Page 17 of Bookworm and the Beast
As I wrote, the stipulations multiplied, going on for page after page, restoring my sense of control over the situation.
My anticipation over presenting this wordy legal document to the reporter when she arrived began to overtake the sour dread that had been accumulating in my gut during the past week since I learned about the non-negotiable interview.
She’d sign it—I’d see to that. No contract, no interview.
She’d sign it, ask me the safest, most bland interview questions ever recorded, and it would be done. Over. Just a faint, unpleasant memory.
Then I’d be free to get back to… well, it would be over anyway, and I could stop worrying about my secret getting out.
Satisfied with my work, I hit print then stepped over to the printer table, loaded the machine with paper, and waited.
Crisp, warm papers filled the printer tray for the first time in months.
Wait. These weren’t the contract pages. These were from the last job I’d sent to the printer—the fifteen pages I’d written so far of a novel that was contracted for fifteenhundred.
That had been months ago. I’d forgotten I’d even tried to print out the meager beginning of the book that was doing its best to kill me.
I sniffed a laugh and let the printer finish. At least I didn’t have to wait long for it to spit out the entirety of my work on book seven and begin printing the contract.
Setting the pitifully thin stack of manuscript pages aside on the table, I gathered the freshly printed contract pages and stapled them. Then I signed and initialed each one, and in a rare moment of levity, lifted the contract to my lips and kissed it.
It was, after all, the best thing I’d written in a long, long time.
* * *
I dragged myself out of the water Thursday morning, breathing hard from exertion.
Swimming laps in the mansion’s indoor pool was one of my favorite ways to exercise, and a hard workout usually provided excellent stress relief.
Usually. Today was a different story. The reporter, who I’d learned was named Bonnie Hamelin, would arrive in an hour. There wasn’t enough water in the Atlantic to relieve the stress I was feeling. I still hadn’t been able to get any writing done on book seven, which meant I literally had nothing to say to this woman that wasn’t a lie.
Toweling off first, I took the elevator from the basement level to the second floor and went to my bedroom to shower and change.
Not that I was trying to impress her or anything.
In fact, I deliberately put on my rattiest pair of jeans and an old t-shirt. I smiled grimly at my silent-protest-via-fashion-choice as I looked at my reflection in the mirror on the dressing room door.
My beard was unruly, and I hadn’t had a haircut in months. Since I rarely left the house these days and preferred to be anonymous when I absolutely had to go out, I hadn’t bothered with any personal grooming beyond showering and trimming my nails. I barely recognized myself anymore.
Good.My smile widened.Maybe she’ll take one look at me and run away screaming.
Once dressed, I glanced at my Rolex. Still some time to kill.Crap. Time was a bad thing. Time left opportunity for dread to accumulate. I needed to stay busy.
Falling into a chair by the window, I opened my laptop. Though I had my handy dandy contract printed and ready to go, it wouldn’t hurt to do a little preparation. I decided to look up some of Ms. Hamelin’s previous articles for the New York Daily Report.
She was a good writer, definitely had a style. But she’d asked some probing questions of her previous interview subjects.
Not gonna happen, lady.Ugh. This wasn’t helping the nerves.
Instead of reading further, I opened my long-neglected Facebook page. I’d never been one of those authors who hated social media. I used to love it, in fact, for the connection it gave me to my readers—the operative words there being “used to.”
The past couple of years all my messages and comments seemed to be demands for book seven.
There were only so many times I could say “working on it” or “it’s coming” before feeling like a total fraud, so I’d abandoned all the platforms a few months ago, going dark online.
Today, though, maybe responding to a few dozen of the thousands of notifications would be just the ticket to occupy my mind.
The demands were there for sure, but there were also some readers who just wanted to tell me how much they loved the Onyx Throne series.
