Aconite said:
BardSkye, a very basic question: Is the story true? That is, is this person real, and did the experiences happen to him as you wrote them?
He's real and just as recalcitrant as ever. His name is Rudy Chroust and he was known to the police as The Russian Snake, despite being Czechoslovakian.
Aconite said:
how many years are covered by the account? Does the account cover all aspects of his life, or focus on the drug-dealing parts and their aftermath?
The account goes from childhood to present, and he's now in his sixties. It's more anecdotal (sp?) than dry repetition of fact: he basically told me things like coming home one day to find his dogs had torn apart a bag of money and were tossing bills around the yard like confetti.
Aconite said:
The difference between biography and autobiography gets slippery. Are you working intimately with this person, basically as a ghostwriter? Who will be listed as the author of the book?
I started off simply agreeing to ghost it for him; I expected to be bored silly and did I really
want a close association with a heroin dealer? Even a retired one? Besides, it's not my field; I write fantasy.
But he fed me Vietnamese soup on a weekly basis (I love Vietnamese soup: it was "an offer I couldn't refuse") and I started getting really interested in the story as it unfolded. He's a good storyteller and a funny conversationalist. He's unabashedly open about his past with some often very funny results in the now.
As far as credits go, he wants both names on it. I don't know enough about the field to know whether "by X and X" works better than "by X as told to X." He did insist on copyrighting it under both names.
He would like publication (as would we all) and I'm willing to try for him, but I really should try for the publishers or agents that would suit
this story... ergo the question of whether it qualifies as autobiography, biography or memoir. That at least would give me a starting point.