Here in Lancaster, PA, the main department stores are JC Penney, Boscov, BonTon and….oh, yeah, Sears. The Sears’ spoke of our wheel-shaped mall has to be the loneliest spot in the universe. Who goes to Sears…except to shop for appliances, Craftsman tools or car parts?

I'm sorry. This logo has to go.

So it’s no surprise that Sears is in trouble, closing stores across the country. Yes, their woes are also tied to bigger issues, such as the disastrous Kmart acquisition. But part of their problem is they’ve let their market niche languish. They’ve hardly bothered to define it, let alone keep it up to date and sell it to consumers like me.

So, save yourselves a few million, Sears, and listen up to the advice of this savvy mall-crawler….

First, your competition isn’t the other department stores at the malls where you share space. No, you shouldn’t even bother going head-to-head with Penney’s or Macy’s or BonTon or Boscov. It would take so much rebranding, so much reselling and redefining of who you are to get you in that wheelhouse, and there’d be absolutely no guarantee that loyal Penney shoppers are going to march down that mall hallway to pick up some things at your store. That would take a long time with a lot of advertising and a lot of promos and a lot of everything in your marketing toolkit–just to get the shoppers to the door again, let alone buying anything. It ain’t gonna happen soon enough to make a difference.

No, you need to build on what you already have and come up with a regular enticement, some “must haves” to get shoppers in the door again. Stop thinking Penny shoppers. Start thinking of your competition as….Target.

Target has managed to become a trendy, hip, youngish discount store. A discount store that sells clothing, furniture, home goods, toiletries and more. Things you don’t get at department stores plus department store stuff.

You’ve already got a lot of their merchandise. You’ve got a brand name clothing line. You’ve got home goods and then some–unlike Target, you sell appliances and manly merchandise (the tools, the paint, the car stuff) that make you a destination for the Y chromosome crowd. You’ve got a reputation as the people’s department store dating back to the days when your catalogs brought the world to the prairie and the mountains.

Sears and Roebuck--not just a store, a philosophy.

So, get some Madison Avenue dudes and dudesses working on a vintage/trendy redesign of a “Sears & Roebuck” logo. Give them marching orders to design some new ads that telegraph to consumers you’re going to give Target a run for their money. You’re back in the dream business, the everybody-can-have-something-nice business. Your slogan needs to communicate: We have it all (implicit subtext: Macy’s and Penney’s don’t). Your image needs to shout young and efficient — put carts in those actors’ hands, and shampoo and soap in the carts along with sweaters and shoes.

Clean up your stores. Add a toiletries department. Get in some hip furnishings, offer CDs and DVDs. Gussy up the Lands End section. Offer bright shopping carts for all that stash folks will be grabbing from the shelves.

You do that and shoppers will not just return. They’ll make Sears the destination store, the one whose lot you park your car in. Look, honey, could you park at Sears, I need to pick up…

This will get customers back fast. Once they’re there, you can keep them with the store re-dos.

No need to thank me (although some gift certs would be nice). That lonely Sears hall at the mall makes me sad. I’d like it to be a happy place again.

Remember when pineapples were the rage? I mean pineapples in decorating. Pineapple wallpaper patterns, pineapple molding, pineapple newels and pineapple gewgaws of all kinds on fireplace mantels.

The pineapple craze was a nod back to colonial times, apparently, and you’ll see quite a few of them if you visit the lovely Colonial Williamsburg.

A pineapple wallpaper border.

I have to admit, however, to having mischievous thoughts when viewing all those pineapples in colonial houses. I find myself wondering — were these really fashionable or were they a bit of fun? You know, like pink flamingoes.

Pink flamingoes were the ultimate in low-class lawn decoration when I was growing up in Baltimore in the mumble-mumble years of the twentieth century.  Pink flamingoes on a lawn? Phht, that household probably drank Natty Bo and called everybody “hon,” while the truly elite sipped chardonnay and called each other ”Tad” and “Scotty.”

And then, suddenly, the flamingoes went from being declasse to deriguer for the hip urbanite/suburbanite.  Brahmins embraced them with a wink and nod–look how cool we are, their selection seemed to say. We “get” it.

Who can't love these sweeties?

We joined the craze — although, for me, it was more a bow to my father’s family’s Bal’mer roots — and still have two plastic pink flamingoes that I proudly place in my bed of mint every spring.

