Page 2 of The Perfect Rom-Com

My sixty-page proposal prepared to tell literary agent Jack Sterling every single bloated thing about my life, career, and book.

I don’t work as an ESL teacher. I am a philanthropic academian with a bent for loyalty and integrity in my fifteen years of service.

I don’t have a gerbil named Biscuit my old roommate abandoned when she left me halfway through a yearlong lease. I am in the animal rescue service and provide therapy—via allowing Biscuit to come to my classes so my students can find comfort in stroking his soft black fur during anxiety-ridden testing weeks.

I do not have a newsletter of forty-six people comprised of 25 percent family and 75 percent students. I have a global-spanning news outlet with a roster reaching people from twenty-seven countries and counting.

I have three sample chapters.

I have a pen I can gift him that has my name and email, just in case he loses my business card.

I have a paper clip with my name and email I can slip on my papers in case he loses my business card, and my pen, and my proposal and folder, and all electronic receipts regarding my name and information.

I have . . . everything. Down to the bandages on my blistered heels from walking miles inside these conference halls the past few days and attending classes about how unprepared I was to do something as idiotic as try to sell my book when “don’t you guys know that two million new books come out each year?” and “let’s not even begin to think about the destruction wrought by AI.”

I’ve diminished beneath celebrity speakers sharing their glory stories of old, writing books on washers and dryers before receiving the big phone call with the six-figure advance.

I’ve sat in on marketing classes informing me how I need to run a successful website, newsletter, blog, Goodreads, BookBub, Instagram, Lemon8, Threads, TikTok, Pinterest, YouTube, X, and Clapper account before even considering reaching out to an agent, because of course publishers can’t publish books without successful authors. Never mind that it’s impossible to be a successful author with a thriving platform on social media without actually having, you know, a book.

I’ve done one-on-one sessions only for editors to circle every page of my first seven and tell me precisely thirty-two things I did flagrantly wrong.

I’ve been rejected by three agents during three pitches. The whole reason I came.

If dictionaries were made entirely of pictures, there’d be a large photo of me under the word defeated.

My eyes flicker up to the clock on the wall and I swipe at one particularly annoying lock of brown hair that keeps falling over one of my eyes. The energy in the room is lifting. Shifting as people gather up their supplies and begin to stand.

“Are you done, Gloria?” I say into the phone.

She stops midsentence. “You feeling energized yet? ’Cause I can do this till the cows come home.”

“I’m up,” I say in a hush. “They’re about to open the doors.”

“All right, all right, I know you’re . . .”—she pauses, clearly hunting for a clichéd phrase—“busy as a cat on a hot tin roof, so I’m going to cut to the chase ’cause this is key. Here we go!” she says, and I pull the phone from my ear after a thunderous clap. “Repeat after me: I, Bryony Sophia Page, am a strong and intelligent woman—”

My mouth remains clamped shut.

“—and I don’t care if I have had three agents tell me my stuff was crap—”

The doors burst open, lanyards swinging from the necks of two conference staff. People begin to stream out.

“—or that that woman said my proposal wasn’t worth the paper it was printed on—”

My heart begins to beat frantically. I clear my throat. My jaw tightens.

“—and I will not waste my time on anyone who’s slicker than pig snot on a radiator—”

You can do this, Bryony. You have gotten this far—you can do this.

Do it for The Bridge.

Do it for your students.

Do it for you.

“—or waste my time on anyone who’s as useless as a screen door on a submarine—”

A young woman’s face is as red as a tomato as she walks unsteadily on skinny stilettos, eyes unfocused ahead as she clings to her dignity and, apparently, aims for a trash can.