The rest of the story. K's family has now ensconsed him in a hospital for therapy. They are concerned (and I believe, rightly so) about him harming himself.
Jake is exceedingly stressed about this whole event. It's triggered enormous grief flashbacks to when his other friend was killed and he slept not a wink last night. He should have gone to his college classes today, but he's finally fallen asleep and we'll just find a way to deal with the missed work.
It's never easy with kids, is it.
Last night late, Jake called to tell me that one of his friends, K, just totaled out his car. K walked away pretty much unscratched from what amounted to a completely crushed car. He was doing 110 on the Interstate. (He told Jake the cops thought he was only doing 90, but he admitted how fast he was going.) The thing is, Jake has ridden with him in the past. The passenger seat? Completely obliterated. Back seat? The same. Jake almost always travels around in his own truck, thankfully, but there are times they'd all jump in one car, particularly K's car since he had all the fancy stereo equipment. His roommate at LSU (also one of Jake's closest friends) normally rides around with him. Jake or the other friend, Dan, would be dead right now if they had decided to hang out with K yesterday.
Jake seemed shook up about it. He's already had one very dear friend get killed in a car wreck (when someone else was driving badly and ran into him), so he's aware of mortality moreso than K. (The currently wrecked friend didn't know the one who died.) It makes me furious to think this kid was happily taking chances with everyone's lives -- including those people on the interstate where he was driving. What scares the hell out of me is that he's the kind of kid who never learns. He sloughs off anything that anyone tries to tell him for his own good. He's rude to his parents (who still coddle him, but they're learning not to... too late, unfortunately). He tried to be rude to me one day when he was here and that got nipped in the bud so fast, I think I scared him. (Good.)
I know he has no idea what he's done or the damage he could have done.
You know what's really fun? Sending out something I wrote to friends for feedback and getting it. (I know, I know, that sounds exactly the opposite of the entry below on feedback. I'm a writer. I'm whacky by definition.)
But tonight, I've got comments from three people and I'm thrilled. The things I hoped were funny went over well (and in a couple of cases, all three of them highlighted some of the same sections to show that it was particularly funny), the things I knew needed work still do, but I've got great, helpful comments to work with now. Most of these things are tiny, tweaky sorts of things, nothing to take a long time, but I'm just happy.
A former agent acquaintance e-mailed me today. She originally renewed our quasi friendship via a phone call a few weeks ago because she'd moved to a new area of the country (thus she is no longer agenting), and while teaching at the university there and critiquing scripts on the side, she had come across a horror script that was set here. After reading it, she thought it was commercial and remembered the Louisiana money I had told her about, so she called to get information from me to see if I could help her hook up with the money people. In spite of that not strictly being in my best interest (because hey, limited funds, 'if they spend money on hers, will they still want to do mine?' sort of thing), I gave her the information she needed and told her who the best person was for her to contact. Turned out, she knew that person's financial partner -- the guy who was actually bankrolling all of the films here (knew him personally), so she had a more direct line than I did, and she went to him.
Now, the twist isn't that they're making her script. Nope, the twist is that they turned her down. But in the original conversation, she had mentioned that the script wasn't that terribly well-written. It just had a good commercial hook and enough of a surprise ending, she thought it would get made. She was in a hurry to try to set it up because if she could, she would get a producer credit; she was worried that the script would sell elsewhere. Which it apparently did, yesterday. She e-mailed me today to let me know it had sold to MGM.
I'm not really sure how to respond to that. (I mean, technically, I know how to respond to her... but I'm not sure how I feel about her e-mail.) I'm sorry she isn't getting to make it because she is a nice person and I like her; however, I don't think she's broken-hearted or anything. In fact, she's got so much access, she'll be finding new scripts soon and making them. I don't mind that this other writer whom I don't know at all has sold. Plenty of people do. There's not a limited amount of purchases available in the universe and then poof, it all dries up with nothing ever to be published or sold again. I can't be jealous, then, since there are always opportunities out there. No, what I think bugs the living crap out of me is that someone whose writing isn't highly regarded (or regarded much at all) can have that many people going after his script, when really good writing doesn't sell. I get the whole "it's a commercial hook" thing -- hell, I've made that lecture a hundred thousand times to new writers. I know how the film business works, and this is the dark part of it -- that it really isn't about the writing. It just sucks a little bit of my soul away to see it in action.
