His slightly rambling message in the group before explaining that he should probably get some sleep also helped me win.
I’d clearly been watching way too many game shows lately, but I decided to worry about that after I focused my energy on a certain slightly distracted writer. One who was incredibly entertaining, sober or drunk, and wrote the best dirty books I’d ever read.
Originally, I’d worried it was some kind of stunt, but the way his editor laid into him in a comment said it’d been real...and she thought he was insane and that he was going to end up on a milk carton.
Did they still do that?
Either way, I was glad to see the original message had been real and I was concerned the reply had been real too.
I was technically on Team Lori because she was right, it’d been dangerous, but he’d very neatly thrown her under the bus when he commented that it’d been her idea to begin with.
It seemed like neither of them could be trusted to make safe decisions...and that was either great for me or incredibly dangerous.
Both?
The comment section was a fabulous mess with people guessing what he’d done and if they were arguing about a plot point or something real. Sometimes it was very hard to tell with those two because reality wasn’t their strong suit.
And if I hadn’t been the person they were not-so-subtly arguing over, I’d have guessed it was about the plot of an upcoming book too.
But it wasn’t.
I was very real and slightly confused.
There was a bigger part of me that was curious, though. Did he really want someone to clean his house? Had I been reading too much into the slightly suggestive wording? Had he really started Teddy’s book? He’d been teasing it for a while and it’d beenall talk, no teasers, so I was a bit skeptical about how much progress he’d made.
And even in his politely but confusingly worded reply, I still couldn’t tell if he just knew what was going to happen with Teddy or if he’d put words on the page. Some authors didn’t seem to understand that it didn’t matter if the whole story was in their head—it only counted if they put words on a fucking page...screen or paper, I wasn’t going to be picky.
Yep, I still had questions before I was going to clean his house.
But since I could read directions and was a hell of a lot more sober than a certain curious writer, I commented on the bottom of the post with a tag to him and his editor that was short and slightly cryptic.
I promise I’m not a stalker or a serial killer.
It wouldn’t mean anything to the readers in the group—especially since my real name wasn’t on my profile—but it would to Knox Whitaker and his editor.
Hopefully.
I still wasn’t sure how sober he’d been when he’d responded to my email, so there was a distinct possibility I’d get booted from the group because they thought I was insane...or at least more insane than Knox.
That was an interesting threshold, though, which didn’t make me any more confident about what would happen. But it was turning out to be a fascinating way to pass the time, so I was going to play along even if it turned out to be some kind of stunt for a new book.
But something told me it wasn’t a game to Knox.
I just wasn’t sure what he thought would happen when someone agreed to clean his house in exchange for copies of his books.
Authors were strange creatures.
I liked interesting—and I liked books—so it seemed to be a good trade-off for me as long as he was actually writing Teddy’s story.
All bets were off if he wasn’t writing that particular one, though, so I went back to the email and hit reply.
I was sober last night, so you don’t have to worry about both of us being drunk. Thank you for the compliment, though.
For being drunk as a skunk, he’d been very articulate too.
The proposed mix of WIP chapters, ebooks, and paperbacks (once the box is found and yes, I remember that story) is very fair depending on how much work needs to be done.
The number of times he’d announced he’d lost something important was too many to count, but the way he’d accused his smiling mailman of possibly stealing a box had been too good to forget.
