To provide all that, they needed what were known in the business as Creatives.
It seemed logical enough that their first Creatives ought to be writers, since their work would inform that of the artists and composers and architects who would be hired later. They had hired Professor Donald Cameron, a Cambridge don and writer of very highly regarded fantasy fiction, to lay down a few general markers. But Don Donald, or D-squared as they inevitably referred to him in all internal communications, was under contract, at the time, to deliver Volumes 11 through 13 of his Lay of the Elder King trilogy, and Richard really needed to get a lot written in a hurry.
And so it was that Richard, under a certain amount of temporal duress (launch was less than a year away), had conceived Corporation 9592’s Writers in Residence Program.
Years later, he was astounded by the na?veté of it. Writers, as it turned out, rather liked having residences. Once they had moved in, it was nearly impossible to dislodge them.
Devin Skraelin was the third writer they approached. Negotiations with the first two had run hard aground on various arcane new-media subclauses for which their lawyers had lacked the necessary mental equipment. Richard was desperate by that point, and, as it turned out, so was Devin. As a fantasy writer, he was not highly regarded (“one cannot call him profoundly mediocre without venturing so far out on the critical limb as to bend it to the ground,” “so derivative that the reader loses track of who he’s ripping off,” “to say he is tin-eared would render a disservice to a blameless citizen of the periodic table of the elements”), but he was so freakishly prolific that he had been forced to spin off three pen names and set each one up at a different publishing house. And prolific was what Richard needed at this point in the game. Early in his career Devin had set up shop in a trailer court in Possum Walk, Missouri, because he had somehow determined (this was pre-Internet) that it was the cheapest place to live in the United States north of the Mason-Dixon Line. He had refused to deal through lawyers (which was fine with Richard, by this point) and refused to travel, so Richard had gone to see him in person, determined not to emerge from the trailer without a signed contract in hand.
Just how dirty and squalid that trailer had been, and just how much Devin had weighed, had been greatly exaggerated since then by Devin’s detractors in the T’Rain fan community. It was true that his reluctance to travel had much to do with the fact that he did not fit comfortably into an airline seat, but that was true of a lot of people. It was not true, as far as Richard could tell, that he had grown too obese to fit through the doorway of his trailer. Later, when the money started coming in, Devin moved into an Airstream so that he could be towed around the country with no interruption in his writing schedule—not because he was physically unable to leave it. Richard had seen the Airstream. Its doorway was of normal width and its sanitary facilities no larger than those of any other such vehicle, yet Devin had used both of them, if not routinely, then, well … when he had to.
It was all kind of irrelevant now. Richard had shared with Devin the trick of working (or at least playing) while walking on a treadmill, and Devin had taken it rather too far. Obesity had not been a problem with him for a long time. On the contrary. The nickname Skeletor was at least four years old. There was a web page where you could track his heart rate, and the number of miles he’d logged that day, in real time. He graciously credited Richard with saving his life by telling him about the treadmill thing, and Richard ungraciously wondered whether that had been such a good idea.