Apparently, money can help you be satisfied.
Well, duh.
There's this awful truth about writing that writers have to face, which is that at some point, they really do have to turn over what they've written for someone else to read it. Writers want to get feedback, of course, to learn exactly how the piece is being received so that they know whether or not it is working. The only problem is that the writer will probably hear the truth. They do not really want to hear the truth. Or, rather, they want to hear it, but they want it to be, "This is absolute perfection! Don't change a word! Why aren't you rich and famous yet?" Sadly, this is not the common reaction.
Have you ever seen people walking around kinda twitchy, their heads cocked a little sideways when they look at you as if they're expecting you to clout them at any moment, and they're mumbling inchoherently? Don't be worried, they're just writers waiting for feedback. One time when I gave a script to a friend of mine, I dropped it off at her apartment, holding it out and flinching simultaneously (this after she INSISTED that she get to read it because she swore she really really loved my writing), and I drove ALL THE WAY HOME (absolute torture) and I paced by the phone, and paced and paced and paced, and when I could not stand it any longer, I called her and left a message:
"Hi, it's me. I'm just wondering if you really hated it and just didn't want to tell me. Because I can take it. Really. I swear. You can be honest. So. I'm over here. Sort of waiting. No pressure though. I know you have important things in your life. Like work. But really, no pressure. If this message sounds kinda funny, it's because my head's in the oven. But really, no pressure."
To which she called back and left a message:
"IT'S BEEN FIFTEEN WHOLE MINUTES SINCE YOU LEFT. TAKE A VALIUM, TAKE TEN, TAKE A NAP, BUT QUIT WORRYING, IT'LL BE OKAY."
Like ten valiums would work.
Sometimes, getting feedback is a wonderful vindication of a writer's brilliance, and the notes they get are teeny little feedback sorts of things, and being writers (who have been Godlike in creating and peopling a world), they are magnanimous in their reception of such notes. Ever gracious, actually. Bowing to the wisdom of the reader. (Ahem. They also like sarcasm.)
I recently sent some of the book to a good friend of mine for feedback, and she really liked most of it (a phrase that sounds good, except it really isn't because there's always the WHAT THE HELL DIDN'T YOU LOVE ABOUT IT aspect, not that I shouted or anything.) (There may have been high-pitched squeaking, but I'm not sure.) So anyway, there was this one teeny little note which sort of annoyed me. Just a little. (360 degree head spinning is so too normal, so there.)
Needless to say, I objected to the note. I was nice about it. I am always nice and calm about it. (My friend is due to be released from the hospital soon. They say she will regain full hearing and speech in a few weeks. Isn't that great?) And since I knew that my friend was clearly, obviously, totally WRONG and had no BRAIN CELLS that were functioning properly, it was obvious that I could easily ignore those notes as being COMPLETELY IDIOTIC. Obviously, there are people out there who simply ought to recuse themselves from giving notes.
Now, there used to be times when all I would listen to were the negative notes and I would pretzel myself six ways from Sunday to try to address those notes even if I disagreed with them, and for the longest time, I didn't understand why. Subconsciously, I think it's easier to believe the people who say the writing sucks than to believe the ones who say it's good because most writers bounce between despair and despair (no, that isn't a typo) over how well they're doing, and the negative feedback just validates the despair, so it must be right. A produced screenwriter friend of mine was lamenting the same phenomenon once (and I would have assumed his ego was quite healthy since he had way more success and vindication), but notes had knocked him for a loop at that time. He said he thought it was the little kid in us always trying to gain approval, that the creativity in us is like that little kid, wanting so much to please, and of course, the ones it's already pleased aren't the target -- it's going to focus on the ones it needs to please next, like the child always trying to appease the angry parent and taking for granted the one who lavishes love.
