Almost an author, p.14
Almost an Author, page 14
‘I am meeting a publishing consultant either tomorrow or Friday. I’ll bill you when I get home.’
Yeah, sure. Go ahead and bill me for root beer and hotdogs, I think-mutter sourly as I slide further into the hole of disillusionment.
‘Ruby, the US market was interesting, even though the news was not good. Smaller publishers are not looking at any new manuscripts until next year. Large companies are seeking manuscripts from known writers.
I phoned Barnes and Noble about stocking New Zealand books. They seemed interested but I got sick. Penguin USA declined. Their comments are interesting…I wonder if what I forwarded failed to show enough about your characters. I think what they are saying overall is that yours is extremely good, not excellent.’
Poor Barbara caught the Swine Flu, which she brought back to our pristine green country, decimating a percentage of our population.
‘I hate sending you this invoice. My biggest problem was our low dollar at the time I was in the States.’
Even with three jobs, I’m broke. Yet somehow this account doesn’t faze me as it would have a week or two back. Perhaps I’m in the process of re-finding myself, re-finding Ruby.
‘I made copies in USA. I still have copies here. Not sure how many but will count shortly. On the bright side, your manuscript is in front of a good number of prospective publishers and one film company. Let me know if you are unhappy with the invoice.’
I’m unhappy with any invoice. Especially from Barbara, with not a great many emails about sales. Is she really doing what she promised, or am I expecting too much of her?
I hole up in my room where I drink sugary, black coffee. I shut Hunter’s dog outside.
It’s about six in the morning, and I’m sleeping the thin dreamy sleep of early morning when Hunter slams me awake. He’s towering over me. I scream and lash out, and we scare the shit out of each other. Then he starts laughing. I get a good look at him and realize his lip is bleeding. I gallop off to get a facecloth. He’s still laughing when I get back. I start dabbing his lip.
He says I pack a mean punch, then adds he’s been duck shooting and has a duck for me to pluck.
“It’s already duck shooting season?”
He’s roused me from my dark funk with his spontaneous action.
‘I’m having trouble accepting that only work from already published, successful writers is being accepted. We need a niche publisher. Had I sold all 2000 books I have on hand of my own title I would print and finance yours.’
My eyes rocket to that final comment—I would print and finance yours.
Like manna from Heaven, I feast on these words. I count them, read them separately, individually, randomly and then in ordered order. This is the third time she’s said that. My faith is restored. I’m so damned good that an established literary agent, Barbara Banning from Banning Books, would consider publishing my book, and financing them. But, again, the question niggles—if I am so good and Barbara is a publishing house, why doesn’t she? Surely that’s where this whole journey is going? Or is it? I’m confused. I squash the thought; I don’t like where it’s heading. I reassure myself that with Barbara having 2000 copies of her own books in stock she has storage issues.
Chapter Twenty-One
Hunter says I obsess over my books. I have to agree. But then he suggests I live in a fantasy reality. Bastard! But he’s right. I have no other interests or conversation. I attempt to conjure up a sentence that doesn’t refer to my books or have anything to do with Barbara. Nothing.
Now, when I write, I get the guilts. Sometimes, I think I’m taking too much time to write. I don’t have rules anymore. There are too many rules and they’re too hard, too complex. Like a program. A formula. So I don’t outline or plot. I just type random sections, which I’ll cut and paste into something when I’m finished. I pop in some bits about my family to spice things up a little. They’ll never read my books. I know that for a fact. 95% certain fact anyway.
I break the silence. “Hunter, Barbara sent me an Excel spreadsheet of who’s paid for my books when she sold, sent and invoiced them. Her handwritten list doesn’t tally with my—”
He abruptly leaves the room, taking his big, fat law book with him. Okay, my timing is off. I accept that.
