Today's Reading
CHAPTER ONE
It was a dark and stormy night.
I mean, not technically.
Technically it's actually remarkably warm for a January afternoon in Nashville, Tennessee. Men and women of all ages are practically skipping down the sidewalk on the street below, twinkles in their eyes, hope in their chests. Just a moment ago I watched from the three-story glass wall of the conference center as one stuffy-looking businessman actually dropped his phone call to commence sharing crackers with a squirrel. Crackers. With a squirrel. Having a little lunch together on a green bench while taxis and tour buses flash by, windows down, hair in the breeze.
Everybody in all of the city is basking in the unusual sunshine.
Learning life lessons.
Having existential breakthroughs.
Except for me.
No, I, twenty-nine-year-old Bryony Page, have the distinct pleasure of my mind crackling like a thunderstorm while I pace outside the conference pitch room on my final day of the American Society of Writers conference, awaiting my final pitch appointment that will determine whether the past two years of writing my heart and soul out was life-changing or, in actuality, a complete and utter waste of time.
And then, of course, there's my sister on the other end of my phone. With her own particular brand of "trying to help."
"It's your last day, Bryony," Gloria says in my ear, a nails-down-the- chalkboard kind of twang in her voice. "You just have to buck up. Pull yourself up by those bootstraps. Slap that book on the table—"
"Proposal," I interject, pivoting on the thin hotel carpet.
A manager in the distance is frowning mildly at my legs, looking like he's calculating exactly how many times I have to pace this exact path before I'll wear a hole in his carpet.
"—and get back on that horse because you are going to have a rootin' tootin good day, ya hear? This is it."
I pinch the bridge of my nose, trying to ease the tension. On the bright side, I'm not hyperventilating. Hyperventilating is what the man to my left is doing as he exits the pitch room and collapses onto the first bench he finds.
Neither am I crying.
Crying is what the woman to my right is doing while another conference attendee is shaking her by the shoulders, telling her to pull herself together because she has, according to the clock above the door, thirty seconds before she's up.
No, what I am doing is getting my pre-pitch pep talk. The same pep talk I've received from my sister the past three pitches over the past three days I've been at this writers' conference nine hundred miles from home. Only, as each day has gotten progressively worse, the rejections have piled up higher and higher, and the stakes have risen to dangerous levels, the pep talks have grown... weirder. Longer. Just worse.
My sister, Gloria: dignified court reporter in the courtroom, whimsical adult-child every moment out.
I know what she's doing, though. The harder she sees me struggle, the more absurd she gets.
Some people's love language is baking casseroles and sending letters. Hers is providing distraction—even at the cost of throwing on a Big Bird costume and dancing down a congested hospital hallway waving streaming blue ribbons (i.e., during our friend's seven-year-old daughter's recovery from tumor removal). And right now, without question she has at least four tabs open on her phone on websites about "Southern slang" while she grasps at straws for any sort of distraction from these tortured few minutes before my last and final pitch.
(Not to mention she found it raucously funny that I called her from a line-dancing saloon my first night during a "meet and mingle." Needless to say, life at the conference here in Nashville, Tennessee, is a far cry from our little borough outside New York City. And to my misfortune, it turned out, I did 'not' happen to have any life-changing chats with agents while doing the Boot Scootin' Boogie.)
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