The Book Deal
A best-selling author finishes his latest novel
Writing was a battle.
The weeks and months of staring at the empty screen or blank page, when the process of writing became the process of doing anything but, clawed at him.
The deadline passed like a ship in the night, but still the story was not ready.
His agent was screaming for the manuscript, his publishers getting ready to set their lawyers on him to return the advance he had already spent, but he knew what he was writing was terrible, unpublishable. That, if he handed in the skeleton of his idea — which was all that he had, even at this late juncture — his career would be over before it even began.
It was this, more than anything, which forced his hand.
“Writer’s block, is it?”
He nodded.
His mentor and friend, a famous writer of global renown, eyed him over her cappuccino.
“How desperate are you, exactly?”
“Very.”
“Hmm.” She sounded unconvinced. “I’m not sure that’s desperate enough…”
“Enough for what?” he asked, looking up. “Do you have a solution? Some… exercise I can do to be able to write again?”
She let out a laugh that was more of a cackle.
“Sure,” she said. “There are a million of them. Though you wouldn’t be here now if you hadn’t tried them all.
“Am I right?”
She looked into his eyes until he tore his gaze away.
“What can I do?”
She studied him.
“How much are you willing to give up to write once more?”
“Anything,” he said. “Everything.”
She put down her cappuccino and sat forward in her seat.
“Would you be willing to make a deal?”
The black book sat at the end of the dustiest, most forgotten shelf of the library. It sucked the air out of the space, making anyone who ventured into this overlooked recess uneasy, though they could not have said exactly why.
He licked his lips when he read the title on its spine, could feel its coiled power pulling him towards it.
This was his last chance to abandon a plan which sounded like madness, a fantasy.
But the book was where she had said it would be, and there was no denying its call.
He lifted it from its place on the shelf, turned to the page he needed, and began to read, a single tear snaking its way down to his quivering chin.
When he had finished, he knew it was the best thing he’d ever written.
He put his pen down with ink-stained fingers, then hefted the manuscript in his hands, feeling the weight of all those pages, all those words and the hours of toil and doubt that had gone into them, and he smiled.
His old leather chair complained as he leaned back and gazed at the bookshelf: the first editions of all six of his bestselling, award-winning hardbacks sat apart from one another like dominoes, looking back at him. He hugged the manuscript to his chest, closed his eyes, and sighed deeply.
The smile slowly dropped from his face.
It was always hard to say goodbye to a book that he’d just finished, especially one as good as this. But he knew it’d hurt more the longer he left it — this was the seventh time he’d done it, after all. He flicked through the thick sheaf in wonder at the product of his mind and will, then he struggled out of his leather chair and walked towards the fireplace.
The flames licked the air, forming the same image that he always saw staring back at him: the inhuman face that cajoled and leered, amused at what he thought of as his craft.
In one practiced movement, he threw the manuscript into the fire, removed the poker from its holder, and pushed the already curling, blackening pages deeper into the heat. He took the letter opener from the mantelpiece and re-opened the old wound in his thumb. Making sure not to waste a single drop, he shook his blood into the fire, where it hissed, briefly dyeing the flames black.
He placed his thumb in his mouth, trying to deny what infantile comfort it brought him, and waited until what he had written was consumed by the mocking face.
He did not forget to recite the arcane words.
When his novel was reduced to ash, he went back to his desk and sagged into his old leather chair. His tears dropped unnoticed onto the desk as he put away his stray papers, ink pot and pen into the top drawer, then switched on his computer. While it croaked to life, he turned to look at his books on the shelf and realized that he would have to build another one for his latest publishing sensation, as he kept a space before every book to remind him of what each had cost him.
He had no idea what he was about to write, in truth he didn’t care. All he knew was that the words came by themselves, and that each story sold more than the last (up to thirteen million now, with two film adaptations in production).
Did he regret making the deal? He had everything he’d ever wanted after all: fame, fortune and, more importantly than that, the grudging respect of the literary world.
He wasn’t sure how long it would continue, or if this was the last one. And, if it was, what he would then do with his life, though he knew that his soul was forfeit.
His fingers tapped the keys at one-hundred-and-eighty words per minute. Chapter two already, and he’d barely even glanced at the words appearing on the screen.
He had thought writing was the hardest thing, until he’d destroyed his first manuscript all those years ago.
Burning his work never got any easier.
But a deal’s a deal.
A former columnist for Cracked, Matt Cowan’s genre fiction has appeared in Daily Science Fiction and The Arcanist. He won first prize in the New Deal Writing Competition 2019 and was shortlisted for the TSS Flash Fiction 400. On Medium, his work has been published by Lit Up, P.S. I Love You, Slackjaw and The Junction, among others.