If She Were Dead by J.P. Smith

Author:J.P. Smith
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Sourcebooks
Published: 2019-11-12T16:00:00+00:00

33

“Are you writing now?” the unseen interviewer in Santa Monica asked, and Amelie said she was working on a new book. “At least I’m trying.”

“Do you find it difficult, especially as your latest book has only just landed?”

Amelie said that it wasn’t always easy when you’re in the middle of publicizing another book. “Sometimes I get a little lost,” she said, and she laughed. “I’m still in the world of the last book.”

“Will the next novel be anything like the one that just came out? Your reviews have been uniformly excellent.”

“I can promise it’ll be completely different.”

“Then will the setting be pretty much the same?” He went on to say that over her last three novels she had begun to map out a universe of suburban angst, where below a veneer of respectability and conformity was a universe falling into disarray.

She felt a tickle in her pocket, indicating that a call was coming in over her iPhone. She could do nothing about it. She was being interviewed by a man she had never met who was sitting in Southern California asking her the same questions everyone else asked her, except he sounded a thousand times more intelligent.

“Well, I’m not sure actually. I mean, I think all writers try to create a consistent fictional world. The challenge is in always making it new. Exploring different layers of it.” In other words, stepping over the line. She didn’t know what else to say. Her phone kept vibrating, and she knew instantly it was Ben, that he had managed to extricate himself from the demands of his family. The vibrations stopped; the call had come to nothing.

“Of course a lot of writers don’t like to discuss their work in progress, at least not in any detail.”

“I suppose I’m like that, too,” Amelie said brightly, addressing her invisible audience: people in cars, people in rest homes, actors in their studio trailers. Eight minutes had passed since the interview had begun. She looked at the digital clock on the studio wall, and her pocket began vibrating again. She wanted to say, Could you please let me take this call from my lover? Instead she said, “I still have no idea of even the names of the characters.”

“So you’ve just begun work.”

“I started it quite recently.”

“And I know a lot of our listeners are interested in a writer’s working habits.”

That again.

“Could you tell us a little about some of yours?”

She wished she could be outrageous as some writers were. She wished she could say that she smoked a joint, or needed to cut her own flesh before sitting down to her laptop, comments that boosted sales and earned their authors spots on late-night talk shows and photos in the pages of glossy magazines devoted to troubled celebrities.

“I like to take a long walk in the morning,” she said. “And then I just write.”

“So you clear your head in the fresh air.”

She was sorry she had mentioned it. Soon the interviewer would be asking her about her religious duties.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.