The Bestseller: Creation Myth in Two Paragraphs

Hope.

It’s the cornerstone of the publishing industry: The writer hopes to escape humdrum life into literary fame, immortality, and, yes, fortune would be nice, too. The literary agent dreams of easy street finding that bestselling gem in the swill of mediocrity that’s swamping her in-box. And her assistant wants to make it as an agent, sooner rather than later, clinking champagne flutes with J.K. Rowlings or shooting skeet with Brad Thor.

Alas, reality, she is a heartless bitch…

by J. Christoph Amberger

The Masterpiece

She rearranged her desk with the keyboard just so, the monitor at a slight angle to avoid the blind spot, the glare, the circular white-out that the late-afternoon sun lazed through the living room window right onto her screen, no matter how many lovingly potted plants she threw in to filter out the staring orb, with her head right in the center, an oversized eye that was watching her every keystroke as she crafted and erased, crafted and erased, crafted and erased yet again, because the first sentence of her lyrical novel had to be just so, had to be perfect, had to engage, touch, move the reader,the audience, and, yes, the critics, chauvinist pigs who would approach her work with anticipation and doubt, as the work of an independent-minded, possibly over-educated, spirited woman writer, or better: authoress, one of the few who had the courage, the integrity, the drive to broadcast their trials and tribulations, the conflict of their femininity with the crude male-ness that society was still moored in, tried to expand and change, for the better, for humankind, for womankind, the boundaries of traditional role definitions, which still mired so many of the sisterhood in large suburban houses, taking care of children (quite selfishly, she found,) without ever making, or getting the opportunity to make, that special difference in the world around them, that male-dominated, paternalistic hierarchy aimed at keeping women chained to the stove, to the baby bottle, or—even worse—to breast pumps, like cows, well-dressed cows that sat on rockers in the special room the university had to sequester for mothers who breast-fed their young children, pumping breast milk every couple of hours, during breaks she didn’t get to take, having to cram all her work into the office hours before going home to her condo, to her art of crafting a lyrical masterpiece despite the glare of the evening sun on the screen that now looked less like an eye but like a breast, impossibly white, with a dark, fluent aureola constituted by her head.

 ***

The Gate Keeper

Another damn manuscript, he thought, taking the floppy half-ream of paper from the stack that never ever seemed to go down in size, no matter how many hours he spent shackled to his cheap Office-Depot desk, “paying his dues,” “getting his foot in,” or, more accurately, getting ditched, stuck, dumped on with the work no-one else wanted to do anymore, stupid agents, accepting more submission than he could possibly read during a day, during a lifetime, a fucking wasted lifetime of gagging on piss-poor prose, contrived plots, self-serving, self-pitying, self-centered schlock—only to have the agents throw out nine-hundred-ninety-nine of the thousand manuscripts he had slogged through, his eyes burning, words beginning to dance on the page as the day wore on and on and on, an endless stream of rot and lukewarm coffee—spit-out bad, disgusting, sell-out coffee—first souring his mouth, then his blood, the caffeine making him jittery, disquiet, as if his life was rushing by like water down a storm drain, days floating away one after the other, with him standing helplessly by, stuck as the assistant to the acquisitions editor, or better, the conceited bitch who thought that her fucking a Random House editor after a marketing party and a degree in advertising from a third- or fourth-tier college qualified her to tell literature from shit, prose from putrefaction, a fucking amateur from a writer, when all she was doing was look at the top paragraph of his summary, at the name (and, of course, for the appropriate gender!) of the author, and maybe at the first three pages of writing—writage!—looking for sentences that were paragraphs long, whole pages long, damn Faulkner and his dated style, damn Donna Tartt and that stupid second book of hers, what was the title, no idea, goes to show ya, for making every community college drop-out think that they’d be writing “Literature” if only the sentences were long and the words pretentious and filled with secret meaning, with a message, which all boiled down to “Look at meee, look at meee, ain’t I smart that I can craft this unreadable shit!”, fools all of them, bloody, insipid fools whose texts should never make it on paper because what a waste they were, what a total, colossal waste!