The Thieves of Manhattan by Adam Langer

Author:Adam Langer
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Fiction, Humorous, American Mystery & Suspense Fiction, General, Fiction - General, Humorous fiction, Manhattan (New York, Theft, Authors, Swindlers and swindling, Crime, Manuscripts, Publishers and publishing, N.Y.)
ISBN: 9781400068913
Publisher: Random House, Inc.
Published: 2010-09-15T07:00:00+00:00

REVISING THE DRAFT

Geoff asked if I could return Thief to him in two weeks. But the day after our lunch, when I went back to Roth’s place, I couldn’t summon the motivation. Isabelle DuPom called me at Olden’s behest to ask how I was doing, and I told the truth—that I was working to return the manuscript to her boss at the appointed time and that making the changes was harder than I’d anticipated. Isabelle asked if I needed more time, and though I said no, I’d meet the deadline, I continued to fritter away days. After a week passed, I began to panic when I realized that half my time had elapsed, and I had not come close to cutting A Thief in Manhattan down to the size Olden had requested.

I spent the following week cutting and rewriting, chopping this paragraph and that, lishing entire chapters. But when the next Monday arrived and I reread my work, I realized that I had made the book worse. The shorter manuscript took longer to read; it lurched from incident to incident; Iola Jaffe and Norbert Piels were as shallow and cartoonish as Roth had initially written them—their actions were not only improbable but also dull. The book was becoming one that Roth had warned me about—no reader would care whether it was true or not, and so wouldn’t feel betrayed when I revealed it to be false. I considered calling Olden to ask for more time, but because I knew that I had to become the sure-of-himself author of A Thief in Manhattan, because I knew that I had to be an actor and not a reactor, had to act like something big was at stake, I vowed that I would send in the revised manuscript to Olden the following morning as promised, no matter how much work was left.

I must have spent hours pacing in front of Roth’s window, watching the wind blow the bright green leaves of the London plane trees, watching the ripples in the Hudson River, watching traffic zooming south but getting backed up in the northbound lanes on the Henry Hudson Parkway, watching the sky brighten as the sun rose behind Roth’s building. Cut about fifty pages, Olden had told me; lose the swearwords; change the beginning, the ending, the title. I watched the sun dip into the river, watched the sky grow dark and the trees disappear into its blackness. I saw southbound traffic stall, then ease up, watched the separation between river and sky evaporate.

Finally, in a blaze of inspiration and swagger, I returned to the original manuscript, glanced at it for just a moment. On the computer screen, I selected the entire document, then changed the font from twelve-point to nine, switched from Times to Palatino. The page count was now just about 250. Olden hadn’t liked the first paragraph, so I lished it and started with the second. Olden didn’t like the swearwords, so I figured what the hell, and just cut all of them out except for Iola Jaffe’s.

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