by Steve Hely
“Wait—”
“Look, do you realize how many manuscripts we get? Thousands! Tens of thousands! Just stacks and stacks! Some people don’t have desks, they just have stacks. And there are people whose whole job it is to throw them in the garbage. Huge bins! They use shovels! But the manuscripts never stop coming in.”
“But most of those have got to be terrible.”
“You have no idea! Crazy terrible! Sometimes pages have bloodstains on them. We have a group, an e-mail thing, me and these other assistants, we e-mail around the worst sentences— you can’t believe them! You get just numb to it. But once you sort those out, then there are the ones you actually deal with.
“Pete, listen, I’m smart, right?” She said this so pleadingly that I nodded as fast as I could.
“I can’t tell. I thought I could. I thought I knew good from bad. I’d find these incredible, touching books, and I’d say how great they were, and the editors would toss them. Or they’d publish them, and they’d sell like fifty-four copies. Literally. Fifty-four copies.”
She finished her bourbon. “Peking. I sent you Peking? It sold thirty-four hundred copies. That’s it. Total. And that was ‘above expectations’!
“And this, this is even worse. The bad ones! These bad ones— terrible ones, ones that don’t even make sense and have adverbs everywhere and made-up words—they sell ten million copies and they make movies out of them. I used to cry, every night, literally, I would get a milkshake and put vodka in it and cry because I thought I must be stupid. I had these dreams, every night, where everybody speaks some foreign language and I don’t know it.”
“What kind of milkshakes?”
“And I thought I was gonna quit. But then I sort of got it. Nobody knows. None of them. Editors, writers, agents, nobody. You know like when a kid is just screaming and screaming, and the mom just keeps throwing toys at it, but the kid keeps screaming, and it looks like the mom’s about to cry, too?”
“I think so—”
Lucy slapped the table. “That’s what it’s like! The editors are the mom! Readers are the kid. And the editors just keep throwing stuff at them, but they don’t know what to do!”
Lucy made it sound like the ruins of a postwar city. A nightmare where a crafty fellow could make a fortune.
“My boss, he’s crazy. He’s literally crazy. Do you know what he made me do? Monday, he told me to go on MySpace. Just spend the whole week on MySpace. And find something —a sentence, anything—something kids want. Just anybody he can sign.”
“Did you find anything?”
“And blogs! Jesus! Blogs! If I hear the word blog one more time I’m gonna put my neck on the subway tracks.”
“So how’s business?”
“Oh it’s terrible. They’re going to fire people. They said so. These guys from England, these guys who own a liquor company? They bought the whole place and announced they’re going to fire people. That was the first thing they did! ‘Cheers, ’ello, we’re going to make redundancies!’ And everyone who’d seen the British Office knew that meant fired.”
Then her eyes burst out at me again. “But you! You’re going to get me off the desk! Because you meet the Checklist!”
“What’s the Checklist?”
“It’s this thing, this form you fill out now. The corporate guys made it up. Look!”
She produced a document from her messenger bag.
ORTOLAN PRESS NEW TITLE ASSESSMENT
Title The Tornado Ashes Club
Author: Pete Tarslaw
Reader: Lucy Etten
Genre: Literary / Crime
(3.5) Readability
(2) Potential for sequels
(5) Potential for movie sales (visuals, action, casting, filmable locations)
(5) Potential for spinoff cookbook
(4) Potential for branding
(2) Potential for merchandising
(1) Potential for video game
(4) Potential for ancillary material (reader’s guides, etc.)
(3.5) Author appearance
(5) Author interview
(5) Author blog / web presence
(4) Awards potential
(5) International marketability
() SR (if applicable)
RECOMMENDATION (5)
“Look at these scores! We’ll have to make you a blog at some point.”
“How come I got a three-point-five in appearance?”
“Believe me, compared to most of these guys you’re at least a three-point-five. But look at this!”
“I’m a four in awards?”
“We’re gonna make Genevieve Mexican. She’ll sing ranchera music. Trust me.”