Well, I wondered, did pineapples travel the same route? Did they start out as the pink flamingo–scorned by the hoity-toity and embraced by the hoi polloi until finally the in crowd realized it was being left out by not embracing them? Were pineapples the pink flamingoes of their day?

Mmm…I like to imagine the scene. Mistress Smith goes into the candlemaker’s shop and sees a pineapple ornament on the shelf.  She sniffs, lifting the corner of her mouth in a subtle sneer at the rude taste of the crass mercantile class. Then she heads to the pewter shop to pick up that new pitcher she had made. There’s another pineapple, this time carved into the door post. Really, how plebian, she thinks. And then, months later, her best friend and arch rival, Mistress Jones, puts a pineapple decoration on her fireplace mantel. Quelle surprise! Over tea, Mistress Jones — who has a reputation as an impish troublemaker — gushes about how much joy she gets from viewing this tropical fruit. Soon, Mistress Smith is keeping up with the Joneses by having special pineapple wallpaper made….and there you have it, my friend, a fad becoming a trend.

Pineapple wallpaper in a bathroom--hmm, might go with our avocado green tub!

What fun it would be if this story were true. Imagine some colonial grande dame looking down from the afterlife at a well-to-do household today papered with pineapple patterns, smiling and thinking, “Now, why on earth would they think that was a good pick with all that lovely furniture?”

Which brings me to my avocado green bathtub. We live in a pre-owned house, one built in 1974, which means we didn’t pick out the kitchen cabinets, countertops, appliances or sinks and tubs. And the guest bathroom has an avocado green tub in it, along with matching sinks and toilet.

You remember the days when avocado green and burnt almond were the rage? Everybody had to have these shades! They represented the latest, the most fashionable, like granite countertops and stainless steel appliances today.

But times and tastes change. Now, avocado green appliances, sinks, tubs elicit a gasp of horror from the with-it interior decorator, his sentiments echoed by sneers of derision from young couples looking to buy a home and encountering the shades for the first time — oh, the humanity.

We’ll ignore their sneers. Our bathtub is real ceramic, not one of those plastic/vinyl/whatever surrounds. It has heft.

A green tub similar to our own.

I figure that one day the color might come back in style, or at least be embraced by the fashionable crowd as retro or camp, sort of like the pink flamingoes of yesteryear. Or maybe even the pineapple.

If you have avocado green fixtures in your house, I’d love to hear your thoughts on whether you’ll keep them and how you’re decorating around them.

The story is a fictionalized account of the small Derbyshire town of Eyam whose citizens, in 1665, made the selfless decision to quarantine themselves when Bubonic Plague strikes the village, thus stopping infection from spreading to nearby communities. Anna Frith, a young widow and servant, is the narrator, and her evolution is the backbone of the story. Kind and strong at the outset of the tale, she becomes fiercely independent by the end of it.

After reading the description of the story on the back cover, I knew what to expect once the book got going–the witch accusations, the ghastly deaths, the violence. There was, in fact, a sense of “we’ve seen this movie before” reading them. Brooks was wise not to embellish her prose too much in these sections. The mere laying out of actions and reactions was enough. This was the strength of Brooks’s writing–her quietness, her matter-of-fact narration. This, along with that elegant descriptive prose and period detail, placed the reader squarely in the story so that you could not only see and hear the 17th century villagers but smell their town’s best and worst scents.

Despite admiring and enjoying these aspects of the author’s skill, I finished the book angry! Beware–if you’ve not read this novel, spoilers follow…

As you would expect, a story of such vast death and destruction confronts questions of good and evil, faith and faithlessness, God…and no God. Brooks does an admirable job of placing these weighty subjects in appropriate context and keeping them from becoming sermonettes. Anna Frith is Everywoman in this regard, struggling with these heavy topics the way ordinary men and women do when confronted with tragedy and unknowable pain.

But Anna, while the narrator, is not the only pivotal character in this book, and I found myself warming with irritation when the author took the respectable, if imperfect, character of the minister, Michael Mompellion, and turned him at the end of the story into a gross misogynist, whose past treatment of his wife Elinor was the epitome of lust-hating  but inwardly lustful zealot. I’ve seen that movie before, too. And its excesses seemed out of place in this nuanced and understated story.

In fact, the backstory of Elinor Mompellion seemed excessive as well, standing out in this quietly sorrowful story like a red blotch on a Monet lilypad painting. Why, I wondered, did Brooks throw that in? Well, to give her subsequent revelation of the minister’s dark side a foundation. These parts of the story and one other plot twist made me feel the presence of the author, smirking in the background.

