All the Lies

by Charlotte Byrd

  There is a narrow path meandering between the boulders stacked near the house and the horse expertly makes her way toward me.

  I know that I'm not supposed to be out here on his property, in his backyard, but I can't make myself move.

  When they get closer to the house, the man’s face remains in shadow under the wide-brimmed hat and I can't quite make out his face.

  The horse, on the other hand, is absolutely magnificent. She is tall and elegant and her coat glistens with sweat. She is the color of chestnut with a long oak mane and deep, curious eyes. When the man squeezes his legs, she trots over to me, stopping a few inches away.

  “Emma?” Liam asks.

  My mouth drops open as I look up at him with my hand over my forehead.

  “What are you doing here?” I ask.

  My voice cracks in the middle, forcing me to clear my throat with a cough.

  “Is everything okay?” Liam asks, jumping off the horse and taking off his hat. “Did something happen to Alex?”

  Then it hits me.

  He has no idea why I'm here.

  How could he?

  I stare at him, shaking my head, not sure how to start.

  “Alex is fine,” I say.

  “Okay,” Liam says slowly, waiting for me to explain.

  “You really don’t know why I’m here?”

  “No.”

  “You didn’t write that post with your address on it?”

  He shakes his head no.

  “You’re not Matt Lipinski?”

  “Who is Matt Lipinski?”

  We’re not getting anywhere with this and suddenly, I realize that he may not know anything about Matt at all, if that’s even his name.

  “So…you live here?” I ask.

  “Yes, this is my house,” Liam says, waving his arm. He leads the horse closer to the barn and drops her lead over a hitching post.

  Then he turns to face me.

  Dressed in a plain white T-shirt, tight jeans, and cowboy boots, he looks nothing like the sophisticated investor that I met in Calabasas.

  I like that.

  He wipes the sweat off his brow with the back of his hand.

  “What are you doing here, Emma?” he asks. “How did you find out that I live here?”

  I wait for a few moments and tap my foot on the ground. A little cloud of dust gathers around my flip-flop and settles on my newly painted toenails.

  “Are you… D. B. Carter?” I ask.

  The expression on his face changes from an awkward friendliness to something resembling dissatisfaction.

  I don't know him well, but he isn't pleased.

  The answer to my question must be yes.

  “How did you find me?” Liam asks. “Is that why you were chatting me up at the party?”

  I shake my head and say, “No. I had no idea who you were.”

  “Yet, you're here, at my home. How did you get my address? Alex doesn't know where I live. Alex doesn't even know what I do.”

  “He doesn't?” I ask.

  “You need to leave,” Liam says.

  He turns his body away from me and starts to walk away, but I catch up with him.

  Now that my shock is wearing off, I need to get some answers.

  “Listen, I had no idea that you were D. B. Carter,” I say. “I was assigned a story on him, this reclusive and prolific romantic fantasy author that no one knows anything about. I searched through Facebook groups and forums and finally someone just happened to message me with your address. I thought it was a joke. The only reason I came out here is just to confirm that this guy, Matt, was lying. Plus, LA was feeling a little bit claustrophobic after everything that happened.”

  I'm putting everything on the line and I hope that he realizes that.

  I don't have any other choice.

  I have a feeling that this is the only way that I can get him to talk to me.

  Liam hesitates. Standing on the beautifully distressed porch in the back, he turns on the heels of his cowboy boots and faces me again.

  His eyes are cast downward, but they eventually meet mine. He looks so different from the night that I first met him and yet with his hair falling in his face like that, I see the man that I can’t stop thinking about.

  “Who is Matt?” Liam asks after a moment.

  “What?”

  “You said Matt gave you my address. Who is he?”

  “I have no idea,” I say, shaking my head. “His name is Matt Lipinski, but that could just be a nickname or something made up. I can't remember what forum it was, but he replied to one of my questions about you and then messaged me directly and told me your address.”

  I repeat my story again, hoping that this time he believes it.

  I watch him hesitate. He narrows his eyes and stares at me. He doesn't believe me. My heart sinks. I'm not sure what else I can do to convince him that I'm telling the truth.

  “How else could I find out your address? Nobody knows who you are. Like you said, not even Alex.”

  “That's by design,” Liam says. “I don't want anyone knowing what I do.”

  “Why?” I ask.

  He raises his hand in my face and asks, “You’re a reporter, right?”

  I nod.

  “Whatever I tell you is off the record.”

  I let out a deep sigh.

  Shit.

  Those are the magic words. Now he can tell me his deepest secret like that he is actually the Golden State killer and I don’t have the right to print it. At least, not ethically and not under my name.

  I feel myself starting to freak out, but I take a few deep breaths and tell myself to calm down.

  It doesn't matter.

  So, what if everything that he says right now is off the record?

  We have developed a rapport.

  Maybe I can get him to change his mind.

  “Okay,” I say. “It's off the record.”

