I genuinely believe this work has a readership well beyond what it's currently reaching. If you're open to a fifteen-minute phone call, I'd love to discuss what representation might look like. No commitments. Just aconversation between two people who care about good stories.
Warm regards,
Nora AchebeAchebe Literary Partners
Clara set the phone face-down on the table. Then picked it up. Read the email again. Set it down again.
Brilliant. An editor had called her work brilliant.
"Clare-bear, webcomics aren't real art. It's a hobby. Nobody's going to pay money for cartoon drawings when there's actual content out there."
Sam's voice arrived on cue, punctual as always, settling into the familiar groove it had worn in her brain over four years of hearing variations of the same message:You're not good enough. This isn't real. Stop embarrassing yourself.
The thing about Sam's voice was that it didn't sound like Sam anymore. It had lost his specific inflections—the practiced casualness, the way he'd deliver cruelty like he was doing her a favor. Now it just sounded like fact. Like gravity. Something so obvious it didn't need a source.
Clara pulled her knees up onto the stool and wrapped her arms around them, making herself small the way she used to in the Portland apartment when Sam would critique her sketches and call it "helping."
An agent wanted to represent her.
An editor at a real publishing house had called her work brilliant.
And her first instinct—her very first instinct—was to close the email and pretend it hadn't happened.
What the hell was wrong with her?
She lasted until dinner.
Jack was making pasta again—it was becoming a running joke that his entire culinary range consisted of variations on noodles with things on top—and Clara sat at the kitchen table watching him move through her space with the ease of someone who'd learned its rhythms. The sealant he'd ordered was curing on the gallery post outside. His boots were by the door, next to hers. His coffee mug sat on the shelf beside her lighthouse mug, the two of them lined up like a pair.
All of this was happening. Her life was filling up with a person, and now the universe was apparently trying to fill it up with a career, too, and Clara hadn't asked for any of it and didn't know what to do with either.
"You're quiet," Jack said, draining pasta over the sink.
"I'm always quiet."
"You're differently quiet. Regular quiet is you thinking. This quiet is you avoiding thinking." He glanced over his shoulder. "What's going on?"
Clara opened her mouth to say "nothing." To deflect, the way she'd been deflecting for five days, filing the emails under Problems For Future Clara and moving on.
But Jack was looking at her with those hazel eyes that didn't push but didn't look away either, and the words came out before she could stop them.
"I got an email from a literary agent."
Jack's hands stilled on the colander. "What?"
"A literary agent. She wants to represent me. Wants to turn Tidal Lock into a print graphic novel series." Clara pulled at a thread on her sleeve. "An editor at a publishing house already read some of it and apparently called it 'brilliant,' which I think might be a sign of the apocalypse."
Jack set down the colander. Turned all the way around. His face was doing something Clara couldn't quite categorize—something between surprise and delight that was building toward full excitement.
"Clara. That's incredible."
"Is it?"
"Are you—yes. That's incredible. Someone wants to publish your work. Your art. The thing you've been pouring yourself into for three years." He crossed the kitchen in two strides and took her hands, his face lit up like she'd just told him the best news he'd ever heard. "When did this happen?"
"Five days ago."
The excitement flickered. "Five days? You've been sitting on this for five days?"
