Leaving Word. Steven Boykey Sidley
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She spent a few hours making calls, cajoling contacts, seeking openings, possibilities, lifelines. No one was hiring. Companies were closing, shrinking, deflating, pivoting, pretending. No one wanted an editor-of-substance, a woman who had read everyone from Chaucer to Groff. Who knew how to shave a contract at close throat and provide sensibility to wild imaginations. She was among the best, and charged accordingly and now she was just so much chaff from a time forgotten.
Having running out of steam on the new career front, she picked up the next manuscript on her desk. It had been submitted by a well-known agent with a cluster of superstars under her belt. It was by a debut novelist, and the agent had assembled praise collected from other writers in her stable, overflowing with adjectives and hyperbole. The author’s name was Cassandra Apple. The book’s title In the Event of Fire (an excellent title, she thought, even without the benefit of plot). She read the first chapter, and started composing her rejection letter. Shouts and blurbs were worth only the favors that propelled them.
The door to her office burst open to reveal a pale-faced intern, her eyes brimming.
‘Buddy is dead.’
Joelle stared incomprehensibly at her. ‘What do you mean Buddy is dead?’
Chapter 4
Buddy Rappaport had been on the job for only two years. He had been brought in by the board from Silicon Valley where he had founded an opinion-aggregation mobile site called Opine, which had attracted millions of subscribers, received considerable acclaim from technology wonks and utopian barkers, barely breaking even. But CrossMedia had decided to purchase it for an obscenity, leaving Buddy with the distinction of having never turned a decent profit and yet having been rewarded with a powerful and vaunted CEO position and enough cash never to have to speak of cash again.
The deal had been done in secret. One minute CrossMedia Publishing was a mainly print-focused company, and the next the perplexed Los Angeles office staff were being addressed by an oversized thirty-five-year-old teddy bear in jeans and a faded green T-shirt and a disarming smile. Joelle had not even had time to do a Google stalk before everyone was summoned to a large auditorium atop the pale-blue building on Wilshire, with live links to the New York office, where the grand old original publishing building still stood. CrossMedia Publishing had been started as Cross Publishing by successful New York playwright and trust-fund baby Gareth Cross in the 1920s, an iconoclast and philanderer and drunk who threw elaborate Gatsby-like parties. His reputation was such that all aspirant writers scrabbled for attention at his firm, and Gareth’s eye for talent was unerring. And so over the following eighty years it grew to powerhouse status, before some smart marketing exec had suggested a name change to CrossMedia Publishing, dovetailing nicely with expansion plans that sought to occupy hitherto unexplored alternative media jungles, plans that had shown little success to date. Print, especially books, had still dominated their aging DNA. Although the company was headquartered in New York, the LA offices had gradually grown into an equal force, attracting and nurturing writers unimpressed with East Coast pretensions.
‘Hi, I’m Buddy Rappaport. It’s been a somewhat shocking privilege to be asked to lead CrossMedia Publishing, with a legacy that goes back to the early twentieth century and whose archives are peopled by the some of the greatest literary talents the world has seen.’
Not bad, thought Joelle. ‘Whose archives are peopled by …’ She would temporarily suspend skepticism.
‘Most of you probably don’t know me, nor should you. But those of you who do will know that I’m a product of my times, which is all digital. CrossMedia’s decision to buy my company expresses the board’s wishes to expand outwards from their roots in print, to take the company into this strange new digital, mobile and block-chained world. Which is as fast moving and confusing to me as to them, which I didn’t tell them in the interview.’
A smattering of polite laughs. Joelle wondered whether she would be forced to edit Tweets. She re-engaged her skepticism again.
‘So let me simply say this. Balzac, the great French novelist, who handwrote over twenty novels and two thousand characters, lies on his deathbed in 1850. To whom does he cry out? His mother, his new bride, his children? No, he calls out to Bianchen, a doctor, a character from his book La Comédie Humaine. At that moment of reckoning, he seeks a character of his imagination for comfort. He seeks a character of his imagination for comfort.’
Balzac? Joelle wondered if he was any good in bed. If he were married, attached, single, gay. He had a great smile. And the slight paunch and well-appointed thighs were, well, cute.
‘Why am I telling you this? Because my emergence in digital and this company’s heritage in print are less important than this—we are the silent hands that hold and caress the writer’s imagination. There is nothing more important. It matters not a whit whether that imagination is borne on the wings of hardcover or a mobile app. Our job is to hold the writer’s imagination gently in our care and to deliver it to as many people as possible.’
It matters not a whit? He had nice hair too. Curly and soft looking.
‘Of course, it’s not realistic to believe that there won’t be changes, perhaps some of them uncomfortable.’
What a piece of shit. He had almost had her.
‘But I promise you this. The gentle ghosts that live in your archives and backlists will be treated with the reverence that they deserve. The authors currently on your lists will be protected. The editors and proofreaders and assistants and interns and salespeople and marketing staff and the rest will keep their jobs. I ask only that you give the new young people who come in here a friendly smile and an offer of support. They are as passionate about writing as you are.’
Well, OK. Maybe.
The following day she got the summons. He was sitting in the boardroom, where he had been meeting staff for hours. There were plates of fancy miniature edibles, health drinks and a stern-looking assistant, tall and model-thin, and taking notes on a Mac. Buddy jumped up and shook her hand, his stare direct, his smile distracting.
‘Joelle. I’ve been looking forward to meeting you. You’re a legend around here. This is Polina, who works with me. Call me Buddy.’
Polina nodded severely at her, causing Joelle to do the same.
‘Nice to meet you, Buddy. I am hardly a legend.’
‘Three of your authors have been finalists for the National Book Award. One of them won. You have an Arthur C. Clarke winner, a Booker winner, as well as a couple of finalists. You have seven New York Times bestsellers. Your authors have a combined total of six films made from their books. Surely this qualifies as legend?’
‘Except I didn’t write the books.’
‘Yes, well, behind every writer …’
‘That’s nice of you to say.’
‘So. In the coming weeks I will start putting some of my plans in place, which, unsurprisingly, are going to be focused on some of the new emerging areas I have poked at for the last few years.’
‘Like?’
‘Podcasts, mobile shortform, aggregation sites, paywalls, donation subscriptions, VR, artificial intelligence, that sort of thing.’
‘Uh huh.’
‘You don’t sound enthused.’
‘Artificial intelligence?’
‘There are all sorts of very interesting tools being developed in Silicon Valley that can analyze and even generate storyline.’
She said nothing, her face frozen into a rictus. He burst out laughing, a small tinkle for such a large man.
‘I can see how that must sound.’
‘Yes.’
‘I want you to stay with us. You don’t have to poke your nose into this new stuff if you don’t want to. You can carry on being