I liked Ed, and he seemed to like me. We talked up a storm on the phone, him summarizing key points and offering examples from literature and the cinema, and me as excited as a dog with its head out a car window, happy to be along for the ride. I studied those same philosophers in college, and knew the gist of what they were saying. And the kernel of his idea -- honesty in the workplace, as opposed the phony-baloney climates we dwell and die in, appealed very much to me. It was like a great first date, and we were charming the crap out of each other (which you must do if you are to be authentic). I was excited about the project even before Ed's assistant told me that they planned to pay me $40,000 to do it. Let me be real for a moment and say I was authentically pleased at the idea of $40,000. The most I ever made on a book until then was maybe $17,000. I couldn't see a downside. Eager to get going on a project that sounded meaningful and promised to be lucrative, I stayed up all night and wrote my take on a key chapter, and e-mailed it to Ed by the dawn's early light. Then everything soured. Days passed, and no word from Ed. Finally I called his assistant. She hemmed and hawed, and finally said that Ed was put off by my writing style. My first drafts can be pretty feverish, and I suppose this was prime Finley, punctuated with lightning flashes and prophetic pronouncements about the self and the abyss. My ideal client understands that eventual quality requires initial emotion. But Ed hadn’t told me that he saw the project as nearly academic, footnoted, documented, and above all, respectable. After all, he had his reputation to consider. My style was a little too interesting. I also learned from the assistant that Ed wanted the book to be 150,000 words long. Which was three times longer than anything I
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