It took a long time to learn that some people really are bad at critiquing, because they give notes based on what they would have done with the premise, or things / themes that they see that are more important to them personally than the ones the author explored or simply because their ego won't allow them to see that the other story works. There have been times when I've gotten critiques like that which were devastating, and it took a long time and other friends' perspectives and feedback to deal with it, but on the whole, it's made me a much better writer and much more able to receive feedback and know how to use it as a diagnostic tool. (An aside -- one of the best pieces of advice came from a young screenwriter on a panel at the Austin Film Festival one year, and ended up being repeated by several of the other more established pros, because they liked his description so much. He said that most writers use notes as a prescriptive tool, i.e., this thing is wrong and therefore change it, instead of a diagnostic tool to say, "Something isn't working and this is a symptom, now let me dig around and find the hidden cause." Most often, by the time a reader has recognized there is a problem, they've already passed up the source of the problem. Similarly, by the time an older person goes to the doctor complaining of really swollen ankles, assuming it's a simple water-retention problem, it could be a symptom of a hidden problem somewhere else, such as congestive heart failure.)
All of that to say, when I got those tiny tweaks from my now-recovering friend, I wanted to assign them to the category of the clueless, to something vindictive or wrongheaded or just plain dumb. However, my friend is none of those things (which I knew but was really hard to admit in the moment) and she's never ever been any of those things, and has always been encouraging and kind and helpful and DAMNIT, THAT SUCKS, because when someone is like that, you really can't just say, "SORRY, YOU'RE AN IDIOT, I'M NOT LISTENING TO YOU ANYMORE, LA LA LA LA, I CAN'T HEAR YOU." Which is just really fucking annoying, you know? So I did the mature thing. I stewed and steamed and stomped around all weekend that weekend, bitching and moaning and being angry. I may have kicked things. It was not pretty.
The problem was, I couldn't ignore it. I couldn't let it go. EVEN THOUGH she had been gracious (um, several times) and said, "If this is how you want to approach this piece, I'll completely support you in that and read it accordingly." I mean, THE NERVE. How in the hell are you supposed to deal with that, I ask you? All of that niceness is just WRONG and INAPPROPRIATE because it makes it so much harder to take out a hit, er, ignore the note. Especially when you're really really angry and you can't figure out WHY because you've been perfectly capable of ignoring perfectly nice people prior to this.
As painful as it was to start contemplating, it occurred to me that maybe, just possibly, there was a .000001% chance that the problem was within me. I know, I know, no fainting, but I am not perfect. It's a really scary thought, one that will probably ruin your life for MONTHS, and I know it's sort of hard to believe, like there may be aliens right here among us, but seriously, I had to face the remote potential that I was my own problem.
It took a while, but I finally realized what my particular problem was at this point; my friend disliked a certain technique I used and though she did like some other things, the things she liked came more from the script I'm adapting... the fiction technique she disliked was one I realized I had always used in my fiction writing (as opposed to screenwriting) and I had defaulted to that technique out of comfort and familiarity, and not, (and I really really hate to admit this) because it served the story. So what my subconscious was hearing when she said she didn't think that technique was working was that I SUCKED AS A FICTION WRITER AND MY COMPUTER SHOULD BURN IN HELL AND MY HANDS SHOULD BE BOUND FOR LIFE. Not that I was touchy about it or anything.
And, once I figured it out, the damnedest thing started happening... the emotional attachment I felt for that technique slinked away. (It may have whined and pouted in the corner for a little while, but we're not telling.) Without the emotional attachment, I looked at the other parts of the book that I had already said I felt much more confident about, felt like they worked much better and damnit if I hadn't written all of that the way she was suggesting already, having dropped my other technique and forgotten about it completely. There may have been more stomping and frustrated gnashing of teeth, because the very very VERY last thing any writer wants to do is admit when someone else's note that we knew to be TOTALLY STUPID was, after all, um, not.
Still not willing to totally admit I might have possibly been wrong, I decided to tweak the first chapter without the tainted technique and see if it worked better. I did not want it to, because that would mean I'd have to admit someone else was RIGHT and by default that meant I was NOT right, which would have caused very bad things to happen. (Hurricanes, anyone? You think it a coincidence that it came so much nearer to Louisiana than originally predicted. Ha.)
So. Tried it. It worked.
I really hate it when that happens.
(Um, thanks Pooks. Hope the ears heal quickly.)
