Murder on eBay

It was a dark and stormy night on October 6, 2004 when I was sitting at my computer working on my latest novel, Murder by Burger, and I realized that I needed somebody new to murder. I looked through my character notes, but there was nobody worthy of killing. I thought about all the people I’d ever met, but I’d already used them in one way or another in stories, poems, and other lies. I needed fresh meat. I needed a stranger, an unsuspecting victim.

Well, maybe not so unsuspecting. Maybe … somebody who wanted to be killed off … but still be able to read about it.

The ceiling over my head opened and God looked down at me. He was smiling. He said, “Biff, go to eBay. Lots of people like to be killed at eBay.”

So I went to eBay. They have a category called Everything Else/Weird Stuff/Totally Bizarre. I had to tone down the part about God, but otherwise, the media release tells it all.

Unfortunately, God neglected to inform me that eBay is run by Satan. Seven days into the auction, the bids were climbing quickly over the $300 dollar mark, and then the unthinkable happened.

eBay pulled the plug on my auction.

Without warning, without remorse, without apology, eBay shut down the auction and sent me one … two … three separate emails informing me that I had violated Satan’s rules. They were keeping all monies paid to them, and shutting me down. They really rubbed in the part about keeping the money.

Now get this … this was an auction in which the winning bidder was to appear in a novel that had at least some hope of being published. Personally, before bidding, I would want to see some proof that the writer might actually have something published already. So in the auction description, I included a list of my publishers. This turned out to be against Satan’s rules. It was considered to be a keyword manipulation list, so they pulled the plug on me for trying to establish credibility.

I ran another auction, but since the links to the auction in the original media release pointed to a site that no longer existed, traffic was not so good. Bids were abysmal. I had to run it one last time before the right to be murdered off in Murder by Burger went for just over $50.

Always read the small print when you deal with Satan.

But on other fronts, things went well. I was interviewed by radio stations across the US, written up in a few newspapers, and was told that I was like the cannibal guy in Germany by some hysterical woman in a writers’ ezine (she was quickly pounced upon by several other writers who told her to smarten up and get a sense of humor before they tore out her jugular).

As for who won the auction ... well, that turned out be an interesting little twist. More to come on that later.

Murder by Burger – Weird Beginnings

In 1988, I started a novel called Men In Weird Shirts. About ten pages into a story that was going nowhere because all I really had was what I thought was a catchy title, I scrapped the project and started a novel called BigCrunch (that was somehow inspired by the Weird Shirts story) about a French detective bloodhound called Fleeh Beaugt (or something like that – it was a pun) who solved cases with the help of a kid who had built the world’s most powerful computer in his parents’ basement. The dog spoke a mixture of French Canadianese and NewfieSpeak. It took thirty pages to convince me that I was writing drivel again.

I couldn’t shake the idea of the dog though. Then, a few months later, I was reading Big Mac: The Unauthorized Story of McDonald’s. Like a flash of lightning straight up the ass, the idea came to me. Barto Burger. Cloned hamburgers. A corporate structure more religion than business. A murder. A French detective bloodhound to solve the case.

It was an on-and-off again thing for years. I wrote three novels before I finally came back to the original research. The French detective bloodhound disappeared somewhere in the plotting and characterization phases, but the burgers and mayhem in a corporate headquarters building fashioned after the giant Gothic churches of Europe and the idea for a truly weird detective-like character grew into Boston Jonson, CI Extraordinaire.

But it still wasn’t a smooth trip. Sixty some odd pages in, I started to lose the thread of the story. I put it aside and wrote short fiction and marketing stuff for about two years before coming back with the rest of the story somehow worked out in the back of my head deep under layers of subconscious gray matter and daydreams.

Today, I’m about twenty pages away from the end of Murder by Burger. There’s a lot of story in and behind the story. That’s what this blog is about.

Next: Murder on eBay

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