Just Her Type

by Laudat, Reon

  “And thank you for accepting the invitation. I knew we’d be good together.” Dominic got up to adjust the thermostat, lowering it to encourage closeness without the arctic blast.

  He kept his promise and held her with one arm curling around her waist as she dozed off. If he’d listened to that killjoy in his head, he would’ve been alone in his own bed. He kissed Kendra’s forehead and stroked her hair some more as he anticipated spending many more nights with her in his arms. Just like this. But when he was sure he wouldn’t awaken her, he slipped out of bed to take a cold shower.

  Chapter 21

  Kendra left the room when her panel discussion ended and headed to the long table with complimentary coffee. She helped herself to a cup. Her thoughts kept drifting to that wonderful date with Dominic and how fun and hot he was. The perfect combo.

  Although she could tell he had a great body from the moment she saw him in person, she still wasn’t prepared for Dominic in all his shirtless glory —the deep-cut perfection of his shoulders, abs, chest, and those muscle thingies that ran along the sides of his midsection. What were they called? Well-honed cords slanting toward one another until they resembled an inverted arrowhead, leading to wowsers! Their lustful embraces and those sweats of his left little doubt what he was working with. A lot. A little flutter of excitement warmed her core. Enough with the racy musing. Obliques! Yes, that’s what those muscles were called.

  It was time to get down to a different sort of business. She finished the last of her coffee and tossed the paper cup in the nearby trash. With purpose and a full tote bag, she strode to the restaurant on the hotel’s second level, where Corinne awaited her. No sign of Momster Ostertag. Hallelujah! She’d asked Corinne to come alone, but Corinne hadn’t been so sure she could manage it with Mrs. Ostertag practically shadowing her every move at the resort. During their hike, Corinne had revealed she was twenty-seven, but her mousy manner and obvious deference to her domineering mother made her seem much younger.

  “Glad you could make it,” Kendra said when she reached the table and sat. “I know you’re missing a keynote luncheon speaker for this.”

  “Not a problem.” Anticipation brightened Corinne’s eyes. “I’m getting the podcast.”

  Since landing in Maui, Kendra had lost count of the number of times conference attendees had mentioned that option.

  When the waitress appeared to take their drink orders, Kendra complimented the sparkler on her left hand. “Wow. It’s blinding.”

  “I know! He done good,” the waitress replied. “But the man is more awesome than the ring.”

  Kendra and Corinne offered their congratulations.

  After the waitress departed, Kendra nixed additional preamble. “I finished my early reads of Four Simple Wishes. I loved it!”

  “You did?” Corinne’s jubilation was infectious.

  “Yes, I did!”

  “Oh, thank you! Thank you! Thank you! You don’t know how much that means to me.” Corinne welled up and tried to fan the tears away. “This is a dream come true! You don’t know how many times I’ve imagined hearing this from a top-tier agent!” She reached for her purse on the floor and removed a tissue to dab at her eyes. “I’m sorry!”

  “Don’t apologize.” This was one of the best things about Kendra’s job, reading excellent writing and praising the author. “You took a well-trod, coming-of-age-overcoming-seemingly-insurmountable-odds-to-succeed-in-America tale and made it fresh and fascinating. Oh, the insight and realism… And the way you expertly braided past and present is beyond skillful, especially for a writer of your age. America and Africa, atmospheric. And what you did with Nse. He’s a truly unforgettable, multifaceted character. You expertly handled his character arc. And all the ways in which you depicted how his traumatic childhood informs his adult life… Unconventional. Inspired. Blew me away!”

  “Really? Inspired? Blew you away? I loved Nse, too. The young Sierra Leone emigrant came to me when I was in college. I was inspired by stories of my roommate’s family. She was from that country. I interviewed several members of her family over the years. Nse haunted me until I finished his story.”

  “But it’s not just Nse. You populated the narrative with so many intriguing characters… And the colorful prodigiously researched detail…I don’t know where to begin,” Kendra said breathlessly. “It’s a wonderfully meaty story many will relish sinking their teeth into.”

