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Slowly, I nodded. “Gonna try. I have a call with my agent soon, but I’ll head to the coffee shop after that if you don’t mind me borrowing your car.”
She sighed. “Fine. I shouldn’t need it today.” My mom paused, the knuckles on her dainty hands white from how tightly she was gripping the mixing spoon in her hand. “Your dad told me they still need help at the mill. Wouldn’t be much—cleaning up and such, some light office work, but it’s honest, hard work.”
I swallowed down the immediate response that my job was honest, hard work too, because I knew she meant well. They’d always meant well. But my parents had an incredibly different idea of what providing for your family meant. With the benefit of time, I realized how hard it must have been for them when my sister and I were young, living paycheck to paycheck with no extra. Theirs was a stress that I came to understand when I was down to my last few months in New York and rent became a bit harder to pay with royalties that were drying up.
“Thanks, Mom,” I told her. “If I can’t get something started in the next month, I’ll … I’ll talk to them.”
No doubt about it, Mom was chewing on some words, based on the tightness in her jaw, but she left them unsaid.
My agent, however, did not have the same compunction.
“You need something, Harlow.”
I groaned. “I know, I know. I’ve tried, and I’m just”—I paused, mimicking a brain explosion next to my temple—”empty.”
Through my phone, she sighed, sounding incredibly put out. Why was she so stressed? I was the one who needed to write the fucking book.
“What about that female serial killer idea you had? You could easily get a four- or five-book series out of that. A little cat-and-mouse game with a hard-jawed, silver-fox detective.” She made an encouraging little noise that made me want to punch something. “You were so excited about that last year.”
“Past me was excited about a lot of things, Cora. She was delusional.” I flopped back on my childhood bed, the frame squeaking like it did when I was in middle school. There was something weirdly comforting about that. Except for when it happened in the middle of the night because my daughter liked to starfish in bed and whack me in the face with her arm. “I tried to start it, and nothing. Even the idea that she was only killing men who deserved it couldn’t get me going.”
“That’s pretty serious.”
“No shit. What have you heard from my publisher? I don’t know if I dare reach out and ask for another extension.”
“They’re not the happiest. You were lucky, kid. They loved your first two series enough that they didn’t need more than a whisp of an idea for your contract, but if your brain doesn’t kick it in, they might ask for that advance back.” In the background, I heard the tap-tapping of her keyboard. She said it so casually. They might ask for that advance back. Like that didn’t make me want to curl up and cry. “I’ll shoot him an email, but I think their patience is close to running out.”
Using the back of my hand, I gently tapped my forehead like it would knock loose some earth-shattering, bestselling idea. Unfortunately for me, that was not the way it worked. I would’ve hooked myself up to a lightning rod if I thought it would help.
“You talk to that writing coach Paloma told you about?” she asked.
“We have a call scheduled for this afternoon.”
“Good. You can get through this, I promise.”
I snorted. “You’ve been saying that for a year, but I appreciate your unwavering optimism, Cora.”
“That’s my job, honey. Tell Sage I said hi.”
That made me smile. “You might be the only thing she misses about New York.”
“Smart kid.” She cleared her throat. “All right, no mushy stuff. You’ll be fine. I believe in you, Miss Keaton.”
It was amazing how powerful words like that were. Words, in general, held so much weight. You never quite realized how much until someone said something that cuts you straight to your gut—painful and demoralizing. Today, I’d had a little bit of both, but fortunately for me, Ian and my agent outweighed that slight thread of disbelief that my parents always had in my career. In all my life choices, really.
I packed my laptop bag and noise-canceling headphones, along with a notebook, heading to the coffee shop downtown for what was likely another exercise in futility. But my parents’ house just didn’t have the juju. And creating the correct writing juju was very, very important.
Sometimes I found it in a library or a coffee shop. Sometimes it was on a small desk tucked into the corner of our tiny one-bedroom apartment. But it worked. That small desk in the place Sage and I used to call home was the birthplace of six of my ten novels.
But that particular juju was expensive, and I couldn’t justify close to four grand a month for a six hundred square foot apartment when my daughter was craving family and a different experience.
That different experience involved saving money, swallowing my pride, and giving her the thing she wanted, even if it meant I had to listen to a bit of “I told you so.” Even as I stared at my blinking cursor again and felt some of the stares at the coffee shop while I sat down with my drink, I knew it was worth it.
The phone call with the author coach was … fine. It wasn’t like she told me anything I didn’t already know, but I found my frustration bubbling higher and higher the longer I sat there and thought about what she’d said. And I’d been doing that for hours.
Creating a place that fosters your creativity is the best thing you can do.
Embrace your process instead of fighting it.
