Chapter 3 Literary Cinderella
Literary Cinderella
The next afternoon Sam was back in her apartment in her yoga pants and T-shirt, her suitcase unpacked, her dry-cleaning bag
so stuffed with red clothes that it bulged as if it contained a body. She sat at her desk in her study, face scrubbed and
hair in its usual side braid, her favorite WRITE LIKE A MOTHERFUCKER mug full of dark roast. Literary Cinderella back from the ball, ready to do what any career writer would: Try try again.
Sam opened her laptop. She said the usual prayer—God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, the wisdom to know
the difference—and set her hands on the keyboard. She typed:
Chapter One: Panning for Gold
There. She was done. Could she be done? If only. Unlike many writers, who loved the Pollock splatter of first drafts, Sam
hated beginnings. She much preferred having written and cleaning it up. She glanced at the wall above her desk, which was
coated with magnetic chalkboard paint. Stuck to it were two things—her favorite quotation, from Winston Churchill: Never give in, never give in, never give in.
And a photo of her adventurous, energetic, lucky/unlucky, and extremely virile ancestor Ole Nielsen.
A man like a blade, thin and stern with the white-blond Norwegian hair Sam had had as a child.
Sitting on his farmhouse porch in Minnesota, surrounded by his multitudinous progeny.
“Hey, Ole,” Sam said. “If you have any inspiration to send me, this would be the time.”
Ole’s gray gaze remained remote. Sam returned to the keyboard.
Ole Nielsen sat up on his haunches in Dead Man’s Creek and rubbed a weary hand over his eyes. His hand shook, and when he
held it in front of his face he saw the missing nails, the dirt ingrained in the fortune teller’s lines. Protruding as it
was from a wrist scrawny with starvation, his hand which for the last several months had held a panning pan
Sam backed up and tried again:
It was early morning in the California hills above Dead Man’s Creek, and when Ole Nielsen emerged from his __tent?__ the sun
had just cracked like an egg yolk over the mountaintops
Well, this was terrible. Sam got up and went into the kitchen to warm her coffee in the microwave. It was fine. Everything
was fine. Sam was just out of shape. She never wrote when she was on tour. She’d been at conferences with other authors who
did, including one super-successful historical fiction writer Sam had affectionately nicknamed The General because she got
up at 5:00 a.m. daily to run sprints in their hotel staircases, then banged out a thousand words before they went onstage.
When Sam was on tour, she conserved her energy for her audiences.
The big Nordic man standing askance in the frigid waters of Dead Man’s Creek had ceased days ago to even feel his gangrenous
feet
Ole Nielsen hadn’t come all the way from Norway to Ellis Island to ___another ship___ down the __Mississippi?___ via steamer? Paddle boat? Canoe? JETSKI
“Jesus,” Sam muttered. But this, too, was part of the problem. Sam was not a Mad Libs writer, getting the story down first and filling in historical details later. She usually did at least six months of research
before she wrote a word, so she could climb into her characters’ skins as if they were virtual reality suits and replicate
their lives for her readers. Her tour had not allowed her much time to do this.
Sam opened her browser to look up Norwegians in Gold Rush and got tractor-beamed in by her email, which she had been deliberately ignoring, in particular a message from her agent
Mireille with the header: I HAVE BEEN CALLING YOU! PLEASE READ THIS!
From: Mireille Levenge
To: Sam Vetiver
Date: August 1
Time: 9:30 p.m.
Chère Sam,
Félicitations on the Sodbuster tour! You are a road warrior par excellence.
I have tried to call you several times and it went straight to voicemail, so I am sure you are writing. ;) Bien. I hope this is true! Once you have taken a breath, I would like to hop on the phone to discuss where you are with Gold Digger’s Mistress.
I was calling to tell you I reached out to your editor Patricia yesterday to see if I could get your first-month numbers for
Sodbuster. Sam, there is not an easy way to say this, so I will tell it to you straight: they are not as we had hoped. (See attachment.)
Bien sur, this is not your or the book’s fault. Sales are soft industry-wide, and it is never easy to launch in summer. Add to this
recent consolidations at every publishing house, and you have un peu a perfect storm.
I do not think this will necessarily affect you, given your track record.
After all, you are “The Little Author Who Could.” Still, we must be prepared that Hercules House may tighten its belt, and toward that end, I want us to put all our energy on this next book.
Vraiment, let us make Gold Digger a blockbuster!
Do you have pages I might show Patricia? She asked for them. It would help convince her and the Hercules team that you are
producing and will hit your deadline, and that will help your standing in the house.
Call moi if you want to discuss. Bisous, my favorite author,
Mireille. XOXO
“Oh holy hell,” Sam said, and slammed her laptop closed.
She did what any self-respecting writer would do: took her coffee to the bar in her living room and poured in a hefty slug
of bourbon. Then she paced her apartment with it. Sam’s beautiful first-floor condo in a historic Back Bay brownstone, a place
she never should have been able to afford even with book sales and the occasional royalty—and honestly, she barely could.
