The Bazaar of Bad Dreams

Ralph Vicinanza, a close friend who also sold the rights to publish my books in lots of foreign countries, had a way of coming to me with interesting ideas at just the right time – which is to say while I was between projects. I never talk much to people about what I’m working on, so he must have had some kind of special radar. He was the one who suggested I might like to try my hand at a serial novel, à la Charles Dickens, and that seed eventually blossomed into The Green Mile.

Ralph called not long after I finished the first draft of Lisey’s Story and while I was waiting for that book to settle a bit (translation: doing nothing). He said that Amazon was launching their second-generation Kindle, and the company was hoping that some hot-shit bestselling writer would help them out in the PR department by writing a story that used the Kindle as a plot element. (Such longish works of fiction and nonfiction later became known as Kindle Singles.) I thanked Ralph but said I had no interest, for two reasons. The first is that I’ve never been able to write stories on demand. The second is that I hadn’t lent my name to any commercial enterprise since doing an American Express ad back in the day. And Jesus Christ, how bizarre was that? Wearing a tuxedo, I posed in a drafty castle with a stuffed raven on my arm. A friend told me I looked like a blackjack dealer with a bird fetish.

‘Ralph,’ I said, ‘I enjoy my Kindle, but I have absolutely no interest in shilling for Amazon.’

Yet the idea lingered, mostly because I’ve always been fascinated by new technologies, especially those having to do with reading and writing. One day not long after Ralph’s call, the idea for this story arrived while I was taking my morning walk. It was too cool to remain unwritten. I didn’t tell Ralph, but when the story was done, I sent it to him and said Kindle was welcome to use it for their launch purposes, if they liked. I even showed up at the event and read some of it.

I took a certain amount of shit about that from portions of the literary community that saw it as selling out to the business side, but, in the words of John Lee Hooker, ‘That don’t confront me none.’ As far as I was concerned, Amazon was just another market, and one of the few that would publish a story of this length. There was no advance, but there were – and still are – royalties on each sale (or download, if you prefer). I was happy to bank those checks; there’s an old saying that the workman is worthy of his hire, and I think it’s a true saying. I write for love, but love doesn’t pay the bills.

There was one special perk, though: a one-of-a-kind pink Kindle. Ralph got a kick out of that, and I’m glad. It was our last really cool deal, because my friend died suddenly in his sleep five years ago. Boy, I miss him.

This version of the story has been considerably revised, but you’ll notice it’s firmly set in an era when such e-reading devices were still new. That seems like a long time ago, doesn’t it? And bonus points for you Roland of Gilead fans who catch references to a certain Dark Tower.