![fatwizard fatwizard]()
A horrible realization occurred to me the other day while I was speaking with someone on the bus. "Did you see my column last week?" the conversation began, as indeed all my conversations do. "It was a pretty good one I think. What was your favorite line? I'll tell you what mine was." Later, when I joined him at the front of the bus after he'd decided to switch seats, and we'd started arguing about personal boundaries (as indeed all my conversations end) it hit me:
I may not be as important as I'd previously assumed. Although I own shoes and electricity and many other trappings of success, the sad fact remains that I have yet to earn millions of dollars or international acclaim or speedboats from the practice of my craft. Clearly something had to change. I thanked the stranger with an enormous wet kiss, and left the bus to find my fortune.
Outside of a daring jewel heist while wearing a dick-joke themed costume, I decided the easiest way for me to earn a fortune with my writing was to create the next bestselling book series. I realized that two of the most recent successes, the
Harry Potter and
Twilight series, followed very similar formulas which could easily be copied. They took long standing fantasy elements and reinvented them, creating shamelessly escapist stories targeted at very specific audiences - in those cases children and teenage girls with fourth grade reading comprehension. The formula was easy enough, but could I write that well also? I thunk I could.
After a bit of brainstorming, I decided the demographic currently most in need of escapist fantasy were middle-aged men. Under pressure from tiring careers, family obligations and enlarged prostates, this was clearly a demographic that could use an escape. And I noted they were woefully under served by the existing escapism service industry; these men were too old to find video games accessible, too young to experience the delights of senility, and likely to burst into flames if made to watch a