36.

The change keeps me up at night.

There’s something I feel, like the hour before you come down with something like food poisoning, or a cold – you can feel your body’s queasy, can feel it’s struggling with something that shouldn’t be present, and you’re just hopeful that you’ll fight it off, but there’s an inevitability that it’s going to unravel spectacularly.

Only it doesn’t – outside of a lack of sleep, and constant restlessness, and some tightness in my back and shoulder blades, nothing develops, other than the awful exhaustion I feel when I drag myself out of bed before my alarm goes off at 6.43am.

I text Autumn and tell her I’ll work from home as I’ve had a rough night. She asks if I’m okay. I tell her sorta. She asks if I’m still going to my meeting with Regina. That makes me think. Is yesterday’s change reflecting from that point? Is this part of it? I could skip this meeting – I know it’s largely pointless – but I’m still on the bender of trying to do things better, even if Melody nuked my ambition.

I’ll try, I tell Autumn.

Would she reschedule? Autumn asks.

I don’t know how long she’s down here, I say.

You could do it over Zoom or phone.

I’ll see how I go.

I log into my work email remotely, and see that Cameron’s emailed me about revisions. Totally nailed it! Wow! You’ll love this. Think it’s better than ever! Cameron writes beautiful prose, so the emojis just make it hard for me to reconcile how such a great writer can talk in idiot hieroglyphs.

Idiotglyphs.

I also can’t remember if Cameron answered me last week, although I vaguely recall there had been an email, but I didn’t get around to looking at it. Now that bugs me. Luca said I’d forget something, and in some cases it would be discoverable. Is this it? But if it is, it also seems mind-bogglingly irrelevant, and that’s why it does annoy me.

A massive change would seem purposeful. This seems so purposeless that it makes all of life seem purposeless. Just more unease. I’m wading in it. So I deal with it how I always deal with it.

Work.

Fortunately, true to her word, Cameron has done an awesome job with the revisions – she hasn’t approached it in the way I suggested, but has come from a more lateral point of view where it’s even better. These times, as fleeting as they are, are when I think being an editor isn’t a thankless clusterfuck, and somebody appreciate what I’m trying to do for them, rather than condescends how I’m unworthy of their produce.

I write her back, Well done! And then I spend the next ten minutes trying to find how to stick a single fucking emoticon in, because I want to connect to her on her level. I know “:” and “)” make “J” but I’m looking for the colourful emoticons that she used but can’t find them.

Typically, Google searches yield instructions that would’ve been useful for prior versions of Word, before dashboards and options under each menu changed. Finally, after a mini-rage, I just send my J, although I feel guilty that he’s not as good as any of the ones she sent me. I hit SEND on my email before it can plague me any further.

But the one thing this episode has shown me is that if I’m capable enough to rage, then I’m capable enough to take this meeting, and my experience also highlights a new tact for me – something I don’t think I’ve ever tried with Leopardus or any of the staff I’ve worked with.

37.

So, let’s jump to the meeting, because there’s little point telling you about the train ride into the city – I notice this time that Regina exhibits a wariness. That hasn’t changed from the last time. I recognise retrospectively, like somebody’s hit playback in my head, that she was like this last week, but I was too self-absorbed to notice, and then there was the whole James Bond argument thingy.

I try to be pleasant as we talk – she gives me the advice she did the previous time, and then I tell her about Melody, who simply wrote a book (and then I add, “badly wrote a book”) and had a huge hit.

“You have to look past the writing,” Regina says. “Look at the story she’s sharing.”

The story’s a caricature of exploring racism and sexism. It reads like a first draft some inexperienced person – not just a writer, but some twenty-something who thinks she has all the answers (because, at that age, we all think like that) decided to write as her commentary, like she’d enlighten the world.

Well, to be fair, she enlightened a good readership, but only people who fall into that wake and want to keep paddling because they think they’re going somewhere important, somewhere original, unaware they’re just paddling further and further out to the sea, where eventually this shit’ll (and by that I mean their writing, and not the message) be exposed and they’ll drown.

“Under that premise,” I say, “that just means I can write absolute shit, but as long as it’s about something important then everybody will think I’m a genius.”

