Humor

Please welcome guest poster John Vorhaus to Writer Unboxed. John is the author of the “sunshine noir” con artist novel, The California Roll, and the classic comedy-writing textbook, The Comic Toolbox: How to Be Funny Even if You’re Not. He twitters at @TrueFactBarFact, and meets the world head-on at johnvorhaus.com, where he welcomes allies of all stripes.  He’s funny as hell and we think you’ll enjoy his slant on writing and the industry.  Enjoy!

In clocking my progress as a writer, I often muse upon a certain metaphor, the metaphor of the hope machine. The hope machine is like a slot machine, only I feed it with effort, not coins. I feed it with hopes, dreams, sweat, and loud frustration, and sometimes it pays off with accomplishment, achievement and paychecks. Real writers (and I like to consider myself one, as I’m sure you do) invest heavily in the hope machine. To put it more prosaically, we just simply never give up. We keep putting nickels in the hope machine, and pulling that handle as fast as we can. We want the jackpot, of course: the blockbuster bestseller that makes every other book in the bookstore sick with jealousy. Still, we’ll settle for any kind of payout, so long as it’s enough of one to stay in the game. That’s all we want: just to stay in the game.

My hope machine is fed with query letters and sample chapters. It pays off with book deals and exercised options. The jackpot would be just a growing group of people who see my name on the jacket and think, “Another Vorhaus book? Cripes, I can’t wait to read that!” Smaller payoffs include, you know, good reviews, foreign rights sales (for literally tens of dollars!), and the odd and never, ever unwelcome word of praise from a reader. The smallest payoffs come from anything – anything – that involves trading my words for money. Hell, I’ll write cereal boxes if there’s a paycheck in it.

How does your hope machine work? What would your jackpot be? What would constitute a smaller, yet still satisfying, payout?

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I got the keys to Castle Unboxed a few weeks ago, and for the most part, my move has been a smooth one. There’s a draft in the belfry that irritates my ears, but I’ve taken to wearing a hat, so that’s good. They tell me I’ll eventually get used to the yowling of Ray’s vampire kitty-cat, and sleep; and while I could wish for more order in the cupboards after Jael cooks, I don’t like to complain. Why would I when the company’s everything I anticipated?

Now it’s time to pay my keep in the keep, and much as I’d like to dismiss it, there’s a quiet “Yes” that insists on being both heard and written for this blog post.

“Not yet,” I tell it. “It’s too soon. Mystic Jan will frighten away all the left-brained people and they were just getting over the toast fairies.”

But if you haven’t noticed, despite their understated arrival, quiet Yeses can be freaking tyrannical.

Do you know what I mean by that term? Are you familiar with that burst of recognition when a choice is right for you?