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‘That’s not a hook,’ Kitty said.
‘Okay.’ I had another try. ‘The hook is how love turns to heartache.’
‘Yes. Heartache. That’s what the problem is. It’s the storyline.’
‘Eh? What’s wrong with it?’
‘Frankly, it’s depressing. The last few days I’ve had this dark shadow over me and’ – she hoisted my typescript up as evidence – ‘it’s this book. It’s bleak.’
Couldn’t argue with that. ‘Well’ – I shrugged – ‘that’s the story. It’s about the break-up. It broke my heart.’ I was starting to feel nervous. No one likes criticism. ‘That’s why it’s bleak.’
‘It’s not just bleak; it’s bitter.’
‘Yeah. That’s what I was trying to get across.’
Kitty sighed and changed position. She studied the neat tan shoe dangling on her toes and looked up again. ‘Lana, no one wants to sit down with a book that makes them feel bitter. Bitterness is not appealing,’ she said. ‘What’s happening with your blog?’
‘I was getting so much hate mail I stopped posting.’
‘You see? Sad; now that’s something else. Sad, you can get away with, at a push. So, maybe you could have your hero die of something?’
‘Yes, I could do that!’ I leant forward eagerly. ‘Trust me, I’ve imagined it – Mark Bridges is hanging off a cliff and I could save him, but I don’t, and at the funeral, although I’m wearing black, I’m ecstatic that he’s been smashed to a bloody pulp on the jagged rocks.’
Kitty screwed her nose up. ‘No, that’s a different genre altogether. Look – think of your first book. Writer falls for photo-journalist. You’ve got lots of conflict but plenty of pay-off, too – and that ending, with Lauren and Marco moving in together, and that last line …’ Kitty pinched her fingers together, waving the words at me like a tiny banner. ‘“… Their adventure wasn’t over. It was just about to begin.”’
Woah, was I wrong about that.
‘You’ve already given us the happy ending,’ Kitty said, ‘and the sequel should go on from there. It should be about their continuing adventures. Forget about the fact Mark Bridges abandoned you for a Swedish girl—’
‘Helga,’ I said gloomily; her name hurt like a curse.
‘Whatever – that’s between you and him. Leave real life out of it. We’re talking fiction here. This isn’t about you and Mark Bridges, it’s about Lauren and Marco, the couple your readers love. We want the adventure, the lifestyle, the feel-good factor.’
‘Feel-good factor?’
‘So let’s talk about what happens next. Maybe Lauren and Marco start a family,’ she suggested.
I looked at her in dismay. ‘You want me to write about having a fictitious baby?’
‘That’s it! Remember, your book is about living the dream. No one wants to read about how it all went wrong and you didn’t get out of bed for a month – they can look to their own lives for that sort of thing.’
I stared at her bleakly. What kind of insanity would that be, writing as if Mark and I were still together, in love, and then switching off the PC and coming back to the desperate hideousness of reality? I couldn’t do it. The whole idea made me ill.
I gripped the chair tightly. ‘Kitty, could you just tell me, before we start thinking about new ideas, is there anything at all about this book that you do like? Apart from the paper?’
She thought about it for a few moments, obviously troubled by her own integrity. Personally, I don’t mind a lie if it’s told in a good cause.
‘The problem is, it’s too real,’ she said at last.
‘But the first book was real!’
‘Broadly speaking, yes; but you fictionalised it, you made a romance of it, whereas this one’ – she laid her palms on it – ‘to be honest, it reads like a misery memoir. Lana, I want you to see this’ – she spanked the typescript with the flat of her hand – ‘as a catharsis, a healing process, a way of getting all your angst out of your system.’
‘But – you don’t like any of it? There’s nothing I can keep?’
Kitty sighed – the only thing worse than receiving bad news was giving bad news. ‘Okay. Forget about writing a sequel. Put this book behind you and start again with something new. Start afresh. Invent a hero. You’re a writer. Be creative! Find that little spark of hope!’
I tried. I looked inside my head for a spark of hope. It was very dark in there. There was no glimmer of light at all. Opening my eyes, I said in desperation, ‘I don’t know where I’m supposed to get that from when there isn’t any. I’m not sure I even believe in love any more. What if it’s all a myth?’
I expected her to get panicky right along with me, but she stayed calm.
‘We need to think about your publishers, you know,’ she said gently. ‘Anthea feels that Heartbreak is not suitable for your established readership. Those are her exact words.’
