“Sorry to make you wait.” My agent sits down across from me. Jen Bradley is middle-aged, fearsome in negotiations, and fantastic with working out plot holes. She’s the second agent I’ve had in my career. After Only Once, I had my pick of literary agents. I chose Jen for her straight-shooting sensibility and her intelligence, which she’s shown in selling my solo manuscript.
“It’s fine,” I say, washing the words down with iced tea. “How are you?”
“Busy,” Jen replies. “How was your tour?”
I have to smile. Straight to the point. I just wrapped a weeklong book tour for my new novel, Refraction. It was a whirlwind of bookstores in Midwestern cities, nondescript hotels, dinners of room-service Caesar salads every freaking night. Hour-long flights between airports named for one president or another, which were the best parts of my day for the refuge I could take in writing on the plane, running wild on this new thriller. “Fewer stops than the last one,” I admit. “Pretty good turnout, though.”
Jen eyes me.
“Okay, mediocre turnout,” I amend. “They did crap marketing, and you know it.”
I was prepared for Refraction to get less promotional support than Only Once. When we sold the book, it was clear my publisher was settling. What they wanted was another Katrina and Nathan book. It was Jen who convinced them this was the next best thing. One-half of the duo whose book sold fifteen million copies and counting wasn’t someone to turn down.
Her mouth flattens. She’s displeased. “First week numbers aren’t what they’d hoped.” She lets the sentence hang in the chatter of the room.
I nod. While I suspected sales numbers were low, I don’t like having my suspicions confirmed. In the pause, I drift from the conversation. I have this problem—at least my ex-wife, Melissa, would say “problem”—where when I’m not immediately engaged in what’s in front of me, my mind returns to whatever I’m writing. Which right now is the critical scene where Sarah confronts her husband. It’s a referendum on their marriage with huge, high-intensity implications, and I’m hungry to put it on the page.
“Will the numbers hurt their offer?” I ask, remembering I haven’t yet sold the book I’m working on now. I submitted the proposal months ago, and we’ve heard nothing since. Jen’s explained the publisher didn’t want to offer until they had sales information on Refraction. Truthfully, I don’t even care what they pay me. It’s not like I need the money. I’ve never needed the money—a trust fund and an Ivy League education took care of that long before Only Once was an idea in the back of my head. Even with the divorce, in which I willingly gave Melissa half of Only Once’s royalties, I still don’t need money.
What I need is to write. I’m not me if I can’t write.
Jen frowns. Her fingers worry her delicate gold watch. She says nothing.
It scares me. “Don’t sugarcoat it now.”
While she hesitates, my mind rehashes the scene I’m working on. It feels less like a reverie now, more like a coping mechanism. Sarah’s in their kitchen, the domesticity of the setting purposeful. She doesn’t need to speak. He knows. He says, They’re going to pass on the proposal.
Wait.
I refocus on Jen. The words I just heard weren’t in my head. They were from her.
They’re going to pass on the proposal.
The weight of it settles on me. They’re rejecting me. I wasn’t rejected from Dartmouth, wasn’t rejected when Katrina and I queried our agent, wasn’t rejected when we sold Connecting Flights or Only Once on proposal. I haven’t been rejected from anything.
No, that’s not true.
It hurts. No matter how much success you’ve had, insecurity is never far from reach when you’re being judged on pieces of your soul. If you won’t kill your darlings, I guess someone else will. There’s no indignation where I expected there to be, only whispers of doubt newly insistent in my head.
I force my next words past them. Wallowing won’t help. “Okay. It’s a setback, but I’ll write something else. What’re they looking for?” This is how I’ll fight those whispers. I’ll write. I have enough ideas in my head to fill my hard drive. It’s not difficult to imagine, if given the time, loving one of them the way I do this one.
“Nathan.” Jen says my name forcefully. It’s her reality-check voice.
“What? I have the 1950s novel I was developing—”