What was the other twist? (Again, spoiler alert!) At the end of the novel, Anna leaves the village after the plague has passed, taking with her a newborn babe abandoned by its family, and she ends up in…an Arabian harem, happy as a clam with these gentle “Muselmen.” At which point, I found myself thinking, “Really? Really?” You paint poor misguided Michael Mompellion as a crude psychological abuser, and you think it’s just dandy that these “Muselmen” engage in the woman-degrading practice of polygamy? C’mon.

This moved my irritation up a notch. It finally exploded in anger, however, when I read the author’s notes at the end. Turns out there was a real minister of that little town of Eyam, a William Mompesson, whom Brooks describes as “heroic and saintly.” He did, after all, convince his fellow villagers to impose the quarantine on themselves.

So, Brooks took this real “saintly and heroic” man, Mompesson, and turned him into the priggish and boorish Mompellion (perhaps she thought changing his name to Schmompesson was too obvious?). In other words, she ruined his reputation with her fictional retelling. Sure, he’s long dead, and sure, we don’t know much about him except his good deeds, but….well…really? Why? Why bestow on Mompellion’s wife, Elinor, all the saintly characteristics? Why not give Mompesson some credit?

In her notes, Brooks blithely mentions her liberties with the truth. I get that — historical fiction is fiction. But why not make up another name for this dude instead of the lightly disguised Mompellion. I mean….c’mon. You gratuitously slammed what appears to have been a good man, and for what? Your novel was good but was it worth that?

So, while I give Brooks props for the storytelling, the historical research, the prose, I say “shame on you” for taking a real man and turning him into a misogynistic religious nut while at the same time giving readers the impression that Anna’s true paradise lay in the confines of a woman-degrading harem. Sorry, that’s just…nuts.

I

There we were…

…on the anniversary of Disease Eradication, celebrating the end of the horrors of the past – now less real than the zombies, vampires and werewolves of all the movies and books we were devouring as fast as they were produced. Gone were cancer, typhus, staph infections, heart ailments, autoimmune syndromes, even athlete’s foot. Long live the Scientist!

There I sat …

…on the dais with my dad, Dr. Erich Preston, proud of him, yes, but a little bored, too. I’d been going to these events with him for ten years now, ever since I’d turned eight and he could trust me to sit still. He wasn’t even primarily a biologist. He was a biometrician and a physicist, and lately the latter had been his drug of choice. Oh, I loved him dearly, I did. But he was more than distracted by work. He was addicted to it. So much so that he tried to get me actively interested in these annual celebrations which seemed to mean so much more to him than they did to me… or to anyone else for that matter. I’m sure they wouldn’t get half the crowd if friends and family of lab workers weren’t jollied or coerced into going. The NewsBlogs would carry pictures of the beaming faces, after all, so happy and excited to once again mark the beginning of the New Age of Reason.

There I sat…

… happy to support Dad but not enough to really pay attention to the speeches, peering into the crowd, searching for one face, the voices of the various speakers mere background noise on a bright October morning, crisp and clear, blue as blue can be—the sky! Oh, the sky!—and leaves in Central Park winking yellow and orange, as if they knew something and would only whisper it to the most astute of listeners. Possibility and farewells were in the air, as they always are in autumn. Possibility was my drug. His name was Roland.

Just as my gaze caught Roland’s, Dr. Stephen Galsmith coughed. Dr. Galsmith was one of Dad’s colleagues. He came over to our apartment once every two weeks for cocktails and informal chats on scientific issues of the day. A kind soul, he always asked me how I was doing with my studies, and he seemed to really want to know; he wasn’t just being polite.

He sat at the end of our row today. He coughed again. Like quick snapshots, these images remain with me:

In the crowd, Roland frowned.

On the dais, my father looked over at Dr. Galsmith and grimaced.

A scientist behind Dr. Galsmith – I don’t remember her name—shook her head and looked down.

A NewsBlogger in the first row snapped a picture.

His colleague whispered something to him, and he hit some buttons.

Dr. Galsmith coughed again.

Poor fellow. Did anyone really care if the tickle in his throat interfered with one more dull exultation of Science and Its Accomplishments?