  “Wow! Best-seller lists here I come!”

  Kendra smiled. Many new authors had stars in their eyes, fantasizing about quitting the day job, landing movie deals, topping the national best-seller lists, counting loads of cash rolling in, and generating book-signing lines snaking around bookstores and extending a couple of blocks. In reality relatively few published authors actually made a living wage from their book earnings alone. However, these fantasies were part of the fun. Similar to the experience of buying a Powerball ticket and then mentally spending the cash before the numbers were announced.

  Kendra made a practice of tempering those hopes with a few dollops of caution and truth without completely dashing them. She did not immediately shift into dream-crushing detail about how the most prestigious best-seller list worked. Technically that list didn’t just report who sold the most, but who’d sold the most the fastest in the span of a few days. Slow and steady did not win that particular race, even if slow and steady actually sold more books in the long run. And there were lots of other “mystery” ingredients that the average reader knew or cared nothing about: sample selected stores and wholesalers, advertising, store placement, pre-orders, bulk orders, and insiders, or rather, tastemakers who ultimately decided which books were actually worthy of consideration. However, this was still considered the preeminent list and a career milestone that gave an author street cred, even among those who hadn’t picked up a novel since their high school lit class The Great Gatsby assignment.

  “For now, let’s just say it’s the kind of book certain acquisitions editors will go wild over. I have this feeling—”

  “You think I have a shot at a deal?”

  “Yes, I do. We wouldn’t be sitting here if I didn’t.”

  “A big money deal?”

  “Well.” Kendra paused because she wasn’t comfortable making predictions about a large advance even if the book had a better than average chance of receiving one.

  “So this must mean you’re going to,” Corinne bounced on her seat, fanning herself, “represent me?”

  Kendra paused again because she had to play this just right. “I’d love to—”

  “Omigosh!” Corinne clapped her hands and squealed. “I can’t believe it!” When the waitress returned with their teas Corinne blurted, “I’m going to have official representation by Porter Literary Agency! Kendra Porter! This is Kendra Porter! And I’m going to be an agented author! This is my dream come true!”

  Before departing, their waitress offered her congratulations, asked Corinne’s full name, and wrote it down on her pad so she could keep an eye out for the book.

  “So we do a written contract?” Corinne asked. “Oh, wait. Is our agreement verbal for now?”

  “I do written one-year contracts that renew automatically unless one of the parties chooses to end it.” Kendra opened a packet of sugar and sprinkled it in her glass of iced tea. “Everything is spelled out. It’s fair and pretty standard as far as client/agent agreements go. A thirty-day written notice is required if you want to opt out at any point for any reason. No in perpetuity demands or other egregious terms, you’ll see. But I fully expect and encourage you to have someone with knowledge of these things look it over.”

  “Do you have it with you? After I sign, how soon do you think we can send the manuscript to editors? Omigosh! Wait ’til Mother hears you want to represent me!”

  “Here’s the thing.” Kendra removed folded papers from her tote and passed them to Corinne. “Before we get to the agency retainer, you need to look over this first.”

  Cori
nne’s brow furrowed as she scanned it. “What’s this?”

  “An editorial letter,” Kendra said casually, while studying Corinne’s reaction. “Revision letter.”

  Corinne’s eyes clouded with confusion as she counted the thirty-five pages of dense single-spaced type. “But, but, you said it’s a wonderful book.”

  “It is! It is a wonderful book, Corinne, but I think it needs a little work. Tweaking to get it in the best shape possible before it goes out on submission. I sometimes jokingly refer to it as a spit shine to impart a nice gloss as a finishing touch.”

  “But thirty-five single-spaced pages of spit shine?” Corinne stared in aghast silence for several protracted moments.

  Kendra sipped her tea, giving Corinne a few moments to absorb her request. “Remember, it’s nearly one-hundred-and-fifty-thousand-word manuscript. Overly long for the market for this type of book, actually. It needs some trimming. That word count is a tough sale these days unless it’s epic sword and sorcery or something along those lines. As you can see, the bulleted suggestions contain notes explaining my reasoning in greater detail.”

