This is still rough but pretty close to final. My editor and I are fine-tuning the manuscript now and it looks like it'll be ready next week. Please indulge any formatting issues. I'm going from Word to Blogger here, which doesn't always work so well.
Barista is a short, sweet romance novel, approximately 45,000 words. If you're expecting hot sex scenes like in my short stories, you won't find any here (fair warning).
~~~
“I don’t drink coffee. Do
you have anything else?” Eric said.
The
barista’s lip ring twinkled under the overhead light of the coffee shop. Her
name tag read, Awesome, but he had his doubts. He’d been in a lot of these
places over the years even though he hated coffee and had observed baristas in
their natural habitat. Most were pleasant enough to their customers but had an
overblown sense of importance when it came to their jobs. If coffee suddenly
disappeared, the world wouldn’t end. But they acted like it would. And he’d
heard so many of them snicker at those folks that just “didn’t know any
better,” because they preferred a non-descript house blend to the more exotic
(and more expensive) other beans they constantly pushed on their customers.
And this
one, the one who labeled herself Awesome, who thought she was all cute and hip
and whatever, he’d seen her true colors last week when she’d given that woman
hell about ordering a coffee because she was in her second trimester.
She wasn’t
Awesome, not by a country mile, unless of course she meant it in an ironic way.
“You do
realize where you are, right?” Awesome said.
She would
have been cute, if she lost the nose ring she got ten years ago in high school
and while she was at it ditched the anti-snob snobbish hipster attitude. She
had cute, pouty lips and a button nose. He wasn’t sure about her hair—she
always had it pinned up under a baseball cap while she was working—but it was a
dark and looked promising. She had a tiny little cushion of gut on her
otherwise thin frame and it looked good on her.
“I’m in a
book store,” Eric said.
“You’re in
a coffee shop inside a bookstore,”
she said. “We sell coffee.”
“You also
sell overpriced chocolate, overpriced bottled water, overpriced desserts, and
overpriced croissants.”
Awesome
looked left toward the door marked EMPLOYEES ONLY, like she was making sure
nobody was listening.
When she
looked back at Eric, there was nothing friendly in her smile. “You need to work
on your French r’s. They’re more in the back of the throat. Cwwoissant.”
She craned
her neck and touched where her Adam’s apple would have been.
Eric said,
“Do you have anything else to drink?”
“You know
we sell overpriced water.”
“With
caffeine. Tea? Soda?”
“Jonesing,
huh?” she said.
Eric
sighed. “Yes.”
“Couldn’t
sleep?”
He shook
his head.
“Guilty
conscience?” she said.
“Are you
serious?”
The manager
poked his bald head out of the EMPLOYEES ONLY door. “Meredith, is there an
issue?”
Meredith /
Awesome shook her head no. “Just helping this customer here.”
“Okay.” The
man gave her a long look then disappeared back behind the door.
“Sir, I’m sorry
but we’re out of tea and we don’t stock soda.”
“Thanks.”
Eric went back to his seat on the other side of the café, where his laptop was
waiting for him. He unlocked it and went back to work.
Or tried
to.
There were
two words on the page: Chapter One.
And that was it.
The
otherwise blank screen stared back at him.
Meredith took her second
break at six like she always did.
She walked
right by Cheapy McCheapy, the guy who’d given her crap because he didn’t like
coffee, and continued through the bookstore. She enjoyed working in a coffee
shop and she liked working in a coffee shop that was inside a bookstore even more. Her life revolved around coffee and
books. An Ethiopian blend in one hand, a novel in the other. The perf combo.
There was
just one downside to working as a barista in a coffee shop inside a bookstore.
The customers in general were a bit loony. Like The Twins. They weren’t really
twins. They might have been mother and daughter. The younger one cared for the
older one, who was hard of hearing and could barely move without breaking
several bones in her body. And jeez, how the younger one talked to the older
one. Basically ordering her around, telling her what to read, what to drink,
reminding her how forgetful she was. She was a real bitch. Meredith was overdue
to give her a piece of her mind. You shouldn’t talk to someone like that at
all, let alone your mother or relation or friend, let alone the old and infirm
and someone possibly suffering from dementia.
The
customers could be real annoying. And one out of every thirty of them was an aspiring novelist.