I didn’t. I only cared that Roland looked at me and connected with me and, after this banal festival, we’d go out somewhere and share secrets. I didn’t know what secrets, but surely we’d share them on this waning day of a waning season. Perhaps the colorful trees would divulge theirs, as well.

When Dr. Galsmith coughed for the third time, my father leaned over, talked quietly to the man, and he left! Really—I would have to speak to Dad. I knew he took all this stuff very seriously. I knew he was polite and good-natured and loved order. But a coughing colleague? Shouldn’t he have offered sympathy, not ostracism?

***

 II

The next weeks blurred. Roland was rarely around, which caused a pain in my side—a pain, I  realized with embarrassed relief (and turmoil!), before asking to see a health care professional, that was nothing more than heartache.

Roland was nearly five years older than me. This caused some tension with my father. I’d met Roland first at the Learning Center, at the labs we schoolers had to take together and not online. He was a teaching assistant, and he’d been shyly helpful to me, so shy, in fact, that I’d thought at first that he’d actively disliked me.

No, it had turned out he’d been motivated by purity of spirit. He considered it unethical to “fraternize” with his students. It “colored his judgment.” As soon as the lab was over, I asked him out, more as a dare to myself, to prove what a jerk and a snob he was. He laughingly accepted and proved me wrong.

But Dad—oh, Dad—he’d been a hostile noncombatant in this war for my heart. He’d barely talked to Roland when he stopped by, and whenever Roland stayed for dinner or a movie or anything at our flat, Dad substituted interrogation for conversation. Only recently had his objections been satisfied as he learned that Roland had been forsaking teaching for research and security work, a loyal citizen, a helpful and well-connected member of my father’s circle of peers, all good men and women, all Scientists committed to the improvement of humankind.

Roland was gone a lot during those weeks after the celebration because of his new work, in fact. Meetings he couldn’t talk about. Projects he wouldn’t admit to. The few times I saw him, I could just trace my finger down his cheek and look into those deep pools of eyes and whisper, I love you, hearing his response before the words passed his lips, “And I, you, Aspasia.”

His poetry writing increased during that worried time. If I couldn’t see him, I could get his pings, often snippets of poems about me. At least, I believed they were about me.

His creative side seemed on fire to communicate, perhaps because he had so much else he couldn’t say.

***

 III

“You’re a mope,” my friend Regan said to me, nudging me as we lay on my bed staring at our assignments.

“Am not.”

“Are, too.” She giggled and grabbed a pillow to swat me with. But I wasn’t in the mood for games.

“You’re right. I’m a mope.” I sighed and sat up, looking out at the empty streets. Roland couldn’t come over even if he could find the time. Strict curfews were in effect due to a “temporary security situation.” Usually, these resolved in a few days, but this one was going on for a week. Regan lived in our apartment building, and we were spending more and more time together.

“He pings you every day, doesn’t he?”

“More than that.”

“Then there’s no need to reach for the poison, Juliet. The curfew will be lifted soon.”

“I hope so.”

“Curfew” was a misnomer. For us, it meant restrictions on movement 24/7, not just in the evening. I only learned that after reading an older book and having to puzzle out the usage.

I gazed out the window, at a dreary rain cascading down the glass like transparent satin. I’d not seen Roland in a week.  Suddenly, I felt afraid.

“What is it this time, do you think? The curfew, I mean,” I said, not looking at Regan.

“Beats me. Mom and Dad just complain about it –she hadn’t had a chance to stock up, so we’ve been eating canned foods all week. They don’t say squat about the reason for the curfew.”

Nobody did, come to think about it. It was just part of life, part of being safe and taken care of. Regan’s parents both worked for the university system. Her mother was an anthropology professor, her father an administrator.

A sudden wind whipped rain toward the window with a crash, shaking it in its frame. We both jumped back and then giggled at our fear. Down below, the only people on the streets were the usual police patrols on horses and in minis, and an occasional moped, taxi or segueroller, all of which had the cobalt blue stickers and badges indicating they had permission to break the curfew.

Tonight, a group of those blue stickers would be at our house. It was Dad’s get-together night. With a gulp, I remembered that I’d promised to make some food for the event.

“C’mon, domestic science time,” I said to Regan as I got up and headed toward the kitchen. “How to make mouth-watering hors d’oeuvres with whatever’s in the pantry!”

“Oh, yum. Can I have some? If I have to eat one more tuna sandwich, I’m going to start barking like a seal.”

“Do they eat tuna?”

“Dunno. But they should.”

