Author Inspiration
Cooper-Brad greets me at the door, his face unreadable.
“Don’t worry,” he says. “All’s quiet on the Western front.”
Ooh, okay, good, breezy, light, a quip, a jibe, a joke. I follow his lead. “Strong literary pull for someone who writes apocalyptic
worms and killer manatees.”
He frowns. “Who says my apocalyptic worms and killer manatees aren’t literary?”
Oops. “Oh, of course, I shouldn’t have... Are they?” I stumble through.
“Nope. Is that a problem?”
“Of course not.”
“Okay. Cool.”
He’s angry, I get it. He thinks I’ve been too self-centered. (And yes, we need the too .) He doesn’t know I’m prepared to release his craft-fair friend or friend-friend. (Release, subject to a not insubstantial
amount of blackmailing.) He doesn’t know what happened at dinner and that I’m back to being BFFs with Blaire and Rosie. (Oh,
just go with it.)
“Listen, Cooper-Brad,” I start. “Cooper. Coop. I realize things have gotten—”
He slips my book out from under his arm. “So, I’ve read enough to see that you’re writing about sacrifice. Which is interesting,
because aren’t we supposed to write what we know?”
Is he actually psychoanalyzing me in the middle of a hostage situation?
“Figure this out, Sofie,” he says. “And quickly. Or I will.”
The blood drains from my face as he storms out. The door slams shut, and I regain my composure as I approach Hartley, whose
brow glistens with sweat.
“More than fashionably late,” she says, clutching the edges of a chair behind a table in the middle of the room. “Slaughter
the cow yourself?”
“No, but from the way you’re sweating, it looks like you did,” I say.
“Amusing, as ever.” She relaxes her grip on the chair, revealing dark circles beneath the underarms of her white tee. The
Bears sweatshirt lies crumpled on the floor beside her. “Except this is what it took for me to get myself here.” She taps
the table and points at the tray I’m holding. “Formal invitation or what?”
I navigate through the tree nut obstacle course to set the bottle of wine on the bar before sliding the steak in front of
her.
She lifts the cloche and inhales the smell. Her eyes slice to the bag of Marcona almonds to her right. “Would you mind...”
Her voice is uncharacteristically meek.
I pocket the almonds, trying to ignore the guilt winding a knot in my stomach. As I begin to clear the nuts closest to her,
her knife scrapes the plate. I quietly move about the space, gathering bags and containers and fans and piling them by the
door. She’d called this a phobia. I didn’t really understand. Or care. I didn’t care.
I circle the speakeasy one final time, checking behind the cardboard cutouts and scanning the bar, making sure I’ve collected everything. I grab the scissors as I go. Four pairs, including the Barbie ones, which judge me for my betrayal of another woman. (Women, technically.) With all the nuts beside the door, as far from Hartley as I can take them without putting them in the hall, I sit across from her.
She eyes me with suspicion. “What is it? Ceiling rigged to drop nuts like confetti if I make a break for it?”
“If only we’d had the luxury of time. And your creativity, Genevieve.”
She stabs a piece of meat. “I figured this was coming.”
“You did?”
“Despite what you may think, I am a writer. Stolen laptop isn’t the most subtle of clues. And I screwed up big-time with that
stupid candle analogy. That’s how you found out, right?”
“Plus, your romance writer’s ID accidentally fell out of your wallet.”
“Which accidentally fell out of my purse?”
“Look at you following.”
We stare intently at each other, until she eventually breaks the connection to dredge her meat in the sauce.
“I endured this,” she says. “But I’m done being caged inside this phobia the size of the Grand Canyon. So whatever you want—the
keynote, me to leave the convention, I’ll do it. Let’s just keep my use of this pen name between us.” She pauses, fork in
midair. “It is between us? Your accomplices...”
“Have no idea. And Cooper-Brad?”
She cocks her head. “The traitor otherwise known as Cooper only knows me as Hartley.”
I try to discern if she’s telling the truth as she lifts the fork and pries the meat off with her teeth. While she chews, I fish the infinity bracelet out of my pocket. I drape it across my wrist beside my bangle and pry open the clasp to fasten it. Hartley thinks her pen name is all I’ve discovered, and yet she’s capitulating, offering me everything I want. An outsized conceding of defeat. Which proves that I’m right about the rest of it. The bracelet slides off my wrist. I try again and again, each time lining up the clasp and each time watching the string of infinities slither away.
Finally I say, “The pen name though, that’s not actually the most titillating piece of the story, is it?”
She continues chewing, but a flash of fear crosses her eyes.