They were
always cheap and this guy was no exception. He came to the café to write and
used their free wi-fi and yet had the gall to bring his own food and drinks
with him. Every day he unwrapped a sandwich around two in the afternoon and
drank from a bottle of water he brought from home. Never once did he buy
anything from the coffee shop—he was basically just a cyber parasite, using
them for wi-fi and somewhere to sit other than his house or apartment or
wherever he lived. Making use of the bookstore but never purchasing anything in
exchange.
The worst.
Not only
were they cheap, but most of the time they were oh my God so boring. The worst
was when they met in groups to discuss their books that would never be
published, or even be self-published. She’d watched them over the years on the
sly, each one trying to top the last one’s list of excuses why they couldn’t
finish their Not-So-Great-American-Novel, the one about were-chipmunks that shapeshifted
or an assassin growing a conscience on their one last assignment or…
This guy
was probably no exception.
Alana was
waiting for her behind the store, cigarette already to her lips. She worked the
Reader Service Desk in the middle of the store usually. She had that rare gift
of being able to pair customers up with books they would love. All she had to
do was talk to them for a few minutes. They liked to joke that it was her super
power.
Meredith
wished she’d been really good at something like that. In her spare time she
managed a book review blog that about five people read, including her mom and
dad. She liked to joke she didn’t care if nobody read it—she just managed it to
get free copies of books.
“Smoke?”
Alana said.
“Please.”
Meredith took a cigarette and let Alana light it for her. “Dan is always on top
of me. I can’t stand that guy.”
“In
fairness to him, you aren’t always Mrs. Customer Service.”
Meredith
shrugged. “Where do I get this reputation?”
“For
example,” Alana said, wearing a smirk, “you upset that pregnant woman last
week.”
“Because
she wanted a coffee!” Meredith shook her head. “She shouldn’t be drinking
coffee when she’s pregnant. Everybody knows that. I tried explaining but…”
Alana was
in hysterics.
“What’s so
funny?” Meredith asked.
“You are.
Unintentionally.”
“It blows
my mind that I’m more concerned with her child than she is.” Meredith knew she
could be a bit abrasive sometimes, and her outspoken personality often
irritated people, but she was who she was. She didn’t understand people who
tried to hide who they were.
Alana
finished her smoke and stomped it out. “Oh, we figured it out, by the way.”
“Figured
what out?”
“Who that
hot guy is.”
“What hot
guy?”
Alana
rolled her eyes. “Really?”
“I have no
idea who you’re talking about.”
“You’re so
full of it. The guy who started coming to your café two weeks ago. He’s here
from open to close.”
Meredith
frowned. “Hold on, you don’t mean the aspiring
writer, do you? The one who’s always on his laptop?”
Alana
nodded. “I’ll bet he’s a cunning linguist.”
“That guy
isn’t hot.” First of all, he wasn’t tall. Meredith was the same height as him
which meant he wasn’t even six feet. Second, he had dull brown, and thinning,
hair. Third, his teeth on the bottom jaw were crooked—Meredith had a thing about
teeth. Fourth, he was kind of thin. Meredith wanted her men to look like they’d
just stepped off the cover of a bodice-ripping romance novel. This guy wasn’t
that, not by a long shot. She would have even preferred fat to thin. A stiff
breeze would knock this guy over, and she never dated anybody that had a
smaller waist than her. The only exception had come in college, and that person
had been a woman, not a man when she’d been bi-curious for all of five minutes.
But most
importantly, he was an aspiring writer. She would never, ever, ever date one of
them again.
“That guy’s
not hot.” Meredith shook her head. “All he does is take up space and never buys
anything. Just another freeloader.”
Alana
shrugged. “You’re never going to believe who he is.”
“I’m waiting
with bated breath.”
“Eric
Hanlon.”
“Eric
Hanlon.” The name was familiar, but Meredith couldn’t place it.
Alana
smiled. “The writer.”
“The
writer?” She still didn’t know who—then it hit her. “Eric Hanlon, the thriller writer?”
“The one
and only.” Alana smiled. “And if I’m not mistaken, you love his books.”
How could
that guy be Eric Hanlon? Alana had to be wrong.
“I wouldn’t
say love.”
Alana took
out her phone and tapped a few keys. “And I quote, from your book review blog: Newish author Hanlon is every bit as good as
the best thriller writers out there. He has mastered the art of invisible
prose, and I mean that as a compliment.”
