18.

Wednesday, I go into work for the morning, but come lunchtime (Autumn ducking her head out of her office to wish me luck) I’m out of there and catching a train into the city (I hate driving into the city) to meet my publisher, Regina, for lunch – well, actually, she was appointed fiction publisher after I was signed and had my two books published, and I’ve only dealt with her briefly, and unsatisfying, over email.

She’s only thirty or so, which worries me because I’m ageist – I’ve dealt with younger people in the publishing industry, and they think they know everything. I know that because when I was their age, I thought I knew everything. It’s only as I got older, and things didn’t work out the way I had hoped that I realize that the only safe philosophy is admitting that I know nothing, and back when I was young, I not only knew less, but what I knew could be destructive.

But I don’t say any of this to her as I sit at a table she’s secured in the middle of a courtyard café, because I vowed to be as amenable as possible when I signed with Leopardus Press, and not try to impose my own experiences or expectations upon then. I regret that now. I even regret having the regret, because it tells me just how much I erred.

She smiles at me – this pleasant-faced woman with short coppery hair who radiates assuredness. I want to feel some connection with her, the way I felt some connection when they originally signed me (and assured me they were confident they could sell me), but I get something else: disdain. Or dismissiveness. Or the sense that this is a formality for her. Maybe I’ve got that wrong, but I feel it all the same.

“It’s nice to meet you finally,” she tells me, offering a limp handshake over the table.

“You, too,” I say, but that’s not what I really want to say.

A month ago when she was appointed to the position, she shot me an email to say it’d be great to talk about strategies for marketing me. I responded immediately that I’d enjoy that, and then I didn’t hear back from her for three weeks. Three fucking weeks. And I only heard back then because I emailed the publicist to see what was happening. The publicist checked with Regina, who said my email had gone into a SPAM folder. That’s possible – happens to me at work. But if I don’t get a response I’m expecting, I follow it up. Regina did none of that, so what does that say? Maybe my sense isn’t instinct, but some Sherlock Holmesian deduction.

We make nothing chatter until the waitress arrives to take our orders (Regina has a medium latte with coconut milk, two sugars, and extra foam, and me a tea) – the sort of filler shit you spout when you’re feeling one another out, seeing how well you connect, and working out how you’ll function together. These conversations happen every day in life, whether they’re with people who’ll have some permanence (like co-workers, friends, prospective partners) or who’ll only interact with us fleetingly (the barista from whom we buy our coffee, clerks, salespeople).

“We’ve been talking a lot about you,” Regina finally brings the conversation around to the reason we’re here. “You have a lot of fans in the office.”

A lot of? What the fuck? Doesn’t that suggest there are people who are then not my fan?

“You have an interesting voice, too. The question’s come down to how we sell you – writing about guys trying to reconcile their emotional trauma isn’t engaging the way we thought it might. It’s not exactly an established genre – like guy-lit.”

This was a concern I expressed to them before they signed me – I’d gotten a lot of positive rejections for my first book, publishers telling me they enjoyed it, but didn’t feel they’d be able to sell it. Leopardus assured me they would be able to. Then they did all the things that any publisher would do for any book: try to get reviews, try to get interviews, and that’s about it.

“With all due respect,” I say, “I’m a little concerned about the marketing you’ve done. Like with my second book, you advertised me in The Juncture, a monthly political mag. Nobody knows who I am there. And Standing Proud – it’s a feminist journal. Why would anybody in a feminist journal want to read a book you’re identifying as ‘guy-lit’?”

She shifts uneasily. “We’ve had to try things to build this audience.”

That’s bullshit. This was an out-and-out error.

“You’re writing literary fare – it’s always harder to sell.”

“Look, my writing’s not literary. The concepts might be, but my writing’s always been mainstream. My second book was this coming-of-age story.”

“That’s not really a market – not in the way you might think. We would’ve marketed is as a romcom, but they don’t end up together in the end.”

Even before Leopardus, I’d had enough of my own experiences, and talked to other writers about their experiences, to learn how the industry works – the book’s got to be marketable. That’s it. You can have a story that’s beautifully written and is the greatest story in the world, but if they don’t feel they can sell it, you’re doomed. And what sells? Well, exactly what fits in their pigeonholes. Which leads to …

“We feel you can still write these things you want to write,” Regina says, “but think of ways of making them more distinctly genre.”

Fuck.

“Get yourself out there, too. Go to writers festivals. Build your network. Market yourself. All these factors help in selling books.”

Double fuck. Fuckfuck. These are things you tell writers studying writing in whatever tertiary institution they’re attending. I know, because that’s where I first heard them. It’s worthwhile advice as a starting point, but just so generalized – especially given everybody’s doing it.

“It’s just going to be harder for you now,” Regina says.

“Even if I do these things?” I say, although these things aren’t rating among my priorities right now.

“Debut authors have a buzz about them – what are they going to produce? It’s new. It’s exciting. You’ve had two published books. They’ve underperformed. Booksellers will look at your track record. It’ll inform whether they decide to take you on.”

So let me get this straight, I want to say to her. You’ve actually set my career back further than BEFORE I was published? You, who told me you felt you could sell me; you, who took away my creative vision for my second book and edited it to your commercial reality? You, who pride yourselves on building careers. I’m now in arrears?

But I don’t say any of that, because it feels like the whole meeting is about shifting responsibility onto me. I didn’t expect bestsellers – that would’ve been nice, but I know how publishing works: those overnight sensations are rare. I have these conversations with authors. But it feels they’ve put the onus entirely on me.

“Publishing’s hard,” Regina says. “You know that. You work in the industry.”

“I know it’s hard and unfair,” I say.

“It’ll be okay,” she tells me, and while she holds my eye, and while she smiles, I know she’s faking me out now.