In the kitchen, we spent a fun hour baking sun-dried tomato mini-biscuits, cheese straws, tapenade for slices of toasted baguette and ham wrapped around pickle slices. This last dish was a joke and a treat. Regan was ravenous for some meat, and I wanted to see if Dad noticed the dish—he disliked pickles—and whether he’d say anything. Always the absent-minded professor type, he’d been more distracted than normal lately.

At the end of our cooking session, Regan popped one last biscuit into her mouthand sighed, rolling her eyes. “Mmm….thanks. I’m going to live,” she said. “But I better get home before Mom calls.” She looked at her handheld. “Too late—I see she already has. I’ll skedaddle and see you in the morning, okay?”

It wasn’t long after she left that Dad came home, and a short while after that, his guests arrived. He was very grateful for the food I’d fixed and didn’t say a word about the ham around pickles. This would have amused me but for one troubling aspect of the night’s soiree. Professor Galsmith wasn’t there.

And as I overheard Dad’s guests talking quietly, I discovered the esteemed professor would never again grace our humble abode with his presence.

He was dead.

***

IV

“Call or ping. Must talk.”

I put down my handheld, waiting for it—willing it—to flash with a respond message from Roland.

Bright sunlight dazzled the outside world, casting a glistening spell on everything as rain had continued in the night. It was as if a crystal net had been thrown over the world—the streets, treetops, sidewalks, buildings sparkled. And the few people, blue badges in place, running about.

Running. They were hurrying. No one walked casually, as if on an unhurried errand. The few who were out and about scuttled in and out of sight as if they were late for something.

In the distance, I picked up a flash of color, standing out from the more natural greens and browns and tans, a manmade color of bright florescent orange. Someone was wearing an orange jumpsuit, a suit that announced its presence long before you could focus on who actually was wearing it. It had a hood, too, that made the face more difficult to see. From the gait and shoulders, I surmised it was a man. Soon, he was joined by another fellow, not in an orange suit but in a security uniform. They both carried a long board of some sort.

I watched as the approached a brownstone, rang the bell, waited, knocked. I saw a pale face glance out a window of the house from behind a blind, snapping it closed in a second. The men waited no longer. They put a device on the door that exploded the lock, and they entered, all businesslike and powerful.

Transfixed, unsettled, I continued to stare. The street went silent. The house remained still as if no one lived in it.

Thesecurity patrols weren’t often seen on our streets. Oh, we would hear on the NewsBlogs about their success in uncovering this nefarious terrorist plot or that drug cartel, but it stayed far from our neighborhoods. The only time I saw them was at special celebratory events, the annual Refounding Ceremony or the Thanksgiving Day parade with all the floats. They were a benign presence in our orderly society. Father said they were good men and women who kept us safe.

My handheld buzzed. A message from Roland. Relief and excitement morphed into disappointment. A message was good, but I’d rather be able to hear his voice.

Busy today. Can’t come over.

Double disappointment. A Chinese restaurant dish in the making, I mused. Instead of Double Happiness with two delectable treats on the plate, it would hold…nothing.

That’s what my heart held. I felt empty. Why couldn’t he call me? What was happening?

I ambled to the kitchen to read the note my father had left for me on the fridge. Silly Dad. He left paper notes for me, not pings, because he was convinced I ignored most of his electronic missives. He was right.

I pulled the note from under its magnet. “Meeting I forgot about at the university. Muffins in the cabinet, and I’ll be able to bring home something fresh. Stay put. Write your essays. Do your lab report.”

Smiling, I sat at the counter, fingering the note as if some clue could, through osmosis, seep into my hand and head. Dad was an absent-minded professor for sure. But not about meetings involving his work. He was almost obsessive over those, one time nearly frantic when one of my school programs almost made him late for a faculty get-together. A meeting he forgot about? Unlikely.

I ran to his office and switched on his Notebook. Not surprisingly, it was password protected. I tried a few—my name, my birthdate—and came up with nothing. Then I thought of my late mother’s name and tried that. Again nothing.

Sitting back in his chair, staring at the blue screen, I felt not one ounce of guilt. Being trapped in the apartment made me comfortable with being a conspirator, an escapee in training. I kept trying.

Dad was a scientist. Maybe his password was some form of calculation. I tried various equations, and nothing worked. Then I remembered a gift he’d given me on my thirteenth birthday—an equation to solve, the ultimate answer spelling out my name using numerals. Oh, spelling it with Greek letters, that is, since I was named after Periclese’s mistress, a woman of independence, refinement and keen intelligence.