  Still, Liam hesitates. I lift my hands up in the air to show him that my hands are empty.

  “I'm not recording anything. You can take a look at my phone,” I say, pulling it out of my back pocket. “Can I ask you something? Why don't you want anyone to know that you’re D. B. Carter? You're famous. There are millions of people around the world who love your work. Yet, no one knows who you really are.”

  “You have asked and answered your own question.”

  He starts to walk away and I'm not sure if I should follow him. So, I stand here, in his backyard next to his horse who is feverishly drinking from the trough.

  “Your horse is beautiful,” I add as he heads up the stairs.

  I see his dog through the enormous living room window, barking up a storm. Surprisingly, the house is so well insulated that I can barely hear her at all.

  “Are you coming in or not?” Liam asks.

  He doesn't wait for me to answer and disappears into the house.

  Not wanting to push my luck, I follow him inside.

  25

  Emma

  The back entrance leads through a small foyer, where Liam takes off his boots and leaves them haphazardly in the middle of the floor. As soon as I walk over the threshold, the dog runs up to me, yelping, but Liam places his hand on her head, and she immediately calms down.

  “This is Skylar,” he says. “She's a little protective of me, but she's friendly. Don't worry, she won't bite.”

  I lean over to try to pet her, but she bursts out into another cacophony of barks.

  “You might want to give her some time,” he advises.

  I decide to not approach her again until she calms down.

  Liam leads me to the large kitchen island made of marble and reinforced with steel and offers me something to drink. There's a farmhouse sink with one of those modern, spring-like faucets installed in the island and when I tell him that I want some water, he grabs a Mason jar and flips on the filtered water setting on the faucet. When I bring it to my lips, it tastes cool and delicious like it's straight out of the spri
ng.

  “Good, right?” he asks.

  I nod.

  “I have a well on the property, one of the few around here so that's natural spring water.”

  “Wow, it's some of the best water I've ever had.”

  “Yeah, it's one of the reasons I bought this property.”

  I look around the enormous open floor concept containing both the kitchen and the living room in one. There are huge skylights up above in the twenty foot ceiling, illuminating every nook and cranny. The walls are mostly bare, except for a few gigantic canvases. One is of a woman's nude body, facing away from the painter, done in an abstract style with hues of blue and violet.

  “These are beautiful,” I say, looking around the space.

  There's a large modern chandelier the shape of an enormous hexagon hanging in the kitchen. The floors are the color of cool oak, covered with a few distressed looking rugs. Along one wall sits a modern midcentury couch and along the other is a plush chaise lounge in linen white.

  “I love the way that your house is designed,” I say.

  “Thank you.” He nods. “I did it myself.”

  I raise my eyebrow, surprised. It looks like something that could have a whole architectural spread in Coast magazine. I'm tempted to suggest that I pitch him and his home for the cover story.

  I'm tempted, but I'm not stupid.

  He's already suspicious of me and if I bring up another story angle, I know that he won't let this go any further.

  I need him to trust me. I have to put him at ease. The problem is that I feel like I'm going to pass out every time he looks at me.

  “I'm sorry if I was a little rude earlier,” Liam says, opening the double doors to his wide subzero refrigerator and pulling out a box of blueberries.

  He raises some to my eye level and shrugs, asking, “Do you want any?”

  After such a long drive, I'm feeling quite peckish and I give him a vigorous nod.

  After he washes the blueberries in the sink, he transfers them to a glazed bowl with small little imperfections along the sides which makes it look like it was handmade. If the berries looked good before, now they are completely irresistible. I grab a few and pop them in my mouth.

  “I'm sorry that I just showed up here. The thing is that I had no idea that you would be who I would find here. I thought that maybe D. B. Carter was actually this Matt Lipinski and he was testing me.”

  “You know, that wasn't really smart. Coming out to the desert all by yourself to knock on a stranger's door. What if it had been a trick? What if he was just trying to get you to come to his house… For…”

  His voice trails off, but we both know the threat that women face from strange men.

  “I know, but I told my sister where I was going and I was going to stay in touch. Besides, I looked up the house and it looked quite nice.”

  “Yes, rich people never commit crimes,” he says sarcastically and we both laugh.

  “So… Can I ask you a few questions?”

  He shrugs and tosses a blueberry in his mouth.

  “How long have you been writing as D. B. Carter?”

  “Five years or is it six? It's been a while.”

  “How did you get started?”

  “Like any writer. I started with short stories and essays that I submitted to what feels like hundreds of literary magazines. Some got accepted, fewer got published. None made money.”

  “So, what happened?”

  “I got sick of it. I went to this writers’ conference and I attended a talk by a fantasy writer who was self-publishing. I knew that the Kindle existed and people were doing self-publishing, but I didn't realize how successful you could be. He went over the basics of marketing, nothing too intricate, but what really caught my attention was the fact that he said that he made as much money from writing in his first year as he did from working his full-time job as a chemistry teacher. I saw that as a way to do what I really wanted to do.”

