[Secret,Strange,Vulnerability, Headquarters, Unexpected]
The biggest advantage to living in a writers collective is also its biggest detriment. It was my turn to cook breakfast. All the daily jobs at the collective are shared equally. Every ten days I’m the breakfast cook. This is my least favorite job in the whole collective job rotation cycle. The reason I particularly hate this job is because I’m forced to get up extra early. Breakfast is served at eight thirty and the table is cleared by nine fifteen. At nine fifteen the clean up person takes over. I’m always up reading late so getting up by seven to cook breakfast is real torture for me. If we had more bedrooms, I would fill this place with writers. It’d be great to have thirty writers in residence, I’d only have to get up early once a month instead of every ten days.
No one likes cleanup duty, breakfast or dinner but I always offer to swap my breakfast cooking duties for cleanup. Where I don’t have to show up until nine fifteen, a much more civilized hour of the day. I can put on an audio book, have a cup of coffee and I have forty five minutes before I have to open the store. It’s almost as good as actually sitting reading a book. In fact, depending on the narrator sometimes it can be even better.
“Laura, for someone who hates to cook breakfast, you always do an excellent job even though you never eat breakfast except the days you cook it. What’s up with that?”
“What are you writing a book, Ezra?”
“As a matter of fact I am Laura, it’s a zoology book about the habits and nature of night owls."
“You non-fiction writers are all the same, all facts and figures. So if you must know, I like to stay up late reading as most of you already know. But I hate to rise early, again something you are all familiar with. However I love breakfast foods from pancakes to eggs and all the baked goods. So three or four or five days a week when I lived alone in New York City, I’d cook breakfast for dinner. I’m the exact opposite of the Japanese who at least in my humble opinion eat dinner for breakfast.Now Ezra, your turn, tells us all one weird, strange or unusual fact about you.”
“As you all know I’m the only non-fiction writer in residence. Bu..”
“Hey, I’m a nonfiction writer, you are not the only one.”
“Bianca, I love you and the hippies that birthed you. But you write wu wu New Age to aging hippies, who couldn’t get enough acid back in the day. That stuff is pure fantasy, Amelie our High Fantasist has more actual facts in her novels. But as I was saying, one weird fact about me is as a non-fiction author, I only read fiction for pleasure, I never pick up a non-fiction book just to read for fun.”
“Ezra if just once you’d let me lead you in a past life regression, or an out of body experience, you’d see that my studies are just as valid as anything you could learn in those technical manuals you call books.”
“Bianca, my books are popular science not technical manuals, explaining cutting edge important scientific topics to an audience without them needing an advanced college degree to understand what I’m talking about. The one I’m working on now is about Artificial Intelligence.”
“See that’s the kind of thing, I’m talking about Ezra, we have eight billion intelligences on this planet that we don’t take well enough care of as it is. Why build artificial intelligence when so many actual intelligences’ are just going to waste? Besides, doesn't it make you angry that they are using your work to create those intelligences?”
“No, I’d be happy to be quoted if an A I is explaining a complex subject to someone who is interested in that subject. Don’t you write about out of body experiences to explain them to your readers. Are you mad at the readers who read your book at the library? As much as I disagree with your ‘science’ and ‘facts’ , wouldn't an A I who uses your book on those experiences to explain the concepts to some person who queried about them, just broaden your audience. Do you want your views included or would you rather the A I only use my point of view that those subjects are just wu wu pseudo science.”
“Doesn’t it make you mad that they stole our work.”
“Sure but I also understand why they did it. They needed huge blobs of data, you can’t buy huge blobs of data anywhere. You can’t go to Amazon and buy every book all at once with the push of a button. But there are shadow libraries on the net where any person with enough bandwidth and storage can download those blobs of data. Yours and my books were just a tiny miniscule portion of that data. The venture capitalists the stock holders if the companies are public should be made to pay once the A I actually start making money. They shouldn’t just pay the authors, they should pay all the citizens of the country they are in because they are making everything more expensive, electricity, water, computer memory, any workers whose jobs they replace.”
“That’s it, breakfast is over, everybody out, you can discuss this over dinner. But I have to clean up this mess and then I have actual writing work to do and I want to get to it.” Monique clapped her hands together three times and the writers started to get up and move toward their personal workspaces. It was funny watching our youngest, resident goth girl, ordering the older writers out of her temporary domain.