Shooting up from the chair, I raced to my bedroom, rummaging through my packet of mementos, pawing past the fuzzy bear Regan had given me when we were ten, the sparkly notebook I had used to write stories in the old-fashioned way when I was seven, the funny rings and buttons and pins I’d collected over the years.

Finally, I grabbed it—a wrinkled bunch of papers, Dad’s handwriting neat and exact, as if he’d been a calligrapher, mine a mess of pencil marks and cross-outs. He’d not let me use the computer for my calculations, so it had taken three times as long since I’d kept goofing up on basic arithmetic. The last page, I needed the last page, please tell me I didn’t keep everything but that!

With a racing heart, I found it. The digits stood out in dark letters and were underlined three times as I’d realized victory.

Back at the computer, I tried the number sequence as password and was in!

Not surprisingly, his calendar was on the desktop. His days were filled with
classes, meetings, lab time, everything meticulously noted so that every hour was filled. Today’s date had on it absolutely nothing. In fact, he’d typed “home” in that slot, as if he’d had to schedule time for that, too. He hadn’t forgotten a meeting today. There was none. Or one had been hastily called.

I’d started this exercise only wanting to look at his calendar for a clue to what was going on today. But now that I had access to his Notebook, my fingers hovered over other file folders. Should I look? If he’d done similar to me, I’d have been outraged, beyond forgiving him for such a breach.

But something was going on now, something odd and mysterious… I had to look. Maybe he was in danger. Maybe we all were….

Ping, ping, ping!

My handheld buzzed insistently with the high sound indicating serious attention
was needed. Regan—she was calling me. Quickly, I exited Dad’s program and closed the Notebook, at the same time I answered her call.

“What’s up?” I asked.

“Boredom to the Nth,” she said. “Talk to me, sister. Or soon I’ll be carted away.”

“Can you come down?” She lived in the same apartment building, just a few floors above.

“No. Get this—Mom says the curfew’s been expanded. No one’s to go out at all. Not even in the same building. To that, I say, Schmaloney. I can probably sneak out while she and Dad argue about something.”

The curfew was expanded, yet Dad was called away? Something made my heart drop. As I talked with Regan, I wandered back to my room and to the window, staring into the now-empty street. Perhaps people had been hurrying before to get inside as the new regulations went into effect.

“Any word on how long this will last?” I asked. “I haven’t checked any blogs yet today.”

“Don’t bother. There’s not much up. Uh…wait a sec…” I heard her muffled voice talking to her father, who said something to her.  “I’m back. Apparently, some people can go out, just not us.”

“Your Dad?” He worked at the university. “Does he have a meeting?”

“Sounds like it. Something special. Probably some planning session for how to keep professors from coughing during ceremonies.”

“He’s dead, you know. Professor Galsmith.” Regan had been at the ceremony, too, though not on the dais, and we’d snarked about the incident afterwards.

Silence. “What?” she whispered. “I…I…took a course with him. Online, but we met a few times to go over papers. He was really nice. How’d you find out?”

“I overheard it.” I felt guilty for giving her the info so cavalierly. “I—I’m sorry. I didn’t realize you knew him.”

“Nothing’s on the news.” I could hear her tapping to various sites, looking for the obit. Usually, when a famous man or woman of science died, there were scads of tributes and a big obituary. Professor Galsmith had been a beloved mentor to many students and had done award-winning research in viral biometrics.

“Maybe it’s too soon.” But it could have been up in the blink of an eye. Others had been. Just last week, a venerable leader of the Reason movement, a respected scion of chemistry, had died at 110. His obit had appeared moments after his passing. It had sounded, from the snippets of conversation I’d heard at my father’s gathering, that Galsmith had passed several days earlier.

“Reg, listen, have you seen any dudes in orange suits roaming around?” I peered out the window. Still no activity at that brownstone, but maybe I’d missed it.

“Orange suits? You mean like jackets and pants?”

“No, like a jumpsuit. Like prison garb from that old flick we watched last week.”

“Ick. Sounds awful. No, I haven’t seen any.”

Just then, the door of the brownstone opened.

“Look outside right now! Across the street. That house with the open door.” The orange-suited guy was coming out. He was carrying something. No, he was carrying the front end of a stretcher—that was the board I’d seen. The security fellow had the other end. On it was a woman, her face ashen, her eyes wide. Her head lolled back and forth, and her mouth moved as if she were saying something.

