Total pages in book: 130
Estimated words: 126425 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 632(@200wpm)___ 506(@250wpm)___ 421(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 126425 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 632(@200wpm)___ 506(@250wpm)___ 421(@300wpm)
“Met Stevie-boy here back at the first one of these when Essie and Audrey were just starting out. Who knew they’d blow up to run the game?” James laughs a hoarse, overly enthusiastic laugh. “Not a lot of guys in the game, amirite? Bros gotta stick together, amirite? Stevie? Steve? Steve-O? S to the T to the E-V-E? Amirite?”
“Yeah. You’re… right,” Steve mutters.
“Although this one here”—James points at Steve—“this one here was always the fave of the ladies, if you know what I’m sayin’.” He winks a little too hard and kind of… sticks his tongue out?
“Forgive James. He got started on the minibar early,” Audrey explains.
James grabs at Audrey’s backside, buries his face in her neck, and makes a ‘nom nom nom’ sound before exclaiming, “What? It’s a con! We’re in Vegas! The kids are back at home, nobody’s watching the hen house while the cat’s away—”
“I don’t think that’s the way the saying—” Steve starts.
“—so it’s time to puh-lay!” James crows.
A few hours into the event and James is no longer the only one who’s drunk.
These. Writers. Can. Drink.
Sitting on the sofa in the center of the lounge, next to Steve, SS, and her husband, Mike, open bottles and half-finished glasses of champagne everywhere, I lowkey feel like this is what being a celebrity must be like. Because, I guess, SS kind of is.
Maybe not to the broader world, but in this little corner of the universe, she is a very big deal. And the thing about her that strikes me is that she doesn’t feel like a writer. I don’t know if I can explain what that means exactly, but it’s true.
Maybe it’s that she—and the other writers, for that matter, all of whom swing by to offer their hellos, well wishes and thanks—seem to have one thing in common: They’re really nice.
This being the first time I’m meeting a real… I don’t know what you call an assembled group of romance authors. A gaggle? A murder? A coven? Maybe there isn’t a word for it. I should make one up.
An engorgement? No. Both wrong and gross.
A corpulence? No. Great word, but I can see it being problematic.
A regent? Most do use pen names. That tracks. Meh. Boring.
An ostentation? Cavalcade? Hootenanny? Pandemonium?
An effulgence?
Yes. That’s perfect. A bright, shining, radiant collection of writers. I love it. I’m going to try to make that a thing.
But as it’s my first time meeting a real effulgence of romance authors, it’s kind of like the first time I encountered romance novels at all. I think I must have had some latent idea about what they would be like. And they’re nothing like what I expected.
A lot of the TV and movie writers I’ve known over the years have been either anxious and burned out or competitive and bitter. Not all, certainly, but there’s this pervasive sense of competition in that world that comes of having to please gatekeepers and make sure you get there first.
And while most of the traditionally published novelists I’ve known aren’t really that way, per se, some of them can get very down about the fact that they write these great, sweeping, heartbreaking works of staggering genius (shoutout to Dave Eggers) and nobody seems to read them.
The books get buried on some back shelf at whatever bookstore has managed to survive in the modern world and then they just fade into obscurity, leaving the sometimes-incredible author to give up altogether or, at least, take on a teaching gig or something to make ends meet.
My fiction professor at UCLA was that second one.
She’s published three award-winning novels through a very, very old and fancy publishing house, but none of them ever made enough money for her to quit her teaching gig and just write full-time. And while it’s not some great tragedy—there are plenty of worse things a person might have to endure in life beyond teaching kids how to write—I know it wasn’t her dream.
And that’s always haunted me a little. That and my parents’ struggle with making it in the literary world. The idea that you can give it your all, try really hard, and still have it not work out like you planned is understood by anyone who gets into some kind of highly competitive, subjectively assessed field, but understanding it and understanding it are two different things.
And the thing that stands out to me as I’m meeting all these romance authors is there’s virtually none of that baggage. No real angst. No bitterness. Not even really that much competitiveness. To a person, they all seem like pretty cool chicks who either fell into it, or kind of dabbled in fanfiction before trying it out full-on, or who just needed a way to pay some bills and saw this as a viable path forward… and then did it.