Title
Running Up a Glass Hill on Roller Skates.
Synopsis
A project manager at a digital marketing firm grapples with a dark addiction that jeopardizes his family life and endangers his career. I’m thinking that this could be the first sentence on the back of the book jacket. What is this crippling addiction? That’s for me and you, potential publisher, but mostly you, to decide.
I’m thinking my life-threatening temptress will be something like waffles, but edgier. Like Belgian waffles? Or crepes. No those two are out. With a French last name nobody’s going to want to hear about my love of crepes or wine or raw milk cheese, which is too bad because raw milk cheeses are illegal in America and are pretty much as close you can get to an addiction to illegal narcotics without the syringes and awful complexion and frequent beatings from your cross-dressing Flemish pimp.
Target Audience
This addiction memoir will serve as a cautionary tale to anyone who has an addictive personality or thinks they might attempt to roller skate up a glass hill.
The Competition
The non-fiction market is beset with addiction memoirs—some might say that the book buying public is hooked on these worse than the addiction that I could theoretically develop and write about. Addictions like sex, drugs and steamship acquisition sell books, but they are often depressing and require a great deal of start up capital.
Unlike the majority of addiction memoirs, the addiction which eventually takes over my life will be affordable and low-risk: resulting in an addiction memoir that could be appreciated an even attempted by regular everyday people, not just those with fat bank accounts and self-destructive impulses.
Part One – Temptation
It starts out simply enough. I will associate a heightened pleasure from those water soluble packing peanuts made from cellulose because they remind me of holidays when my parents showered me with gifts but no love. Then I discover that those packing peanuts taste delicious with MSG and I am ensnared.
Part II – Rock Bottom
My family will be torn apart after my wife has seen what I’ve been doing in the basement while wearing Lee Press-On Nails. My credit ruined, not because I’m in debt but because the grease stains from my breakfast burritos render the magnetic strip indecipherable.
Part III – Redemption
Then the twelve-step recovery program, which for purposes of brevity will be converted to two steps. How many steps do you really need to recover from your dependence on the smell of a freshly uncapped magic marker?
Once in recovery, there will be several moments in which I’m tempted back to the abyss, like when I’m traveling for work and I can’t get away from the convenient and delicious personal waffle makers they have at the Best Western that have completely revolutionized the free hotel breakfast.
Marketing this book
I can imagine memoir tie-ins with specific food products and there are plenty of opportunities to relapse: as it is, I eat food at least thrice daily. Here’s a thought: it could be both a memoir and a cookbook, A Recipe for Disaster.
A catchy title for the sex memoir that catalogs my deviant lifestyle would attract the female element to my work, which I’ve heard is crucial to getting books sold, though I’m not certain what the word “cunnilingus” means or if it fits on a book jacket spine. It sounds a little like something having to do with an airline operated by rabbits.
To drive sales for the book I will appear on all the talk shows, demonstrating how difficult it is to roller skate up a glass hill.
Timeline
Given the time rush to get my memoir published before anyone else has a chance to tell of their destructive dalliance with Forever Stamps I’ve developed an abbreviated time line. If I start my addiction this summer my personal life will implode by the excruciating heartbreak of Christmas. I’ll then undergo recovery with the stern guidance of Maple Syrup Anonymous, which will allow me to deliver the book by late spring, ensuring that my tell all about the iron grip of silver dollar pancakes/glass blowing/heavy petting will become recommended summer reading.
Please treat this book proposal as urgent. I’d like to get started identifying my demons, confronting them, and sending out invites to the book party as soon as possible. You’ll be the first person I reach out to when I hit English muffin/knitting/snorting pencil shavings rock bottom.