I had forty five minutes before I had to open the store and after six chapters of Lachlan’s novel, I needed a palate cleanser. The Romance Book club was reading Problematic Summer Romance by Ali Hazelwood, so I grabbed a copy of it off the shelf and settled in the reading nook. I’d absolutely loved other books by her like Check & Mate, Love on the Brain, The Love Hypothesis and Love, Theoretically but by the time I had to unlock the door, I just wasn’t getting the same feelings that I had when I’d read her other books.
That’s the problem with an eidetic memory, I just don’t remember every word of the book, I remember what I thought about those words and this experience just wasn’t living up to the others. Part of the reason was I don’t particularly like stories revolving around weddings, rich opulent settings and age gap romances. I loved her science stuff, I had never rated any of her books below four stars before but this one just might be my first if it doesn’t really turn around fast.
But I wished I could read The Love Hypothesis again, for the first time. Yet what’s the point of a reread when I remember every single word already. I can reread it just by thinking about it. But it is great for work, if someone comes in looking for a book and they don’t know the title or the author, just some vague synopsis they’ve read online. Well I read every blurb on the back cover of every paperback, and the dust jackets of all the hardcovers in the store. I don’t know how many sales I’ve made over the years, but quite a few and better yet it’s earned me many loyal customers.
But I’d give that all up, without a squeak of protest if I could reread the Lord of the Rings or One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, again without remembering every single word. Oh to be Christopher Lee and read the Lord of the Rings every holiday season. I don’t want a debilitating memory disease, I just want to have a reasonably good memory instead of a perfect one. There is nothing more boring in life than something that is perfect.
It’s the imperfections that make things interesting. That gives us something to strive for. Something to imagine. If the moon were a perfect sphere, people may still want to visit it, but I doubt that people would have built a telescope to study it. But you look at the Sea of Tranquility, doesn’t just the name fire off the imagination. Long John Silver cruising the seas of the moon looking for plunder or better yet pods of whales that have never been hunted, just living out their peaceful lives with those enormous brains.
Of course too many imperfections are worse than zero. Which leads me back to Lachlan’s novel, maybe I could just skim it, skip all the redditor sex scenes and just focus on the bare bones plot, that is driving the story forward. Fifteen minutes or so before I was to open, the bell to the back stock room rang. I must be getting a delivery.
“Sorry, I’m late Laura, I know you are about to open up. There was an accident on route seventy three, it had traffic stopped in both directions.”
“Not your fault Harry and I still have time before I open up, have you got much?”
“Five cartons of books, I’ll bring them in on the handcart, go open the store. I’ll ring the bell once I have everything inside and you can come back and lock up and sign for them.”
“Thanks Harry, I owe you.”
“You can give me a discount when the new Andy Weir comes out.”
“You got it Harry!”
“Don’t forget now.”
“Like that is likely to happen.”
Harry chuckled and I headed to the front door, to open up. When I saw who was waiting at the door, I was sorry I hadn’t unloaded the truck myself. Anais Connor Ferraro, waited at the door. I could see her visibly tapping her foot. As soon as the door was unlocked, she pushed right in. We had never gotten on from the day that we met in kindergarten.
“According to the sign on the door, you are meant to open at ten. It’s past five after ten.”
“Yes well there was an accident on seventy three.”
“You live in the store an accident miles away hardly seems a proper excuse for opening late.”
“Not that it’s any business of yours but I had a delivery,” just then the bell rang. “Now I have to go lock the back door.”
“You don’t mean to tell me that you left a delivery driver unattended in your stock room. You will be lucky if you have anything left back there.”
“It’s Harry, of course I trust him.”
“The drug dealer from high school?”
I went and signed the delivery receipt so Harry could be on his way.
“Harry, Anais is out front, want to come and say hi.”
“I’d rather wash my eyeballs in bleach. Besides I’m running behind and not all my customers are as understanding as you, Laura. See you soon.”
Harry left and I dragged my feet hoping that Anais had taken off, in my absence. But there she was as I came back into the store from the stock room.
“Did he try to sell you drugs back there?”
This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road. If you spot it on Amazon, please report it.
“Anais, Harry was never a drug dealer; he used to sell pot to his friends in high school. Besides, he was the nicest boy in the whole school. What did he ever do to you?”
“He asked me if I wanted to hang with him at the school formal. I told him that I wasn’t one of his druggie loser friends and never spoke to him again."
“Well, he still remembers you fondly. Look you are not here about the mansion are you? It’s still not for sale, It’s never going to be for sale. Not as long as I’m alive and if I can find a suitable candidate to take it over, it will be another fifty years before the next caretaker will need to be found.”