This is like when you call a utility, or something like that, to query an issue, and you put on that polite but fake phone voice that lasts only as long as the call (providing they don’t piss you off). Politicians sound this way, too. People construct this affectation and employ it unthinkingly, just as Regina’s doing now. We might as well be breaking up a relationship. We might as well—

“You’re a white dude,” she says. “You’ll find a way.”

The “white dude” comment cuts off my thinking. I don’t hear anything else from that point, so I might entirely be misreporting what she says, but I feel like storming out. I’ve done it repeatedly in arguments with Lana. “White dude”? Like I’ve had some entitled pathway through my writing career: plagiarized at twenty-five, thousands of rejections, published at forty-seven to an underwhelming reception, and now being told I have to change what I write, so I’m unsure where I’ve been charmed. Somebody will think I’m entitled just proclaiming all that. Get fucked.

“Yeah,” I say. “I’m sure I will.”

But she knows she’s offended me, or pissed me off, although judging her by how disaffected she is, she doesn’t care. Right then, what occurs to me is that she has no interest in carrying me over as an author, and when I’ve been submitting stuff to them – considerations for my third book – she’s been championing against me. The others be might inclined that way, but she’s the flag bearer. It’s a flash of insight that could be prescience or paranoia, but both feel equally valid right now.

The waitress arrives with our drinks, which makes this super awkward – we have to kill enough time to allow our hot beverages to cool down so that we can drink them. It’s stupid. We’re done with each other. But we maintain the façade of the relationship, because while we maintain the façade we don’t have to look at the truth: this is fucked, and likely unsalvageable, but nobody wants to take responsibility for that finality.

“You thought about doing something more genre?” she says.

“Is that something you guys prefer?”

“We want you to be happy writing what you’re writing,” Regina says. “But genre’s a much easier sell.”

“Maybe I’ll write a romcom – like an actual romcom.”

I argued furiously with them during the editing process over my second book, which I had positioned (in my own head) as a coming-of-age story. The editor and I kept butting heads. Halfway through, she made a suggestion, which I flatly refused. She wrote something back, “But that’s what usually happens in a romcom.” Immediately, I understood this is why we were butting heads – she thought I was writing something I wasn’t. But the barb’s lost on Regina.

“That could be something,” Regina says. “Or like a serial character, like Jack Reacher.”

“Maybe I’ll create a James Bond,” I say, “but just with a woman. Not James Bond, though.”

I say this because there’s been talk that the current James Bond won’t reprise the role, and there’s been speculation about the character, whether they’ll swap him to something more racially diverse, if not gender swap him.

“What do you mean?” Regina asks.

I try to wave this away. “Just all the talk recently that they’re gonna cast a woman as James Bond.”

“That could be something.”

“But the character’s not a woman.”

“So?”

Well, I would’ve thought that was a telling point.

“You can’t swap out an established character just for the sake of doing it.”

“Of course you can,” Regina says. “It’s fiction.”

“The character’s been in like twenty movies over fifty years. He has established canon. He’s been married. They’ve carried that over through each incarnation.”

“Women can get married to other women.”

“But the character carries over established memories – so now he just remembers himself as a woman? What about all those other actors?”

“They can reinvent the character to do whatever they want.”

“The established canon says he’s a man – in the books, he’s a man. In the movies, he’s a man. It’d be like me making a Wonder Woman movie and casting a man.”

“If you wanted to do that, you could.”

“The difference is you’d get upset if I did that.”

“There’s no reason James Bond couldn’t be a woman other than your bias. You have women who are physically capable of exactly the same things he is.”

“That’s not the argument, though. The issue’s the way we’re swapping pop culture characters for representation, rather than giving them their own source material. We’re using established marquee as a launching pad to transform a character into something they’re not.”

“Lots of these properties were made when white males dominated the industry, and propagated the landscape with idealised versions of themselves. There’s no harm in increasing diversity in the interests of representation. You shouldn’t feel so threatened by it.”

But I don’t. I just feel faithful to the integrity of the canon that’s been established. I might be provincial, but I think it’s more my OCD trying to maintain the order of something that’s been around so long that it has to remain faithful to the character, otherwise the whole thing implodes.

There’s not a lot of place to go from here, so I scull down a tea that’s far too hot to be sculled down, say I’ve got to get back to work, exchange goodbyes (I’m sure she’s relieved too for this clusterfuck to be at an end, and I’m sure she’ll go home, and tell everybody what a prejudiced bigoted white relic I am) and abscond to the station.

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

I tell her it wasn’t so good, and I’ll fill her in tomorrow, but then I add that I feel they’ve lost confidence in my writing, and then I add that it feels they’re offloading responsibility for my lack of success (moderate or otherwise) entirely onto me, and then I tell her that apparently now I’m starting back further than before I published because booksellers will be looking at my sales record, and then before I know it I’ve written several essays detailing what happened while also venting my exasperation.

What do they know? Autumn asks me.

When I get home, I goof off, playing an arcade game, ELEVATOR ACTION, from the 1980s on my PC, then sit there, intending to write, but feeling an absence of any willingness, zest, confidence, aspiration, passion, and everything like that to write.

You okay? Autumn texts me around 8.00.

I’m not because I’ve built my whole life around this aspiration of writing, and you get to the point – to this point – where what proclaims itself is the belief, What a fucking waste of time. And the worst thing is I know that won’t hold, that I’ll flip from dejected to hopelessly writing, like I am now, and I’ll still want to believe in the dream, like I’m suffering from some terminal illness, and I’m holding onto the hope that despite trying every traditional and alternative treatment I can, I’m still dying but, don’t worry, don’t worry, some boutique cure will pop up and I’ll find some last reprieve.

Yep, I tell Autumn.