  “Yeah, I know that feeling,” I say, nodding.

  “I wanted to make a living at it. I wanted people to read my books. Before I went to the conference, I wrote a book and submitted it to forty-five different literary agents, most of whom didn't have the decency to get back to me. I figured that I had nothing to lose so I might as well just try to publish and market it myself. So, that's what I did. As soon as the first one came out, I was already done with the second and halfway through writing the third. When I did research on independent publishing, I realized that it's all about content. The readers who like these kinds of books are feverish for more titles. They just want to read them all. Well, I decided that if that's what they wanted, then that's what I'm going to give them.”

  “Did you sell books right away?”

  “No, not at first. I took a class on Facebook advertising and then another one. Still, I struggled. But I figured that if I have content and books for people to read, then I can always tweak the marketing and the advertising and learn more about how to do it right. About a year into it, I finally hit on the right ad copy, blurb, cover combination, and people started to download my books and read them. I continued to publish and I still publish a book about every six weeks.”

  “Wow, that's a lot.”

  “Yes, it is, but the thing is that I have been trying to be a writer for my whole life so once I started being successful, I figured the best thing that I can do is keep writing.”

  “I like that attitude. That's probably going to take you far in life.”

  “Well, it took me here.” He points to his house. “I never had the goal of being rich, I just wanted my books to find readers. Then, the more books I had, the more readers I found. It was kind of like a snowball effect, but I appreciate every last one of those readers.”

  26

  Emma

  I have never spoken to a writer before in real life and I find this conversation utterly fascinating. Of course, I have learned a little in the Facebook groups and read what feels like a hundred different writing advice books on Amazon. Yet, it feels so exhilarating to talk to one in real life. Especially, one who is so successful.

  “How do you manage to publish so often?”

  “Well, I have a lot of them already written and in various stages of editing and marketing. I have the pre-order set up for the next five books, but I'm already working on book six in that series.”

  “How long are your books?”

  “About 50,000 words. 300 pages, give or take. I found that to be the sweet spot.”

  “Are most fantasy books much longer?”

  “Yes, especially those that are traditionally published. I personally like the feeling of completing a book and then staying in the series, not just as a writer but also as a reader. There's something about finishing something that gives you this positive feeling and I want to give that to my readers.”

  “So, how much do you write each day? Each month?”

  He pauses for a moment and looks out into the distance. I follow his gaze and we stare at the horizon where a gigantic saguaro cactus reaches for the sky.

  A big black crow, or maybe a raven, perches on the top, balancing on the bright yellow bud of a flower, expertly avoiding the needles of the cactus.

  “Different things and different approaches work for different writers,” Liam says. “When I first started out, my goal was to just write 3000 words a day. I would often procrastinate and sometimes it would take me hours to get this done. Then I immersed myself in books about the writing process, experimenting with other writers' approaches like they are jackets in a department store. A small few were a good fit, but most did not.”

  “So, what happened?”

  “I know that you want a straightforward answer, but you didn't ask a straightforward question. The truth is that different approaches work for different people at different parts of their life as a writer.”

  I nod, taking a sip of my water and wait for him to continue.

  “In the beginning, I experienced a lot of wr
iter’s block because I wasn’t sure where I wanted the story to go. Then I started doing a lot of meticulous outlining. I had to know exactly what was going to happen in my story in order to move forward. That cut out a lot of the planning stages while I was writing. Then, just as I figured out how to outline and plot, something strange happened. I did it enough and with enough books that I no longer needed to outline. And if I do it too much now, know too much about my characters and the story, I end up with writer’s block again.”

  “Really?”

  “I start with who the main character or characters are and what it is they want. All primary characters have to want something otherwise the story isn’t going to go anywhere. Then I know the basic midpoint and I know how the book or the series ends. So, I sit down and fill in the blanks.”

  “Wow, that's amazing,” I say. “I have been struggling with writing this one book and have about 20,000 words, but I'm stuck. I'm tempted to try something else.”

  “You need to focus on achievable goals. You started this book, writing another 30,000 words isn’t going to kill you. I'd recommend that you set yourself a goal, like an hour a day, and stick to it.”

  “What if I just sit in front of the computer and stare at the blank page?”

  “No, you can't do that. You have to plan out where you're going to write. Since you don't have much experience with writing fiction, outline the whole novel. Write a paragraph about what's going to happen in the next chapter and the one after that. Then just sit down and write them.”

  “Is that what you did?”

  “That's what I did at first,” Liam says, shaking his head and running his fingers through his hair. “Then I realized that I could write a lot more a day and finish more books. I started doing sprints of twenty - thirty minutes following the Pomodoro method. I would write eight, sometimes ten hours a day, but only for a short period of time, like seven days in a row.”

  “So, when you were doing that, how fast could you write the book?”

  “My fastest time writing a book was in five days. It was exhausting, though, and frankly, not really worth it.”