There was
no way that guy was Eric Hanlon. He couldn’t be. Hanlon the writer seemed like
a cool guy that drew three-dimensional characters and came up with wild, but
convincing, plots that didn’t rely on all the tropes these days: no vampires,
no doomsday machines, no ancient codes or symbols or other MacGuffins. Just
straight up thrillers with an edge where plot and character were the same thing.
Eric Hanlon was cool.
The guy
sitting in her café day in and day out, leeching their free wi-fi and never
buying anything, was not.
Meredith
didn’t want to give the guy any credit. “If I said I loved him, I just meant in
terms of being a thriller writer. You know anybody could do that if they
wanted.”
Alana
arched her eyebrows in surprise. “Hello, literary snob.”
Meredith
shook her head. “I didn’t mean it in a bad way, just that…”
“Thrillers
don’t qualify as art. Got it.” Alana patted her shoulder. “You should introduce
yourself. Tell him about your blog. Maybe he’ll send you more free books. Maybe
he’ll ask you out.”
“Uh, no
thanks. Not interested. Especially not after Damian. I can’t take another
writer. Ever.”
“You need
to get over it. You need to get laid. How long has it been?”
Meredith
liked Alana a lot, but she got very personal sometimes. “Not that long.”
“It’s been
long enough that we need to carbon-date your vagina.”
“It’s only
been a few months.”
“Translation:
one year.” Alana mockingly shook her head. “That is an eternity for a vagina.”
Meredith
blushed. As blunt as she could be about most things, she’d never gotten used to
discussing sex with anyone, not even a good friend like Alana.
“Has he
written any sex scenes?” Alana asked.
Meredith
thought about it. “A couple, yeah.”
“Check them
out.” Alana smiled. “They are a window into his bedroom.”
Alana went
back inside, leaving Meredith with that thought.
Eric wanted to throw his
laptop through the window. He wasn’t getting anywhere. This latest book had
been one stall and restart after another. Every idea that came to him had been
done before, by somebody else or by himself. Every scene annoyed him. His
characters were always just smiling and nodding, maybe, if things got really
crazy, pointing.
For the
first time ever, he was blocked.
He packed
up around eight and stood. Stiff from sitting all day again. He surveyed the
people around the café. Sometimes just looking at a random person prompted a
new idea. But he’d been staring at these same people for the last two hours.
He put his
laptop in his backpack. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Meredith / Awesome
behind the counter. She had been watching him. As soon as he looked over, her
eyes darted down and she brought her phone up, pretending like she’d been
texting the entire time.
He’d been
kind of a dick to her earlier. He knew baristas didn’t make a ton of money, and
it wasn’t her fault the café overcharged for everything. Knowing he would be
back soon—probably tomorrow—he decided to swallow his pride and try to make
nice.
She saw him
coming and put her phone away.
“Hello
again,” she said. Her voice was flat, no intonation, like she was trying to
hide her dislike of him. Immediately he regretted coming up here.
“I just wanted
to apologize for earlier,” he said. “I was short with you. Sorry about that.”
His words
had zero effect on her. Meredith just stared at him, open-mouthed.
He waved
his hand in front of her eyes. “Hello? Saying I’m sorry. Okay?”
She came
back to reality. She was pretty cute. “Apology accepted.”
He laughed
nervously. She looked like she wanted to say more. Her eyes were all over the
place. For a brief moment, he got the crazy idea to ask her out. Maybe dinner.
Somewhere cheap, though. His sales had been slow the last few days and, like he
always did, he was beginning to worry that the well was running dry. Yet
another reminder that he needed to get more books out there. Like the one he’d
been working on for a month solid.
Now wasn’t
the time to ask a girl out, no matter how cute she was. Eric was smack dab in
the middle of starting his own business and the bills hadn’t stopped coming in.
And just as
importantly, she was kind of nuts. He’d seen the crazy in action, like when
she’d asked a mother to leave the café because she was being mean to her
toddler.
“Alright,
see you later.”
Meredith closed down at ten
and was home in her apartment by ten-thirty. She changed into comfy pants, her
favorite pajama bottoms, and an old folk festival t-shirt.
At any
given time, she had as many as five different books going. She’d always read
that way, for as long as she could remember. Speed-reading came naturally, too,
so she motored through novels like they were greeting cards.
