Datamining your Twitter feed

Friday of a long holiday weekend. I should have come straight here to the office after leaving work, but I felt some resistance. In fact, I spoke of it last night to A.: I said "I actually don't want tomorrow to be Friday because I don't feel like working on my book already." After I left work I went home, took a shower, tried and failed to nap, and left the house; but even then I drove around unwilling to go straight to my writing office. Nevertheless, I drove up the block, and there was no parking place, and I felt vaguely hungry, so I finally drove to Noe Valley and had something to eat at Pomodoro, a chain Italian restaurant on the corner of 24th and Noe. It's cheap but good, and neighborhoody enough that I don't feel bad about going in there wearing only a t-shirt (while I would never wear just a t-shirt to Bar Bambino).

After eating I felt more like working, so I came to my office at Bob's house. I have a couple of hours to make a few notes, and then I have to take S. to the airport.

So let's see. I was thinking in the car that I can just skip the rest of the ferry trip, elide it, and get right to the mountain retreat. I could do that. But the important thing is to decide what I'm showing in this chapter. Surely I'm not just staging this chapter so I can show the ferry ride. It has to have a purpose, like:

• Demonstrating the relationship between characters
• Telling us parts of the characters' backstories that are essential to understanding parts of the book
• Introducing and/or forwarding plot elements

Hmm, perhaps I should be doing more plot. I was just thinking of the Peter Plate novel I read, how it had cryptic plot and character elements suitable for a mystery -- basically it was all atmosphere, with these plot elements to drive it forward.

Brainstorming:

• Don's main motivation is to recruit Bart for his new company. He's willing to take others if it means he gets Bart, but only Bart is essential.
• Thus others are motivated to make alliances with Bart.
• Greg, of course, would do anything to be part of it. His natural niche is sales, but strangely he finds himself competing with Shaun, who actually has done sales for one of Don's companies in the past.
• Shaun doesn't really care about getting hired by Don except to the extent it fits into his own trip, which is, pretty much, self-aggrandizement and making himself a celebrity but doing it through the unlikely vehicle of being a leftist revolutionary. It makes sense to him: leftist revolutionaries are his only heroes, therefore he wants to be like them. Of course, the main things he wants to emulate is the fame and hero status. He's not really down for the years of solitary confinement in prison and such.
• Denny is searching for some kind of forgiveness for the death of his girlfriend... does she have a name? Marinka -- and also for a release from his other demons. Plus, Marianne has just left him. He is a sort of negative seeker -- he really seeks only a release. How could this fit into any decision to join Don's company? It wouldn't. Probably Don only wants his money.
• The prospect of investing money may also be a draw for Shaun, for the typical reasons of a middle-aged man with what he feels is a sizeable stake -- it's only a few million but the temptation is to pull it out of the politically correct investment fund and give it to Don.
• Of course, Hap wants to keep his apartment (or get another one), but his price is low. All he wants is a job that pays a lot more than what he makes now.
• Seth wants to be recruited because he wants approval. He might even secretly feel he's still in competition with Bart.
• Greg feels he can possibly use Seth, so he flatters him.

That's a good collection of motivations and relationships vis-à-vis the new company. But I feel there has to be another subplot. For this, I suspect the most interesting character is Denny. He seeks a release, I wrote above. What does that mean? I don't know, but it occurs to me that Denny has to offer an alternate temptation to Don's. Hap will have to choose at the end. Of course it has to be that the job, or whatever it is, that Denny offers will be less financially secure than what Don is offering.

But remember that Don wants Denny's money. So let's say there's a competition for that too. Could be like this:

1. Don explains idea for company. Hap considers the attractiveness of going to work for Don -- the pluses and minuses.
2. Don wants Denny's money. Denny considers investing in Don's company versus doing the something else.
3. Denny indirectly encourages Hap to think there's an alternative to going to work for Don. (Problems here -- why shouldn't he go to work for Don anyway? What's stopping him? Must make it some kind of moral objection.)
4. Hap has to decide, and he finally decides to go with Denny.
5. But then Denny decides to go ahead and invest his money with Don anyway.

Seems kind of like a classic dilemma: A is attractive but morally repugnant, B is less attractive but more morally acceptable, you make the "moral" choice and decide to go with B but then B is taken away. But instead of going with A as the "only" choice, you say fuck it and choose C -- whatever that is.

A little like Catch-22. But I'm sure no one will notice the similarity.

In order to make this work, I would need only to make the various choices clear. It must be that A is less in keeping with Hap's character than B, so that accepting A would be a sort of betrayal of himself. In order to make that clear, I have to make Hap's character clear, and I have to do this from the stories he tells.

Similarly, I have to make Denny's character really clear too: his moral ambiguity.

The only problem... hmm... Who is the more morally interesting character -- Denny or Bart? I've always said that "Bart is fundamentally amoral." And yet I also feel Bart has more potential for corruptibility, while Denny does not. Denny feels more like the lost soul. Perhaps Bart isn't really amoral, but he's never actually been forced to make a truly moral choice.

That means the stakes have to be really high for Don's venture. The moral and political stakes, that is.

I can show Shaun to be interested only in himself. Don will appeal to Shaun's vanity.

To sum up:

• Don wants Bart
• Goes through Hap to get Bart (therefore I must make Bart and Hap close friends)
• Hap is tempted by $$ but finds Don's venture morally objectionable
• Denny, seeking redemption, has an alternative.
• It's more in Hap's nature to take the morally good alternative and to refuse the $$ advantage.

So I need a complication.