Coming Up Murder by Mary Angela

Author:Mary Angela
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: small town, amateur sleuth, south dakota, clean language, clean, clean fiction, clean mystery, clean humor, clean book, clean chicklit
Publisher: camelpress

Chapter Seventeen

The only place I wanted to go was home. The coffee and brownie had revived me enough to grade papers—or at least quizzes. Felix’s keynote speech was at seven o’clock and dinner at eight. That left me a good chunk of time for grading. On my dining room table, I arranged two stacks: essays and quizzes. Then I set out my highlighters, pencils, and handbook. I felt very organized. As I took a seat, Dickinson decided to join me. Her plans didn’t include organization. She batted down one marker after the other—yellow, pink, blue—with her orange paw, then the rubber bands. I was gathering them off the floor when my cellphone rang.

It was Dewberry Press. My earlier email came back to me in a wave of nausea. What had I said and how strongly? I was too panicked to remember. “Hello?”

“Emmeline, this is Owen.” His voice was full of exasperation.

“I know. Hi.” Dickinson gave me a look that relayed how stupid she thought I sounded. I pulled her off the table and onto my lap. I didn’t know why I couldn’t speak coherently to him. Every time a Los Angeles area code popped up, I became tongue-tied.

“I received your email,” Owen continued. “I didn’t think the call could wait until Monday.”

Good. I was glad he could sense the urgency of it.

“I’m only going to say this once. The book is too long. The final chapters need to be revised. It’s not a question of if but how.”

“Too long?” This was new criticism.

“Too long, too wordy, too much,” said Owen.

Sensing my irritation, Dickinson jumped off my lap and onto the dining table. She started working on the rubber bands again. “I hardly think three hundred and fifty pages can be considered too long. I have appliance manuals longer than that.”

“It is,” he said. “Long books don’t sell. You want the book to sell, don’t you?”

Of course I wanted the book to sell. But this wasn’t a large press. You didn’t see many of their titles on the shelves of bookstores. Were sales really driving his decision? Or was it his experience with fictional titles? “Yes, I do, but—”

“You read, don’t you?” he asked.

What kind of question was that? I was an English teacher. “Every day.”

“You want to feel satisfied when you finish a novel, right?”

“Yes, but this isn’t a novel,” I said. “And some novels are quite disturbing.”

“The ones you read in college, maybe,” said Owen. “Not in real life. Readers want a happy ending. Your ending isn’t happy.”

“That’s because there’s still work to be done in the field!”

He let out a sigh. “Save it for another book, okay? Make the changes this week. Our graphic design department is working on a mock-up cover. They’ll take into consideration your requests from the questionnaire we sent. Look for it soon.”

This week? If I wasn’t in the middle of a murder investigation, it might have been plausible, but there was no way I could rewrite the ending this week. But what other option did I have? Like Claudia said, I’d sealed my fate when I signed the contract.

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