Ohhhhh.
Don’t ask me why I hadn’t considered this before. I’d got the idea the publishers were buying my writing, when actually they were buying the romance. I hadn’t realised that until now.
To be fair, Kitty had asked me at regular intervals to show her the sequel, but had I? Nooooo. Had I even given her a synopsis? Nooooo.
Why not? Well – I was convinced she would love it: the Dream turns into a Nightmare. It was real. I honestly thought Kitty would be moved to tears; I didn’t expect to make her depressed.
I burned with shame. Second novels are notoriously difficult to write. Kitty was strumming the rubber bands binding my four hundred sheets of good quality paper together while she waited for me to work it out for myself.
‘Okay,’ I said. ‘What are my options?’
‘Either you can start again …’
‘Or?’
‘You can pay back the advance.’
‘Or?’ I prompted in a panic, because I was broke and the promise of a payment was one of the major factors why today had started off perfect.
Kitty raised her eyebrows and shrugged. On the or front, that was it.
Generally, you have to be thin-skinned to be a writer, so you can be insightful and all that, but you have to be thick-skinned too, because no one in the history of the written word has ever written anything that everyone likes.
Still; rejection does put you off, even if you’re trying to be philosophical about it.
The truth is, I like being a writer. I don’t like the actual writing, which is hard work, but the rest of it – lunches, interviews, festivals – is great fun and I recommend it.
I looked around. On the shelves were books with bright covers. By the law of averages, some of them had to be bad – trust me, plenty of bad books get published. And how depressing was this – mine was too bad even by those standards.
I imagined startingon a new book. In the right genre. A contemporary romantic novel.
I pushed myself out of the low chair and walked right up to the glass window, pretending to walk off the edge, which is what I felt like doing. Pressed up against the pane, I couldn’t go any further and neither could my thoughts. Way down below, a man was looking up at the building. I could see his face, his shoulders and his feet. What could he see? A blonde-haired doll standing in the doll’s house?
Hope flared – I could write about him! – and faded.
Once upon a time I had looked at all men with interest; and then I found Mark and I stopped looking. The end.
My breath clouded the window and I was just about to wipe it with my hand when Kitty said, ‘Don’t do that! It’s just been cleaned.’ She glanced at her watch. ‘I have a lunch at one.’
I hugged myself in panic at being dismissed. ‘What do I do now? I need the “on delivery” money. I’ve got an overdraft. I’ve got bills to pay!’
Kitty brightened. ‘Good! That’s your incentive! Now we’ve got something to work with. Let’s forget about paying back the advance for the moment,’ she said briskly. ‘We’ll extend the deadline. You come up with a new story and we’ll talk it over. Love, and it goes wrong, but they get back together, happy ending. Find the characters, the emotions, the dialogue and we can stick a plot in later.’ She smiled. ‘Okay?’
I’m very susceptible to suggestion, so I nodded back. ‘Okay.’
She stood up and I realised we were done.
‘I’ll give you the typescript back,’ she said. ‘You can recycle the paper.’
She gave me a Tesco carrier bag to take it away in.
When I left her apartment I had a day-drinking feeling of light-headedness.
My book on rejection had been rejected.
CHAPTER TWO (#u07c610c3-1ee4-57b4-9b96-e7f702aedbc4)
Heroic Attributes (#u07c610c3-1ee4-57b4-9b96-e7f702aedbc4)
Heading towards Camden Town, I decided to avoid the markets and the tourists by calling in the York and Albany for a drink. If you feel drunk and you drink, it makes you feel less drunk, like homeopathy. But I realised it was exactly the kind of place that Kitty might be going to for lunch. A bit further on, just off Delancey Street, is the Edinboro Castle, a place she would never set foot in, so I walked on and went into the bar, swinging my heavy Tesco bag. It was so dark it was like being momentarily blinded.
I took my wine out into the glare of the beer garden and sat at a table all to myself under a silver birch where I could think up a plan with no distractions.
A shadow fell over me. ‘Is this seat taken?’
‘Yes,’ I said automatically. Looking up, I saw a guy wearing a bright orange Nike sweatshirt and faded jeans. He had messy dark hair but, despite being unshaven, he had a friendly, open face with straight dark eyebrows and clear grey eyes. Realising I was being ‘difficult’, as my parents liked to put it, I quickly apologised. ‘Sorry, that was rude.’ Suddenly, having company wasn’t such a bad idea, even if it was with a stranger. ‘No. Help yourself.’
