I do not think this will necessarily affect you, given your track record.After all, you are “The Little Author Who Could.” Still, we must be prepared that Hercules House may tighten its belt, and toward that end, I want us to put all our energy on this next book.Vraiment, let us makeGold Diggera blockbuster!
Do you have pages I might show Patricia? She asked for them. It would help convince her and the Hercules team that you are producing and will hit your deadline, and that will help your standing in the house.
Callmoiif you want to discuss.Bisous, my favorite author,
Mireille. XOXO
“Oh holy hell,” Sam said, and slammed her laptop closed.
She did what any self-respecting writer would do: took her coffee to the bar in her living room and poured in a hefty slug of bourbon. Then she paced her apartment with it. Sam’s beautiful first-floor condo in a historic Back Bay brownstone, a place she never should have been able to afford even with book sales and the occasional royalty—and honestly, she barely could. The only reason Sam had this place was that when she left Hank and returned to Boston, she’d wandered past this building and seen theOpen Housesign, and when she told the previous owner, a nonagenarian frowning at the hedge fund bros swarming the rooms, what she did for a living, the woman had thumped her walker and declared, “This property is now sold to the writer. She needs the bookshelves.” That had been that. Therefore Sam was in possession of eighteen-foot bookshelves, a marble fireplace she could stand up in—and, even with the special writers’ discount, a very hefty mortgage.
She’d heard the rumors, of course. All summer, like thunder over the horizon, distant but getting closer. Of editors being fired, authors let go, contracts canceled.Shifts in the industry.This was hardly anything new: Sam had seen several such reorganizations in her twenty-five years as a professional author, the publishing mobile spinning and flinging people off into the abyss before settling uneasily into a new position. In the early 2000s Sam’s own editor, who’d bravely taken a chance on Sam’s blockbuster debut, had been let go. Sam had hustled all the harder, earning theNew York Timesmoniker Mireille had cited, The Little AuthorWho Could: Visiting eight hundred book clubs with her first novel had apparently catapulted her onto the bestseller list and changed literary marketing ever after.
Yet Sam was in no way immune now to being cut loose. If she missed her deadline forGold Digger, if the novel was bad, if itssales were soft, she could easily become a literary footnote. Only the biggest-name authors, the ones who could sneeze into a napkin and publish it and make the list every single time, could afford not to worry.
Sam carried her laced coffee back into her study, past the hallway gallery of her framed book covers. On her desk were three things: an unlined notebook, a mason jar of disposable fountain pens, and a photo of her dad, Ethan. It was one of the few Sam had; a sad thing about parents who’d died was you could never get new images of them. In this 1970s Polaroid, Ethan was in the studio where he’d been a children’s television writer. He was so young he didn’t have a beard yet, although his sideburns were impressive. He was sitting at his typewriter, the Corona Sam still had in its mustard-colored tweed case, and smiling, a fuzzy puppet peering over his shoulder. His turtleneck had horizontal stripes. Sam had often wondered whether someone had just said something to make him laugh or if he was just happy.
Sam had never wanted to be anything but a writer like her dad. Her earliest memory was jumping up and down in a bouncy chair to the sound of Ethan’s typewriter. She remembered the Sunday morning she’d left Hank snoring in their musty, vodka-smelling bedroom and driven to the market in her pajamas. How she got theNew York Timesand took it to the park, then sat on a bench with it and opened it to see her name and her book’s title on that all-hallowed list. She was by herself, but she was not alone. She’d looked up at the sun filtering through the little green leaves and said,Dad, this one’s for you.
Sam reopened her laptop, closed Mireille’s email, and typed:
Ole Nielsen hadn’t come all the way from Norway to Ellis Island to ___another ship___ that sailed south around Cape Horn, through the world’s most perilous seas in the Drake Passage, up to San Francisco—where he found himself coughed up on shore like___a thing coughed up on shore__, only to stand in this creek for months on end and come up with NOTHING OF WORTH AT ALL KIND OF LIKE WRITING THIS FUCKING BOOK
Ole Nielsen was finishing the last of his whiskey for breakfast when he first saw the one-legged prostitute crutching swiftly along the board sidewalk in front of the saloon
Young Norseman Ole Nielsen had never known a woman could have hair under her arms until he first made the acquaintance of Dead Man Creek’s one-legged prostitute
Ole Nielsen was drinking postcoital corn whiskey with the one-legged prostitute when he saw the GIANT FUCKING TIDAL WAVE COME OVER THE MOUNTAIN AND WASH EVERYTHING AWAY MY LIFE IS OVER JUST KILL ME NOW THE END
Sam put her head in her hands. “What the actual,” she said. One-legged prostitute? It was time to step away from the desk. It was counterintuitive, but experience had taught Sam it was useless to keep pushing at this point. She needed oxygen, a shower, food.
She responded to Mireille, asking for a call later. Then, as she was closing out of her email,click!, a new one slid into the queue. It was from a sender named William Corwyn—why did that name sound familiar?—and the header said,Admirations!The first lines read:
My dear, we don’t know each other, but I know of you, and in case nobody has ever told you: You write like a ninja.
Whaaa? thought Sam. Whoever William Corwyn was, she felt fairly certain he should not be using the termninja. Then she remembered: He was an author, published by her own house, and ridiculously successful. If he wasn’t one of the .001 percent who didn’t need to worry about being canceled, then he was on the next rung.
She googled William Corwyn, and sure enough, he was who she thought he was. His author photo showed a white man of silver-foxy age, with dark hair and little glasses, speaking into a mic. “You definitely should not say ‘ninja,’ buddy,” muttered Sam, “in case nobody told you.” She knew she should get up and leave. She needed self-care and focus.
Instead, she clicked on William Corwyn’s message and read the whole thing.
Chapter 4
A Letter from William Corwyn
From: William Corwyn
To: Sam Vetiver
Date: August 2
Time: 7:30 a.m.
My dear, we don’t know each other, but I know of you, and in case nobody has ever told you: You write like a ninja.
I suspect that, as a white male of a certain age, I’m out of line using that term. I hope I haven’t offended you. If I have, I hope you’ll forgive me and read on. If there’s one thing we might agree on, it’s that there’s a delicious pleasure in deploying exactly the right word, isn’t there? A pleasure so sharp, so exquisite, it’s almost sexual.Le mot juste.Therefore I feel justified in taking the risk of using the termninjato describe the way you write.
You might be wondering, Who the hellisthis man? How does he have the audacity to write to me? And whyishe writing to me? You would, of course, be smart to ask these questions. Any writer would, and a female author, I imagine, might have extra suspicions. (Note I did not call you an authoress, a word I despise for its smarm—do you as well? But I digress.)