Tamar posted this when talking about researching for her next project:
Somewhere along the line I'll need to find a cop or two to interview, learn the inside of a police station and a jail and maybe even a morgue. On the other hand, those are standard-issue thriller and mystery fodder and I live in a made-for-the-screen town. I'm sure I can find a way in. The LAPD probably has a whole division set aside for this purpose. But I'm nervous anyway. I've never done this, never gone to the source and asked the questions. Not for fiction. I've read books and visited locales but never interviewed people for this.
This reminded me of my very first (and only, and you'll see why) experience doing research here locally when I was writing my very first thriller. I didn't know anything about police procedure, particularly how the local cops would isolate a murder site and what sorts of things would happen next (and this was long before there was any sort of CSI). I had written quite a lot of articles for the local paper and magazine and had eventually become an assistant editor at the latter, so when confronted with not knowing something, it seemed pretty natural just to go to the source.
I am, and have always been, a sort of weird dichotomy. I can be outgoing when meeting people and interviewing and dealing with the public, and I've learned (especially when interviewing) how to guage the other person, to charm them just enough so that they are comfortable and not wary; I can handle being in large crowds, but it's much easier being in front of them, whether it's speaking / performing or whatever, because then it's simply a role. Which leads to the dichotomy, in that I am essentially a hermit, and am happy being a hermit, and wouldn't step foot out of my house unless the family made me on occasion.
So going to the local police department was scary for me, even though I knew I would sort of hit the internal switch and turn "on" and play the role of a person who could handle that sort of thing.
When I got there, I was introduced to a very nice Sergeant who was going to answer my questions. He was the "media liaison" I was told. He asked me if I had ever seen a police station (I hadn't) and he gave me a tour, taking me to where they book the people brought in, showed me the fingerprinting thingie, asked me if I wanted to have my fingerprints done. I figured why not, it would better help to be able to describe the whole thing. (I was 23. Okay? Naive.) At some point, he had asked for my driver's license (I cannot for the life of me remember the reason he asked for it, but it seemed so plausible, I handed it over). So we finally get to his office where he asks me to describe the murder scene in as great a detail as I could. I had brought with me other things I had written so he could see my byline and know I wasn't wasting his time, but he didn't bother looking at them. He just wanted the murder scene.
Which I sketched out. Luckily for me, I have a really vivid imagination and my intent was to set a scene using certain aspects of Louisiana that I hadn't seen anywhere else. He kept asking questions until one of his officers came in with my license (I hadn't realized he'd handed it off to someone) and said something along the lines of, "Clean as a whistle." Whereupon the Sergeant grinned and I suddenly realized what had been going on the whole time. I felt like the biggest, most naive imbecile on the planet. (okay, I was, but still.)
I asked, "Were you seriously thinking I'd committed a murder and had gone to all the lengths of proving I was a writer just to come in here and brag about it?" And he answered, "You'd be surprised just how many times something similar to that has happened." He went on to explain that they had often had the perpetrator walk in there with some piece of information or some little observation that they know won't really help, but it's legit enough to get them in there and the main reason they want to do that is because they know they outsmarted the police and it's bugging the crap out of them that they can't crow about it, so they do the next best thing -- watch as closely as they can. I was still reeling over having been a suspect (however briefly) and he said, "Don't worry, no one here trusts anyone completely, not even their partners." I looked out across the bullpen of detectives as he spoke and it suddenly hit me was a terribly lonely life they must lead. I also knew after I left there that if anything remotely similar to what I was describing happened in real life, I was going to get a nice little visit.
The whole process freaked me out a little. Actually, a lot, at the time, and I think that was the first time I came away from an interview with a lot less than I needed (and I always had more than I needed). There have been several times since then that I really really really needed to ask questions of the law enforcement to get a scene just right, but the process feels like I'm dealing with tricksters instead of just a source, so I try to find written sources instead. (Google? I would sacrifice chocolate before I'd let anyone take my internet.)
You'd think after so many years (I am so not 23 anymore) and successes, that this wouldn't bother me, but it does. Probably most of all because I felt silly, and I was hoping to be taken serioiusly. Feeling silly really doesn't do a whole lot for the ego, particularly for a writer's ego when you're so rarely taken seriously anyway. The problem is that after I finish the writing project I'm doing right now, the next one is really going to require me to ask a lot of police procedural questions. I also have some CSI / coroner types of things I need to know. (I had a breakthrough on a major story point on how to accomplish something that seemed to be un-doable, but to get the exact detail right? Gonna have to ask someone in the field.) grrr.