  “You want to change the title?”

  “Four Simple Wishes sounds like a Thomas Kinkade painting,” Kendra said.

  “But what’s wrong with Thomas Kinkade paintings?”

  “Nothing, if you like that sort of thing.”

  “What sort of thing?”

  Kendra paused. A successful partnership required full disclosure so she forged ahead. “It’s a little too, well, twee.”

  “Twee?”

  “You know, too precious. The layered world you’ve created is not cast in soft glow sorbet colors. The title doesn’t match such a powerful book. We’ll need something with more punch. I want this one marketed a particular way. This story will appeal to book clubs who go for more literary and commercial upmarket reads. These groups tend to be female, but I also see male readers taking to this in a big way, too, if it’s packaged and positioned just right.”

  “I don’t understand,” Corinne said, her eyes intently scanning the type. “Yoshe is one of my favorite characters.”

  “Ahhh, Yoshe and Sharif. Well,” Kendra paused to choose the right words, “perhaps you would consider combining them.”

  “Combining them?” Corinne’s befuddled expression morphed into one of revulsion, as if Kendra had instructed her to rewrite them as conjoined, three-legged leprechauns.

  “You see, their purpose and dialogue felt a little repetitive. You can take the most interesting and essential parts of both and make the two of them one character. I’m thinking Yoshe could remain, but give him the most interesting bits of Sharif. The story moves at a nice clip, especially for one hundred and fifty thousand words, which is a credit to your skill, believe me, but there are a few places where I feel things stalled a bit. That’s where the trimming will help.”

  “Trim?”

  Kendra might as well have requested that Corinne hack off a limb. “Chapters four and five can be tightened or cut altogether. They felt like throat-clearing, or rather, static padding for what happens in your more dynamic chapters six and seven. And some of the foreshadowing is a wee bit heavy-handed.”

  “Oxymoron.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “Wee bit heavy-handed. You know, jumbo shrimp.”

  Uh-oh. Kendra took Corinne’s remark as a wry joke and continued, “Your imagery is good, but it can be strengthened in chapter ten and—”

  When Corinne’s lips trembled Kendra paused. All this emotion about revisions did not bode well for a future partnership, but she refused to give up on working with Corinne. She was a novice, after all. Kendra wanted to offer her a big hug. But it was too soon to reach out with such a gesture before she had established her place as the literary representative of record and become better acquainted with Corinne. Though Kendra had enjoyed their bonding chat during that hike, she needed more time to get a better read on Corinne’s emotional stability.

  Kendra delighted in the amiable relationships she’d cultivated with all of her clients. One of her closest friends was Aurora Chastain, an author whose work Kendra had acquired and edited when she worked as a senior editor at Winn-Aster. But as an agent, she’d made the mistake of venturing into “buddy” territory one time too many in the past.

  One colleague had callously, yet accurately, used something similar to the Homeland Security Advisory System to rate such clients’ annoyance levels. Under his system three particular clients of Kendra’s would be considered “code red clingers.” This had led to some uneasy and exhausting incidents where boundaries had been blurred.

  Who could forget Blake Spencer’s frequent TMI bodily fluid updates: That stuff they make you drink before a colonoscopy is no joke, had me spewing like Mount Vesuvius for the better part of the day. By the time I was done, I had nothing left to crap out but my damn balls.

  Kendra was nobody’s prude, but she could do without the endless references to Blake’s “damn balls” and “jimmy.” She preferred to pretend every male client had the groin region of a Ken doll.

