6
The next morning I woke up late—something that hadn’t happened in years.
Me, the woman who, even while unemployed, kept a work ethic worthy of a Tibetan monk.
Normally I was up with the sun, brewing coffee—the only life coach I could afford—and then parking myself at the desk to hammer out sentences that, in my head, were destined to change the course of literary history.
Morning is golden, they said, and I tried to scrape up every ounce of it with the keys of my typewriter.
It was a strict routine: writing during the sacred hours of morning and early afternoon, then reading—because for me, reading counted as professional training.
I read everything: the good novels, to learn; the bad ones, to understand what not to do.
Basically, my entire day was a nonstop literary workshop… minus the paycheck.
That day, though, I stayed in bed. No alarm, no coffee, no world-changing sentences destined to rewrite contemporary literature.
It wasn’t that I lacked ideas—quite the opposite.
Every time I wrote a novel, ten more popped into my head.
The real problem was actually finishing one before my brain—like an overwhelmed mom with too many kids—forgot which one really needed the attention.
I finally dragged myself out of bed at ten-thirty—a time I’d always associated with retired millionaires and lazy cats—and found Tess perched on the kitchen counter, nose buried in her brand-new gospel: How to Seduce a Doomed Artist.
“What are you doing home from work?” I asked, but she dismissed me with a regal flick of her hand.
I shrugged and turned to my breakfast, silently wondering if the coffee would be strong enough not only to wake up my body, but also my self-esteem.
I collapsed onto the couch with all the grace of a hibernating sloth and decided this would be my natural habitat for the rest of the day.
The TV was on some random channel—a first for me.
Normally, the only shows I allowed myself were a couple of hours at night, and only if the plot was so tightly constructed it made me forget I hadn’t yet written the Great American Novel.
But today? Today I was reclaiming all the laziness I’d denied myself for years.
What a waste, I thought. All that hard work and not a single cent in return.
If I’d poured the same dedication into literally anything else, by now I’d probably be running a Fortune 500 company, competing at the Olympics, or floating around in space in a silver NASA jumpsuit.
Instead, I was here—in pajamas—counting down the days until my financial blackout: three weeks and then goodbye to Mom and Dad’s wire transfers.
And no, I had zero intention of spending those days sending résumés, filling out motivational forms, or pretending to love teamwork.
Those three weeks would be devoted to honoring a decade of repressed laziness.
So I dove headfirst into an uneducational binge-watch of old ’80s TV shows: The A-Team, Magnum P.I.
, MacGyver. A parade of improbable schemes, giant hair, and work ethics that made mine look stellar in comparison.
At some point Tess must have gotten tired of sitting, because she started pacing the room with her nose buried in the book, like a nun on a hardcore spiritual retreat. She read with fierce concentration, as if the Countess’s words were carved into stone.
I watched her, baffled. “Don’t tell me you actually called in sick just to read that ridiculous book?”
Nothing. Not even the usual dismissive hand-wave. She was totally immersed—probably at some crucial chapter, something like Appendix: How to Seduce the Doomed Artist While He Performs Shakespeare Naked Under the Full Moon.
Meanwhile, I was thinking about the Countess…
wh at was her name again? élo?se de la Croix?
Whatever. Sounded like a brand of fancy chocolates.
I wondered if she’d struggled to get published.
How many copies had she even sold in her lifetime?
Probably just enough to land an English translation.
Unless, of course, the whole thing was an elaborate scam cooked up by some shady Cincinnati printer in 1912, who’d spotted the self-help craze and commissioned a ghostwriter—probably a man—who’d never held more than a three-minute conversation with a woman, but knew exactly how to hit her ego by the second paragraph.
Maybe his name was Earl, he wore suspenders, lived with his mother, but could wield the word ardor like no one else.
Every so often Tess would stop dead in her tracks, like the book had just revealed the meaning of life. Her lips moved silently, reading some line that was no doubt “life-changing.” The kind you sigh over, underline with a heart, and later copy into your secret diary in glitter pen.
After my marathon of ’80s TV shows—an experience both formative and utterly pointless—I decided it was time for lunch.
As I sliced tomatoes onto a mountain of lettuce (the kind only I had the nerve to call a “big salad”), Tess relocated to the windowsill, her new reading perch.
She looked like she was in mystical contemplation.
I tried to break through with another one of my brilliant theories: “If you ask me, that book was written by a career con artist. The kind of guy who sells ‘authentic’ Napoleon love letters written in ballpoint pen.”
Nothing. Zero. Not even a glance. Not even a twitch of an eyelid. Tess was lost in that manual as if it were the final fragment of some long-buried secret of the universe.
After lunch, I retreated to my room. Not because I felt inspired—let’s be clear. It was more of a Pavlovian reflex than any genuine desire to write. As if my body, after years of ruthless discipline, simply couldn’t resist sitting down at the typewriter whenever I was within five feet of it.
I sat. Slid a sheet into the roller. And without any expectations, I tried giving shape to one of the thousand ideas I’d stockpiled while working on my misunderstood masterpiece. They were always there, lined up like angry passengers at a bus terminal. And now one of them was finally boarding.
I banged out three paragraphs at lightning speed, like I was trying to outsmart my own brain. Then I stopped. I reread them slowly, the way you open your final report card of the year: with equal parts hope, dread, and nausea.
I tried to figure out if those damned words… well, if they “leapt off the page,” like he’d once said. But I couldn’t tell anymore. I couldn’t feel anything. An d that’s when I realized I was doomed.
It wasn’t just the humiliation of Bronson. It was worse. It was the awareness. The damned awareness. Now I knew there were living words and dead words out there, and every time I sat down to write a sentence, an inner voice would start judging: “Pulsating organ or typographic corpse?”
It was like a tennis player who, instead of hitting a ball coming at 110 miles an hour, suddenly thinks: Wait… better to go 40% biceps and 60% deltoid? Or maybe 30% ulnar, 20% coracobrachialis, and 50% triceps?
Result: ball to the face, career over.
That’s exactly where I was. Whether I tried to write a pathetic little romance or some deep, soul-crushing story of love and death.
Screwed. Totally, gloriously, irreparably screwed.
I dumped the Olivetti into the trash can, right on top of the mountain of crumpled paper. It sank slowly, Titanic-style, swallowed by weeks of failed attempts. Then I collapsed onto the bed, arms spread, staring at the ceiling as if it might reveal the deeper meaning of life. Spoiler: it didn’t.
I stayed there all day. Crawled out of my cave only twice.
The first time was to go to the bathroom—where I found Tess perched on the edge of the bathtub.
Yes, an actual bathtub, the kind nobody has anymore but that she refused to give up “for poetic reasons.” She didn’t even flinch when I sat down across from her to pee.
I mean, the whole thing could’ve been staged as some Scandinavian theater drama, that’s how surreal it felt.
The second time, I found her on the couch, lying upside down with her legs crossed over the backrest and the Countess’s book still clutched in her hands, as if she were absorbing knowledge straight through osmosis.
Both times, I tried a joke.
First attempt: “Zane Ryder, brace yourself… she’s coming for you. She’s gonna scramble your brain and ruin your career. With love.”
Second attempt: “I have a feeling this story’s going to end with a restraining order.”
But Tess didn’t even look up. Not once.
She was completely possessed. By a manual published in 1894. By a French seductress.
And me? I was jealous. Jealous of that damn book.