I query the list with Barbara instead, but sense her become defensive. There are library sales missing from both, including the cash I gave her for sales during the book tour. Of all her authors on that tour, it seems I’m the only one who surrendered all that cash. Hunter once asked why I parted with it. At the time, it seemed the honest thing to do. But now I ask the same question.
When I try to talk about it with Barbara, based on her Excel spreadsheet, her solution is that I send all of my books out myself. Forget about the discrepancies.
But I want… Actually, I’m not sure what I want anymore. Correct and timely accounting would be good. This waiting eight months then depending on my memory for both of us is unprofessional.
My accounts, done by myself, are printed out and tally with my bank deposits. They are coded either ‘shared’, or ‘personal’. And filed.
I can’t cook without lots of burning smells. I think there’s a connection with my writing, lack of confidence and disappointment in the whole publishing process.
It’s as if the books I spent all Gran’s money on is just a huge free resource for Barbara. She repeat reports her sales, which has me thinking she’s sold double. She doesn’t send statements but suggests she should get on to doing that. I think she continues to make herself go on day after day, one foot after the other, and hope the outcome is near enough. She’s out of her depth and has invested a lot of money in her venture, but it’s relative. So have I.
I think she has misrepresented herself.
I resent her.
It’s mild here. Very soft and balmy again. Blue skies in the morning, which later cloud over. The wind gets a bit brisk before settling. I wake to frost and little birds in my hanging bird feeder.
“Are you happy with your publisher?” This comes from a quiet woman sitting in the library. When people ask how my sales are going, I always say, ‘Great,’ because the alternative is depressing. But are they hoping to hear, ‘Bad’?
My response is quick and even surprises me. “Like all business arrangements, there’s room for improvement.”
There’s a hailstorm. It lasts three minutes. It drowns out the quiet woman’s reply. The sky is floor to ceiling blue again, and it’s crisp from the new snow down the line.
Sometimes, I’m glad when Hunter’s gone off some place. Sometimes, I enjoy being alone. Sometimes, I walk through the house and right into his bedroom. Sometimes, I sleep in his bed…
But not today. He’s mucking around in his room and I have The Eagles on as loud as I can stand. I stretched out on the carpeted floor in the lounge and felt the bass rippling through my body. Through the opaque, pseudo crystal glass pane in the door I can see James hammering. No doubt to complain that the vibrations are upsetting his axolotls’ equilibrium. Or maybe he wants to join me. I ignore him and his nose pressed against the glass. I know he can see me but he doesn’t figure I can also see him. Eventually, he goes away. I get dressed in three layers of Merino thermal undies.
It’s 10am and my car is frozen solid. Who’d have thought? I sit on the cold seat with the heater on full trying to work out which bit of automobile wizardry directs the hot stream of air to the windscreen. After seven minutes it starts to clear, but when I turn the wipers on they smear more melting ice across the windscreen. The wipers are now stuck in place. I go back inside and drop my coat onto a chair.
“Hunter? Oh good. You’re awake.” He mouths something about The Eagles. He’s holding the remote in his hand. “Let’s go for a walk. We need milk.”
“Nope.” He shakes his head. “Too bloody cold.”
“And dog roll, for your dog, Armstrong.” On cue, Armstrong raises his dopey head and woofs. Hunter grunts.
“Go on, Armstrong. Fetch your lead. Walkies with Daddy.” Armstrong obeys no instruction but does stand and starts baying. “Quickly, Hunter. He needs to pee.”
I shove my arms back into my coat and wrap a scarf several times around my neck, pull my beanie down around my ears, angle my fingers inside my gloves, and create a commotion, which I know excites the dog. We head over the crunchy frosted grass into town to buy milk, mince pies, and dog roll. We walk the long way home just to see the cars with their iced-up windscreens; the frost softens their hard lines. It also deadens the sound of traffic. Everything is slick and crusty with frost, and very still. It’s a beautiful sight.
“It’s bloody freezing,” I say, holding my pie in its little paper bag, nibbling at the hot pastry crust.
