So there was Belem Knight, hammering away excitedly on bits and pieces of Silverdale Academy, the latest idea that he stole from under my inattentive nose.
Then he comes to me this morning, with a good question: The idea is about an exclusive girls’ finishing school, but have you looked into the economics of such a venture? Could you actually run a school like this in the 2030s in California and actually make a profit?
“I dunno”, I said. “Have you done the math?”
“I think you should do the math”, he said. Then he played the ultimate card. “After all, this was your idea”.
Eegads. The perils of dreaming up locations.
So I spent lunchtime and part of this evening doing the math. I had to essentially, at a high level, create the annual operating budget and revenue account statement for a California private school.
Conclusion: At a 10,000 foot level, with some gross assumptions, yes, Silverdale Academy can make money.
Phew. I hate fundamental unrealities intervening into part-fantasy storylines. It is that sense of professional paranoia that I have based on my experience interacting with the Sci-Fi communities and fandoms, where they look diligently in novels or stories for any inconsistency or missing item in the plot, the timeline, or the characters, and leap upon it like a vulture on roadkill, yelling “HAH! This is WRONG! GOTCHA!”.