She really
needed to post her review of the last historical she’d read: The Emperor’s Physician. But she’d had
severe block the last two nights. And since she’d finished the book, she’d read
another four, so the details of the historical were already slipping from her
mind. She’d enjoyed it but hadn’t been this-is-the-best-book-ever wowed. She
always picked out a good quote to use as a blurb in her review, so she decided
to start there with The Emperor’s
Physician. Finding a good passage in the book might spark an idea of how to
review it.
Her Kindle
wasn’t on the coffee table. It also wasn’t on: the end table, the kitchen
table, the kitchen counter, on top of the refrigerator, in the refrigerator
(don’t ask), in the bathroom, in her closet, on her night stand, in her bedroom
chair, on top of her bureau, or on her bed. At first she’d scoffed at the idea
of reading a book on a device but had tried it out when her parents got it for
her as a birthday present and instantly fell in love.
Problem
was, she was always misplacing things and her Kindle, with all the books she
reviewed on it, was one of those things.
Meredith
went back through the apartment, basically looking in all the same places as
before. Ten minutes later she’d grown frustrated and was ready to write the
night off. She could always pull out one of her old paperbacks and read that in
bed, like she’d done every night growing up, falling asleep in the middle of
some great story with her reading lamp on. In her youth she’d explored so many
strange worlds and had pitied her friends who didn’t enjoy reading. They didn’t
get it and were missing out.
She sat on
her bed to take her pajama bottoms off and felt something solid on the
mattress. She got up, lifted the bedspread and found the Kindle tangled in her
sheets.
She
resolved yet again to find a particular home for everything, as her mother had
constantly urged her growing up.
Feeling
more tired than usual, Meredith pulled off her pajama bottoms and climbed into
bed. As she did, she remembered she was wearing her granny panties—very hot—and
told herself this weekend she would pick up some new underwear. It had been
ages since she’d bought herself new underwear and honestly this pair was a
little small. She’d put on six pounds in the last year, which wasn’t much in
the grand scheme, but it had all gone to her ass which didn’t need the extra
padding. She really needed to get back in the gym and maybe lay off the foam
lattes. Once upon a time, she’d been a size four.
She was so
tired but really had to get that review out. She settled on finding a good
passage tonight and leaving the review for tomorrow morning. This was one of
those in-between books. It was well-written, well-researched and deserved
three, possibly four stars out of five, but looking back now it was perfectly
forgettable. The thought struck her.
How could
she give four stars to a book she was having trouble remembering, let alone
writing something thoughtful about it?
Maybe she
had to seriously adjust her scoring…but then that wouldn’t be fair to the
hundreds of books she’d reviewed in the past.
Meredith
pulled her sheets up to her neck and turned on her Kindle. It had been a long
few days. Her boss, Dan, had been all over her. And maybe Alana was right: she
needed to be with a man. It had been much longer than she’d said, closer to
nine months. She loved living alone and curling up to a good book, but it did
get lonely sometimes. She basically consumed two things: coffee and
entertainment media.
Maybe she
was just stressed out and overtired and underpaid. Maybe she needed to exercise
more. Maybe these were all reasons why she couldn’t remember the book that
well. Maybe she needed to give it another chance.
It was
listed on the first screen of her library because she had read it recently,
right above that thriller she’d really enjoyed, The Hard Woman.
By Eric
Hanlon.
Meredith
remembered what Alana had asked her earlier today, about whether Eric Hanlon
ever wrote sex scenes.
She opened The Hard Woman.
Normally
thrillers all ran together for her, even if she liked them. But she remembered
this one pretty well. It was about a woman that killed her abusive husband,
framed her husband’s lover for the death, all with the help of her own lover.
And there were definitely a few sex scenes in it.
She thumbed
The Hard Woman.
She really
needed to write her review of the other book, but now she was on a mission.
Quickly she scrolled through the thriller. The two main characters were the
woman and her lover, Janey and Craig. Her eyes absorbed Hanlon’s invisible
prose, taking it in easily like the fast food writing that it was. Then, about
a third of the way into the book, she found the first sex scene.
Despite her
orders to the contrary, Craig visited Janey’s house one night while her husband
was away on business. He claimed it was because something had happened that
would significantly change their plans, but the reader knew the real purpose
behind his visit. The two had decided not to see each other until it was all
over, but Craig just couldn’t stay away. She was like a drug to him, and he was
seriously addicted.
Meredith
tapped her way to the next page.
Craig kissed her. On the lips, along her
jaw, on her neck. Each kiss a reminder to her of where else his lips had been
on her and where they would go again. He knew just how to touch her, to set her
heart racing and shorten her breath. His hand was a million degrees through her
blouse.