As Jette pointed out in the comments below, Louisiana just passed a constitutional amendment to ban any sort of marriage AND CIVIL UNION that isn't between a man and a woman. Yes, welcome to the deep and close-minded south. A relative of mine who shall not be named (because she will kill me) said today when I was arguing the point with her that she didn't really want to vote against gays being able to have a civil union, but she didn't want there to be any leeway in the definition of "marriage" because what's to stop "them" from one day saying it was okay for three people to be married? Or four? Or a man and an elephant? To which I said, "And exactly how does this hurt you?" To which, there is no answer. It's just that they have become convinced that this somehow diminishes the value (the legal value) of a marriage bond. No, that isn't logical. And given that it's completely born out of right-wing propaganda, which is prevalent here, I don't know how to combat that, since actual logic does no good. I pointed out that if we really wanted to make sure that marriage was not devalued legally, we wouldn't have allowed for divorce. To which most of the opponents sort of nod, knowing that's correct, knowing they aren't on solid footing but they're going to win because there's enough of them to do so.
Sometimes, I really hate this state.
I expect the vote to get a lot of civil lawsuits almost immediately because there were a large number of voting booths which did not get delivered to quite a few precincts in New Orleans, the one place where there is a large, openly gay population. In many of the precincts, the voting booths weren't delivered until after two p.m. -- when the delivery people had tried to deliver them in the morning at the appropriate time, no one had been at the precincts to take delivery. This occurred in many places, not just one, so there are going to be lots of shouts about that, as there should be. The commissioner said that if anyone in New Orleans was in line at eight o'clock, they would get to vote, even if the polls closed, but that's not going to help all the people who showed up in the morning because they couldn't go back at night. I hope it's enough to get the entire amendment thrown out and up for another election. (Not that it'll do a lot of good, but you never know.)
I hate politics.
LSU just lost to Auburn by one point. One freaking point. First game, won by one point. I'm convinced the LSU line is in chahoots with various cardiac specialists and are getting kickbacks for all the heart attacks they're causing.
Someone on the radio then said, "Yeah, but they played really well." To which I replied, "Unless they're curing cancer in the backfield, I don't care."
grumblegrumblegrumble
Funniest moment, however, occurred when LSU blocked an extremely important pass and I shouted YES so loudly, the sleeping cat literally went straight UP, two feet, and then landed back in her basket, glaring at me. And the only real consolation here is that this is a team who had lost quite a few important players at the end of last year and they're still doing okay. They've got a lot of young talent who seem to be improving pretty quickly.
But dayem. One freakin point. ugh.
Jette has a couple of very interesting posts on the hurricane Ivan and the potential impact on New Orleans, and Brian commented in my comments section below how he didn't see how we got used to all the hurricanes coming through here (or rather, dealing with all of the flooding and damage.) Truth is, we get so many terrible thunderstorms here, it's just plain normal. My mom and dad have a couple of friends who have re-done their house something like seven or eight times because they're in a flood zone and they have gotten nailed by some terrible flooding. They pay for flood insurance and go through a lot of hassle, but this area is home (to all of their kids and grandkids) and they wouldn't dream of moving. We've been lucky enough to have never lived in a house which flooded or had flood waters regularly blocking our street, but I know a lot of people who aren't so lucky. I'm not sure that I could live like that, to tell you the truth.
It's funny, because as bad as the hurricanes or big storms can get, with today's access to the media / news and technology's highly accurate forecasting, we typically know a huge storm is on its way long enough ahead of time to take precautions. Lots of families are old hands at sand-bagging (piling up bags of sand at all doorways or entrances to their homes to prevent flooding if their lawn gets flooded but it's only just high enough to get in a door's threshhold.) A lot of people feel like there's enough beauty here and culture and family tradition / ties that they couldn't picture themselves living anywhere else, and since they can at least prepare for the big storms / hurricanes, it's a small and decently rare occasion that they'll get harmed by the weather and since that liklihood is so low, they're willing to risk it. And I can see their point. I, on the other hand, cannot fathom living in an area where the earth could just up and decide to move somewhere else while I'm standing on it, or a tornado showing up without much notice and destroying random things in its path, or a blizzard burying everything and having to battle all that snow to get out... those things seem way more impossible to me. I guess it's all what you're used to.
