Today's Reading
I let Gloria continue as I turn on my heels and pace beside the doors, taking in words like "highfalutin" and "can't never could" and attempting small chuckles every few moments for her sake.
And to my surprise, it's actually helping in a small way. Just hearing her voice rattling off anything, anything at all, braces me. It's not fixing me, mind you. But it's stabilizing enough that I'm not getting any worse.
At least eight people are pacing in the massive room around me (all of whom are contributing to the manager's stress). Most with heads bent, mumbling to themselves as they stare at their papers. Some, like me, on their mobiles, getting their own personal pep talks—that no doubt don't include phrases like, "There's someone for you, B. After all, there's not a pot too crooked that a lid won't fit."
And as the long hand on the clock strikes twelve, I feel an urge to flip open my proposal folder and recheck everything. Just one more time.
It's unnecessary. I've checked to make sure my papers were all there and in order at least a dozen times.
But I have to see. I have to confirm it did not magically disappear in the past sixty seconds.
My one-sheet. Check.
My business card crafted on some site I'd never visited before, where I ordered two hundred for the sole purpose of this weekend (and 197 still linger at the bottom of my bag). Check.
My sixty-page proposal prepared to tell literary agent Jack Sterling every single bloated thing about my life, career, and book.
I don't work as an ESL teacher. I am a philanthropic academian with a bent for loyalty and integrity in my fifteen years of service.
I don't have a gerbil named Biscuit my old roommate abandoned when she left me halfway through a yearlong lease. I am in the animal rescue service and provide therapy—via allowing Biscuit to come to my classes so my students can find comfort in stroking his soft black fur during anxiety-ridden testing weeks.
I do not have a newsletter of forty-six people comprised of 25 percent family and 75 percent students. I have a global-spanning news outlet with a roster reaching people from twenty-seven countries and counting.
I have three sample chapters.
I have a pen I can gift him that has my name and email, just in case he loses my business card.
I have a paper clip with my name and email I can slip on my papers in case he loses my business card, and my pen, and my proposal and folder, and all electronic receipts regarding my name and information.
I have... everything. Down to the bandages on my blistered heels from walking miles inside these conference halls the past few days and attending classes about how unprepared I was to do something as idiotic as try to sell my book when "don't you guys 'know' that two million new books come out each year?" and "let's not even begin to think about the destruction wrought by AI."
I've diminished beneath celebrity speakers sharing their glory stories of old, writing books on washers and dryers before receiving the big phone call with the six-figure advance.
I've sat in on marketing classes informing me how I need to run a successful website, newsletter, blog, Goodreads, BookBub, Instagram, Lemon8, Threads, TikTok, Pinterest, YouTube, X, and Clapper account before even considering reaching out to an agent, because of course publishers can't publish books without successful authors. Never mind that it's impossible to 'be' a successful author with a thriving platform on social media without actually having, you know, a book.
I've done one-on-one sessions only for editors to circle every page of my first seven and tell me precisely thirty-two things I did flagrantly wrong.
I've been rejected by three agents during three pitches. The whole reason I came.
If dictionaries were made entirely of pictures, there'd be a large photo of me under the word defeated.
My eyes flicker up to the clock on the wall and I swipe at one particularly annoying lock of brown hair that keeps falling over one of my eyes. The energy in the room is lifting. Shifting as people gather up their supplies and begin to stand.
"Are you done, Gloria?" I say into the phone.
...
