Then, after what seemed like an eternity, a simple,Me too.
* * *
I foolishly hopedthat Montrose had blown off his training session, or that maybe it had been cancelled and he’d still be in his office when I arrived around four-thirty, but no.
It was obvious he’d been there, though, and also obvious—at least to me—that he’d spent a fair amount of time going through the Esme/Rachel pile. The stack was still neat and tidy, but in a different order than I’d originally organized it.
I wondered if there was a reason he’d reordered the pieces of paper, and decided to work on a different stack tonight in case he wanted to clarify something with me first.
I took the pile I’d namedOne Mile Trotwith me to the desk, where I saw a note he’d left for me on top of his laptop.
I won’t need my laptop tonight, so if you’d rather work on it, go ahead. At the very least, transfer over the work that you’ve got transcribed to my machine when you’re done. I might get a chance to go over it tomorrow before my first class.
I liked working on my machine, so I pushed his laptop to the side of the desk, pulled theOne Mile Trotpile to just within reach and began typing.
After I finished transcribing the stack of papers, I spent a fair amount of time cutting and pasting and moving passages about to try and create some kind of cohesiveness to his various trains of thought. When I was pleased with the results, I transferred the files I’d created onto a flash drive that Montrose had left on top of his laptop.
Booting up his laptop, I packed mine away in my backpack. I was a little uncomfortable with poking around on his computer, but I supposed that many literary assistants had this kind of access to the machines of the authors they worked for.
And, he probably wouldn’t have left all his downloaded porn, or sensitive love letters to past girlfriends, out on the desktop and then leave a note for me to use it.
Nope. No porn. On his fairly empty desktop was a folder titled “WIP” which I took for Work In Progress. Opening it, I found five more folders named by the past five years.
His notes had all been dated at the top, but I wasn’t sure if the dates he scribbled the note necessarily coincided with the year from his folders. Probably not, as even withTrotthere were notes from several different years.
I opened the most distant year’s folder, from five years ago. In it were at least forty Word docs, all named with what looked to be different book titles. And also a corresponding file with the title and “notes.” None of them were titles of the copious piles of notes I’d unpacked and sorted.
Perhaps the notes for these books were in the boxes still at his apartment?
I opened all the years’ folders to find the same thing, only there were progressively more files in the ensuing years. I matched up the names with the piles of notes I had created. They were all accounted for, but there had to be at least an extra two hundred files. Were therethatmany boxes at Montrose’s apartment?
Suddenly I was extremely grateful that I’d put so much time in during the holidays and got through all the boxes in his office. I was thinking I was over halfway done with the organizing part of this large project.
Now I realized I probably wasn’t even close.
I opened the files forTrotand its notes, intending to see where it would make the most sense to add on the material from the flash drive.
The notes file was empty, but the book file started with the two words every voracious reader loved to see—Chapter One.
Yes, the character introduced on the first page matched the pile of notes I’d just transcribed, and I scrolled down to continue, resigning myself to a long evening ahead, spending time with my favorite author and his next—or possibly his next—book.
Except, there was nothing to page down to, nothing beyond the opening paragraph or two. Disappointed, I quickly realized that that’s why I was here. So I could add notes and he’d be able to continue. Though, looking at it from solely a reader and transcriber’s point of view, his notes were almost too random, too esoteric, to be called an outline or plot points, or anything close to a story structure.
Undeterred, I plugged in the flash drive and transferred my whole folder onto his desktop. I ejected the drive and put it in my bag to have as backup, then returned to his files.
I opened myTrotfile from his desktop, copied all, then pasted it into his “One MileTrotNotes” document. That way he’d have all the transcribed and organized notes in one place, my transferred folder, but also in the notes doc for each book title. I wasn’t sure what I would do with the files I had that didn’t match up with a title for which he’d already created a Word doc. I grabbed some scratch paper from my bag and jotted down the ones that didn’t match, so I could ask Montrose about them later. I also wrote a note to him, describing the approach I took and that he could find my transcriptions in two spots on his computer.
Then I set about lots and lots of copy and paste.
It was the same for each document that I pasted my work into. The notes doc would be empty and the main doc would have two or three paragraphs of chapter one. No more. Not on one single document of the over forty I had transferred from the flash drive.
Curious, and basically done for now, I selected all of the main Word docs from every year and opened them all at once. The documents flying open on top of each other seemed to go on and on. My eye was not quite fast enough to see if any went beyond a few paragraphs, but it didn’t look like it.
I started reading each of the docs—it didn’t take long—and closing them when done. Just doing some quick math in my head, it seemed like he had enough different chapter ones of different stories to have started something new each week for the past five years. It probably wasn’t exactly how it had happened, but that’s what it would have averaged.
I had no idea how authors work, but I would have imagined that no matter how much tinkering with different ideas, at some point they committed and got to at least page two.
Billy Montrose had been literarily paralyzed for five years. No wonder he’d come to Bribury to shake things up.