As I said to Jette on her blog, though, I'm afraid that since we've dodged yet another bullet, more and more people are going to decide not to leave next time, (especially this time since so many tried to evacuate and it took an insane number of hours to go somewhere that's normally just an hour away. New Orleans keeps dodging the huge hurricanes and the potential to be 20 feet under water, but I don't know if its luck will hold. What I'm afraid of is that next time, people will remember all too well all of the aggravation and expense of trying to evacuate and decide "screw it, it's not worth the effort" and get caught in the really big one. (Of course, that's a movie right there. I'm sure someone who does end-of-the-world scenarios... probably even Dean Devlin and Roland Emmerich already have someone writing it.)
Last night, we saw Ivan turning more due north in the Gulf, putting it moving up through Mobile, which is where it's gone. Additionally, it seems to be moving away from us. The most "weather" we had here last night were a few strong breezes! No limbs, no trees going down, no worries. (Well, the only worry is that you may not have gotten something you needed from the grocery store because if so? You're outta luck. Every store out there looks plucked over and bare.)
Ironically, they had already declared all of the schools closed yesterday, so it's gorgeous weather, sunny, not too hot, and all of the kids are sleeping late (well, all of the big college kids, who had "hurricane" parties last night... any excuse, eh?).
I have now become firmly convinced that when the majority of the male gender is young, probably sometime prior to starting grade school, a genie or pixie or evil imp appears to them to impart THE TRUTH. They are sworn to keep this secret, I believe, but there just cannot be any other explanation, and I have figured it out. Yes, indeedy, they are convinced that if they go through a house and shut ANY DOOR WHATSOEVER, their penis will fall off. Immediately. kerplop, right there on the floor. It is the only explanation that makes sense, because I have three guys who go through this house looking for things, needing to retrieve things, and they open doors and they never touch them again. Sixteen billion open doors in the house, never occurs to anyone of them to close one. They will SMACK INTO the open door, stumble back, grabbing their head, side, arm, leg, whatever, moan and groan in a much greater proportion than the injury and still walk away from the door without closing it. They will claim that they have cleaned a room and claim that it is amazingly wonderfully completely clean (translation: they dug out maybe one pile of crap and piled it all into another pile), and I will bet money they have left every door open in their room. The only exception to this rule that I have been able to see is the car door. That, they can somehow manage to close. Maybe because the penis is safely inside the doors, I dunno.
It looks like Ivan is taking that northernly path upward to Mobile, which totally sucks for anyone there in the way. It's always hard expressing these things because while you're relieved it's not heading directly at you, you realize someone's going to be hurt, badly, and you don't want to wish it on anyone else.. I know in years past, whenever there's been a big storm / hurricane / catastrophe, there are a few business people here who'll load up a big 18-wheeler full of food, supplies and whatever people will volunteer and truck it over to where they need help. Every little bit counts, particularly if you aim for rural areas which may not have gotten the Red Cross relief just yet. We'll participate again this year. But I hope it's not needed, ya know? (Though that is surely wishful thinking.)
Right now, though, it is incredibly calm here. I don't even think we've got much wind, though the storm is supposed to close in on land in the morning and we should be getting those outer band gusts.
With Ivan moving a little more to the west each time I turn on the news, we've gone into hurricane prep mode. It's a bit insane here with the traffic and the rushing to and fro to get groceries, water, money. We have two big generators we use for our business, so if we lose electricity, we can keep the refrigerator / freezer and other essentials running. Carl also had a very large propane tank filled -- it fuels the new propane bar-b-que I just got him (which is another story, but he loves it), so we'll have it decently easy to cook. We'll have lots of water stored, so that should be fine.
