The first draft of my thriller, The Impairment, reached fourteen chapters. Its premise still holds: a systems engineer at a century-old American manufacturer loses his job in the company’s first layoff, and finds that the goodwill impairment behind it was cover for moving technology to a foreign military regime, through work he did himself.
The draft did not hold. An editorial review found the company and its chief financial officer never named, the layoff written into two chapters, a first chapter in first person followed by thirteen in third, and outline notes left in the prose where a reader would see them. Each is fixable on its own. Together they say the draft was written before the decisions it depended on.
So I am starting over from the premise, with a new title: Badwill Impairment: Corporate Cache Compromised.
What the title means
A goodwill impairment is what a company writes off when an acquisition turns out to be worth less than it paid. Badwill is the other side: negative goodwill, the gain a buyer books when it pays less than the assets are worth. In this book they are two sides of one deal. One ledger’s write-down is another’s bargain; the value did not disappear, it moved.
The corporate cache is what a company keeps in its systems: designs, configurations, plant data. Say cache out loud and you hear cash. In this story both leave with the deal, and the engineer who built the systems is the one who can show how.
How it will be written
The book is fiction. Its people and companies are invented.
The making of it is not. I will write it in the open, here, with short updates on X and LinkedIn: the decisions as I make them, the chapters as they move from outline to draft, and the tools I build to write and publish them. The drafting happens in the books studio of zer0-CMS, where an AI’s draft arrives as a suggestion I accept or throw away, and nothing goes out to X or LinkedIn until I approve it.
The outline, the character notes and the open questions are public in the book’s folder in zer0-CMS.
Before chapter one
Eight questions come first, and the first two are names: what the company is called, and who its chief financial officer is. The rest decide whose books record the badwill, what exactly the engineer kept in his backup, and how it ends. The answers are the next post.