Death By Email. Carol Hadley
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Soon stories seemed to write themselves. I hated going to work, begrudging the time spent away from my precious computer. Narratives percolated in my head and I asked my characters for their honest reactions.
I created email accounts and sent questions or story ideas to them. Then I answered me as the character. It sounds crazy, but don’t knock it until you’ve tried it.
For example: Worse than angry, Jess was homicidal after learning of his daughter’s marriage to his enemy. He had some shocking ideas. And in another story Francesca confessed that she’d rather be in lust than in love with the new man in her life. I hadn’t really thought of her that way, but it spiced up the story.
My mind automatically raced straight to cliché and would have stuck there without input from my characters. Internet role playing; who’d’a thunk?
Genuinely helpful, GQ never laughed at my enthusiasm and we became good friends over the next two years. She even tried to persuade me to try my hand at writing magazine articles to help supplement my meager income until I sold a book.
Journalists don’t earn much, not unless they’re famous, anyway, but I should talk. All a journalist had to do was publish one article to be way ahead of me in the game.
My novel was getting rave rejections from all the best publishers who accept unagented material. I knew I needed an agent, but so far none had shown any interest in representing me. I finally decided that my problem was that I wimped out when it came to killing my victim. I needed to be more ruthless, make him suffer. And I’d read somewhere that it should be someone the reader knows and possibly even likes.
“Say, MI-- Been thinking.” GQ wrote to me one evening as we gabbed about nothing in particular.
“We’ve shared story ideas and written some great ones together over the past year. What do you say we try to publish our plot machine stories? I saved all of them. (Didn’t you? ;-) Most of them are really good. I think we should try to make a buck on ‘em.”
I felt like my brain was going to explode. Why hadn’t I thought of that?
“I’ve sold magazine and newspaper articles,” GQ continued, “so I’ll talk to people I know, see if anyone can suggest an agent. That is, if it’s okay with you. We could sell them in a series or maybe as a collection. What do you think? Shall we sell a book?”
Silly question! I’m aching to get published and she wants to know if I’m interested? All I could say was, “Who, What, Where, When, How and YESSS!”
In the following weeks, she managed to find someone who knew somebody, who might introduce us to the right people to get the stories published. It was sure to be a bestseller — if we ever connected with half the people who knew people.
GQ was charming and I savored our time spent on the ‘Net. We laughed at the same things and while adhering strictly to our no personal information rule, I felt I was getting to know her. We’d relaxed our rule enough to share a little about our respective projects.
My rewrite had some twists I was almost ready to try on a friendly audience and GQ had some concerns about a story she was investigating.
While I agonized over my struggle to build a believable villain, she understood. I was surprised when she confided that her story was so big 20/20 was interested. Then she suddenly regretted having told me that much, which if you must know, was exactly nothing.
She joked when I tried to make her promise to be careful, so I believed she might be worried, too.
I had the vague impression that money, a lot of money, was involved but that was only a guess. When I asked for an explanation, she changed the subject.
“My Internet bank account is all screwed up,” she complained. “They say that I have to give the bank access to my computer to see where my mistake is. I sure can’t find it.”
I wouldn’t have done that, but she insisted she’d installed the best and most expensive firewalls intended to keep intruders from hacking into her personal files.
“How can the bank get access to your computer?”
“I had to give the woman in charge of Internet banking my password, but she assured me that as soon as she was finished solving my problem that she’d forget she ever knew it. Plus, I plan to change my password the minute it’s fixed.”
I didn’t know enough about computers to argue.
~~~
GQ was sensitive, creative, had a great sense of humor, and was an endless source of motivation. She had answers to most of my questions. If she didn’t know, she tried to point me in the right direction. That way I discovered the information for myself. My most valuable find at that time was the web site, thesaurus.com. This computer stuff is pure gold if you don’t mind digging a little.
One morning I checked my email before leaving for work as usual and found a message that just made my day.
“Hey, Kiddo,” GQ wrote, “Just got word that we have a publisher interested in our stories. More later.”
My drive to work that day was so joyful and sunny that I rolled down the windows and seat-danced to golden oldies all the way through town. I didn’t care who saw or heard me.
As I approached our downtown office, Roy Orbison began Crying. I joined him at full volume, which in my case was a screech. The driver of the car in front of me gave a startled look in her rear view mirror and pulled to the side of the road.
I looked back too, but didn’t see anything so kept driving and crying. When I sing, dogs howl, babies cry and grown men become suicidal.
I was so giddy with excitement that I was nice to the Twit for a change. He’d done nothing to deserve it. I just felt like tormenting him with kindness. It worked. Made him crazy, wondering what I was up to.
“Hey, boss,” I sang, “Want to dance?” I held out my arms and waltzed up to him.
He ducked under my arm and hid in his office.
Once he came out to give me a new assignment and another time he hesitantly slipped close to my drafting board to ask, “Would you mind fixing this ad? Sam’s sick again and the client wants the caption to read, ‘Leader of the pack,’ rather than ‘Leads the way.’”
I gave him my best smile and snatched the page from his hand, scanned it and rendered the change. When I silently handed it back to him, he gulped and returned to his office without a word.
Now, why hadn’t I seen it before? The Twit was afraid of me!
CHAPTER FIVE
After what seemed an eternity, GQ and I received copies of our contract for review. The publisher loved the fact that we’d never met and intended to use it in the promotion of our book. At first, they’d talked about using our email names as co-authors, but finally decided to combine them artfully into the book cover instead — my idea.
Our publisher, House Afire, was a new company, looking for first-time writers and unique formats with which to launch their business. The timing couldn’t have been better.
There was talk of recording our very first meeting in front of the media as a publicity gimmick. Since GQ and I had agreed that we both should have the same agent, negotiations progressed swiftly.
Yup, that’s what they said. Swiftly isn’t how I would have described it, but then I’d never had a book published before. House Afire wanted to get our stories on the shelves by the end of the year, an unheard of occurrence. GQ, who had more time and experience with this kind of thing than I did, made most of the decisions.
I’m not interested in business, anyway. I just want to write and get paid for it.
When the time came to sign the contract our agent,