You mentioned your millennial boyfriend
I haven’t earned out most of my novels, in the sense that they haven’t paid back the advance. Books were never something that would make you rich. I’ve been able to make a living as a writer, https://datingranking.net/amor-en-linea-review but always with stress about money, scraping by from pay cheque to pay cheque. Whenever I complain about money to my boyfriend, who’s a millennial and a dem- ocratic socialist – I think he’s actually a communist –, and say, “How am I going to pay the mortgage?”, he’s disgusted. He thinks I’m rich, but he doesn’t know my tax situation and doesn’t realize it’s all a big mess.
Don’t the film adaptions – Less Than Zero, or American Psycho, for instance – come with a big pay cheque?
The big pay cheque for American Psycho was that the production company optioned the book, meaning that they don’t buy it, but they give you a little bit of money so that they can control the rights. And they kept optioning the book every year, so that was a money flow coming in for a few years. And then, of course, when they finally buy the book to adapt it to film, then yes, you do get a bit of money. But then again, American Psycho was never a number-one bestseller, and didn’t have a lot of people trying to adapt it, just the one production company. So, basically, I had to accept their offer. And believe me, it wasn’t that high. I was like: “Okay, I’ll take the money, they’ll never make this book into a movie, and let’s just be done with it.” And then things turned out differently. So in many ways it was a bad deal for me, even though it seemed like a good one at the time. Continue reading