The only reason Sam had this place was that when she left Hank and returned to Boston, she’d wandered past this building and
seen the Open House sign, and when she told the previous owner, a nonagenarian frowning at the hedge fund bros swarming the rooms, what she did
for a living, the woman had thumped her walker and declared, “This property is now sold to the writer. She needs the bookshelves.”
That had been that. Therefore Sam was in possession of eighteen-foot bookshelves, a marble fireplace she could stand up in—and,
even with the special writers’ discount, a very hefty mortgage.
She’d heard the rumors, of course. All summer, like thunder over the horizon, distant but getting closer. Of editors being
fired, authors let go, contracts canceled. Shifts in the industry. This was hardly anything new: Sam had seen several such reorganizations in her twenty-five years as a professional author,
the publishing mobile spinning and flinging people off into the abyss before settling uneasily into a new position. In the
early 2000s Sam’s own editor, who’d bravely taken a chance on Sam’s blockbuster debut, had been let go. Sam had hustled all
the harder, earning the New York Times moniker Mireille had cited, The Little Author Who Could: Visiting eight hundred book clubs with her first novel had apparently catapulted her onto the bestseller list and changed literary marketing ever after.
Yet Sam was in no way immune now to being cut loose. If she missed her deadline for Gold Digger, if the novel was bad, if its sales were soft, she could easily become a literary footnote. Only the biggest-name authors, the ones who could sneeze into
a napkin and publish it and make the list every single time, could afford not to worry.
Sam carried her laced coffee back into her study, past the hallway gallery of her framed book covers. On her desk were three
things: an unlined notebook, a mason jar of disposable fountain pens, and a photo of her dad, Ethan. It was one of the few
Sam had; a sad thing about parents who’d died was you could never get new images of them. In this 1970s Polaroid, Ethan was
in the studio where he’d been a children’s television writer. He was so young he didn’t have a beard yet, although his sideburns
were impressive. He was sitting at his typewriter, the Corona Sam still had in its mustard-colored tweed case, and smiling,
a fuzzy puppet peering over his shoulder. His turtleneck had horizontal stripes. Sam had often wondered whether someone had
just said something to make him laugh or if he was just happy.
Sam had never wanted to be anything but a writer like her dad. Her earliest memory was jumping up and down in a bouncy chair
to the sound of Ethan’s typewriter. She remembered the Sunday morning she’d left Hank snoring in their musty, vodka-smelling
bedroom and driven to the market in her pajamas. How she got the New York Times and took it to the park, then sat on a bench with it and opened it to see her name and her book’s title on that all-hallowed
list. She was by herself, but she was not alone. She’d looked up at the sun filtering through the little green leaves and
said, Dad, this one’s for you.
Sam reopened her laptop, closed Mireille’s email, and typed:
Ole Nielsen hadn’t come all the way from Norway to Ellis Island to ___another ship___ that sailed south around Cape Horn, through the world’s most perilous seas in the Drake Passage, up to San Francisco—where he found himself coughed up on shore like___a thing coughed up on shore__, only to stand in this creek for months on end and come up with NOTHING OF WORTH AT ALL KIND OF LIKE WRITING THIS FUCKING BOOK
Ole Nielsen was finishing the last of his whiskey for breakfast when he first saw the one-legged prostitute crutching swiftly
along the board sidewalk in front of the saloon
Young Norseman Ole Nielsen had never known a woman could have hair under her arms until he first made the acquaintance of
Dead Man Creek’s one-legged prostitute
Ole Nielsen was drinking postcoital corn whiskey with the one-legged prostitute when he saw the GIANT FUCKING TIDAL WAVE COME
OVER THE MOUNTAIN AND WASH EVERYTHING AWAY MY LIFE IS OVER JUST KILL ME NOW THE END
Sam put her head in her hands. “What the actual,” she said. One-legged prostitute? It was time to step away from the desk.
It was counterintuitive, but experience had taught Sam it was useless to keep pushing at this point. She needed oxygen, a
shower, food.
She responded to Mireille, asking for a call later. Then, as she was closing out of her email, click!, a new one slid into the queue. It was from a sender named William Corwyn—why did that name sound familiar?—and the header
said, Admirations! The first lines read:
My dear, we don’t know each other, but I know of you, and in case nobody has ever told you: You write like a ninja.
Whaaa? thought Sam. Whoever William Corwyn was, she felt fairly certain he should not be using the term ninja.
Then she remembered: He was an author, published by her own house, and ridiculously successful.
If he wasn’t one of the .001 percent who didn’t need to worry about being canceled, then he was on the next rung.
She googled William Corwyn, and sure enough, he was who she thought he was. His author photo showed a white man of silver-foxy
age, with dark hair and little glasses, speaking into a mic. “You definitely should not say ‘ninja,’ buddy,” muttered Sam,
“in case nobody told you.” She knew she should get up and leave. She needed self-care and focus.
Instead, she clicked on William Corwyn’s message and read the whole thing.