I am mostly worried about the wind and falling trees. Even if Ivan doesn't move any closer to us than the current path indicated, the winds will gust pretty high and we'll get a lot of downed limbs / trees, which can do a lot of damage. When we went through Andrew so many years ago, we had so many downed trees, it felt like there were more down than up. Lots of people have a hard time imagining the problem here until they travel in this area, but our landscape is so full of trees, that when you cross the Mississippi River bridge and look towards Baton Rouge, towards LSU, you see mostly green and only a few buildings piercing above the treeline.
Meanwhile, I don't think the business big-buy-out thing is going to happen or work. There are some legal wranglings going on, and frankly, we think the partner guy bit off more than he can actually chew. We've watched other friends do big business deals in unorthodox ways and sail through it and pull off rather shocking accomplishments, so as absolutely crazy as the original deal sounded here (and truly, I'm certain it did sound insane since I can't give details without the people who own the business being able to google themselves and finding my entries), it wasn't as impossible as it may have sounded. But some of the unorthodox cowboy ways of the business partner are coming back to bite him, so to speak, and we doubt very seriously there will be any sort of deal. Which, frankly, is actually a relief at this point. I haven't really been able to talk about it here because I can't explain with real details, but we have been very uncomfortable with how fast he moved without consulting us and without giving us the level of approval we should have had to do the very things he was wanting us to do. We started feeling very weird about the whole thing, and we've consulted quite a lot of friends (attorneys, other CEO friends of big companies that have moved fast like this -- one in particular we've done a lot of work for -- and other good advisors), and while they agreed that cowboy partner probably could pull it all off, they were bothered by the same things that bothered us. When we heard about the attorneys wrangling for the partner, we pushed for more information, and we feel that it's just not going to happen, and that's probably for the best.
Thing is, we've known this guy for three years. We've seen him do a lot of impressive things, and he's actually done quite a lot of things with us and has always lived up to expectations, until now. So maybe we were incredibly naive that he could pull off what he said? I dunno. Probably so. But the very nice thing about all of this is that we didn't invest a single penny, it's not going to cost us anything for him to have tried, and we've still got more work construction-wise anyway, so no harm, no foul.
(And me... I'm really relieved. Because I would have been glad to have a secondary income that made us not wholly dependent on our own business to make all the ends meet, but at the same time, our business is growing and doing better so taking attention away from it right now... probably not so smart a move. And like Daisy said in a comment... no writing time! That would have really gotten to me after a while.)
The attorneys are supposed to be hashing out the details of the business buy-out, but I am hearing that there are some glitches. The whole thing may go south, at which point I will feel stupid for having posted about this, but hey, stupid isn't intentional and I'll survive. I probably won't know anything about this in any sort of final way until next week. (I loathe suspense.)
Okay. So. Um.
We have apparently bought a business. They countered this morning, wanting to keep their land and buildings. We said sure (we wanted to move it here later on next year anyway.) The partner lowered the price accordingly. They accepted.
I did find out that the valuation of the business did include the changes we wanted. I have ordered all of the information I want. There are a lot of really good people in place who will keep their jobs, but I want to make life as easy on everyone as possible and know their business better than they do when I first arrive. Which I will have to do -- travel there and stay for a week or so to get fully up to speed. Others will run the day-to-day. I will be in charge.
Is it very executive of me to laugh a little hysterically right now? Probably not. I should schedule that panic attack though. I'm pretty sure I'm going to need it.
I have to ramble here. I can't quite wrap my mind around this yet.
After a weekend of another headache, I started feeling a little more human today. And then I found out that the business partner mentioned in that linked entry had indeed gotten his attorneys and business people all involved in weighing and measuring the value of the national business and they were making an offer to just buy out the other people.
A $7 million offer.
They think I am going to be in charge of this new business. Certainly, it is already established, there are a lot of support personnel in place, but the problem is, first, they have already alienated their biggest client (and we will be getting that client back since we'd be the new owners), and secondly, we don't think that part of their business should be done the former way it's being done. What worries me is the sort of cowboy way this partner is throwing out this money. Oh, he has it. And I'm sure the aforementioned attorneys and business managers have crunched all of the little nickels and have determined that yes indeedy, their assets and the national contract is worth that sort of investment... the way they currently are doing business. But the way the other business owners are currently doing business has ticked off their biggest client who is looking for this to be changed, and if we do that like Carl and I believe we should, it will change the income flow. We had discussed this with the partner, just prior to him going in for the major heart surgery. What I don't know is, did that information get accurately translated to the business people assessing the value of the business-to-be-purchased.
