Total pages in book: 130
Estimated words: 126425 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 632(@200wpm)___ 506(@250wpm)___ 421(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 126425 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 632(@200wpm)___ 506(@250wpm)___ 421(@300wpm)
And, lastly, sitting next to me—“Hey. I’m Audrey Saint,” Audrey says in the most casual, off-the-cuff, unassuming way anyone possibly could. Which I find both comforting and a little impressive, given that she is probably the biggest deal on this panel, as her name card confirms.
AUDREY SAINT, Multiple #1 NY Times, USA Today, Wall Street Journal, Times of London, and Various Others Bestseller
The list of achievements is almost too great to fit onto one placard. The crowd goes wild.
And then there’s… “Um, hi. I’m… uh… Cynthia Lear?” The name card on the table in front of me reads, simply:
CYNTHIA LEAR, Author
The tepid applause feels, to me, like it’s laced with confusion. A ‘who is this person and why is she here?’ kind of confusion. I look to Britney, who is still smiling and encouraging me to do the same. And, just because he’s standing beside her and not at all because I need his approval or affirmation, I also look to Steve, who is smiling the same way.
Audrey reaches under the table, squeezes my thigh, and winks at me. It’s comforting. Kind of like what I assume what a mom might do. (To be clear: A mom. Not necessarily my mom.) It doesn’t work, really. I don’t feel comforted. But I appreciate that she’s trying.
I don’t know why I’m so nervous. Yeah, sure, it’s partially the ‘being in front of a crowd’ thing, but it’s also partially because… I’m not even sure I really belong here at all. I’ve tried to stuff it down, but having to rewrite the end of Filling the Gap kind of did a number on my head. Like, I thought I knew what I was doing with my writing and then, suddenly, I wasn’t so sure.
And then Steve takes my ARC, reads the whole damn thing in an afternoon and woos me with praise to the point that I get swept off my feet, only to now discover that there might be a whole raft of ulterior motives at play and now I don’t understand any of the things I thought I understood anymore.
So, okay, I lied. I do know exactly why I’m so nervous.
I wonder, if I just slipped out right now and left the room, if anyone would notice or—
“All right,” Frizzy continues, “so what we’ll do is go ahead and open up questions to the floor. Please, raise your hand to be called on and let’s go one at a time, trying to limit the number of follow-ups so that we can give people a chance to get their questions in. So, does anyone have a ‘reader rant?’ Something that you’re curious about or that frustrates you that you want to ask about?”
You can actually hear the snap in the air as probably close to a hundred hands shoot up in unison. All kinds of hands. Young, old, thin, strong, sleeved, sleeveless, wedding-banded, not ringed, tattooed, nail-polished… a panoply of limbs attached to bodies with brains and hearts all unified in their shared love of this thing called romance.
It’s… well, it’s kind of beautiful. If I weren’t sitting in front of them all, with a thousand mixed emotions racing through my brain, I might get a little teary. It’s just so—
“Yes, you there.” Frizzy points and then clarifies, “You in the t-shirt.”
A woman stands up. A PA in the crowd brings a microphone over and hands it to her. The woman is probably my age or maybe a little younger and wears a babydoll tee that doesn’t quite cover her stomach and shows off the belly button ring she wears. Which must be, I assume, the point.
“Thanks. My rant is kind of a general one for the panel. So, I hate cliffhangers…” There is a mumbling agreement from about half the crowd. “And, y’know, I get that they’re supposed to entice the reader to stick around and come back for another book in a series or whatever, but, like, don’t you think, at the end of the day, that’s just kind of a tactical choice to keep people reading a book? You know, rather than a creative one?”
My spine immediately stiffens. Because… my first two books both end on cliffhangers.
That was… that was the whole point when I started The Purity Principle. That it would continue on for, like, a long time. That was the whole point! Oh, no. Oh—
“Well,” Mercy Rose begins, “I can say, for me, that sometimes I don’t necessarily want to end a book on a cliffhanger. That, if I had my druthers, I’d just keep writing until I resolved the story. But, now and again, a story is just too big and it wants to keep going. And, honestly, if I waited until I was finished to publish the whole thing, it would be, y’know, a thousand pages long and take, I dunno, ten years to be done. So, at the end of the day,” she says, calling back to the phrase Babydoll Tee used and smiling, “it’s a little from column A and a little from column B. You have to try to balance the demands of the industry with whatever your creative vision might be. That’s the key to keeping things going. It’s a balancing act.”