“No, I’m here for a book, the bible actually. Something in plain language.”
“Why would you want a bible, you were named after a porn star.” I don’t really believe that porn star slur, I was just trying to get under Anais’s skin and it worked.
“A feminist writer of erotica among other things, I can't believe I have to defend a writer to a bookstore owner, Laura.”
“Anais was no feminist she said and I quote “Systems are perishable, so I feel that big changes will come from a big collective change in human consciousness”. So she never did anything political, she didn’t believe in it.”
“Look Laura, I’m in a hurry and I don’t have time to stand here and banter with you, I have an important client coming in and I need a bible and I need it now.”
“Anais, I don’t sell bibles, I’ve never sold bibles, I never will sell bibles. You can probably get one in Plattsburg or a used one at the used bookstore in Saranac.”
“Laura, you are the most unreasonable person I’ve ever met. I don’t have time to go to Plattsburg and the bible is a gift for a client. Can you just order it and have it shipped overnight, I don’t care what it costs.”
“Anais I won’t sell that pack of lies, that has caused more wars than common greed. This is a fictional only bookstore not one non-fictional book on the shelves The general consensus is that the bible is non-fiction and yes I’ll order it for you, but I will not make a profit off it you can have it for cost and it will be drop shipped to either your office or your home. The bible will not enter this building.”
“How do you know that one of your commune comrades isn’t upstairs reading one right now.”
“It’s not a commune, it’s a collective, second I search all of their luggage when they first arrive, for drugs, weapons and bibles.” It’s not true that I search the author's belongings, again, just winding up Anais. I don’t want you to think I’m some kind of maniac, just winding up Anais is a life long tradition.
“If Bianca Garnier didn't bring drugs here then she bought them while she was here. I caught her naked at the top of Haystack Mountain, in the middle of black fly season. I mean who strips in the woods during black fly season. Crazy people and people on drugs.”
“Bianca is one of the sweetest people I’ve ever met, while I don’t ascribe to her spiritual views she has a right to her own opinion. Also I’ve never even seen her touch a glass of wine at dinner let alone drugs. If she ever did do drugs, I’m sure they’d be magic mushrooms or possibly ayahuasca for spiritual reasons. As far as being naked in the woods, I knew all about it, it was a ritual involving the summer solstice which just so happens to fall in black fly season. Which sounds better to me than sitting in some box telling a priest all your sins so that he can make them all go away.” That time I wasn’t just winding her up.
“As long as the bible arrives by tomorrow.”
I turned the monitor around so she could see, I’d ordered it next day and drop shipped to her office. With that she left. I was already exhausted and we’d just opened. But that’s exactly how it’s been between Anais and me from kindergarten through senior year of high school, thankfully we’d chosen different colleges, moved to different big cities. But as soon as my aunt had fallen sick, I moved back home. After Anais was disbarred, for what I do not know, and have never tried to find out. Something like that I’d never use against her. I may be petty but I’m not that petty.
So after my first non-sale of the day, I was heading back to the reading nook to give Ali a few more chapters to win me over, before the dreaded DNF did not finish. Emily, our resident romantic comedy author, was coming down the stairs from the collective.
“Fighting with your nemesis again, I see.”
“I don’t know why she shops here, we’ve hated each other since kindergarten, it would have been preschool, but I was home schooled for that.”
“I don’t know, I think I could probably write pretty convincing enemies to lovers about you two. You both have the spark and the chemistry just hangs in the air.”
“If I hadn’t cooked breakfast I’d accuse whoever did of spiking your breakfast with edibles and please don’t ruin that trope for me it’s one of my favorites. Some of your own enemies to lovers are among your very best books in my opinion and so funny, you must have lived a charmed life to be able to come up with the plots and the characters you do.”
Her wide smile suddenly wanned and a troubled look crossed her face. Oh crap, I put my foot in it.