On the one hand, I know this is how this guy does business. He buys things, lets other people run them, makes a profit, sells it (if he's sole owner) or sells it to the partner. I know he has always trusted these business people in the past. The thing is, and the only reason I'd be right for this company, is that Carl and I have already been dealing with these same clients for another type of thing they need... for the last ten years. We know them, know their needs, their culture, their priorities and what they won't like. That's the key -- and the company the partner is buying unfortunately has as one of its main money making components a service that the clients don't like having forced on them with the other parts of their contract. We think that should be eliminated. We don't know if the business people / attorneys took that into account when they valued this business.
Does this all sound completely insane? It does to me. If anyone had told me even a year ago that this guy would buy a $7 million business and, on top of that, want me and Carl to run it (mostly me)... I would have suggested a change in medication. So tomorrow, I am asking for all of the paperwork done by the attorneys and the business people and I'm going to see how they valued the company and why they made that kind of offer and if we eliminate the annoying part of the company, will it still make enough revenue to not only service the debt, but actually turn a profit.
The partner said he thought it would take the other company a whole month before they respond. And we sort of figure that with their ego (and that is huge), they'll counter with some sort of outrageous amount even over that. I'm hoping this is true only because it buys me time, and I need to get up to speed on what makes them think this will work.
You know, I look at who I am and what I've accomplished and on the one hand, this is just plain insane. On the other hand, I get this particular business on a cellular level, and so does Carl, and we know how to handle the people and the particular service they want, which few people know how to do. So there's the up side -- we are weirdly perfect for it. But holy turbo charged jesus on a pogo stick, batman, this is still nuts.
On top of thinking about that, in our construction business, we're bidding more and more of the bigger jobs like we had last month, and there are a lot of things coming down the pike for us to do, which is a very good thing, unless we get that other business, and then I have no earthly clue what we'll do then, because we cannot clone ourselves. And there's the potential indie film for the romantic comedy, and I had talked with that producer about me producing other things if this one works out and she was very receptive to that. And there's this book I'm writing with someone waiting for it so she can show it to her NY agent. And... and... :::kaboom::: exploding head.
We're starting to get a lot of rain, and as Frances moves through Florida tomorrow, we'll probably see a fair amount of it as the outer feeder bands spiral our way. I really feel for all of the people in Florida who are having to prep for this second one after already having to deal with the chaos Charley caused three weeks ago. We went through Andrew when the boys were little. It sliced across Florida, downgraded slightly and then slammed up through Baton Rouge. Our house had so many trees down around it, it was difficult to see, and people were without electricity and basic needs for weeks. Here's hoping Frances dies out fast and doesn't cross the state to do even more damage there... or anywhere else on this side of the Gulf.
And, just to keep me floating on the ceiling, another person from the prodco here who is interested in making the romantic comedy script e-mailed me yesterday and then again this morning... she'd started reading it yesterday and said she was "loving" it and then said so again this morning. She's the assistant to someone else important at the prodco, and since I now have one of the owners behind it, I probably didn't have to have her doing what she's doing (which was reading it to get it worked through a different person at the same prodco), but it's nice to have multiple people at the same place behind it.
So, ultimately, what does this mean? It's all a little ephemeral right now, but there are a couple of different things that could happen there.
1) It gets made through this production company.
2) It gets made through an association with a production company formed by the owenr's husband, who is the one who just made the bigger deal with the guaranteed distribution deal.
If it's the first option, they could be thinking more MOW, because that's an easier thing since the financing comes into them through the networks and it's more of a sure thing. However, they are talking theatrical release right now. We will see.
If the second option happens, then they would definitely be going after a (bigger) theatrical release.
I expect in order for the first one to happen for a theatrical release, the distribution deal memo I have in place would have to be refined and a contract signed in order for them to feel secure about moving forward with the bigger theatrical budget they mentioned. Obviously, those conversations haven't happened yet, and I am going to touch base with them at the end of next week, so I doubt there'll be more news until then.
This feels a lot firmer than previous conversations and potential deals. I am going to think positively about it, that this is a movie and it will be made.