“And the most titillating piece of the story negates all else.” I continue to lose my battle with the bracelet clasp, reinforcing
my preference for bangles (and my need for reading glasses). I let it go and look directly at Hartley. “You wrote Love and Lawlessness .”
Hartley doesn’t look at me as she says, “We’ve been over this. We have to expand our definition of write to incorporate—”
“I know, Genevieve. And the reason I know will give you the ultimate satisfaction.” I swallow past my hubris. “You’re too
good. Or AI isn’t good enough. But the combination means you actually wrote Love and Lawlessness the same way you wrote all the books already published under your real name. Let’s skip to why you would pretend otherwise.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Hartley says.
“Yes, you do.” I surrender to the prowess of the clasp.
Hartley stares at me, and for a moment I doubt myself.
Then she says, “Fuck it.” She pushes her plate to the side and reaches across the table. Instinctually, I jerk back, my plotting mind expecting to see the glint of her steak knife. Instead, Hartley picks up the bracelet and gestures for my arm. I extend it slowly, and she grabs hold of my wrist. She loops the bracelet around and her young eyes allow her to fasten it with ease. “So now what?”
“Now you tell me the truth.”
“About what?”
“I want to know why you lied.”
“Isn’t it obvious?”
“Not to me.”
“Look at where I am.” She scans the room. “Not literally.”
“You couldn’t have known it would lead to this—that readers would embrace you. An author who admits writing a book using AI
is easy prey for cancel culture.”
She shrugs. “I made a bet and won.”
“It’s not that simple.”
“Damn straight.” Hartley stabs the last piece of steak. “I told you earlier: I didn’t do this on a whim. Any of it. Or without
trying the traditional way. I walked that path. I crawled down that path. I dragged my limp, pummeled body down that path.
If I printed the number of query letters I’ve sent to agents, it would deforest the Amazon. For every much to like here and extremely talented writer and gripping premise , there were hundreds of not connecting with the voice and not a fit for me and a thousand no responses.”
Hartley became someone else in order to do this. Not out of shame. She wouldn’t have made herself a co-panelist at Harbor
Books or taken the stage here if she were ashamed. But she wanted this part of her life to be different. She wanted to be
someone else. And I suddenly feel a kinship with Hartley-Genevieve that I never felt with another author before—not Rosie
or Fiona or Grace, not even Lake.
I spin the bracelet around my wrist. “So the system isn’t perfect.”
“The system isn’t a system, it’s a dumpster fire. Great writers get missed because an intern wanted to start their weekend early so they trashed the slush. Mediocre writers get snapped up because high-concept trumps storytelling. How is it remotely fair that to even be considered by an agent or an editor, we have to write the whole goddamn book—two, three, four hundred pages—and they get to decide after reading a single page, maybe five? That opening chapter can never represent the full arc
of a story—and if it did, we’d be called out for being too rushed and heavy-handed. And yet, that’s all we get. Years of our
life dismissed in less time than it takes to cross and uncross your legs. It’s a miracle that anyone makes it in this industry.”
She’s not wrong. But she’s not entirely right. Signing with Blaire showed me just how much agents have to juggle. Author egos
and self-doubt and missed deadlines and fights over covers and sobbing over not getting put on tour or selected for a best-of
list. Agents are thinly veiled therapists. Treating a breed of human arrogant enough to believe that, despite the odds, their
work will rise to the top and yet crippled by a lack of confidence and constant need for validation.
Hartley has only seen one side of it. She can’t see past it yet. “I was there, you know that. Still, I’m not sure what the
alternative is.”
“We can build a spaceship and land on Mars, but we can’t find a way to make this less soul-sucking? This is all before we
even get to publishers and the fight we don’t know we’re in for marketing dollars.” She jiggles her head. “Whatever, okay,
so self-publish. We do it among the hordes whose only actual talent is the ability to click Upload. We do it among the very
talented who have publishing contracts and decide to dabble in the hybrid world for fun . Can I have something? Some. Thing. Please? A chance?”
I think back to my Harbor Books rant and finally understand how the wrong delivery can obscure the right message.
“I had to stand out, somehow,” she says. “So I hitched myself to someone else and gambled that grabbing headlines would help me beat the house.”
“So all of that about needing to be saved... about being lonely... your dead cat—”
“I never owned a cat.” She thrusts her chair back and stands. Her arms hug her chest, and I don’t know how to respond. So
I wait. Eventually, she faces me again. She reaches for the wine bottle I left on the bar, pours two glasses to the rim, and
slings one across the bar top. Drops of wine decorate the bar like polka dots. She settles herself onto a stool and takes
a long sip. “I hate cats. Cats are just lying in wait for the chance to eat your eyeballs. But yeah, my tissues were on a
monthly subscribe-and-save that still wasn’t enough.”