‘Cheers.’ He smiled, sat down and put his lager in front of him.
His smile looked like the smile of a man who has had an easy life, which is a good foundation for a warm character. People who have an easy life assume the best and tend to be generous and optimistic – I haven’t googled this or anything; it’s just my opinion, based on experience.
On the downside, I do remember reading that optimistic people die younger because when they’re ill they take it for granted it’s something trivial. But it’s not as if the optimistic people I knew were dying in droves, so it wasn’t much of a negative, currently.
As I was pondering on these facts about him, which I later discovered I’d got completely wrong, the sun slid out of the shadow of the pub and shone through my wine glass, throwing a radioactive reflection onto the wooden table. A phone rang.
We both sprang to life and patted ourselves down, but it wasn’t mine, it was his.
‘Jack Buchanan,’ he said. And then he frowned. ‘What?’
I heard the disappointment in his voice.
He listened for a few moments and then said, ‘I don’t understand. Embroidery scissors? What are they? How big are they? Well – okay, so she bit him, but what did he do to her? Yeah, well – how hard could she bite? She hasn’t even got a full set of teeth,’ he said with increasing indignation. ‘I don’t see how biting him makes her vulnerable. It’s the bar manager who’s vulnerable. Why don’t you put him in a home?’ He listened a bit longer and then said gloomily, ‘Thursday. At two.’ He ended the call and shook his head. All the happiness had gone out of him and he looked weary and troubled.
If you’re going through a bad time and you’re with someone who is happy, it makes you feel ten times worse. Conversely, if you’re going through a bad time and you’re with someone who is also struggling, things start to look a lot brighter.
‘Dog trouble?’ I asked.
He looked at me blankly. ‘What?’ His eyes were grey and distant. Then he saw where I was coming from, and said, ‘No. It’s my stepmother, actually.’
I’d been trying to work out where the embroidery scissors came into it, and it made more sense now. A warm and friendly feeling came over me, the sort you get when you see a man on his own with a baby. I hadn’t realised you could get the same effect with stepmothers, but there we are – my mission as a writer is to observe and report; something I learned from my journalism days.
‘She bit someone? I couldn’t help hearing.’
‘She’s been going to that bar for years,’ he said bitterly. ‘Now social services have got involved. You know what that means.’
‘Yes, I do,’ I said. Our two problems were very different, but who had the worse one? He had a feral relative and I had a whole novel to write. Just at that moment, a yellow birch leaf dropped into my wine glass. It didn’t exactly tip the scales but I did start feeling got at.
Jack Buchanan watched me fish it out. ‘Can I get you another one?’ he asked as I flicked it under the table.
‘Thanks!’ But like a warning vision I saw the whole week speeding by. ‘Better not, though. I’ve got to write a book. Well, an outline. I know Stephen King did all his best work while he was drinking but it doesn’t really work for me – it comes out gibberish, or sentimental.’
‘You write books? Who are you?’
‘Lana Green,’ I said.
‘Ah …’ he responded. He rubbed the stubble on his chin. ‘Sorry.’
‘That’s all right. You’re not my target market.’
‘So what’s your book going to be about?’ he asked.
‘It’s got to be a romantic novel. Love, and it goes wrong, they get back together, happy ending.’
He laughed. ‘Well, that seems easy enough.’
‘Yeah, it’s not.’
‘Subdivide it into where, why, what and how.’
‘It’s not as simple as that.’
‘No, I suppose it isn’t,’ he reflected. ‘Otherwise everybody would be doing it.’
‘Don’t get me started on that,’ I said, ‘because it seems as if everybody is doing it. Comedians write children’s books, models write romances, chat-show hosts write drama – it’s really annoying. How would they like it if I started doing stand-up, or hosted a chat show, or got famous for my boob jobs? People should stick to one occupation per person. On principle, I don’t buy any fiction written by people who are famous in other fields.’
Jack Buchanan laughed; it suited him. He had a face that was made for happiness. ‘My stepmother does a bit of writing.’
Incredible. ‘See what I mean?’ I looked at my watch. Half the day had gone already and I had work to do. ‘I’d better go. I’ve got to find myself a hero.’
‘And I’ve got to go back and do some firefighting.’
That was interesting. ‘You’re a firefighter?’
‘Metaphorically speaking. I have an IT company. Tell you what, you can write about me, if you like,’ he said helpfully.