“What’s SR?”
“That’s your sales record. Believe me, you don’t want to have that. Unless you’re Pamela McLaughlin or Tim Drew, it won’t help.” Lucy slapped the checklist against the table in joy. “You see?! Now we just convince Dave. But he’ll buy it. ‘Young talent, young talent!’ He’s always screaming that at me. He sounds like a porn producer.”
I went back to the bar trembling.
Lucy and I kept drinking and talking, although not necessarily to each other. She, I remember, went on a rant about why people bother to write at all. She pointed vaguely at dust jackets. “Look at these people! Vance Bourjally. Charles R. Robinson. Forgotten! Dead! Nothing! All that work! All those cigarettes! Their books are pulp now. Their books are these napkins! They literally turned their books into toilet paper. Literally. You wipe your ass on their books. And those are the good ones! But it’s the bad ones! The bad ones muck up the whole field. No offense.”
None was taken. I for my part recall holding forth with invective against Polly peppered with embarrassing revelations. I remember leaving, and propping up Lucy for half the stumble back to her place. She suggested getting corned-beef tacos at this place that was right nearby.
“If it’s so bad,” I asked her, as we looked for the tacos, “why do you want to keep doing this anyway?”
It took her a long time to answer. “Sometimes, you find something that’s so good,” she said. “I don’t mean good like yours is ‘good.’ I mean good good. ‘You can tell’ good. Like Peking. But, mostly—”
Then she vomited on her shoes.
THE SECOND BAR
The Cafeteria, in Brooklyn somewhere.
That morning I had woken up on a purple futon in Lucy’s apartment at about noon. I washed my mouth out with some grapefruit juice I found in the fridge, and I knew I was in a girl’s apartment because the shower was free of pubes.
I have no idea how anyone gets any writing done in New York—I found just getting a slice of pizza to be emotionally exhausting. But when I got back, there was a message on my phone from Lucy, whose misfortune it was to be at work in a rough state of mind, body, and liver. But she sounded excited— she told me to meet her and her editor at a bar called The Cafeteria at seven that night. “I told him you insisted on meeting in Brooklyn,” Lucy said, which I didn’t understand but at this point she was quarterbacking.
The Cafeteria, which I found next to a Polish bakery, was done up like a school lunchroom: the bar had a glass sneeze guard, the floors were gray linoleum, the chairs were plastic, and the bartender wore a hairnet. People carried Pabst on colored trays.
Lucy’s boss, David Borer, an editor at Ortolan, was sitting next to her. Yards away in the semidarkness, you could still see the fear in his face. He was zipping his eyes around the room, as though somebody were about to reveal the secret of publishing and he was terrified of missing it. He was older than we were, fey and beaten. He looked like an elf who’s gone through a bad divorce.
“Guess this is the popular kids’ table!” he said, and then he laughed the kind of laugh a guy laughs when he knows he’s made an awful joke.
“So, Pete, I loved your draft. Read it at lunch, loved it.”
“You read it at lunch?”
“When you’re in my business, you gotta read fast. Sometime
s I read two, three drafts during lunch. And Lucy told me you just nailed this voice, this voice of your generation, that’s really moving back toward what’s real.”
“Yes,” I said, in what I imagined were Abe Lincoln tones.
“Really owning earnestness.”
“Yes, yeah.”
“So you just holed up in a cabin in Vermont and banged that sucker out, huh?”
“Yeah. I mean, I’ve been musing on it for years. A lot of it is very much my own family history. Stories I’ve heard from shutins I visit.”
“It’s real. You can feel that.”
“Very, very real. Definitely.”
“So, I’m always interested—what’s your process, how do you work?”
What followed next was a game of Bullshit Poker. David asked me questions that I assumed were traps. I gave the writerest answers I could think of on the fly. Lucy, for her part, was somber, nursing her beer, from time to time staring hard at me in horror.
Luckily, on the subway, I’d written down a list of writery statements.