Meredith
stopped reading. She remembered Craig was an ex-soldier and worked as a
personal trainer. He was tall and buff.
But
somewhere between Craig kissed her and
on her neck, Craig had stopped
looking like Craig and had started resembling Eric Hanlon.
And though
the exchange in the story had taken place in the woman’s foyer, in the early
afternoon, in her mind Meredith saw everything happening in her own bedroom
right now.
She read
on.
Janey felt his abs twitch at her touch.
Their first night together, she had discovered how ticklish he was. She had
explored his toned body with her hands…then with her lips. Each caress making
him shudder…
Meredith
pulled her eyes away from the Kindle. As she shifted in bed, she was surprised
to feel damp between her legs. Alana was right: it had been too long.
Eric woke at ten. He’d
stayed up late again because years ago he’d read somewhere that deep exhaustion
actually spurred creativity. It was that or get drunk, and Eric kept his
drinking to a minimum. In college he’d come dangerously close to having a
problem.
He looked
over the five hundred words he’d typed last night after reading an old news
story about some guy from Philadelphia who staged car accidents, got the
so-called victims to treat with the right doctors and therapists, then billed
the insurance company. It was a great opening to a novel.
Or so he’d
thought.
The writing
was crap, calling the main character two-dimensional would have been an insult
to the dimensions of length and width, and the opening should have been
exciting but instead it was just all internal shit the guy was thinking or
feeling. He’d written barely five hundred words and he’d already lost the plot.
Usually that took a bad writer a solid fifteen to twenty thousand words, but
Eric had somehow managed the feat in the course of an hour’s worth of writing.
Time to
call Guinness so they could update their Book of World Records.
He saved
the Word document and moved it into his Could
Be Made Good folder.
“I’m
blocked,” he said. “Totally, completely, fuckatively blocked.”
He got up,
stretched, put on some sweats, paced. Paced some more. How could this be
happening now? At the worst possible time?
Eric took
off his sweats and jumped in the shower. Usually he got a lot of ideas in the
shower because it was the closest thing to sensory deprivation he could find.
Just him and the hot water. No phone, no TV, nobody talking through the walls
of the apartment, no cars, no emails, no books, no porn, nothing.
He got out
of the shower with exactly zero new ideas.
Eric put
his sweats back on, found a semi-clean t-shirt, and put on some socks. He
didn’t want to leave the house until he had a clear plan of what to do.
It had been
a month since he’d put anything out. Over the last four years he’d built a
small, but respectable following by writing quality books at night after a long
day’s boring work, self-publishing those books electronically, and keeping the
prices of his novels low to encourage readers to give the new, no-name guy a
try. At first, the sales had trickled in but over time he trended up and, after
a decade of writing and saving money and learning his craft, he’d decided to
take the plunge.
He’d quit
his day job.
It had made
perfect sense at the time. His income from writing hadn’t yet matched his just
as meager income from the two jobs he worked, but that was okay. He had written
to deadlines his whole life and knew if he could devote himself fully to
writing fiction, he would be able to produce twice as many quality books in the
same amount of time, if not more. Eric didn’t aspire to write literature and
scoffed at the idea of penning the Great American Novel. The professors who decided what was good and what was not
from the tenured safety of their ivory towers were well-meaning, but ultimately
dead-ass wrong. In all his years studying English and story-telling, not a
single professor had ever asked him to read The
Three Musketeers or The Big Sleep or
anything by John D. MacDonald. Or
Michael Crichton. Or Robert B. Parker.
Books like
that—which the professors condescendingly referred to as genre writing—had had a much wider-reaching and lasting impact to
culture than the navel-gazing tripe the professors deemed worthy enough to be
included in the canon.
Eric didn’t
want to write the next Gatsby or the next Stranger or even the next Catch-22.
In fact, he knew he didn’t have any such thing in him. He wasn’t that kind of
writer. But he knew he could write page turners. And more importantly, loved to write page turners.
It was the
perfect time to quit his job too. He’d just paid off his car, the healthcare
exchanges were operating so he could get reasonable insurance, and he was still
living in his first apartment so rent was cheap. Eric knew how to live low on
the hog. He got his books from the library, didn’t have cable, and had no one
but himself to worry about.
It all made
perfect sense.
But of
course the plan assumed he wouldn’t get writer’s block.
