Tuesday, August 21, 2012

Writing money in three months

I agree to teach some people how they might get started in writing, maybe even be published.
I go around to see why each person is here. Each has a torrent of memory awaiting release.
Then we come to Alice; that is not her name, it's in alphabetical order in the interest of confidentiality.
For Alice is broke and would prefer nobody, outside of we strangers, to know that. We nod, uncertainly, and wonder who we might tell in a way that might make for a sane recounting of what she says next.
She wishes to write a novel. Fair enough, we nod in agreement.
That will make a lot of money in a short space of time.
By when?
In three months, otherwise she loses her house and her apartment in Portugal.
She took a second mortgage on her home to buy an apartment in an up and coming area that neither came nor arose higher than the hallucination of both buyer and seller.
Now, she cannot sell the apartment nor rent it and her unpaid home mortgage means she will have to quit her nice house, anytime soon.
I try, with the help of the assembled concerned citizens, to say it might take as long as four months to get this rich.
Has she written a novel? No.
Stories, essays, articles, letters to the editor, a shopping list, all draw the same enthusiastic and implacably negative response.
The day wears on, I finish to polite applause from most of the people. I leave but overhear Alice on a phone saying the day has been no good.
They will have to buy shovels and dig up the back garden, she says.
She smiles silently at me as you would to an idiot to assure that all is well.
Shovels.

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1 comment:

  1. I don't get how "Alice" thinks shovels will help her situation, unless she has some stories buried under the hydrangeas, but who am I to comment? I know very little about shovels.

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