this is my new humorous novel.
*Everyone loves you when you're dead.
Fame is
a fickle food
upon a
shifting plate.
Emily
Dickinson
One
“Please
leave a short 10 second message after the tone.”
“Blast
and double damn.” Terence threw his mobile phone into the rubbish bin at the
side of his writing desk and sulked his way to the two seater settee and
plomped with as much plomp as he could muster into the cushions.
He lay
in this abject state for some time, almost as if waiting for a second curtain
call or applause. When none was forthcoming her rolled over and looked at his
desk.
The
desk fitted the bill of a writer’s desk. Computer, papers, pens, pencils and a
pile of books that one might assume the owner was well read. Yet it lacked a
certain something. It lacked a writer.
The
last line of Terence Stitt’s novel, ‘Il est mort’ (he is dead) stared from the
computer screen.at the empty chair. After a prolonged dry spell and a hideous
bout of writers block, which had the effect of making Terence gain 10 kilograms
and grow a scrappy beard Terence felt a bit mort himself.
He
liked to use French in his novels. Not that he was French or spoke it for that
matter, but he just thought it showed a level of intelligence, and Terence need
all the help he could get in that department. He roused himself from his torpor
and sat at his desk and looked at the screen, then added an exclamation mark
after mort. There was a temptation to add ‘fin’ justified in the middle of the
word document, but he resisted the urge. In his experience his agent, his
editor, his beta reader, the proof reader and his wife would all have something
to say about his latest manuscript – and it would be foolhardy to say it was
finished. All the women who held the above positions were only there, it seemed
to Terence to make Terence Stitt’s life one of misery, servitude and anguish.
“They’ll
love it,” he said to the computer screen. That his agent wasn’t answering his
calls, his editor was always in a meeting, his beta reader conveniently
contracted conjunctivitis and his wife wasn’t speaking to him at the moment
didn’t help. They had to love it or he was a dead man. He should have been
happy. He had beaten his writers block. He had finally fulfilled his
contractual obligation to his publisher and he could sit back and relax.
But he
couldn’t relax. He hated the manuscript from the first line to the last. It was
rotten. It could never live up to his meteoric rise to fame from his first
novel. It would never pay the mortgage. It would never clear the credit card
his wife thought was unlimited. It was absolutely, excruciatingly dreadful.
“I
might as well kill myself now.” Terence’s head thumped down on the desk and he
closed his eyes.
A lawn
mower kerruppfft into life and broke into Terence’s contemplation at pressing
DELETE. Now there is a happy man, he
thought.
The
happy man in question was Terence’s next door neighbour Jim Broker, who was at
that moment swearing blue murder at his lawn mower which had decided today was
not the day for getting to work and spluttered once then threw in the towel.
Terence
sighed – one of those depths of despair type of sighs and pressed SAVE.
Terence
Stitt’s light once shone brightly.
He was,
Fresh
New York times bestseller list
New and exciting. One to watch
The Guardian
A marvel
The Enquirer
And
his all-time favourite,
The most exciting voice from a
writer we have seen in a long time.
The London Review.
Now,
just two short years later he was off the radar. He was never invited to
anything and if you asked the man in the street had they heard of Terence
Stitt, the answer might be,
“Didn’t
he invent that kitchen gadget thingy?” In fact, Mr Stitt might as well be dead
for all the once adoring public knew.
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