His last
day at the rent-a-car place and the restaurant had been four weeks ago. With
his hours suddenly his own, he’d set the lofty goal of writing one book per
month for the first year. He had no idea if that kind of pace was possible but
figured if he didn’t reach Mars, at least he’d get to the moon.
The idea
was to build up a “backlist” of titles to give readers on the interwebs many
different ways to find him. The more virtual shelf space he had, the greater
chance he’d get discovered.
Of course
he’d already blown his first deadline, today marked his second month in this
great self-publishing experiment, and he had no idea what he was going to write
about next.
He plopped
down on his sofa and went online. First thing he always did was check his sales
on the sites. Yesterday had been a slow one and this morning there wasn’t much
activity.
From there
he checked to see if there were any new reviews of his five thrillers. Only
one: somebody had left him two stars because they found his second book too
violent.
The second
book, of course, was a mystery set in the world of underground mixed martial
arts fighting. Which was all spelled out in his product description of the
book. How the reader hadn’t expected a lot of violence was beyond him.
“Awesome
fucking review,” he said.
The word
awesome made him think of Meredith from the bookstore. He couldn’t believe he’d
almost asked her out last night. A date would have been a painful disaster. He
was glad he’d clammed up.
From there
he checked email. Readers occasionally messaged him, which was really fucking
cool, especially when they wrote to ask about the next book.
The usual
spam and automated crap he got all the time.
Except for one
email.
It was from
christie17, but the user’s account didn’t reveal any other details. He opened
the email.
Mr. Hanlon – I
reread The Hard Woman last night, which is saying a lot. I rarely reread these
days because there are just too many new books I want to get to. It is really
good, even better than I remembered. The relationship between Janey and Craig
was really interesting…and hot. It was so real that I figured you had to draw
on some life experience for it…anyway, just wanted to drop you a quick note. I
know you’re busy working on the next book, probably. Which will be out when?
Eric was
humbled. He thought his books good but hadn’t ever thought of them as
re-readable. He hit REPLY:
christie17—Please
call me Eric, and thanks for writing! I loved the Janey-Craig dynamic but never
thought I did it justice…anyway, to answer your question vaguely: yes, I
modeled their relationship on personal experience. It’s really a boring story
so I’ll spare you the details ;-) Hard at work on the next book and hope to
have it out
He had
almost written this month. But was
that even a possibility? He didn’t want to piss off a fan by blowing a
deadline.
next month or the month after. Thanks
for reading.
He tried to
go back to writing but again couldn’t get anywhere. Maybe it was time he
stopped acting like a hermit and bounced ideas off somebody else. He called his
buddy, John, and asked him to meet for lunch.
At
someplace cheap.
Meredith looked up every
time someone walked into the café. But so far, Eric Hanlon hadn’t shown up. He
was usually in by noon. She wondered why he was late and found herself making
up stories why he might be. Perhaps he’d had a burst of creative energy last
night, or maybe a date that had gone well…or maybe he was just lazy like all
writers and just couldn’t get out of bed because it was oh-so-hard to make
things up for a living.
Business
was slow and she’d restocked the coffee for sale, refilled the magazine rack,
and wiped the tables down after the breakfast crew left already. She was the
only person working till two. During the quiet time, she had nothing to do but
think. And her mind kept drifting back to The
Hard Woman.
After reading
the sex scene she’d back to the beginning of the book and read it cover to
cover. It really was good, better than the three-and-a-half stars she’d doled
out when reviewing it the first time. She considered revising her score on all
the websites but that didn’t seem right. If she did it for Hanlon, she would
have to do it for everybody else and she couldn’t go back and reread all three
hundred books she’d formally reviewed in the last few years.
Besides,
Hanlon might have been a good writer but he was kind of a jerk. Even during his
awkward apology, he’d managed to be short and had ended up impatiently waving
his hand in her face. She didn’t want to
give the guy a better score because of how he’d acted. Maybe that wasn’t fair
of her, but then again, dicks didn’t deserve to be successful. Only nice people
did.
Rather than
revise her rating, she’d emailed him last night. Which she was now regretting.
All writers had enormous egos. There was no other group of people in the world
that took eighty plus thousand words to tell a story and then expected to be
paid for it.
She loved
stories but authors were annoying. She’d gotten so many angry emails in
response to her honest reviews over the years that she knew what they were
really all like.
“Where’s
your boyfriend?” Alana asked.
