod hair styles, condemned to suffer by their need to feed on the blood of humans who cannot understand the nature of their existence, mostly because of the really thick Eastern European accent. The central conceit is that they are of human kind but apart from them, doomed to wander, unloved and alone (except for the occasional company of nubile 20-something ladies in either bodices or negligées), brooding on the endless, torturous nature of being, the unresolvable existential anguish of which drives them to do things humans would find unthinkable, like unfiltered cigarettes and eyeliner on men.

You're probably wondering where I got such an amazing idea for a character and story. And yes, the answer is Wikipedia, which is why it's so amazing no one has ever thought to do this before.

I'm still building the idea, so I'm toying with changing some of the details around. The Eastern European thing seems so Old World and foreigny. I may go full bore and retool the whole thing and make it about Americans of high school age. That way it will be more immediately relatable to a non-Magyar audience AND think of all the product-placement potential! You'd drink a Pepsi if you saw a vampyre drink a Pepsi, wouldn't you? I mean, they drink blood, but they'd rather drink a Pepsi, even though blood sustains them. How good must that Pepsi be?

Also, the blood thing is just kind of gross. I may make them into something a little less gory, but just as disgusting, self-loathing and socially maladjusted. I'm thinking vegans.

Once I get the story written, I don't see how it doesn't work as a major motion picture and/or multi-night basic cable miniseries. The whole thing is so visual. Pile a bunch of underemoting underwear models in a room, slather them up with a ton of face pancake and a few judicious drops of red-tinted Karo syrup, throw in a teenaged girl, maybe a loyal dog and a hamfisted allegory about AIDS or apartheid or football or whatever and then I just watch the cash roll in. The merchandising royalties from plastic fangs alone should be enough to finance the gastric bypass I need to get rid of these last 11 pounds I can't seem to lose.

Can you feel it? I can feel it. Now all it takes is to write the thing. But I don't see how it could miss. At last, with just a minimum of effort, I just might make this work.