Chapter Eight
Catarina looks apologetic as she hands me a cup of tea the following week.
“I’m glad I caught you,” she says. “We need to chat.”
I reach for a sugar packet.
“Oh god,” I say. “I’m fired, aren’t I?”
It’s mostly a joke. Sometime toward the end of last week we hit our stride.
The plan is to front-load a lot of “low performance” material so that I can get used to my Arabella voice. Since I do the bulk of the narration outside of dialogue, it’s a lot of reading aloud but not so much interacting with other characters on the page—er, mic—yet.
I get to keep my youthful, smooth narrator voice and only worry about my diction, my enunciation, and the way my fingers are still prone to bleeding after a day of snapping to start and restart over and over again. No problem. I could practically do it in my sleep.
Ha.
“You’re not fired,” Catarina says with a laugh. “It’s just…” She sighs. “The social media aspect.”
“Oh,” I say. “That.”
That has been a point of minor fixation for me. With a total of three videos and the introductory live under our belt, you would think our follower counts would have grown by leaps and bounds by content increase alone, but you’d think wrong.
The first video, much like the live, was a disaster.
Even with a loose script for James with easy talking points like how I relate to William and how my acting experience improves my vocal performance, he was taciturn and remote.
No off-the-cuff comments, not even when I tried to pitch him lowball quips that I know he would have hit out of the park if the cameras were off.
After filming our third video, James hadn’t even stayed in the park long enough to glance at the mountains. He didn’t so much as smile when I offered to check him for ticks.
“I have a phone call,” was all he said, and then I was alone with nothing but the tripod for company.
I sat in the park for a long time after that, looking at the mountains for the both of us and texting Serena a new list:
Priority #1 Survive this project.
Priority #2 Search for jobs outside of NYC that don’t require I have money from this project to accomplish because oh my god James isn’t going to cooperate long enough for me to get this thing off the ground.
I didn’t mention to Serena how hurt it made me feel, because my own emotions concerning James Neely were not important to the priority list. They shouldn’t exist at all, and yet his occasional waves of attention—getting me shirts and coffee, leaving pertinent quotes pinned to my window, and looking at me in that way of his—against the backdrop of his indifference unsettled me more than I cared to admit.
As of this morning, we had only gained two hundred new followers on TikTok since the initial following when the account first opened. Two. Hundred. And I’m confident half of them are scam bots.
Catarina’s expression mirrors my distress.
“Well,” she says, “I think everyone was hoping the announcement would make more of a splash, and it just hasn’t. The views are significantly lower than expected, and the engagement seems tobe…”
She trails off, reluctant.
“Seems to be what?”
Catarina takes a stalling sip of coffee.
“Well…not very flattering. Have you not read the comments? The discourse ?”
I had at first. In the couple hours after we posted the introduction video, I found myself growing obsessed with the slow crawl of likes and comments, so I did what I used to do in my early podcast days: Pretend the people don’t exist. All you can do is put your thing out into the world; how listeners react to it is a “them” problem, not a “Juniper Green” problem.
A healthy perspective I only managed about half the time.
On the one hand, having people hate you and your content means someone is listening.
On the other, my people-pleasing brain becomes incapable of rational thought at a disturbingly low level of stress and can only comprehend that yes, I am a trash human with an annoying voice and who do I think I am starting a podcast and working on a project as beloved as The Meadow anyway?
“Not really,” I say. “Maybe I should, but my mental health is held together by cotton swabs when it comes to criticism, so I try to steer clear.”
“Good,” she says. “That you haven’t delved too deeply. I recommend you keep it that way. There are people that seem to be excited at the prospect of following along, but…”
If I have to prompt her into bluntness one more time I’m going to lose my mind.
“But what ?”
She levels a look at me, and her lips are pursed again. Very. Pursed.
“I’m not sure if I should say, given your…what was it? Q-tip health?”
“Better I hear it from you than from obsessively looking at comments at two a.m. ,” I say.
This time, instead of sipping the coffee, Catarina goes to the Keurig station to pour more creamer into her mug, so her back is to me when she says, “The consensus from the higher-ups is that there is a lack of chemistry between you and James that is…perhaps hindering your efforts to connect. With your audience.”