“Put your other hand in my pocket.”
The walk was as brief as you can imagine. Armstrong did a quick pee, a U turn, and galloped home ahead of us.
“Hot chocolate?” I play mother. “Sugar?”
Hunter says, “Two, please. Ta.”
“That’s not good for you. Let’s make it one.”
I take Hunter a mug of Milo. The sugar is already on the table, so he helps himself. He takes far too much to be healthy, but needs energy food to survive this miserable cold.
I’m a third of the way through re-editing Amanda. That’s my focus. Then I will never, ever read it again. And when it’s loaded as an eBook, I can honestly say I’m a published author. That will help me let go and concentrate on my next book.
Barbara hasn’t loaded the web page Hunter made for her seven months back. He told her to give him a call when she’s ready to load it. He says she needs a good whack on her noggin.
We’re having the most amazing run of frost. Even the square-topped hedges out front are white, white, white. Over-looking the park, it’s as if we live in a snowed-in southern rural district. The frost doesn’t thaw until late morning, so it’s calm and still. I like this weather. I start writing down descriptions. I even go out and stand in it to get the feel of the crispness and temperature.
Armstrong picks his way distastefully over the crisp spikes of grass.
When I’m at the op shop, I buy Hunter another gift—long johns to keep his knees warm, especially since the power cuts out during storms. I would like to have bought khaki camouflage but they have lavender. And he’s gone AWOL again. He just packed his duffle bag and went, taking his IT prowess with him. The lavender long johns sit on his bed neatly folded. I hurl them onto the floor beyond his bed.
So as long as he’s bloody paying, he insists I’ve no right to his private life or whereabouts. With a jolt, I realize I don’t even know his surname. Hunter who? He’s just Hunter.
Though I know he’ll come home, my thoughts drift toward an ankle bracelet.
Another glorious day. Birds are chirping and pooping on my frozen washing.
Barbara again asks me to provide two lists of books she’s sold on my behalf and maybe not noted, all the ones I’d ask her to invoice on my behalf and she’d maybe not done, all the money she’s collected on my behalf but can’t account for, and all the dates appertaining to everything prior to 31st March, and the other list after that.
I force my fists into my eye sockets to stem my perched tears.
I have sent her the same comprehensive lists many times.
James is a lousy substitute for company. He’s as needy as I am. I’ve been hyped for a year because of hopes and dreams, and now it’s down to the hard grind of selling myself. I can do that, but every now and then I can’t. I sit and wait for something, or nothing, and go quietly insane.
When I try to sell a copy of Amanda to a random engineer, he blushes scarlet and mutters that he’s just borrowed his plumber’s copy. I’m chuffed.
When I get chatting with the editor of an outlying district’s newspaper, he just says to organize his favorite coffee bar and he’ll do an editorial. Seems smaller towns are always looking for something different to offer.
Barbara’s not interested in my latest news. She says she’ll get back to me in two days, which was 10 days ago.
I sell books to the women in the mobile breast screening bus, drawn to the kafuffle caused by a power outage. Some poor woman is jammed in that machine, waiting for the electrician to dismantle the jaws of mammogram, blaming the faulty generator that wasn’t on stand-by. I read her bits from my book, to keep her mind occupied.
Hunter’s back. I’m elated though I pretend I hadn’t noticed he’d gone. He doesn’t mention it; just continues on where he left off. He comes out of his room, holding up the lavender long johns, grinning.
“I was telling a couple of my mates about you and Barbara. They cracked up. You have a special gift, Rubes. You make things so damned funny. And that’s the book we want to read. We want you to write it from your heart and totally have fun with the character of the disastrous Barbara. Call it The Book Tour. Dad would’ve said she’s like Edith Bunker as President of the United States.”
I’m speechless. Since when has Hunter thought about me let alone talked about me?
I don’t dare tell him that Barbara concedes she owes me money. Using that as a carrot to entice me, she asked me to prepare two more lists for her—in essence, do her accounting for her?
