On a pleasant Friday afternoon in June, best-selling author Jack Henry sat in the study of his Upper East Side townhouse. He had put his creative writing aside and was now focused on his finances—bills, income projections, royalty statements, and pending deals.
After a few hours, he was coming to the realization that he was on the brink of insolvency. Bankruptcy. “Holy shit.”
It just didn’t seem possible. He was rich and famous. How could he be broke?
Well, because the money going out was greater than the money coming in. That’s how. Actually, he’d known about this problem for some time. But through a process of denial, disbelief, and maybe a little arrogance, he’d put off the inevitable conclusion, which now stared him in the face. “You’re broke,” he said aloud. “You have no money. You’re screwed.”
He opened the lower left drawer of his desk, pulled out a bottle of Rémy Martin, and took a swig.
He sat back in his leather chair and stared blankly out the window of his East Sixty-fourth Street townhouse. How did this happen? Well, two financially ruinous divorces had not helped the bottom line. Not to mention that his last two novels hadn’t been well received by the critics or the public and had also been turned down by the book clubs. And then there were the movie deals that had never materialized, and the foreign translation deals on his last two books that had dwindled to a few lowball offers from thieving publishers in countries that he couldn’t even locate on a map. Lithuania? His agent, Stan Wykoff, wanted him to accept any translation deal, like the thousand bucks just offered by the Bulgarian publisher for his latest novel, Into the Dark Waters. Stan had told him, “I’ll see if I can get you a paid trip to Bulgaria to publicize the book.” To which Jack had replied, “You go to Bulgaria. See if you can get me another thousand.”
