Love and Fiction

Chapter One

In the search bar of her slow-speed web browser, Olivia typed the words ‘How to write a fictional boyfriend’ and pressed enter.

Do the search yourself, and you’ll find a similar, eclectic range of links as she did.

Take this quiz to discover which fictional boyfriend is yours!

Hers was decidedly Draco Malfoy. Olivia was unsure what that said about her choice of men, but after taking the Potterhead quiz and discovering she was a Slytherin herself, it seemed to check out.

The next web search answer was an online news article that was entitled: Are Fictional Boyfriends Giving Us Unrealistic Expectations for Real-life Relationships?

The answer is yes, she thought as she brushed a stray strand of hair back from her face. Yes, they are.

As a romance author, Olivia had written many steamy, brooding male characters in her career, a long list of men whom she had conjured up in her mind – each one of her novels adhering to completely unrealistic expectations for romantic meet-cutes and swoon worthy heroes.

At first, that was the point. To write someone so much more impressive than the boys who she had spent most of her twenties swiping right on.

But long ago were the days when she had dolled herself up and dressed to the nines just to try and actually impress someone. Let alone a man.

No, rather than spending her time attempting to flirt with guys who advertised themselves by holding a dead fish or deer slung over one shoulder, she decided to flirt with something much more interesting: fiction.

Unlike real life, in fiction chivalry was not dead.

Instead, it was thriving, as though the pages were the soil, the ink was its water and the reader its much-needed sunshine.

Romance stories, including Olivia’s soon-to-be fourth novel, were conceptualised with one aim in mind: to give the reader hope that out there, in the city of London and beyond, some of these seemingly unrealistic men did, in fact, exist. As Olivia sat in her literary agent’s spacious office the next morning, fingers nervously picking at her cuticles, she hoped her agent could read between the lines of text and see it.

To say she dreaded these meetings, where they shared how well things were going, would be a royal understatement.

Because this time, it wasn’t going. For what seemed like forever, Olivia had tried, failed, tried and failed again to write any more words.

Since her world came crumbling down, since she lost him, her dazzling hero who taught her how to love madly and freely she hadn’t been able to write a single pick-up line, love scene or intimate moment. She had begun to question if she understood what love is at all.

In her novels she wrote about happily ever after because she thought she knew them, she thought she’d found hers.

Keyword: thought.

“I don’t know them.” Olivia sighed, staring at the landscape oil painting on the grey office wall behind the desk where her agent sat, rifling through the precious pages.

The smooth green lines forming the rolling hills of the English countryside seemed to move together, merging in one big blob of brown and khaki green as she distracted herself by focusing intently on the landscape, anything really, other than the elephant in the room.

Writing her first novel had been easy; the premise of her first bestseller was based on the disappointments from her youth – terrible boyfriends and learning to love herself as a twenty-something female in a world of men.

A romance that held the deeper meaning of what it meant to feel feminine and in control of her dating and love life.

It spent six consecutive weeks at number one on the New York Times Bestseller list. She had published her books as though they were her diary.

Writing broken characters that all had happy endings felt like an emotional release.

To Olivia, it was euphoric. She guessed it was that different kind of success you got when you said fuck you to your ex-boyfriend by writing his name in a bestselling novel.

Karma was sitting on her living room bookshelf in the form of a shiny gold literary award.

Her second book was a cheesy Christmas romance, with mulled wine and fairy lights alongside the exchange of provocative presents and a fake dating trope. It was her second successful work, and she was officially on the radar.

Hearing the fluttering of paper folding, Olivia looked up at her agent with the inside of her cheek firmly bitten between her teeth.

“You’ll get to know them; you don’t have any other choice.

” Hannah Pierce, literary agent, forthright and uncompromising in all her dealings, sat against the corner of her desk, a few pages of Olivia’s latest manuscript open in her hands.

Furrowing her brows, she plonked the papers before Olivia and smacked her ruby lips.

“This is good, but we both know you can do better.”

“It’s complete and utter rubbish,” Olivia blurted, her fingers halting their attack on her cuticles. Crossing her legs, she tried to stop their nervous jiggling. It had been over a year since the accident, and she had found it difficult to pick up a pen and write ever since.

Hannah gave her a sympathetic look, “Look, you’re one of my good friends. I understand you’ve been through a lot in the past year, but there’s a deadline. It is creeping up faster than anticipated, and the head office is starting to breathe down my neck”

“I’ll finish it; I just need to get back into the swing of things.”

“You’ve had three months to get back into the swing of things. I need more than this.” Hannah flicked her manicured fingers towards the measly stack of papers. “At the moment, I’m not sure we can use any of these pages…”

Olivia’s heart deflated. It had taken her months to write those measly twenty-something pages – and she had yet to get to the desired meet-cute. She kept going over it, rewriting it and rewriting it, never happy.