Our contract stating that she’ll do accounts and invoicing has long gone out the window. A year on and she hasn’t invoiced any bookshops or libraries. Her excuse is she forgets, doesn’t write notes, or keep a diary.
She insists I need this and that to happen or I’ll miss the Christmas sales—I told her that. I should be speaking at libraries and bookshops—organize them. Oh, and just as an on-going bit of—I don’t know what to call it anymore—she reminds me she’ll no longer invoice any books I sell because it’s not worth it to her, financially or timewise. Which doesn’t alter anything because she doesn’t anyway.
Within days, Hunter picks me up from my familiar hunch over my laptop.
“You can do it, Rubes. Heart and emotion. It’s within you. That’s what I want to read from you. And, if you do that, I promise I’ll help you with editing. I’ll do that for you.”
My eyes widen in disbelief. All because of some secondhand lavender long johns?
“If you get back to work,” he qualifies. “And I’ll also format and put your new book up as an eBook.”
Over the next few weeks, Hunter uses the following adjectives: Compulsive, obsessive, grandiosing, self-aggrandizement, self-absorbed, scatty, feckless, (I have to look that one up to see how I present as feckless. In a good way or a bad way?). And all those other telling words that, since I’m an author, I understand.
So I suck his brain dead? The miserable blighter. All his promises…
I walk stolidly into the kitchen.
Feckless, indeed.
While in this slump I dredge up old warning bells. Like: ‘If I didn’t have 2000 books in my garage, I’d publish yours’. Like: I asked what experience she had in editing. Her glib answer was, ‘I edit books for others’. Okay, so where does the comma come when the sentence ends with a closing bracket? Not so hot on foul/fowl or throes/throws or Belinda/Amanda either.
In my sample book cover, she spelt her name wrong, the name of the publisher wrong, and, worse, got her own address and phone number wrong. What was correct was Barbara Banning, Banning Books. Ah, a sad indictment on our future together, yet how many warning bells do I need?
I stalk her. What I find almost stops me breathing. She’s published an eBook called How to be the Best Literary Agent and Publisher.
Chapter Twenty-Two
“My name is Ruby Wright. I am an author,” I say out loud, before shutting my mouth. The voice drifting out of me sounds as if it’s coming from someone else, and my vision is blurring. The weak sun dries up what little blood I have left flowing to my brain.
Armstrong responds with a muffled whuruumph.
“I’m in here,” I then call over my shoulder. “Needy, grasping, desperate me.”
Suddenly, it’s quiet. Hunter comes out from his bedroom holding his cell phone. “I never said—”
“Oh, yes, you did, Hunter. I was listening.”
“Eavesdropping—”
“Listening. And you said—”
He interrupts me. “To be fair, I was saying those things behind your back. On a private phone call.”
“It wasn’t behind my back. I was right here.”
“It was supposed to be. I thought you were out.” His eyebrows are doing a merry dance of indecision. “And I’m not saying it that way, anyway.”
“Aren’t you?”
“Well, maybe just a little bit.” He grins, a stupid expression. Caught out. “So what do you want with me now?”
“A level of common courtesy.”
“And you don’t think that sounds clingy?”
Okay, unchartered waters. Proceed with caution, Ruby.
I know the real issue I’m bottling up is how can I afford to not work longer hours? Even though I am pretty stuffed at the end of each day. There’s been a substantial rent hike for homes in Poitoa, and it’s a stretch. Ah, yes, reality. I consider the outworking of this, and while I’m reluctant to approach the welfare office, I’m sure they will help me out.
Hunter says I’m fun-deficient and then laughs to show me he’s just joking. But he takes it too far, and I’m too sensitive. I round on him.
“Shhh…” he starts, and I cut him off.
“Did you just shhh me?”
“Pardon?”
“Did you just shhh me?” I repeat louder.
