BENJAMIN LEROY
Firstly, my apologies for the radio silence. Between the end of the holidays and now, I’ve been busy getting situated for 2013, and have been profoundly lacking in the department of worthwhile chatter. I have tackled at least the first part of this problem. We’ll see about the second.
Lately, I’ve been in an “acquiring every story that I can” mode. I’ve always found it important to have a thumb on the pulse of fringe cultures far and wide. I’m particularly fond of getting alternate takes on history. I like to hear conspiracy theories (measuring the steps that I can take along with the explainer until it all unravels). I never know when these things will show up in my fiction, but I trust, at some point, my brain is going to need a prompt, and it will find it cataloged back there somewhere.
If you know me, you know that I’m not much for movies, at least not in the sense of big Hollywood blockbusters. I’m the guy in the theater who, with much incredulity, sighs and says, “Yeah right! That would never happen!” and, in turn, I’m the guy who ruins the experience for everybody around me.
Because I’m not a movie guy, I never saw a need for HBO or a Blockbuster card or Netflix.
But Netflix came with a tv that I bought last year.
And now I’ve got a problem.
I can’t stop watching documentaries. People I’ve never heard of. Events of which I was totally unaware. Sub-cultures. Stories from my youth. Things I didn’t pay attention to in history class. It’s all there.
All of it.
Armed with all of these things, I’m half-tempted to disappear into the desert for forty years and forty months and write some 40,000 page novel that connects all of these people and places and events. The more I think about it, the more overwhelmed I get, because that would be such a significant task and is ripe with so much possibility.
For now, though, I’m content to play traffic cop at one little intersection of the publishing world, doing what I can to wave new stories through. Inevitably, I’ll one day disappear like the Lindbergh baby, but until then, it’s me and Netflix. Speaking of which, I wonder if there’s a documentary about the Lindbergh baby on...
b.
p.s. I've got a plea/request/offer for some of you over on my blog. You can read about it here.
