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“Are you fucking shitting me?” My voice raised—no joke—ten octaves. “Meghan…Meghan… I did not come to Hollywood. Yes, Hollywood in Portland, Oregon… but… Hollywood nonetheless… to sit in my faux office space… yes, a public coffee shop… to hear that I needed to trash 20,000 words. And rewrite my entire ending. Of the goddamn fucking novel. Which is due to Kratchette in… less than twenty days.”
“Jemma. Hear me out.”
“Should I be sitting down for this? I mean, I’m sitting. But…” My words grew louder. “I felt a strong urge to ask you if I needed to be sitting down when you tell me I need to trash 20,000 words… for a novel I worked damn hard on, might I add.”
“I just feel your ending doesn’t match the rest of the book. We’re missing an emotionaloomph… that we’re getting from the beginning and middle. The one your readers are used to seeing in your other novels.”
“But… it’s due to the publisher in…” I popped open my calendar app on the phone and stared at the beginning of October. “Nineteendays. You don’t think there’s a way for me to fix what I have now? Emotional oomph doesn’t give me much to work with here. Can’t you give me something a little more specific?”
Tapping from the other end of the line. No doubt Meghan’s pen against her office table, a quirk I was well accustomed with at this point. I accidentally groaned so loud that the woman sitting next to me glanced over and narrowed her eyes.
“Sorry,” I mouthed through gritted teeth, before returning my focus back on the call.
“Okay, specifically speaking, you know what threw me the most?” Meghan asked. Without even waiting for me to answer her, she added, “Her father.”
“What about him?”
“You killed the man.”
“And?”
“It seemed so… out of left field.”
“Isn’t death exactly that?” I asked.
“Not when you’re writing it into a novel.”
I rolled my eyes. “I foreshadow his death. In the very beginning, when the character says, ‘Death has always seemed to take everyone around her. Sparing only herself.’”
“I like that line. A whole lot, Jemma. Keep your beginning. Don’t touch the damn thing. Hell, keep the first 55,000 words. But the last 20? Gut it. Rewrite. Resend.”
I reached a hand to my forehead and rubbed the area between my eyes with my thumb.
Have you ever been told that you have to rewrite the ending of your book?
It was like being told you’ve been sent down to the nth level of hell.
Except hell would probably be less stressful.
“Keep the father alive, Jemma,” Meghan added as if to add insult to injury. “No one is going to want to see him die.”
Chapter Ten
Father
But he did die.
“Hey, Kiddo,” Dad said to me one time as he lobbed a baseball in my direction. The weight cracked against my mitt. “Do yourself a favor, okay?”
Instinctively, I reached for the ball and slugged it his way. Sweat dripped down my cheek. The humidity of the Portland summer surrounded us, though the leaves of the trees above remained as green as ever.
“From one writer to another?” Dad asked. “Don’t become one… professionally speaking.” Dad smirked as he threw the ball back to me once more. He always did that. Called me a writer, I mean. Like he sensed it long before I ever knew.
I laughed sheepishly. At fifteen years old, the most I’d ever written was a couple of short stories for school. I kept those stashed away in a box in my bedroom closet. Besides, back then, I’d had my heart set on being a film director. Ever since Dad had first taken me to Movie Madness as a kid—this amazingly awesome video rental store with an entire section dedicated to movie props and costumes—I’d becomeobsessedwith Hollywood. Especially old-time movies and B-films that no one had even really heard of. I’d gone as far as to place both aGone with the WindandCasablancaposter in my bedroom.
I tossed the ball back. “I want to createmovies, not books like you.”
“Oh, god. My Hollywood hack in the making!” Dad laughed, and lines around his dark eyes crinkled. I smiled. Nobody played catch with me the way he did. With a constant look of amusement, like he lived for these moments. His tall frame hunched over as he lightly pitched the ball once more.
