Writing: Don't Get Me Started

I've been astounded by how many people  have read my "How To Make a Living Writing," and "How To Make a Living Writing, Part Two." The tone and tenor of the comments left on those posts is truly gratifying. (I wish I had more time to respond to them, but lately I've been eyeball deep in a 60,000 book that's due in about a week [!] and has been devouring my time like the Cookie Monster on a mallomar.)

You know what's weird? I'm in the book business, right? So my life, and the lives of everyone around me, are about book ideas. The Holy Grail of publishers, agents, and authors is The Great Book Idea. It's all any of us want. It's what we live on and for. The better the idea for a book, the better that book's chances for becoming a bestseller. (Failing that, what you want if you're a publisher is a huge name on the front of your book. But that's a whole other ... trip.)

This is how valuable book ideas are: I've had two of them flat-out, no question, bold/bald-faced stolen from me. One was stolen by an agent (who gave my idea and the manuscript in which I'd developed it to one of his better known clients), and the other stolen from a major publisher (who never returned or responded to my inquiries about the 25,000-word proposal I'd sent them, and then, the following season, came out , under the name of a Famous Comedian, my exact book: same title, subtitle, back jacket copy, introduction, chapter headings, chapter content ... all of it, just as I'd written it).

In the book business (as in all writing, as in life, come to think of it) ideas are the currency. It took me forever to realize that. I always thought ideas were just ... nothing, basically. Insubstantial potentialities. Fleeting inspirations. Fun ways to combine opposing or complementary realities. Acknowledgments of obvious (or, in a pinch, teased out) possibilities. Latencies simply spoken into form. I always figured ideas were utterly ... free for the picking, basically.

Man. Wrong. Turns out they're everything.

Anyway, it's obvious enough from the extremo response I've gotten from my last couple of blogs that I've stumbled onto a bonafide Book Idea. How that can be is a complete mystery: If there's anything in this world I figure there's enough of, it's flippin' books on how to be a flippin' writer. I hate books on how to be a writer. I just can't read them. I find them like chewing a huge wad of flavorless gum: bothersome, no nutrition, threatens to choke you to death, can't swallow it. The whole industry that makes money off of people's desire to be famous writers drives me crazy. I hate it. It's so ... smarmy and exploitative.