Page 61 of All For You

I turned around. “Oodles, I know. A sec.”

“Lizzy, my love,” Charlie greeted me with a smile in her voice.

Ha. Yep, she’d read the first pages.

“Hello, sister Lizzy,” a high voice trilled from the background. Mary. Even she sounded pleased with me. With this welcome extra cash from my next novel, she probably knew they could start trying for a baby now, as they needed some medical assistance.

“Lizzy, my darling, have you been eating some of those mushrooms you encounter in the forest on those loooong walks of yours?” Charlie asked.

My pages were that good. Holy shit!

“Because…” And now her voice sounded like her lips seemed a little pursed. “These pages are unusable.”

I sucked in a breath, waiting for the punch line. Charlie was always blunt, but… I’d sweated for those pages. Stalled, then forced out the sentences, then written with such anger my fingers nearly drove through the laptop keys. Then, finally, I’d found a happy story for Thomas and Peony.

“What do you mean, unusable?” My tone was cautious, not quite giving up on my hopes for my pages. My heart, as though suspecting differently, rammed against my ribs.

“Let’s see. Shall I read you a passage?” She cleared her throat.

“‘My dear Peony, may I call on you tomorrow?’ Thomas asked as they strolled through the forest,’”she read.

“‘Of course, Thomas, I would be delighted. I’ll let Mama know. She’ll be delighted too.’”

“‘How wonderful,’ he replied. They grinned at each other as the dappled sun hit their cheeks.”

She gave an embarrassed cough. “So, that’s the first page. Darling, I’m presuming one of them gets killed by a runaway horse galloping through the sun-dappled forest?”

“No.” I was confused. What point was she trying to make? “That would be macabre and odd.”

“No.That would be an improvement on what we have here. There’s no conflict. This story reads like how you described Jane and William, how they were fully drawn to each other immediately, except there isn’t the villainous Darcy brother in the background twirling his mustache. You have Jane and William already inside, happily ever after.”

“Charlie, I’m not sure that’s true.”

“Let’s put it another way. Neither of them has main character energy. I don’t think they could even carry much of a subplot.”

No main character energy. A buzz in my ears reminded me that was what I sometimes thought about myself. Like I hadn’t expected someone who supported me, believed in me, and couldn’t keep his hands off me. But about the story—she was wrong! Definitely wrong.

Shit, but something about her words sounded right.Wasshe right? Oh, bloody hell. The truth seeped into me slowly, then unmistakably, until the full weight of the realization settled over me with a kind of quiet horror. I’d avoided all conflict between my couple, because I’d been going through so much pain personally—disappointed with Darcy and wrecked by Jane’s sadness. All that writing craft and structure I’d spent hours learning and putting into practice over the last ten years had flown out the window.

My panicked pulse roared in my ears, my vision blurred. “I can’t write,” I wailed. “This is the end for me.” Oodles looked up at me, sadder than usual.

“No, this is not the end. But it will be if you miss this deadline. You’ve been so traumatized by Darcy that you’ve gone in the opposite direction and resolved everything before you’ve started.”

I gave a disgusted exhalation. “Is there anything about the pages we can save?”

“Not that I can see. You’ve even set it in a local estate, which has been used time and again, by you and—let’s look in their About Us pages—hmm, about fifty other Regency romance writers and a TV show.”

I kind of knew that but was blocking it out.

“Let’s start with something easy,” Charlie suggested. “How about this? Take a week off and visit an estate that hasn’t been featured in any Regency romances and base your story there. You know the marketing team needs to have a clear and unique—yet familiar—path of messaging, and this would be a brilliant start. You’ll have Cosmo spoofing himself.”

My editor Cosmo’s voice rang out in my ear.Give me the same but different, sweetheart. Don’t make life unnecessarily hard on yourself. Save your energy for our publication date piss-up.

“I’m sending a definitive list of stately homes and manor houses,” Charlie went on. “Ones that have been overused and you can safely avoid.”

She hung up and a ping cut through the air as her help arrived.

I clicked into my email and ran my eye down a familiar list of castles and manor houses under her heading: AVOID THESE SETTINGS LIKE THE PLAGUE (and other clichés). I took a look at the list and felt even more depressed. Many of these places were my go-tos, as the Cotswolds was the land of castles and manor houses and stately homes, close by and easy to fact-check by popping over or making a quick call to the estate managers, who loved that being featured in my pages boosted visitors.