  “It is a great book, Corinne. You must believe me when I say I absolutely love it. But you have to understand I rarely send any new client’s work out without offering editorial suggestions in order to get the best deal possible. That’s how I operate, and I wanted you to know this upfront. Many clients consider my background as a senior editor at a top publishing house an asset. And based on what you said during our hike, I thought that was one of the reasons you wanted to work with me.” Kendra was well aware some people questioned her assessment of certain weightier literary fiction because her list was primarily commercial fiction and genre work. And it probably didn’t help that she had a tendency to express herself in the vernacular, because it felt like donning a comfy pair of slippers. If she was sometimes underestimated because slang of the “good googly moogly!” sort sprang for her lips or because she verbified too many nouns, so be it. I gotta be me. And underestimation had frequently worked in her favor.

  “This is our first pass together,” Kendra said. “I like to do at least three or four passes with the writer, focusing on the developmental part and then there’s some fine-tuning, before I go out with a manuscript. It increases the odds of not only getting published, but also getting published well. You do want the best deal and publishing partner possible, right?”

  “I need a minute,” said as if Corinne mulling over Kendra’s words.

  “Are you okay?” Kendra took a chance and reached out to touch Corinne’s arm anyway.

  “Yes. I understand what you’re saying. I do want a great book deal, but—”

  “Good. And you’d better believe I will fight to get that for you.” Kendra wasn’t a writer, but she understood the disillusionment on Corinne’s face. Listening to or reading the cool deconstruction of one’s hard work could be demoralizing. No matter how many positive reviews a particular work had received, negative reviews could leave a writer nauseated, despondent, and creatively blocked for weeks, which was the reason she’d advised the more sensitive types to avoid them altogether, especially certain snarky blogs and that BookDish social networking site where animation and mocking GIF images laced the most brutal reviews.

  Kendra had experienced similar frustration after Lizzy’s The Single Girl’s Guide to Cute Coupledom went unsold after making the rounds of numerous editors:

  Not enough depth. Not enough solid research or case studies. Not strong enough to compete with similar books in the oversaturated self-help market.

  Cute Coupledom? Title can be changed of course, but the premise and execution is too, well, cute. I’m just not in love with it.

  The author goes by Lizzy? Auto-reject without the benefit of a request for a synopsis or a partial after one pitch email.

  Not dynamic. Too niche. Topic should be condensed to a bulleted brochure for an online dating site.

  Has a certain appeal. Breezily written, but I’ve decided not to pursue.

>   And there was not only the old sloppy seconds to battle, but also the thorny thirds, the filthy fourths and so on. Word tended to get around. If A Certain Editor didn’t go for it, how good could it be? Kendra took great care deciding to whom she granted early reads of projects especially close to her heart. Because she understood the politics and the subjective nature of the business she tried not to dwell on such rejections for long—particularly when the comments contradicted others.

  Besides, she had also rejected the occasional good manuscript in a genre she represented for purely nonsensical reasons. She’d either chalk up those passes to her gut or a raging bout of PMS. And she was grateful none of those rejected manuscripts, as far as she knew, had gone on to become blockbusters.

  With Lizzy’s manuscript she’d kept hustling, working the numbers; it only took one acquisitions editor to see its potential. Eventually she’d found that person. The book and subsequent companion releases became solid hits after publication.

  “So I’m assuming you’ll need some time to think. You tell me how much.” Kendra wanted to see how Corinne handled the editorial letter and Momster Ostertag, who would surely get a detailed account of this meeting and Kendra’s comments.

  “Yes. I don’t mean to be a prima donna. Of course, I can take constructive criticism.”

  “Was this novel workshopped in your MFA program?”

  “No, not this one. A published faculty member, whose work I’d long admired, looked over an early draft. But it’s changed a lot since then. Only Mother read it before I sought representation. I wonder if I’m capable of making the adjustments to your satisfaction. You note what I need to change, but you don’t give me much detail on how to change it.”

  “You’re the writer.”

  “But I thought I’d delivered my best.”

  “I understand, but remember, you’re close to the work. Sometimes someone with a little distance can tell you what to tweak to take good to great. I’m that person, and I believe you’re capable. After you’ve had a chance to read and digest the entire letter you’ll feel better about it. I’ve included a list of questions at the back to guide you. And I’ve made copious notes in the margins of a hard copy I’m going to mail back to you.”