WRITERY STATEMENTS
• I’ve always felt that writing a novel is like doing surgery on yourself.
• I try and stake out territory where the real and the transcendent meet.
• Tornado Ashes Club is really a story of an American pilgrimage.
• Grandma is a spirit guide; she is to Silas as Virgil is to Dante.
• Every morning, before I wrote, I’d read a page from Leaves of Grass. Whitman speaks in such an American cadence.
• Before I started writing, I spent a year just trying to picture Luke’s face. Then one day, as I was taking a walk by the river, he walked past me. And I sat down on the grass and started writing.
• I aspire to be as prolific as Dickens, as subtle as Henry James, and as lyrical as Toni Morrison.
• Writing, to me, isn’t a hobby. It isn’t a job. It’s as necessary to who I am as breathing.
Some of these were hard to say out loud. I saw Lucy’s forehead start to shine with sweat. But David kept nodding. And he kept drinking, more than you’d think a little guy should drink. He almost tripped once as he got up to go to the bathroom.
“Hey, Faulkner, don’t blow this,” Lucy scratched at me when he was gone.
“You’re the one who told him I’m the voice of a generation.”
“He’s buying it, he’s buying it.”
We saw David walking back. He looked wobbly on his feet and he sat down hard.
“God,” he said. “Writing. You know, probably shouldn’t tell you this. But you know, Lucy knows this, everybody knows this. We’re in trouble.”
“I … uh… .”
“We’re in trouble.” He looked at Lucy. “Worse than you know.” He chugged what must have been half a beer and slammed it against the table. “Fuck!” He looked at Lucy. “They’re thinking of having a pledge drive, like PBS. Like, ‘If you like this book, send us a check and get an Ortolan tote bag.’ It’s that bad.”
He burped a couple times, then looked at me. “Why don’t you write screenplays?”
“What?”
“I mean, you know, Lucy says you got the chops, why not screenplays?”
“Well, the novel, as a form, for me as a writer, is just so much more—um, suited to exploration of—”
“I’ve been working on a screenplay. I’ve been working on a short, too. Maybe get some actors, put it on YouTube, see who bites.”
A long pause.
“Fuck!”
Then, “Look, I’m gonna take your book to my bosses. I want to buy it. You know why?”
“Um, because you responded to—”
“Because that country stuff, all that stuff, and the religion —I think we can place it with Wal-Mart. I think they’ll sell it. That’s what you gotta do these days. Make the math work, sell it big. I’m hoping.”
“Uh, thank you.”
“But what do I know? I’m a Jewish kid from Scarsdale.”
Just then a Sasquatch tapped David on the shoulder. That may sound like an exaggeration—it is not. This guy’s face was hidden with matted, untended hair and the air around him seemed to quiver from his body stink, like heat rising from a desert highway. He smelled like the most poorly tended organic farm in the world.
David said “hey!” and they shook hands.
“How’s it all going, with the thing?”
“Oh, it’s pretty good. Getting pretty sick of chicken!”
“I bet.”
“And my dentist, he’s not too happy.”
“Oh yeah.”
“But all in all.”
“Cool, man,” said David. “Shoot me an e-mail sometime, bring me up to speed.”
“Can’t, man, remember? No computers.”
“Oh right, right.”
The Sasquatch left.
“That guy,” said David, “has some nuts on him. He kept pitching me these books—he’d go for a year only eating fried chicken. A year of only drinking soda. A year of never showering, no computers, all these ideas. I could never sell them individually. But then finally he came up with the idea of doing them all at once. Sold it, he’s off and running.”
David took a big sip of beer. “Dude’s having a rough year. Anyway—your book! Lucy, she’s good. I’m gonna get her to clean a lot of it up.”
I could see objections forming behind Lucy’s eyes, but she stayed quiet.
“She’s gonna cut a lot of the crap out. But—it’s good. People will buy it. I think.”
Another pause. David looked up at the bar, then stood up.
