Every weekday in my email I get Publisher's Lunch, which I skim most days, keeping up on which editor has been promoted (or fired) at which publishing house as well as what other interesting news in publishing is going on. I always enjoy the big list of deals that comes out every Tuesday or Wednesday, and I was amazed when I saw the following entry this morning:

Jon Clinch's first novel FINN, the dark story of Huck Finn's father, to Will Murphy at Random House, at auction, by Jeff Kleinman at Folio Literary Management (NA). Film rights are with Howard Sanders at UTA.

Now... isn't that cheating???

I know of a bunch of books that use this trick of taking a minor character from a famous book and building up that character's history. Part of me thinks it's a sneaky way to write a book, because you're basically playing in someone else's sandbox, using characters, situations, and settings that have already been created.

But another part of me is intrigued; I'd probably read a book about Pap Finn, that mean ol' bastard. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is one of my favorite books of all time, right up there with Cather in the Rye and Lord of the Rings.

There have have been books about Ahab's wife, a story by John Kessel about Gulliver's wife (he wrote that while he was teaching us at Clarion in '96, and we got to critique it; of course it went on to be published in a year's best anthology or two -- take that, newbies!), countless memoirs about people who kinda new someone famous (I'm thinking of one a few years back about a guy who was friends with boxer Mohammed Ali), and I know there are many others, usually stories riffing off the classics in literature. I even think there's a novel about Jim's wife from the Mark Twain novel. Hell, Orson Scott Card even does it to himself, with his Ender's Shadow novel.

And there you go -- you have a built-in audience. And you get to fill in the gaps in the existing story, letting "your" character intersect with the events and people of the existing book.

To be honest, I'm kinda jealous I didn't think of writing Pap's story first! Seems so obvious and, well, so easy, in hindsight. Then I'd be the one having an auction for my novel manuscript. What was I thinking???

Okay, gotta go peruse the classics now; the hell with my original novel ideas! ;) Later...