A Shot of Jack #45: The Origin of BAD PENNIES
Hello and welcome to A Shot of Jack. I’m Jack Cameron. This is my bi-weekly newsletter. It comes out every other Wednesday.
Between publishing one book, writing another book, writing a true crime blog, I’m also dealing with a slew of personal drama that is taking up so much of my time that I considered postponing the release of Bad Pennies, my next serial crime novel.
But I work well with deadlines. Or at least I like to think I do.
Of course, I could make life easier for myself and just have generative artificial intelligence write this newsletter and all my books or at least that’s what the ads on Facebook keep telling me. But, I’m increasingly of the opinion that ‘artificial intelligence’ is the wrong term for technology that allows talentless tech bros to pretend they can write or draw.
A Better Lie
Anyone who has spent time using Adobe InDesign knows how much ‘fun’ formatting a manuscript for publication can be. I’m going through some final page-by-page proofreading before sending it off to the publishers for a proof copy. This would be so much faster if I had employees, but that would require publishing books to be a lucrative enterprise.
The Origin of Bad Pennies
The idea for Bad Pennies originated 25 years ago when a friend of mine who had been screwed over by their employer asked if I’d help him rob the place. He knew the security system. He knew the safe combination. He had it all planned out, including an ironclad alibi to keep them above suspicion.
All he needed was someone to pull it off and he thought I was that guy. Not one to dismiss anything out of hand, I asked how much money he thought we might get from our little heist.
“If we’re really lucky, something like ten thousand dollars.”
I laughed. Ten grand split two ways was just five grand each and that’s if ‘we were lucky’. Even twenty-five years ago that wasn’t enough to start me on a life of crime.
I turned my friend down.
But I kept thinking about the plan. I liked it. And so like most things I like in theory but not in practice, I started to write about it.
I spent months working on characters and outlining, then wrote the first draft of a screenplay in six days. For a while I shopped it around, entering it into screenplay contests and talking with what industry folks I could, but like the vast majority of screenplays, it never became a movie.
I told my friend how I’d turned their robbery idea into a screenplay. His face went pale. He told me how after I’d turned him down, he’d decided to forget about the alibi and committed the robbery himself. He was concerned, but he needn’t have been.
His robbery idea was just the seed for the story. I had changed names, businesses, cities, and most definitely the amount of money in the safe. It turned out that in real life the safe had less than two thousand dollars in it.
The screenplay sat for a few years. This bothered me. A screenplay without a movie is like a blueprint that is never a building. It’s not a completed thing. It’s an idea of a thing. I’d grown attached to the characters and the story. I wanted to share it.
Since I lacked the resources to make a movie, I thought I’d adapt it into a novel. I mistakenly thought writing a novel based on a screenplay I knew backwards and forwards would be a good idea. It wasn’t. When adapting novels into screenplays, you’re basically distilling the story and characters into what works in a two-hour screenplay. You’re removing and merging characters and unnecessary subplots. But turning a screenplay into a novel requires ADDING those elements.
It took me a lot longer than six days to write the novel, but I eventually completed it. I was ready for Beta Readers. Two major characters were a bail bondsman and a bounty hunter. Shortly after finishing the novel I met a couple of writers who spent their days as a bail bondswoman and a bounty hunter. I had them read my first attempt at a novel and then we met at a bar and talked about it.
I’ve never in my life had something I wrote so torn apart before. Halfway through their critiques one of them said to me, “I bet you hate this.”
My response was, “I LOVE this. I haven’t published it yet, I can FIX it.”
But their biggest complaint by far was that this was a story about a heist in which there is far more money in the safe than the robbers are expecting. They really wanted to know where the money came from. I knew where the money came from, but none of the characters in Bad Pennies knew and so it wasn’t in the novel.
And so when I had the idea for A Better Lie, I incorporated the antique store robbery into the story to explain where the money came from in Bad Pennies. This is one of the few pieces of connective tissue between A Better Lie and Bad Pennies. Each works on its own, but readers of both will be rewarded.
For this new version of Bad Pennies, I reread the original screenplay and the failed novel. Then I put those aside and created an all new outline with different character work. This version of Bad Pennies is all new and written specifically for serializing on Substack.
It’s a story I’ve been trying to tell people for two and a half decades and I’m more excited than I can say that it’s finally seeing the light of day. I hope you’ll join me on this journey.
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What I’m Clicking On
One Last Thing
I sometimes forget that this is a labor of love. It’s why you don’t see me spending all my time creating Facebook ads or figuring out how to optimize this newsletter to maximize profits and bolster subscriber numbers. I’m sure doing that MIGHT result in slightly increased traffic and income, but it wouldn’t be enough to live off of.
And still, there’s that capitalist side of me that wonders why I put so much time into writing these newsletters and books that on my best days are seen by a few hundred people. And I have to remind myself that I’m not doing it for popularity or profit.
I’m writing because I’m a writer. If at some point my writing makes me enough money that I can live without other income, that’s great, but it’s not anything I or any other writer should count on.
So thanks for taking the time to read. If you know someone who might like this newsletter, forward it to them.