Meredith
looked up from the counter. She hadn’t even heard her friend approaching.
“Who?”
Alana gave
her the look.
“He’s not
my boyfriend.”
Alana held the look.
“How old are
you?”
“Did you go
back and read one of his sex scenes?” Alana asked.
Meredith
felt her face grow warm. “No.”
“I do.”
Alana smiled. “And I did.”
“You did?”
Meredith didn’t know why she was shocked. Alana was just as voracious a reader
as she was, and she was not prudish.
“Was it any good?”
“It was
okay. A little tame for my tastes.”
“Not
everybody is into bondage.”
“Bondage? That’s tame.”
Meredith chuckled.
“You have a one-track mind.”
“Two
tracks: books and sex.”
Meredith
shook her head.
Alana said,
“Seriously, where is he?”
“How would
I know?”
“You
haven’t seen him today?”
Meredith
shook her head.
“I hope you
didn’t scare him off, like you do everybody else.”
“What is
that supposed to mean?”
“You know
what it means.”
“That
happened once.”
“Twice.”
“You can’t
count the guy that was yelling into his cell phone.”
“Actually,
I wasn’t. So that’s three times.”
“Wait—”
“Take it
easy, I’m just half-kidding. But, seriously, if you see him, could you shoot me
a text?”
Meredith
looked at her friend suspiciously. Alana was forever trying to set her up, and
Meredith feared she would try to do just that with Eric Hanlon. Another writer.
“Why?”
Alana
batted her eyelashes. “Why do you think?”
“Alana, I’m
not interested.”
Alana burst
into laughter. “Not for you! I’ve given up trying to set you up.”
Now
Meredith was really confused. “So why would you—”
Alana said,
“I could show him a thing or two in the bedroom and then maybe he could write
about me. That would be hot.”
“Alana…you
can’t date Eric Hanlon.”
Alana
frowned. “Who said anything about dating?”
“No, I
mean, you can’t get into a relationship with this guy.”
Alana
smirked. “And why not, Meredith?”
“Gross. I
don’t want to date him. I mean because he’s a jerk.”
“You don’t
even know him.”
“I’ve seen
him every day for the last two weeks, so I know a little about him. And
yesterday he was a dick to me.”
“Oh yeah, I
heard about that. He was just asking for something other than coffee and you
insulted his French pronunciation.”
“Who the
hell—I’m going to kill Lindsey.”
Alana
smiled. “And so what if he’s a dick? Most guys are.”
“I don’t
get you sometimes.”
“I don’t get
you most of the time.”
“You need to stop
outlining,” John said, between bites of his panini.
“I don’t
outline,” Eric said. He sipped his water. He’d taken two bites of his flatbread
sandwich and had hated it. Seven dollars and thirty-six cents right down the
drain. Or, said another way, he’d just wasted between three and four sales.
John
finished his panini. He was a big guy, tall and broad, and looked like he could
have gone for two more sandwiches.
“Okay, then
you need to start again,” John said.
“But you
just told me not to outline.”
“Exactly,”
John said.
Eric was
reminded of the many reasons why he’d stopped attending the local monthly
writer’s workshop. He’d met John at the workshop (was it really five years
ago?), and they’d developed a friendship over a shared love of books, movies
and TV.
But this
was just the kind of thing that drove Eric nuts. John was only halfway through writing
his first book ever. It had taken him five years
to get to this point. But this was typical of what went on during the
workshops. The three hour sessions always devolved into pity parties about why
nobody could get any writing done, or, just as bad, the whole bunch of
so-called authors who’d never finished anything gave each other advice and
constantly bickered when one so-called rule conflicted with another.
Stephen King never outlines.
Ken Follett spends months developing the
story and characters before he even tries to write.
And on and
on.
Eric had
figured out years ago that you just had to figure out what worked best for you
and do it your own way. And, most importantly, you had to finish the fucking book. If there were any rules about writing,
that was one of them.
”How about
the snowflake method?” John said. “Have you tried it?”
“Long time
ago.”
“How
about…”
John asked
a million questions about his process, drilling down to the unimportant details
like where he worked, what he ate before he started, what he wore, if he
listened to music…
Eric was
exhausted by the end of the lunch. “Thanks, John, definitely gave me some food
for thought.”
It had been
good to see John and he appreciated the guy’s eagerness to help, but in truth
Eric hadn’t gotten much out of their discussion. What had he expected? He’d
actually written five books and published them, while John had been cranking
away on his literary novel forever.