I set down my tea more forcefully than I intended.
“There’s not a science lab in the world that could fix that problem,” I say. “Unless they have vats of an alien substance that gives super charisma instead of strength. In which case, by all means, show me where to dunk him.”
Catarina laughs, but it’s hollow. “He’s not that bad.”
“No,” I say begrudgingly, and my anxiety makes me blunt.
“Not in person, he’s not. But put a camera in front of him and suddenly he’s more guarded than Area Fifty-One.
What am I supposed to do?” I almost upset the tea by gesturing too widely but manage to avoid it at the last second.
“He doesn’t work well with a script. He doesn’t work well without a script.
I’d pay good money to talk to the director of Disassembled because how he got that boy to do a darn thing with a camera pointed at him is beyond me. ”
“All the same,” Catarina says, “I would talk to him. See if you two can’t work something out. The producers…well, let’s just say they really want to see more interest. If there’s not enough…”
There are more pauses in this last bit than holes in Swiss cheese.
“Then what?” I ask. “We don’t get the bonus if we don’t meet the parameters, obviously, but is there something else?”
“There’s…chatter,” Catarina tries again. “That the project might be scrapped or seriously scaled back if public interest doesn’t kick in soon. And one of the best barometers of that, of course, is the project’s reach on social media.”
“But we’re already contracted,” I argue. “The social media was supposed to be optional. How can they scrap the whole project if they still have to pay us our salaries?”
Catarina shrugs. “This isn’t a common undertaking. Full-scale audio productions with directorial assistance of this many novels at once is an unheard-of endeavor all on its own. Most audiobooks are recorded in the home studios of freelancers now.”
Which I vaguely knew from my research, but had I known just how big a deal this job would turn out to be…
“Add in original music, a full cast with name recognition behind it, and you’ve got an ungodly amount of money being spent in a traditionally difficult industry,” Catarina continues.
She takes another slug of coffee.
“There’s a lot of money that will still go into it when your recordings are out of our hands.
Since you and James are the only two in the same studio, there have to be post-engineers instead of the in-studio punch-and-roll engineers who edit out mistakes and retakes as we go.
Then there are the sound mixers who will decide where and at what volume the original score will play.
If interest is so dismal, the producers might walk back some of that postproduction and aim at making it more of a novelty product than one with a wide reach.
Or they might call your salaries a loss and scrap the whole thing. ”
“Do you really think they’d do that?” I ask.
Catarina goes to take another sip of coffee, realizes she’s already out, and sets the mug on the counter beside her.
“There’s no biz like book biz,” she says. And I think she means to be funny, but instead she just sounds sad. “This wouldn’t be the first project I’ve been burned on, but it would be the biggest.”
“You get paid no matter what, right?” I ask.
Her pained expression is enough of an answer.
“Expenses paid and a base salary,” she says. “But the bulk of my contract is received upon publication of the audiobooks.”
Oh god.
That part of my brain that spins stories is now imagining Catarina’s daughter—who in my head is Misha’s age with impossible Disney-Princess-proportioned eyes—crying beside a Foreclosed sign with a teddy bear dangling from her hand.
“We should’ve said no,” I say. “Oh my god, why didn’t anyone tell us this? I would have said no. It’s too much pressure.”
“It’s not your fault,” Catarina says. “It wasn’t explicitly stated in the base contract or the addendum with the social media bonus.
It’s just how things work in the business world.
To the publisher and producers, this is just a product.
They’re not going to put buckets of money behind something they’re worried won’t sell. ”
“So everyone just assumed this would be a buckets-of-money profit situation until James and I filmed ourselves for TikTok and YouTube and Reels and wherever else and tanked it.” I’m starting to sound hysterical.
“We killed it. This project was a goose meant to lay golden eggs and we just roasted it. No, burned it. We’re going to be solely responsible for taking down the next leg of the Meadow empire. ”
“Juniper, breathe,” Catarina urges. “I don’t say any of this to upset you, truly. I just think it only fair that I keep you informed of what I’m hearing.”