“Actually Laura, before my youngest sister turned eighteen and could get out of my fathers house my life was far from charmed. When I was fourteen my mom died. My dad was a bad drinker before my mom got sick and died but afterwards he became a full blown alcoholic. My youngest sister was nine and my other sisters tried to help as best they could but as the oldest I felt that their care fell onto my shoulders. The last thing I wanted to see was us all split up by social services. So I did everything I could to make sure that never happened, I learned how to clean clothes, cook dinners, and make lunches. My school work suffered. I was basically working a full time job at home so I barely passed high school. Once I was done with school it became easy. I was so used to it by then. But one night my drunk father tried to get into bed with me, calling me by my mothers name. I fought him off and went and slept in the recliner in the living room. The next day I installed locks on mine and each of my sister's doors. I wanted to scare them into using the locks so I made up a story about a burglar in the neighborhood, and made each of them swear to lock them each and every night. We had hardly any money, my father went from job to job and what money he made a lot of it went to drinking. But we made due and I still believe that we all were better off, then if social services had split us up. My mom was sick for a long time, but she loved her girls. We'd all climb into bed with her and watch old screwball comedies. After she died I started writing stories, trying to recapture those nights lying in bed with mom, watching these couples fall in love. So it was kinda the opposite of a charmed life but if I hadn’t gone through that maybe I wouldn’t be a writer. I mean writing is hard work, low to no pay, maybe I’d be a doctor or a lawyer but I wouldn’t be a writer and a writer is the most wonderful thing in the world. At least an author who gets to write fiction because they are creating their own reality, they get to make their characters happy or sad. So I’ve seen enough sadness so now, I want to see happy characters, that’s why I write romantic comedies, I don’t ever want to see anything but happy endings. So my choices for employment were writer or naughty masseuse.”
I laughed. “You’d make more money as the masseuse.” Then I gave her a hug. “I’m sorry Em, that was a stupid thing for me to say.”
“No, not at all, Laura. It helps to talk about stuff like that sometimes, but you were headed to the reading nook if I’m not mistaken and I was headed to the romance section. I want to see what’s popular before I start my next outline.”
“Em, you are not one of those authors are you?”
“One of what authors?”
“Authories that try to find out what people want and then write that, instead of something they want to write about.”
“No the opposite of that, I go look to see what is popular, so that I avoid writing that. Some day I’d love to be the next big thing, okay. But to be the next big thing, you have to do something different. If hockey romances are popular now and you write a great hockey romance it’ll get shoved on the shelf with all these other hockey romances. Why would a reader pick-up a hockey romance by a nobody like me, chances are they won’t no matter how great a hockey romance I write. But what if I write a hiking romance and I do a great job on that, write a really fine novel. Not so many women are looking for hiking romances, but there are a few and if I write the very best book I can, maybe I’ll get a few fans, maybe they’ll buy my next romance because they liked my last one.”
“That’s actually genius Em, and the most compelling reason for an author who is aiming to make money to write something creative instead of just following the trends and if you ever just want to talk, I’m here for you.”
“I know, thanks Laura.”
I went back to my book, it was okay, I didn’t dnf, but I would later rate it two and a half stars in my book journal, which for me was an okay book. Lachlan came down to see if I was reading his novel. But I explained that I needed to finish this novel for bookclub which maybe didn’t satisfy him, but at least was a better excuse that I just couldn’t handle one more crowdsourced alien sex scene.
A half hour before closing my best friend Amy showed up, to buy a book no less.
“So what are you looking for Amy?”
“NPR put out a podcast of book reviews and they recommended Paula Talbert’s thriller Paula Becker.”
“Yep, it’s a wild ride Amy, I think this book was meant for you.”
“Great Laura, that’s just what I wanted to hear.”
“Guess who was here at opening today?”
“Who?”
“Anais.”
“Ah your nemesis so how was she today?”
“Same old Anais, she accused Bianca of being on drugs.”
“She’s still going on about her being naked on Haystack.”
“Yep, but how did you know about it?”
“She was at the volunteer fire department fundraiser, just before the fourth of July, I heard all about it then. She claimed you weren’t safe living here in a commune and I should do something about it.”
“Excuse me Amy, sir, could I help you find something?”
“Yes if you don’t mind, I’m trying to find a book I read in the nineteen seventies. It was set undersea and the United States and the Soviet Union had domes. But I don’t know the title nor the author and I ask in every bookshop but no one’s ever heard of it. Sometimes I think I might have just dreamed it up.”
“No sir, you didn’t dream it up. Its title is Dome World and the author is Dean McLaughlin. It’s out of print, so I definitely don’t have it. But I’m sure you can find a used copy online. I’ll write down the info for you.”
After he left. “I have to go to Laura. I have a shift in half an hour, but that was amazing what you did for that man. Your memory is incredible, I just wish one of the local bars would do a trivia night with cool prizes. I’d kill to be on your team. But what you really should be doing with your life is solving mysteries. Your brain was made for it. I could put in a good word for you.”
“Thanks Am, but I’m really happy being a bookseller, here don’t forget your book.”