Hannah sighed, looking at her client with a tough love stare. “I’m just wondering where the award-winning, bestselling author we invested in is?”

Olivia struggled to find the words; she couldn’t answer the question because she simply didn’t know. Where had her bestselling writing gone?

Biting her lip, Olivia gnawed on the flesh in the same anxious manner she did whenever the cursor blinked on an empty document. “They normally speak to me, but this time around, I don’t know… I feel like I’m trying to force the characters to come forward.”

Licking her finger, Hannah sifted through a large pile of papers on her desk.

“I’ll never understand this ‘the character speaks to me’ lingo that authors go on about.

It honestly sounds a bit insane to me.” She was fiddling.

Something Olivia knew was Hannah’s small and subtle signal that this meeting was coming to a hard close.

Olivia sighed and glanced down at the watch strapped to her wrist by thin brown leather.

Noting the time, she let her gaze fall forward again, swinging her arm back into her lap with a small thump of leather against linen.

“If characters don’t want to be written, they’re not written.

That’s just how it works. Maybe this female character is supposed to be a nun and live a life of celibacy. ”

Hannah threw her head back and let out a snort laugh. “Three-quarters of your books are purely R-rated sex, Liv. Celibacy isn’t in your vocabulary.”

She was right. The bulk of Olivia’s writing was uncensored, illicit passion between characters. Emotional or otherwise. It’s what got readers interested. Steam is what had helped her market her novels online before she got professionally published. Sex sells. It always had and always will.

Olivia groaned, her blonde curls curtaining her cheeks as she leaned forward, elbows on knees and head laid heavily in her slightly sweaty palms. With the brainstorming hour ending and lacking inspiration, she felt as though this meeting had been utterly useless.

Nothing had changed. She was in the exact same position she had been a month ago.

Rather than forwarding the story with mediocre words – something writers did just to get the story out of their head and down onto paper – Olivia had just edited, again and again, meticulously refining the same chapters over and over.

Correction, something had changed.

Hannah made her way around the desk and sat in the plush leather chair. She seemed to be running out of patience and, Olivia supposed, time.

Leaning forward with her navy skirt bunching around her knees, Olivia snatched the manuscript off the hardwood desk and smoothed over the pages before looking up at Hannah with a determined glint in her eyes.

“I’ll think of something.” She nodded her head as if to convince herself that her inspiration wasn’t completely dead and gone.

Hannah stood from her chair, smoothing her grey pencil skirt down before placing her hands on her hips. “Just, whatever you think of and whoever you think of, do it fast. The deadline is quickly approaching, and we need our leading man. ASAP.” She gave a tight-lipped smile.

Nodding again, Olivia took the silent meeting eviction notice and began to gather her things before giving Hannah a small, unconvincing smile. “August 15th, right?”

Hannah’s eyebrows pulled down low on her face. “Fabian moved it up a few months. Didn’t you get my email?”

Olivia was seventy-five per cent sure that Hannah had not, in fact, emailed her. Realisation sparking, she asked the dreaded question. “How long do I have, then?”

Hannah took the brutally honest approach Olivia held ambiguous feelings for. “You have until the end of June.”

Two months? Her brow brimmed with sweat. Is she insane? Did she have a vendetta against her? Was Ashton Kutcher about to jump out and yell, “Punk’d?”

“June!” Olivia cringed. How was she supposed to sort and dissect all her notes, scribbles and thoughts into a compelling story in as little as two months?

She had the bones, sure, but she needed the meat.

She couldn’t even write steamy sex between two characters who were still strangers to her because she had yet to decide if the characters were dominant and sensual or loving and submissive.

How was she supposed to write a perfect male protagonist when every time she thought of romance, she felt sick to her stomach?

The concept of writing two characters in love was almost alien to her.

If the past year had taught her anything, it was that love was time-sensitive and didn’t last forever.

She had the worst kind of writer’s block a romance author could ever possibly have.

“End of June,” Hannah stated as if adding the emphasis of a whole thirty-day month made it better. News flash, it didn’t.

Olivia shook her head in disbelief, looking out of the floor-to-ceiling windows to her left at the sun slowly setting over the London skyline.

It had been a sunny day for the capital city, and Olivia felt incredibly silly when she remembered about how she had woken thinking the words: Today will be a good day. Oh, boy. How wrong she was.

First, she had knocked her coffee all over the kitchen floor approximately fifteen minutes after that very affirmation, and now she had two months left to work on her fourth official manuscript.

Hannah settled back into her black leather seat and began shuffling some papers. “Look, it’s doable. You just need to hustle down and focus on the deadline.”

Olivia scoffed, gathering her own things and pulling the bag over her shoulder.

“Go people-watching or something,” Hannah continued. “I don’t know. Just go find him, and when you do, don’t call me. Write.”