A Fresh Start

The best offer we got was a book signing, by invitation only. He won’t let us invite more than thirteen journalists, too.”

“Wow, he’s doing a book signing? You know, we should’ve done some kind of contest, where the winner gets an invitation to the event. Or auctioned off a few invites. Something of the sort, anyway.”

Katie sighed, looking frustrated.

“We wanted to do all that and more. But he said absolutely not. He gets to approve the guest list. It’s already gone out, anyway. Even the firm only gets a limited number of invites! He’s a real recluse. It’s incredible that his agent managed to paint that as a gimmick and make him popular. You know that Rachel does most of his social media, too? I think even she is beginning to run out of ways to keep him relevant.”

Grace sighed.

“It’s too bad, really. He is an incredible writer. I love how he writes gripping plots but doesn’t just ignore the world. He uses all kinds of social issues in his writing, did you know? And his characters are never from the same mold. They’re all so different…”

Grace was off on one of her fangirl speeches. She could actually see Katie zoning out.

“And I loved how he made an elephant learn how to shoot and kill the pixie in his last book!”

Katie nodded, her eyes glassy.

Grace wondered, not for the first time, how the woman had ever managed to get through a manuscript with that minuscule attention span. Perhaps she’d do better with the rainbow unicorns and the sparkly werewolves.

“Anyway, you were leaving,” said Grace, raising her voice and nudging Katie.

“Well, I’ll see you tomorrow,” said Katie, making Grace wonder why she had stayed so long, anyway. As she left, Grace turned back to the manuscript. If she hadn’t been able to focus on it before, it felt like a lost cause now.

An event – an actual Alan Barden event! How had she not known about this? It can’t have trickled down from the management level, even if Katie assumed otherwise. Would Katie have been invited? Probably not, she had nothing to do with Alan Barden, who was the firm’s biggest client.

Of course, Grace could see why they wanted him to put himself out there a bit. It was next to impossible to market him now. The whole mysterious, elusive writer shtick had been good to begin with, but it does start to get old after a while. He was on his fourth book now, and it wasn’t working as well.

She knew that bloggers, journos and every media person in lifestyle and arts wanted an interview with him. But he refused interviews. His agent managed email interviews, but they had begun to sound the same now that he refused to give more personal information.

The only photo of him out there was the one on the book’s jacket, and he looked extremely cute in that – a bit serious, a bit moody, but a lot handsome. The chestnut hair, deep green eyes and firm jaw, the chiseled features and the straight, thick, dark eyebrows – Grace sometimes felt that he looked like a modern version of Lord Byron, though what he wrote was far removed from anything Byronic.

Still, he did cut a very romantic and very dashing figure. There had been some speculation that the man in the photo wasn’t even really him. That had been good, of course. It had bumped up sales. But even that hadn’t lasted very long.

Grace had her own blog, too. She was going to put a review up as soon as she finished reading the book. She loved it so far. But an interview with him – how incredible would that be! Of all the journalists and writers and reviewers who wanted to snag that precious interview, it would be such a coup if she could do it!

Grace tried to get back to her book, but the idea had taken root. She found herself making a list of reasons why it would be incredible to get that interview:

• It would make her famous.
• She could meet Alan Barden.
• She could get his autograph.
• She could strike up a friendship that would last a lifetime, and she could help edit his future books.
• He could give her advice on how to go about getting published.
• She could use his contacts and get herself published, finally.
• He could fall in love with her and beg her to have his babies.

The last one made her giggle. She did have a bit of a crush on Alan Barden.

Even when she’d been a teenager, Grace hadn’t had crushes on movie stars – she’d had crushes on writers. She had mooned over John Keats for months. She’d had a John Grisham phase. At one point, her best friend had teased her about how she seemed to only sigh over and dream about stereo-typically handsome white writers, and she’d felt a bit disloyal for a while.

But she’d soon shaken that off. After all, the heart wants what the heart wants!

The pro-list began to look more and more enticing to Grace.

But Grace was a fair person. She believed in looking at both sides of an issue. So she had to make a con-list, too.

• Might get caught.
• Will probably get caught.
• Will probably be fired if I get caught.
• Will need to steal invite.
• Might be thrown out of event before meeting him.
• He might turn out to be a complete asshole.

She looked at the list for a while and added one final item:

• He might be gay.

There, that looked just about complete, decided Grace. So now she had seven reasons to go and seven reasons to trash the idea entirely. Maybe she needed to sleep on it.

But, she sighed, she couldn’t sleep on anything until she finished the incredibly unreadable manuscript. Thinking many inventive and very vengeful thoughts about the vapid author who hadn’t even put in a single, solitary, measly joke in the entire book, Grace got back to her sparkly werewolves.

*****

It was about eight in the evening by the time Grace finally got back home. She got her dinner – a pasta salad that her mama had made, and boy, it was excellent – and settled down at her laptop. First, she needed to call her mama, and she needed to make sure she didn’t tell her about Alan Barden.

Then she needed to work on her novel.

Grace had been working on a novel for about two years now. Every day, she put at least half an hour into it, no matter how busy she was.