I Propose... Never Mind

Are you staying late sweating over your pitch for your Great American Novel, trying to get your proposal just right, hoping to woo potential publishers into giving you a huge advance? Don't bother.

Amazon.com has posted William Gibson's proposal (.pdf) for the book which eventually became his forthcoming novel Spook Country, to be released August 7. The proposal sketches a story about two readers of a blog called "Warchalker" who are drawn into the blogger's search for a shipping container of hundred dollar bills liberated from the American occupying forces in Iraq and now lost in transit somewhere in the world. Trouble is, unnamed bad guys also want the millions. A novel ensues.

And how much of this actually made it into Gibson's eventual book? I've read Spook Country, and I can say with authority, not much at all. There's a shipping container, and there are bad guys, and that's about it. As Gibson says:

Amazon.com: ...I'm curious how you progress from one group of characters into another group as you're planning the book or writing it.

Gibson: Well, I think the key thing there is that I never really believe in the proposal.

Amazon.com: Does your publisher believe in it?

Gibson: I don't know--it seems to be a sort of ritual object and I've actually been afraid to find out whether or not I could get a contract without one....

Read the entire interview here.--David E