The Big Pitch
Apr. 14th, 2013 08:02 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
jack_babalonThe ghost of a Winter that never was stumbles across a rain soaked weekend in mid-April. Pink and white as dreams of geishas dancing, dogwood petals flow steadily down the pollen green currents of the gutter. Cold dreary rain falling on a lazy Sunday Terminus afternoon and I'm sitting in my first office meeting in over five years.
The location's a brick warehouse partitioned into three complexes retrofitted for business. It's tucked down a side street no wider than an uphill alleyway and of three doors offered it is the only one painted blue. Inside a multilevel suite with the walls gutted out so that everything resembles the jet set Mid-Century chic of a Shag painting or Johnny Quest lair come to life. Still it's the end of the weekend, so there's no one there but us. Us being myself and the two executives who summoned me here. We're seated at a long beige table in a meeting room on the lower level. The meeting room is a single cube carved out of a three dimensional Abstract Expressionist splotch. Its walls are covered in broad sheets of paper. Each thumb-tacked or taped to one another. Each filled with rows of ideas and words stacked and numbered and underlined and each cascading into one another with some frantically circled or connected to each other by serpentine arrows . Terms like "Immediate Focus" and "Intended Now" and "Maximized Contrast" glared wherever the eye should fall. A grimorie hieroglyph scrawled in every available shade of magic marker.
And it's no different really than any of the dozens of meeting-rooms I've manned over my many decades of intermittent employability in the Cube Farms of Corporate American. The one's I've interviewed in, got hired, reviewed, promoted, downsized, laid off and fired in. The ones I fugue stated into daydream escapes that involved ninjas rappelling through the windows, bears bursting through screens lit up with the soul-draining light of Power Point presentations, spontaneous orgies induced by nanobots laced in the break-room coffee pots, fireworks bursting out of the fluorescent bulbs above and what did it matter so long as I performed wholeheartedly those tasks I was monstrously underpaid to perform?
But this time it's different.
I'm there to tell a story.
They're right there. Laptops open. Pen and paper at hand. Sincerely eager to hear why we're here on a Sunday. Above us rain patters on a wide glass skylight casting a soft ripple of shadows over the room. This is it. A moment I've waited, since, fuck, I don't know, how do you time a question you've been afraid to ask?
So here's what you need to know about me in that frozen, shit your pants and smile moment before I say word one. I am not stoned. I am not drunk. I am not there with a friend to ontologically hold my hand and do my talking for me. Know that it's been a tough year, know that I've got a dozen rejections from various publishers since Winter under my belt. Know I've gotten the last one this time last week.
Know that none of it matters because for the first time in a long time, I am not scared.
In fact I am filled with exuberance, ideas and considerations.
I am a man who is exactly where he needs to be.
One who knows this is not just a 'story' behind the pitch, but the fact beyond the Jack.
The location's a brick warehouse partitioned into three complexes retrofitted for business. It's tucked down a side street no wider than an uphill alleyway and of three doors offered it is the only one painted blue. Inside a multilevel suite with the walls gutted out so that everything resembles the jet set Mid-Century chic of a Shag painting or Johnny Quest lair come to life. Still it's the end of the weekend, so there's no one there but us. Us being myself and the two executives who summoned me here. We're seated at a long beige table in a meeting room on the lower level. The meeting room is a single cube carved out of a three dimensional Abstract Expressionist splotch. Its walls are covered in broad sheets of paper. Each thumb-tacked or taped to one another. Each filled with rows of ideas and words stacked and numbered and underlined and each cascading into one another with some frantically circled or connected to each other by serpentine arrows . Terms like "Immediate Focus" and "Intended Now" and "Maximized Contrast" glared wherever the eye should fall. A grimorie hieroglyph scrawled in every available shade of magic marker.
And it's no different really than any of the dozens of meeting-rooms I've manned over my many decades of intermittent employability in the Cube Farms of Corporate American. The one's I've interviewed in, got hired, reviewed, promoted, downsized, laid off and fired in. The ones I fugue stated into daydream escapes that involved ninjas rappelling through the windows, bears bursting through screens lit up with the soul-draining light of Power Point presentations, spontaneous orgies induced by nanobots laced in the break-room coffee pots, fireworks bursting out of the fluorescent bulbs above and what did it matter so long as I performed wholeheartedly those tasks I was monstrously underpaid to perform?
But this time it's different.
I'm there to tell a story.
They're right there. Laptops open. Pen and paper at hand. Sincerely eager to hear why we're here on a Sunday. Above us rain patters on a wide glass skylight casting a soft ripple of shadows over the room. This is it. A moment I've waited, since, fuck, I don't know, how do you time a question you've been afraid to ask?
So here's what you need to know about me in that frozen, shit your pants and smile moment before I say word one. I am not stoned. I am not drunk. I am not there with a friend to ontologically hold my hand and do my talking for me. Know that it's been a tough year, know that I've got a dozen rejections from various publishers since Winter under my belt. Know I've gotten the last one this time last week.
Know that none of it matters because for the first time in a long time, I am not scared.
In fact I am filled with exuberance, ideas and considerations.
I am a man who is exactly where he needs to be.
One who knows this is not just a 'story' behind the pitch, but the fact beyond the Jack.