Novelist Seeks 70s Fast Food Franchise Manual
Novelist Mark Pavlovich is a looking for a circa 1970s fast food franchise manual—McDs, BK, Wendy's, White Castle, etc—for his latest piece of experimental fiction (working title: Turnkey Salvation). This manual must contain the instructions for new franchisees to learn the company way to set up the store, hire and train employees, market the store, and other handy tips on how to become a success. According to Pavlovich, Turnkey Salvation is "an examination of faith healing road shows in the 70's. I'm fascinated by how faith healers got their start and why some of them become superstars while others stay on the rural dust circuit. Between the two, who's doing God's work? I intend to take pages from the manual and use them as harbinger guides for what the characters actually do next, as if they are following god's divine plan, they just not sure which god they believe in more the religious or the economic."
Pavlovich needs the aforementioned manual. I promised to try to help him find one by way of shout out to this blog's audience. So, if you have this manual or know where Mark can get one, please send him an email at mark.pavlovich@gmail.com.
Your manual will become the spine of Mark's experimental piece. In other words, according to Pavlovich, the characters' lives change along with the chapters in the manual.
In talking to Pavlovich about his quest for the 70s franchise manual, I discovered that this isn't his first foray into experimental fiction. He's done other works that center on taking a meager scrap of truth stranger than fiction and suppose what else might happen. "Lots of writers do revisionist history and that's not the appeal for me," he says. "I'm more interested in taking existing bytes and re-branding those using well-established literary techniques completely out of context. To wit: One of my favorite pieces is an absurd take on the McDonald's too hot coffee law suit where all fast food merchants are in an arms race of sorts to make their stores law-suit and the lawyers who smell class action law suit blood in the water. The story is told as a series of sensational, Weekly World Newsworthy newspaper stories. Another piece explores the relationship of two fictional CSI workers who blew the O.J. criminal case through cross-contamination, then cross-contaminate O.J.'s sample with a DNA lift off the Shroud of Turin
Sounds like fascinating stuff.
I hope this post leads him to the manual he seeks.
