Warning, unedited bad first draft fiction ahead. Below is the excerpt I posted for my novel on the Nanowrimo site.

Title: Texas is a State of Mind

Chapter 1.
It all started innocently enough. Just a series of random events that started happening in my life that could have turned out another way. I was writing articles on the ceo’s of various dot com companies that had failed during the crash of 2000. You know the guys who promised internet startup riches to venture capitalists, and the hapless public who saw the internet boom as the next get rich scheme. These same guys then proceeded to lose more than a trillion dollars worth of money during the crash. And not their money mind you, but the money of countless investors, companies and the greedy public. Yeah those guys.

Those guys were smart. They made their money in the beginning, gave themselves nice golden parachutes so in case the companies went belly up as all of them did, they would still have enough money to cook up their next get rich scheme. Ah golden parachute, now there’s a nice term that I should explain.

A golden parachute is the deal, the package, a ceo, usually the founder of a company demands in case for whatever reason he is let go, wants to leave or is fired. See, the guy has leverage in the beginning because he’s the one with the ideas and it’s his startup company.

The deal is usually lots of lots of cash, sometimes things like a plane, the company car, the company house, you know all the goodies the guy at the top should get and keep getting, never mind that the company’s stock is sinking lower than the Titanic.

And these ceo’s, they were great interview material. None of them were bitter. Would you be bitter if you walked away with millions? No, they were positive, upbeat, great talkers and salesmen and believers of their own dreams and visions. After all this time, after all the money they lost and people they let down, they were still willing to sell their dream.

And the public loved them. Loved reading about them. They were modern day Horatio Algers. These former high flying ceos were the guys everybody wanted to be, wanted to know, wanted to follow. That is until he came along.

“You’ve got to interview this guy Jane. He would be a great counterpoint to all the other people you’ve interviewed so far.” John my editor told me one morning during our weekly Monday morning assignment meeting. It was John’s idea to do the ceo articles, and he was the one who arranged for me to meet these people and interview them.

“Raker? Never heard of him.”

“That’s the point. Nobody’s ever heard of him. He’s the CEO who never was, who got there right at the top of the dot come wave, right before it was to crash. He was just about to hit it big, his company was about to go public at the end of April, and the boom, the crash happened.” John was up out of his chair now, his arms flying about like a bird who’s trying to take off.

“So how you’d hear about him?” I said in an even toned voice sitting back in my chair, hoping to calm him down. John standing up like that made me nervous; he was too excited. John sat down and smiled like a kid with a secret.

“Businessweek.”

“Businessweek? You’re stealing a story lead from them?”

“It’s not stealing. They just did a paragraph on him, when they were doing a special on the business climate in Texas after the dot com crash.” John was shuffling through the papers on his desk to find the magazine. It was buried under a pile of about twenty other journals at the bottom of his desk. He plopped the magazine down in front of me.

“Here’s your next assignment. I’ll get my secretary to schedule the interview. You might have to fly to Dallas to do the interview this week. He doesn’t like California.”

"Wait a minute. I don’t know anything about him. I need time to do my research about him.” I hated going into an interview blind and not knowing anything about my subject. An interviewer has less control that way.

“There’s not going to much information to research. I told you he wasn’t famous. But if it would make you more comfortable, I’ll try to get the interview scheduled for Wednesday of next week. You might be able to do more research once you’re in Dallas, so think about flying there on Monday. I expect the completed story on my desk the Monday after you get back.”

“What made you pick him?” I asked thumbing through the magazine to find the paragraph about Mr. Raker.

“He’s bitter about the whole experience.
You haven’t found a bitter CEO yet. This will be your first.”

After leaving John’s office, I went to the corner coffee shop to get breakfast and read about his latest discovery. A bitter failed dot com chief executive officer. A guy who almost made it, but never did. Marshall B. Raker was my next assignment, and even I could tell he was going to be a doozy.