He really
just needed to get his ass back in the chair and write. Just write and write
and keep writing until something good finally appeared on the page, then write
and write and write until that something good was finished.
John said,
“Oh, did you hear?”
“What?”
“Three of
the authors doing the Allentown Conference this weekend bailed last minute.”
“Oh yeah?”
Eric couldn’t be any less interested. Writers’ conferences were even worse than
writers’ workshops. They usually ended up being one big circle jerk. Aspiring
writers flocked to them and fawned over the published authors, best-selling or
otherwise.
John said,
“Yeah, we’re looking for replacements. Especially on our thriller…”
Eric had
forgotten that John, despite having no publishing credits to his name, was
somehow on the board that managed this local conference.
“Well,
thanks for your time, John. Let’s catch a movie this weekend.”
“Can’t,
I’ll be at the conference. But I was thinking, you could fill in.”
“Fill in
what?” Eric had stood already and picked up his tray.
“We need to
fill the holes on our thriller panel the first day, and the plotting panel the
next day. You could do that, right?”
“John, I’m
flattered but…”
But what?
He had no previous engagements, nothing except writing. And he couldn’t take a
whole weekend off to attend some conference.
“The panels
are only two hours apiece and we’ll pick up your hotel stay. It would be good
for you to be around other writers and get out of your environment and be
somewhere else. It’ll spark something. You can bounce ideas off other
writers…other published writers, I
mean.”
Eric hoped
John hadn’t picked up on what he was thinking. “John, you’ve been a big help.”
John shook
his head. “No, I haven’t. I know that. I came out here hoping to learn more
about the way you do things to be honest. Because I just can’t finish my book.”
“How long
have you been working on it?” Eric asked.
John ran his
hands through his thinning blonde hair. “Five years now, ever since I finished
grad school.”
Five years!
“John,
maybe you should put it aside and try something else, something completely
different.”
“Yeah,
maybe.” He looked at his watch. “Shit, I’ve gotta get back to the office. Some
of us do have to work still, you know.”
Eric
smiled. He loved writing and thought it was the best job ever, but it was still
hard work.
Meredith tried not to stare
at Eric, but Alana had got her thinking. Was he really like that in bed?
“You’re
coloring everywhere! I told you not to do that! You never listen to me!”
Meredith casually glanced over at the window. A mother had brought her two
young daughters in for something to do. The girls had each gotten a sugar cookie,
and the mother had kept her nose in a magazine while they got out their
coloring books and went to town.
“You never
listen!” the woman said. “I know you can hear me! Now there is crayon all over
the table. You girls are behaving so poorly! I can’t believe it.”
Meredith’s
eyes roved to Eric. He was watching the scene himself with a neutral expression
and his arms folded.
“That’s it!
We are not going to color anymore while we are out somewhere!” the woman said.
She had stood up and was frantically gathering her children’s toys, crayons,
and coloring books, while both her girls had lowered their heads and were
looking at the table.
“If you
can’t behave, we can’t go anywhere! I bring you out on this special adventure,
and this is what you do?”
Meredith
couldn’t stand it. The girls were so young
and close to tears. The mother was running all over them for something minor.
She grabbed
a wet towel from the sink and stepped out from behind the counter. “Ma’am, it’s
really no big deal.”
The woman
stopped what she was doing and slowly owled her head to look at Meredith. She
had perfect hair and perfect teeth and she was a size zero, of course, and her
jewelry was expensive. She was one of those types that hadn’t worked a day in
her life, who had nothing to do but be a good mother, and she was miserable to
her kids. Meredith saw these types all the time in the coffee shop.
“How dare
you interfere,” the woman said.
Meredith
felt her anger rise, like bile in her stomach. She told herself to keep calm.
“These tables wipe down easily. Food, coffee, crayons, even markers…it’s not a
big deal.”
“That’s
great!” the woman said. “You’ve just told my children that it’s okay for them
to draw on tables, the exact thing I’m telling them not to do. That’s perfect!”
Meredith
was ready to explode. She took a calming breath and looked briefly away. Eric
had turned from the scene and was absorbed by his laptop again. What a coward.
Meredith
said, “Your girls are so young and—”
“Do you
have kids?”
“No.”
“Then you
really have no idea, do you? Where’s your manager? I want to speak to him.”
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