I can hear Regina’s double-take – like that hits her brain, she tries to process and dismiss it, but then it hits the shutters and refuses to go through again. Finally! Maybe there’s been some connection. My rage can have a purpose when it filters into eloquence.

“So,” I say, “can you tell me why you guys passed on Wunderland? I know the other ones didn’t quite work for you, but I really liked Wunderland.”

“The twist was too obvious,” Regina says.

I could explain what the twist was, but I refuse to in case you ever read it. Some of my alpha readers said the same thing, so I acknowledge that, and I know how easily fixable that is – well, I think it is. And that’s not a criticism of the feedback, but a query on my ability to execute the twist better.

“That’s it?” I ask. “The twist?”

“Well …”

I can read immediately that she wants to say something, and it’s probably going to tread the line between professional objectivity and personal criticism. She’s measuring up to say it.

“What?” I say. “I have thousands of rejections behind me. I’m used to this.”

“We didn’t think you had any right to write that story.”

“Why?”

“Your protagonist is a woman.”

“So?”

“You’re not a woman.”

“You know, JRR Tolkien wasn’t actually a Hobbit.”

“That was then,” Regina says, an edge entering her voice. “This is now.”

“So what can I write?”

“Write what you are.”

“A nearly fifty-year-old white dude?”

Regina flinches – that’s what she called me last time. Was probably thinking about how to slip it in again to classify me. No, wait. That’s not classifying. She wants to use it because with everything implicit, it objectifies me as somebody privileged, despite the thousands of rejections, the decades it took to get published, and the startling lack of success.

“Tell me,” I say, “if I start a story about a fifty-year-old white guy, but it’s not published for like five years – as happened with my first book that you took on – am I still entitled to have written it given I’ll no longer be the same age as the protagonist?”

“You’re being facetious,” Regina says, drawing herself up. “Your protagonist was a woman recovering from a miscarriage. What gives you the right to write that story?”

“I wasn’t writing about her experience.”

“There’s no difference.”

“Of course there is – one would be story, the other is backstory.”

“That’s a nonexistent line.”

“If you believe story and backstory are the same thing, you know nothing about writing.”

Regina takes a deep breath – to her credit, she’s much more composed about this than I am.

“Why did you want to tell that story?” she asks. “That particular story.”

“I don’t want to sound like an absolute wanker, but ideas come to me. Sometimes, they mean nothing. Sometimes, they meet up with other ideas, and become bigger ideas. And, sometimes, they grow demanding enough that I explore how to write them. I don’t make the decisions. My imagination’s doing the concocting.”

“Okay – your prolific. You surely had something more relevant to you, to your experience. So, again, why this idea?”

“Because I’m a fucking writer,” I say. “That’s what we do. It’s fiction. You know – made up?”

“We believe in the genuine voice,” Regina says.

“For anybody working in make-believe, that seems redundant.”

“Maybe that’s why you are where you are.”

“Maybe I should just write about this – about this meeting?”

Regina frowns. “Is that meant to be a threat?”

“It’s a statement – oh, fuck it.”

I sigh and rise, sick of this. I’m one of the big stormer-outerers, the heat of the moment usually firing the rockets to launch me the fuck out of situations like this. But I’ve only used this power on personal situations – mostly with Lana. This is the first time I’m applying it to a professional situation.

“Thanks for your time, huh?” I say.

“You’re leaving?”

“What gave it away? Me getting up?”

She also rises – she’s not a short woman, so we stand eye to eye, and she’s impressively confident. More confident that me. If we were going to fight (and I’m not saying we are, I’m just using that as an analogy) I’d be the one second-guessing how I got myself in this situation.

“You’re very fixed,” she says. “You need to learn to adapt. Change. Evolve.”

“That way lies madness,” I say.

Regina frowns. “Shakespeare?”

“Melody,” I say.

We leave with a rudimentary goodbye, and that’s it, I feel like I’m done with Leopardus, or that they’re done with me, or maybe we’re done with each other. When we first met up, they had such hopes for me. I had such hopes for me. But hopes are just that: hopes. It’s funny there are modifiers that come with that, like high hopes and no hope and a fool’s hope. You never heard of a realized hope.