I park myself on a stool two down from her beside the flapper. This doesn’t feel like a toast moment so I simply drink. “Life’s...”
I have no idea how to do this “...not always easy.”
She snorts. And drinks. And snorts.
Christ, do I wish Blaire were here. She would know what to say and how to say it. Earlier, when she said we were friendly
but not friends, I wanted to protest, but she’s right, of course, she’s right. Me thinking I loom as large in Blaire’s life
as she does in mine is delusional. I am one of many, an important one, but still an author, not her partner or child or sister
or mother. Those are relationships built on more than contracts and hand-holding, ones I’ve convinced myself I don’t need.
Blaire’s words now hit me like a slap across the face. For someone who prides herself on a deep understanding of human nature,
I have been profoundly naive when turning that lens on myself. While it’s entirely accurate to say I’ve created a life where
I don’t need anyone else, wanting is another thing entirely.
In the moments when I allow myself to stop caring about not being good enough or funny enough or likable enough, when I admit that I’ve cut everyone off at the knees before they can do the same to me, it’s there. That feeling boxed and stuffed in the far reaches of an attic, covered with dust and infested with mites, supplanted by the characters I write and the fans whose books I sign and the occasional cocktail in a pink chair above a bookstore. It has both been enough and at the same time not enough.
I fight the sting in my eyes, and then, I don’t. My cheeks grow hot like a fresh sunburn and I face Hartley. “Life isn’t easy.
Sometimes you just need a win.”
Hartley’s face goes slack. She then nods, surprise at my words ebbing as the honesty behind them sinks in. “It was my mom.
Is my mom. She’s not dead, though some days death would be preferable for both of us.”
I drink again.
“This is... Well, it is what it is and what it is, well, it’s Parkinson’s. It’s been a while, it’s been something we’ve
known and seen happen over time. At first, it was just her body shutting down, but now...” Hartley taps her head. “She
knows it too. She sees the signs, the dreadfully slow descent into losing herself. I’d give up everything to be able to fast-forward
through it for her. For us both. But as it stands...” Hartley drinks a long pull of her wine.
I do the same.
Hartley watches me and laughs. “You are so uncomfortable.”
“Me? No, I’m fine.” I kick my dangling legs. “I’m used to my feet not touching the ground.”
“That’s not what I meant.”
I fiddle with the stem of my wineglass. “I’m more used to the problems of fictional people.”
“Because people people suck.”
I look at her with surprise, and she shrugs.
“I mean,” she says, “a lot of them do.”
“Especially the ones tricking the world into calling them the next Sofie Wilde .”
We maintain eye contact, each waiting for the other to break. She does. She grins, then pours us both more wine.
“The rest is true, then?” I ask. “You were lonely and sad about your mom, not your cat—understandably.” I get credit for adding
that, right? “And you turned to AI but realized it wasn’t good enough, so you wrote the book yourself?”
She laughs. “I don’t even have an account. I wrote the book originally as me. My mom loves Westerns. Saloons, player pianos,
bandannas, all of it. It was a love letter to her. I was about to publish it when I realized I couldn’t take what she loved
and relegate it to the abyss—again. She deserved more. I wanted us to be able to celebrate at least one of my books being
read by more than a couple hundred people before she couldn’t remember I was a writer. Or her daughter. I read some article
about a writer testing AI and writing the same story in the style of everyone from Ernest Hemingway to Danielle Steele to
Game of Thrones . And that’s when I thought of you.”
I roll my eyes. “I’m flattered.”
“You should be. I said I hitched myself to someone. I should have added to someone I admired .”
That warmth that comes with a fan’s adoration floods me. No need to fill my pockets with rocks, I sink low enough all on my
own.
“I should say I’ve learned my lesson, shouldn’t I?” Hartley says. “Because if someone I admire could be turned into a kidnapper to prove a point doesn’t teach you about right and wrong, what will? The thing is, after being asked to be there for your series celebration and then receiving the call about getting a Times review, my mom and I shared a magnum of champagne and three pizzas.”
The night I got my first review in the New York Times , I took a cab to the beach with a take-out box of sushi and a bottle of vintage Veuve Clicquot. It was February. Lacey made
me keep her on speakerphone so she’d know if I died of frostbite.
Hartley smiles wistfully. “I’ve never seen my mom so drunk or bloated or happy. I’d do it again.”
“But your mom isn’t seeing you succeed. She’s seeing Hartley West.”
“She knows it’s me. We came up with the pen name together.” She trails her finger along the rim of her wineglass. “It was
the only way this could work. If people knew I’d written books before, it undermines the entire story. Besides, debuts are
the unicorns of the publishing world. We love our Cinderella stories. No one prizes years of hard work.”
