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“Hello, Mr. Briston.” I extended my hand as he tried to scoot past me. “I’m Mina Wilde. I’m one of the students in the retreat. I just wanted to say thank you so much for having me on the course. I’m really looking forward to hearing your thoughts on my work and—”
“I’ll tell you my thoughts right now, Mina,” Hugh snapped. “You don’t belong here.”
CHAPTEREIGHT
“Excuse me?”
My heart hammered against my chest.
He didn’t just say that, did he? I must have heard him wrong. My nerves are getting the better of me—
“I must admit to being intrigued by your application,” Hugh continued. “The real-life amateur sleuth writing an amateur-sleuth tale. But when I read your sample pages I knew I was looking at someone who didn’t understand the first thing about literary devices.”
Oscar growled as Hugh tried to step past him. Oscar almost never growled. I bent down to try and calm him.
Hugh sniffed. “Your idea of literary fictional characters coming to life and meddling with modern affairs could have been a clever satire on our obsession with venerating certain works of classical literature without criticism, but you are not clever enough to pull it off. What I read was a lumpy pudding of a book – a teenage girl’s erotic dream wrapped up in the trappings of a novel. The mystery is simplistic, the romance distracting, the sex gratuitous and absurd, and the whole thing a genre mishmash that no one asked for.”
I reeled from the harshness of his words. My eyes pricked with tears. My book was a thinly-veiled fictionalized account of my life in the bookshop with the guys. It detailed how I solved the murder of Ashley Greer, my ex-best friend, and the beautiful and confusing time when I returned to Argleton and fell in love with three fictional villains.
Hugh Briston wasn’t just calling my novel rubbish – he was taking aim at mylife.
I gasped for air. It felt like he’d driven his fist into my gut.
“I…I’m sorry you feel this way,” I managed to blurt out, glancing back at the guys in the desperate hope that they’d come and light Hugh Briston on fire. But they were trying to give me space to impress him. I couldn’t count on them to always sweep in and save me. I swallowed back my tears and tried again. “You must see some potential, or I wouldn’t be at the retreat…”
“Truthfully, the publishers told me that if I want to continue as editor, I have to be moreinclusiveof different styles and ideas. I have to stop only publishing books by old, white men, as if that’s the criteria I use to choose my authors! I pick the best stories by the best writers, and if they all happen to look the same, that’s not my problem. Two of my authors last year were women. But apparently, out of one hundred-and-eighty books on my list, that’s notenough. It’s all a load of PC, namby-pamby bollocks, if you ask me. But that’s the world today. So here we are – you have your place on my retreat and I’m stuck reading a manuscript that’s as ridiculous and confusing as a llama loose in Marks and Spencer.”
Don’t cry don’t cry don’t cry…
“So I should just…go home?”
“What, and tell the media that mean old Hugh Briston kicked out the blind girl?” he scoffed. “Not your wisest choice. You’ll send the sharks after me, which will be an annoyance, but nothing I haven’t handled before. Meanwhile, you will have burned every bridge in this industry. No publisher would touch you after you come after me. You paid the fee to be here, so I suppose you can attend the workshops and group critiques. Perhaps you will learn how real writers do it. Or you might prefer to spend the week in the spa, having the cotton wool between your ears plumped and steamed.” Hugh waved a hand dismissively.
“I’ll see you in tomorrow’s workshop,” I said through gritted teeth. If he thought he could get rid of me that easily, he hadn’t met Mina Wilde.
“As you wish. But do not think for a moment that Red Herring would be interested in publishing this mess of a bodice ripper masquerading as a mystery. It’s good for an internet chatroom for lonely spinsters, and nothing more. Good evening.”
With that, Hugh elbowed his way past me and disappeared into the men’s loo.
I slumped against the wall, too stunned and hurt to hold myself upright any longer. Hugh’s insults circled over and over in my head. He hated my book. He hated everything about it – the mystery, the romance…
I can’t do anything right.
Maybe Idon’thave what it takes to be a writer.
“Mina?” A voice called me back from my dark thoughts. I blinked, and my vision swam as tears welled in my eyes. Warm arms went around me. Quoth. Of course it was Quoth. “Are you okay? You’re shaking. What did Hugh say to you?”
“He said…” I sniffed. “He said that he hates my book. He hates everything about it. He said that he only accepted me on the retreat because I’m ticking a diversity box for his publisher. He said that I shouldn’t even bother attending the workshops…”
“I’ll kill him,” Heathcliff growled, appearing behind Quoth.
“No.” I grabbed Heathcliff’s arm. “You can’t do that.”
“He insulted you,” Morrie said. “He deserves to die for that.”
“Far be it for me to agree with Count Crotchety and the Charlemagne of Crime.” Quoth’s soft lips kissed away the tears beneath my eyes before they could fall. “But if he said all that to you, I will peck his eyes out and eat them in front of him.”
“I’m theNapoleonof Crime, and you know it, birdie.” Morrie elbowed Quoth in the ribs. “And that gibface flapdoodle is wrong about you, gorgeous. Your book is excellent. It’s a fun story and you tell it well.”