Once I’m on the train I feel some bit of remorse that I let my impetuosity get the better of me – I equate it with buyer’s remorse. People can feel remorseful after big purchases. I feel it after interactions where I should’ve behaved the way I’d behave if I was in a TV show and was always cool and eloquent and outsmarting everybody, the way I do in my imagination.

Then again, my imagination hasn’t been my best asset, it seems.

On the train ride home, Autumn messages me: How’d it go?

I tell her it was a clusterfuck, that I let my ranting get away from me as we started talking about storytelling, and that I’m regretting the way I must’ve come across, nearly adding, It was worse than the first time around.

I’m sure you were just passionate, Autumn says.

If passionate equates unhinged, I write back.

Ha!

And I like that – I like that’s how simply she defuses it. I’m about to write back when Lana calls me.

“How was work today?” she asks.

“I had that meeting with my publisher,” I say.

“How’d that go?”

“Not so good.”

“Oh yeah? How come?”

Last time I was honest, she later extrapolated her own narrative that I must’ve shrieked at Regina – which I didn’t then, but I think I have now. Still, it’s not information that I want to handing over, so I tell her that it’s simply an incompatibility – I don’t think I fit Regina’s profile of what Leopardus want for their authors. She wasn’t there, after all, when they initially signed me.

“Maybe you should write something they’d like,” Lana says.

“Good idea.”

Then she proceeds to tell me about her boss bringing in chocolate croissants from some fancy bakery he knows about, her latest skirmish with Mel (I tuned out what this was about), and how she partly loves the holiday period coming up because it means overtime, which means more pay, but she’s also dreading it because overtime means more work.

She finishes up by suggesting she come over tonight with something for dinner, and I agree out of habit more than anything.

But when I get home and sit in front of the computer, I dread the time whittling away, and not because of her, because it’s thoughtful that she’s bringing dinner, and these are things that partners do (I guess – what the fuck do I know?) but because my time at the computer is decreasing, which means my time writing is decreasing, but fucked if I know how I should use this time.

When she comes over, I’m playing my ice hockey game, swearing at how a 9 – 4 lead in my favor turned to 9 – 8 in the space of a minute, like there was some determination that it had to be close, and I become powerless to stop a spate of goals. I switch it off and join her in the living room.

She’s bought charcoal chicken, rice, and roasted vegetables. It all smells great, so I get plates and we sit back and eat as we let YouTube run through its assortment of ads, graciously giving us a break here and there to see our content – a string of 1980s music videos.

There’s more stuff that happens here – more interplay, trolling through Netflix’s catalogue to find something that fits our mood (and when we can’t find anything, we retreat to YouTube), and there’s some idle chatter, but you’ve seen enough of that, so I’ll jump to the important bit.

My phone, sitting on the coffee table, vibrates right as Lana’s leaning forward to grab a slice of roast pumpkin. She frowns, and I remember that last time, Autumn texted me to see if I was okay. Would she still do that, even though our initial interaction was different? Apparently so given Lana’s frown transforms into a scowl.

“It’s Autumn,” Lana says. “She’s asking if you’re okay.”

“Okay.”

“Why would she ask if you’re okay?”

“Because of how shit my meeting went today.”

“How does she know? Did you talk to her?”

“She texted me when I was on the train.”

“And you responded?”

“Why wouldn’t I?”

“Couldn’t she wait until tomorrow at work?”

“I guess not.”

Lana sits back, and I can feel not only how she’s tensed, but how her suspicion has changed what was a relaxed get-together into an interrogation.

I throw an arm around her, and I feel how stiff she is, so I cradle her into me. She’s resistant at first, but finally she gives, like she’s decided this overture is conciliatory, although it’s not – not really. It’s most like defusing a bomb. I wonder if I could take Lana right now, stuff her in the closet, and use that to contain any possible explosion. That’s what I’m worried about – shrapnel.

But it works, and although it remains a bit subdued, at least nothing more comes of it, so when I walk her out she’s upbeat – or midbeat, and right now, that’s about enough for me.