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)
Shawn abandons the game and walks over to stand next to Terry. Then Luke is on my left. The four of us stand there, inside the pinnacle of my success, gazing out at the dream, and sigh.
The money isn’t enough to get me through the eighth annual Sin With Us in Vegas Romance Convention where I am the headliner.
Correction, my alter ego, SS—otherwise known as my twin sister, Essie—is the headliner.
I am the number one romance writer in the world and everyone thinks I am my sister because when I first started writing romance ten years ago, it was… it was… I mean, I hate to say it was a joke, but it was a joke.
Terry, Shawn, and I all did it. We were newbie writers, struggling to get that one breakthrough novel, marketing our asses off trying to sell science fiction. Cyberpunk was big back then. But it was fading, so nothing we were doing was hitting. And after a dozen books with no luck, we were getting desperate.
At the same time, erotica was huge. And then, like overnight, every kind of romance was in the top one hundred on Nile. You couldn’t find a sci-fi book to save your life. It was nothing but man-chest covers and titles like Own Me, Master.
All four of us met at a fiction writers’ retreat at the Holiday Inn and Suites in Thousand Oaks, California, that summer. We got drunk that first night of the retreat in what passed for a motel bar—fuckin’ Luke was only seventeen. He was using a fake ID. Then Shawn made a joke. All we needed to do to find success was write our version of Own Me, Master, slap a man-chest on the cover, and wait for the money to roll in.
That’s literally what happened to me. Only my book was called Master Choke.
One minute I was snickering in the corner of my shitty Encino apartment, writing salacious sex scenes, and the next thing I know, I’m number thirteen in the whole Nile store. I made over a hundred thousand dollars in one month. My SS Facebook page, which had twenty-seven followers before I published that first book, suddenly had fifty thousand.
I banked the money, still snickering like an asshole, and then thought… Hell, maybe I’ll write another one? Maybe Sugar and Master Choke had more story in them? I can’t believe I named that girl Sugar. What was I thinking? How can anyone take me seriously?
Book two, Sugar Push, made it to number seven in the store. Sev-en. They loved it. Artists were sending me fan art—like hand-painted renditions of my characters. I was getting invited to indie book signings all over the country, as SS, of course, and my bank account was overflowing.
This is when it kinda became an addiction. I started publishing one story a month. They were mostly long novellas and every single one of them made it into the top twenty in the Nile store.
Shawn, Terry, and Luke were all cheering me on. We kept in touch after that writers’ retreat. Terry and Shawn tried their hand at the romance, but they never could get the sex scenes as dirty as mine. I tried to get my readers to buy their books too, but it didn’t work.
Eventually they gave up and went back to science fiction and now, ten years later, they’re all icons in the industry. Hell, Luke is the top humorous military sci-fi author in the world.
Shawn has a twenty-seven-volume series about time travel and a huge comic company bought the rights to his shit and they’re making it into a whole graphic novel series.
Terry’s got a deal with the number one online streaming network in the world to bring his fifteen-tome shit-hits-the-fan apocalypse series to the small screen with a three-season guarantee. Three seasons.
Meanwhile, I’m still writing the salacious sex scenes. Only now I run online webinars, and retreats, and this fucking Sin With Us in Vegas Romance Writer Convention. Master Choke was made into a movie several years back. It did OK. But I did very well off that thing.
Thankfully, Sugar and Choke’s story ended a while ago now, but I’ve got nine other series just like it.
I have written other stuff under my real name—Steve Smith. It’s good, intelligent sci-fi. Lots of virtual reality and Matrixy-type shit mixed in with the technical details. But no one liked it. The readers were… murderous. The reviews were terrible. They called me the ‘worst writer in the history of science fiction.’
I just don’t get it. How can I be the number one writer in romance and the worst writer in history in sci-fi?
Needless to say, I haven’t really been in the mood to write since that happened.
“Maybe you should just come clean, man?” I look to my left at Luke. He’s like a little cherub of innocence. No clue how the real world works because he found success at the age of eighteen and he’s been living the dream life of a number-one science fiction author for a decade now and he’s not even thirty yet. “Just… tell people it’s you. They’ll still like your books.”