Entirely true. Even so, I don’t understand how Hartley could relinquish credit. “But no one else knows? Doesn’t that bother
you?”
“Why should it?”
“You queried. You wanted to find an agent and a traditional publisher. You wanted a book deal.”
“Sure, but the name on the cover doesn’t matter. Think about it, Sofie, doesn’t Genevieve Lily sound a little too perfect
for the name of a romance author?”
It is perfect. But it didn’t occur to me with all the Fionas and Lakes and Tara Karas around. “Genevieve” fits right in. “That’s
a pen name too?”
She tips her glass to mine. “Can’t have a preschool teacher writing romance novels.”
I shudder at the thought of being covered in snot and slime and whatever else it is that seems to ooze out of young children with reckless abandon. “So, seriously, that means you’ve never written anything as . . . What’s your real name?”
“Mary. Mary Rogers.”
“Okay, fine, point taken. Still, don’t you want people to know it’s you?”
“People, like who?”
“Everyone,” I say. “I’ve always wanted people to read my books.”
“Obviously, me too. I did all of this to get the chance to reach more readers. It’s what we all want, isn’t it? Our books
in more readers’—”
“Hands,” I say.
“Hearts, is what I was going to say.”
“And all this? The crowds? Going viral?”
“Exactly what I hoped. I told you I planned this. I studied marketing campaigns and book banning and what gets a book trending
online. Saying I used AI is one of a dozen strategies I considered. And when I landed on it, I gamed it out, including setting
up fake accounts to petition for the next Sofie Wilde and Sofie Wilde to meet.”
I can’t help but smile. It’s not just Love and Lawlessness that mimics me. She took a risk, the same way I did by using my own name when the publisher didn’t want me to. By having
Jocelyn choose herself at the end of book one. By killing off Vance. Risks, but not uncalculated ones, same as Hartley. She
recognized the system was broken, gave up fighting against it, and schooled herself in how to use it to her advantage. I didn’t
have social media to manipulate my way to what I wanted, but if the tools she has now were available to me fifteen years ago,
I probably would have done the same. Except there’s no “probably.” I would have.
Rosie and Cooper-Brad are right. I’ve been focused on what Hartley West writing a book using AI means for me. Not other authors. Not other artists. Not the creative community as a whole or the readers and consumers of our work. Riley Moore said that for something to take hold, it requires a tipping point. Perhaps I’ve just reached mine.
Hartley drinks more of her wine. “I chose AI because it was flashy, but also because I was primed for this to work. Being
Genevieve was good training. I’ve always had to shy away from author photos and websites. No one but you and my mom knows
I’m also Genevieve. When I met Coop at that god-awful pilgrim craft fair, I only had books with one name on them: Hartley
West. So now, yes, all this attention means I may no longer be a preschool teacher...” She crosses her fingers. “But I
still get to be Hartley West. I love being Hartley West. But they can call me whatever they want, so long as they read my
books and invite me back. I do want to come back. All the five-star reviews online will never make up for this. The passion
and energy of these fans... you must know how lucky you are. You’re here for them, and they’re here for you.”
A pang in my chest—the energy of my fans is my oxygen. I’ve absorbed it, greedily, without pausing to recognize that it comes
with a responsibility. To give something back. And to want to give something back. At the first panel, Hartley had said something about me not interacting with fans online. I don’t,
because in-person is what fuels me. Me. But not everyone can afford to come to conventions or the bookstores I frequent only because they report their sales to the
list (not all do).
This business isn’t a meritocracy for any of us—authors, agents, editors, bookstore owners—and readers. Machines aren’t the
real threat to art. We are.
“And if it all went away tomorrow?” I say slowly. “If this came out and you were canceled or if no one wanted your next book, what then?”
“I’d up the frequency of my subscribe-and-save. And write more books.”
“To try to hit it with the next one.”
“Yes, but mostly because I will always write. Even if no one reads a word.”
I barely manage a nod.
“Oh, no, truly?” she says. “You’d stop writing? I don’t believe that.”
“What would be the point?”
“The point is you remain who you are. And you are a writer. Nowhere in the definition is the requirement of reader . Or seven-figure advances.”
“But both are nice.”
“I’ll drink to that.”
And she does, the rest of her glass, which she refills along with mine.
“Did you really sign with Max Donner?” I ask.
She gives a wry smile. “Not yet.”
“Don’t,” I say firmly.
“I was hoping I wouldn’t have to. I was going to use him as leverage.” She drains the bottle of wine into our glasses, giving
me the heavier pour. “What would you say about giving me a referral to Blaire?”