Total pages in book: 63
Estimated words: 59947 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 300(@200wpm)___ 240(@250wpm)___ 200(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 59947 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 300(@200wpm)___ 240(@250wpm)___ 200(@300wpm)
“And now you have deadlines. Is that why you became an independent contractor, so you can make your own schedule?”
“Yeah. And these weeks—end of December, first of January—are always slow in real estate anyway, so I keep them free to get a good head start on a draft. The rest of the year, I try to schedule my inspections from Monday through Thursday, and spend the weekends writing.”
“You must be pretty good if you got published.”
His grin flashes. “I suppose that’s a matter of taste. But I think they’re enjoyable—and I think I get better the more I write.”
“Do you ever think of writing full time?”
He laughs and shakes his head. “I’m financially comfortable but I wouldn’t be if I only depended on royalties. There’s not a lot of money in pulp horror.”
“It seems like there could be?”
“Maybe, if one of the books was made into a movie or something. But that’s out of my hands.”
“The marketing is in your hands.”
He shrugs. “My publisher doesn’t spend much promoting them and I don’t care to spend the time.”
“Maybe I can help with that,” I tell him, and the surprised glance Reed gives me probably mirrors my own surprise at having made the offer. Because if I help him, that means continuing…this. Whatever it is we have. And I haven’t let myself ponder anything beyond this cabin—mostly because that’ll force me to make decisions regarding my mom. Yet my chest aches when I think this upcoming week is all the time I’ll have with him.
Slowly he nods. “Maybe you can.”
Not holding me to anything. Probably realizing that I truly meant the offer, but that I don’t know what the future has in store yet. Or whether he’ll have any part in it. Maybe he won’t want any part of it. Or maybe I won’t want him.
My heart pounds. “Can I trust you?”
“You can,” he replies. Dead serious.
Oh god. Why am I about to share this with him? But I don’t stop myself. Instead I get up and gesture for him to follow. Not far. Just a few steps, babbling the entire way.
“You’re going to look at this and think, ‘She didn’t even do most of that.’ It started with this silly challenge that I saw online. You take thrift store art and add something to the canvas, but the whole point was to match the style and colors. So I picked up an Impressionist seascape and decided to add a kraken attacking a ship—which ended up being a lot harder than I thought, because with the fantasy element, you need detail so your brain can interpret what it is. So I ended up with a blob—but I really liked the whole exercise of it, and began picking canvases with a more realistic style. Anyway. This is the one I’m working on now.”
Reed steps closer to the easel. “So this was a finished painting, and you’re altering it—but in a way that looks as if it was always meant to be part of the original artwork?”
“Yeah.”
He begins examining it, and I cross my arms over my chest to stop the nervous shaking of my hands. Praying he won’t think it’s stupid. Or that he’ll at least understand why I find it so fun.
My mom and Lauryn never did. And honestly, that might be yet another reason I’m out here this Christmas. Because it’s impossible to buy them anything as a gift. My mom hates the commercialism and Lauryn hates everything else. But to make something? Even Lauryn can’t nitpick recycled thrift store art. So, two years ago, I gave them each a painting.
My mom’s was a pretty still life with florals and fruit. Not a particularly exciting subject, but incredibly detailed, almost photorealistic. So I added tiny, photorealistic ants swarming all over the still life with their own paintbrushes and palettes, making it appear that they were the ones creating the scene they were in—as if only something so tiny could render those tiny details. And there was so much detail, and all of it so small—overall, it took more time than I’d ever spent on any one painting.
Mom never looked close enough to see the ants. She just thanked me, told me it was lovely—I don’t think she paid attention or understood when I said the still life wasn’t actually my work—then reminded me that I didn’t have to give her anything for Christmas, and I really shouldn’t.
For Lauryn’s, I’d chosen a mountain landscape with a lake and added a camping scene. But the tent was wrecked, and Bigfoot reclined on a bearskin rug in front of the campfire, Burt Reynolds style, with a human femur between his teeth instead of a cigar—because when I was eight or nine, Lauryn and I ran across that old centerfold, and we decided men were gross, hairy men were even more gross (obviously I’ve reconsidered), and then laughed ourselves silly. But either she didn’t recognize the similarity to that old photo, or she didn’t remember how we laughed—or if she did remember, it wasn’t the bright spot in her memory that it was for me.