A Writer Deals with the Devil

The Devil came to me in a dream this weekend. Right away I knew who it was--the creature looked like something recombinant genetics might produce from the DNA of Bill Gates, Richard Nixon, and an emphatically male goat. His voice had the seductive richness of Tim Curry's, and he stood too close when he spoke.

"Have I got an offer for you."

"You want to buy my soul?" I asked.

"Souls, pah! I got souls up the wazoo. I want to buy your output."

"My what?" All my bodily orifices clenched.

"Your output, your work. I want to buy everything you've ever written, everything you are writing, everything you ever will write. All of it." He brandished a thick legal-sized document. I took it and queasily read clause after clause of tightly-worded boilerplate.

"This says you want to buy all rights to the sum total of my written work, past, present and future, in perpetuity, in all media that have ever existed or that will come into existence in the future."

"Yeah, that's right."

"The National Writers' Union says I should always negotiate electronic rights separately."

"Fine, alright, whatever I pay you for all the other rights, I'll pay you that much again for electronic."

"Really? That sounds fair. How much are you paying for the rest of it?"

"The going rate in the open market. That's for everything you write, understand? Grocery lists, Internet posts, that novel you're working on, those poems you never submit anywhere anyway, the whole ball of wax. Everything. The catch is, none of it will ever see print. You get it? You go right on writing, I'll pay you the going rate for everything, but nobody ever gets to read it except me." He rubbed his hands together, producing a sulfurous stench.

"But if I published something and people read it, I'd start to get higher prices for my work. I might turn out to be the next Tom Clancy."

"So? Your point?"

"So Tom Clancy doesn't get the going rate, he gets top dollar. If I take your offer I give up any chance of getting top dollar."

"Okay, you drive a hard bargain, but I'll do it. Anything you write, I'll buy it for the same rate as the top contract in the field. Every novel you get paid like Danielle Steel, every poem like Bobby Bly. Your grocery lists will sell like Elvis wrote them."

"But nobody will ever read any of it?"

"Just me. Don't you love it? Ain't it nasty?"

"Will you tell me if you like my novel?"

"Nope. I'll read it, but you'll never know what I thought." His tongue, a foot long and black, lolled about in his crazily-grinning mouth.

He had me hooked and he knew it. Limitless wealth could be mine--I could get my floors done by Alf Sjoberg, I could drive a Lexus, I could watch Melrose Place on the biggest projection TV in Christendom. But that wasn't the half of it--I could do it by writing! I would be the ultimate professional writer, a dream come true. But the catch, oh my god the catch--no one would ever read a word of it. Sweat began to course down my body as I rolled and thrashed in the bed. My wife woke me, and I tried to explain the dream to her, but she was sleep-dazed herself and didn't seem to understand.

"It was just a dream," she said, as she drifted back to sleep. The Devil came right back.

"So, do we have a deal?"

"No! I can't do it. But. . . why don't you post your offer to a couple of thousand newsgroups on the Internet? You could call it ATTENTION ALL WRITERS."

To my surprise the Devil's eyes grew wide with horror, and he muttered something that sounded like "Get thee behind me."

"What did you say?"

"There are some things even the Devil won't do!"

"Oh well. Tell you what. I'll mention your offer on misc.writing. There's plenty of folks there who'd jump at a deal like that." We shook hands and he departed, with a orange flash and a flatulent thunderclap, and I fell into a deep and innocent slumber.