“All right.” He shook my hand.
We walked outside, the three of us. As we neared the subway, David told us to follow him, and he started off down a side street. Lucy and I looked at each other and followed, and he led us down a slope to a small square of park. On one side was a row of three-story brownstones.
“You see that place?” David pointed at the one on the corner, which stretched back for nearly a block. “That’s Josh Holt Cready’s place. Three point five million dollars. Manassas paid for that place.” Then he turned, and locked me with his eyes. “I passed on that book! Fuck!” We gazed at the place for a minute.
Then David yelled “You suck, Cready!” We all ducked behind a bush. We waited for maybe ten seconds, then peeked our heads over the top. No reaction from Cready’s house.
Then a light came on upstairs. We all freaked out and booked down the street.
“Shattered my confidence,” David said, as we scurried away. “Confidence! That’s the one thing you need to be an editor! Never again, I swore to myself.”
We got to the subway. David shook my hand. “All right. Good stuff. I’m gonna see if I can make this happen. Don’t fuck me on this.”
And he walked off. Lucy was holding her head in her hands.
“Um, is he okay?”
“Oh no.” She took her hands away. “But I think you just sold your book.”
10
The Roman Empire. For two millennia, it’s stood as the symbol of value. Of virtue. Of integrity. Of lasting strength.
Our very word—investment—is derived from Latin. It means the same things today that it did two thousand years ago. Security. Stability. Your financial future.
At Via Appia Funds, we combine the values of ancient Rome with a forward-looking 21st-century approach to investment. Our goal is simple: to build an epic empire of wealth for all our clients.
When you invest with us, you’ll feel the strength, the confidence that comes from turning your future over to dedicated, devoted professionals who can respond to your needs. Professionals who can adapt to an ever-changing marketplace, while always staying true to the core principles that last beyond years.
Choose Via Appia Funds. Choose integrity. Choose strength. And choose a financial future that will stand, proud and sturdy as the Coliseum.
—excerpt from an introductory letter for Via Appia Funds by Pete Tarslaw
What I assu
med would happen after I sold my novel
Some editors would take me to someplace that made cocktails with elderberries. I’d get drunk and hold forth. As I left I’d see a model on the street waiting for a cab.
“Can you only write, Pete Tarslaw, or can you flag a cab as well?”
“I can flag a cab.”
“Then let’s go.”
Back in her apartment, in Gramercy or somewhere, wherever models live, she would press her lips against my ear.
“I know you can write love beautifully, Pete Tarslaw. Can you make love beautifully as well?”
“Why don’t I show you?” I would do so.
Two months later: at a dinner in London (I’d be in London for the UK launch of T. A. C., and the restaurant would be called something like the Fatted Calf), Zadie Smith would lean across the table to me.
“You know, I’m on to you, you bastard.” Then she’d smile. “Takes one to know one. I won’t tell on you if you don’t tell on me.” Later the two of us would do coke off a manuscript.
Also I would be on Charlie Rose.
What Actually Happened After I Sold My Novel
When I saw my contract I learned why writers dwell on hard-luck characters who fix busted boilers and squabble over grocery bills. It’s because writers don’t get paid very much. Ortolan offered me $15,000 for The Tornado Ashes Club. Most of that I wouldn’t see until the book came out. Lucy drew a graphic that explained the finances of the publishing game:
The few writers at the top, the Tim Drews and Pamela McLaughlins, take all the money. There’s not much left for the lots of writers at the bottom.
My book was set to come out in early November. David Borer told me that the British owners of Ortolan believed that Americans did a lot of reading over Thanksgiving, “They buy books to take with them on the train to Cleveland and so on” was their logic. With layoffs looming no one was brave enough to tell them otherwise.
*
Once, in ninth grade, I made a model of the Eiffel Tower out of toothpicks for a big project at school. When I finished the whole thing was lopsided and warped, but it was so fragile that I dared not tamper with it, I just hoped it would stay together long enough for me to get a grade.
