A Writer Prepares by Lawrence Block

Author:Lawrence Block
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Lawrence Block
Published: 2021-02-15T00:00:00+00:00

11

For the spring semester, I moved out of my furnished room on Phillips Street. Pete Hochstein and I took an apartment together, the entire second floor of a two-family house on the edge of town. Our landlord had picked the place up—literally, when it was scheduled to be torn down and a commercial building thrown up on the site. He trucked it to a foundation on a piece of land he owned, rented out the lower half to a young married couple, and was fool enough to let us have the top half. We furnished it for next to nothing with used furniture from Springfield, one item of which was a $10 refrigerator that proved unreliable. It died in late May, and by the time we realized what had happened we’d missed our chance to clean it. Everything was too far gone to go near. Until the end of June we stayed away from it. Every once in a while some unwitting visitor would open the door by mistake, and then we’d quick close it and open every window in the house and go away for a few hours.

We moved out just hours before the landlord’s agent was scheduled to show the place to a prospective tenant. I can imagine them walking through the rooms, bravely ignoring the detritus we’d left behind, until someone, agent or tenant, opened the fridge.

• • •

I had a full schedule of courses to take that spring, and they were the least of it. The important thing I had to do was revise Shadows.

Because, incredibly enough, my lesbian novel had sold to Crest for an advance of $2000.

Thinking back, it’s hard for me to understand why it took so long. That may sound arrogant, but I can assure you that arrogance had nothing to do with it. As a matter of fact, I’d almost forgotten about the book, and didn’t expect it to sell. I’d written it the previous June, and, while it wouldn’t have been unreasonable for the book to take nine months or more to find a publisher willing to take it on, it seems to me that Crest would have been the first place Henry’d have sent it. Could it have been sent to several other markets first? Or did it go straight to Crest and languish in a corner of somebody’s office, with never an inquiry from my agent as to when they were going to shit or get off the pot?

I know it couldn’t have sold until sometime around the end of the second semester, because I specifically recall doing the revisions at a table in the living room of the new apartment. I remember, too, that I had to learn how to type all over again.

I was a self-taught typist, having learned during high school by typing all my papers. I was used to looking at the keyboard, which made copying other text a pain in the neck, and I only used the first two fingers of each hand on the keys, and a thumb on the spacebar.

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