“What is that?” Regan asked. “Somebody go mental?” Despite the conquest of disease, some mental illness remained intractable, controlled only by strict drug regimens. But to see someone carted away because of it? I’d never heard of that before. One more thing to ask Dad. Or Roland.

“Don’t know,” I whispered as we both watched. Perfectly timed, an ambulance pulled up at the curb, the stretcher and woman were loaded into it, and the crew sped off, sirens letting out a low wail, lights flashing. The strident buzz sent a shiver up my spine. You hardly heard those anymore.

I couldn’t stand it any longer. I had to talk to Roland.

“I’m gonna see what I can find out,” I murmured. “Let me know if you hear anything.”

***

V

If Regan heard anything, I didn’t know what it was. Our contact petered out to nothing in the next few weeks. In fact, I peg great change to that moment we watched, separately in our own flats, the orange-suited man and the security guard remove the deranged woman from her house.

After that, the orange suits appeared every day, like a fast-producing new animal swarming the earth, locusts leaving nothing in their wake. Reg and I called them Q cops. Everyone called them Q cops. And by everyone I mean friends, acquaintances, anonymous bloggers, pingers. But not the NewsBlogs. The NewsBlogs called them “Special Health Forces,” an arm of the Security Patrol.

Q is for Quarantine. And we weren’t supposed to talk about it. Dad told me when I mentioned it to him, when I asked him where they all came from all of a sudden.

“Don’t use that term, Azzy,” he said, drinking coffee one morning. “It’s derisive. They’re good public servants just trying to keep us all safe.”

“Safe from what? I thought disease had been eradicated.”

“You’ve read the stories,” he said, and for the first time, I noticed that his hand shook just a little. He’d been working so hard lately, at the lab virtually round the clock only stumbling home in the wee hours and falling into bed for a scant few hours’ sleep.  I had to remind him to eat. He was only drinking the coffee now because I’d made it especially for him and had told him so.

“Malaria,” he continued after a trembling pause that made me wonder if he had lost his train of thought, “makes an appearance every once in a while, and we take great care to isolate the cases and develop new vaccines. The last instance of this kind of outbreak occurred, oh…”

“Fifty years ago. I know, I know. I’ve read the stories in the blogs, Dad.” He finished his coffee and wiped his face with a napkin. He was sweating. “You should eat something,” I said, feeling a frown crease my brow. He didn’t look good. Was it from overwork? Fear tiptoed into my heart and set up a room there.

“I will, I will. There’s so much to do, Azzy. Not a minute to spare…” He looked around, as if he’d forgotten something. I ran to the living area where he’d left his coat, blue badge in place signifying he had the right to be out and about, and handed it to him, along with a red muffler I grabbed from the closet.

“You need to take care of yourself. Keep warm. Are you working on the vaccine? Are you in biometrics full-time, virology?” He floated from field to field, his mind crackling with intelligence like a live wire sparking the ground.

“What? No. Back in the physics group.” He smiled at me for just a second the way he used to, happy at my interest in his work. Then a grimace—no, really, more like a stare of fear colored his eyes. “General work wherever I can help out. No need for you to know.”

He kissed me on the forehead and urged me to stay in and be a good girl. With a growl, I muttered, “what else can I possibly do?”  and instantly regretted my whine. Hurrying to the door before he left, I grabbed him for a quick hug and told him to be careful. What if he didn’t come home?

***

VI

Regan’s mother didn’t come home that week. She sobbed out the story in one of our infrequent calls—calling was getting harder as lines and connections went down. She said she heard a bunch of Q cops – an “army” of them – had visited campus and hauled away whole departments. My heart dropped—had Dad been among them? Even as I offered comfort to my keening friend, I worried about him.

When he came in after midnight, I sprang from my sentry spot on the sofa and embraced him with tears in my eyes.

“Azzy, you poor dear. You shouldn’t have waited up. Go on to bed. You need your rest.”

All I got was rest. He was the one who was bedraggled. He’d felt warm to the touch.

***

VII

To my shame, I tried getting into Dad’s Notebook again. But he must have had one of those systems that alerted him to potential security breaches because the password wouldn’t work anymore.

I longed to talk to Roland. He’d offered no information the few times we were able to speak. He complained of the curfews, the quarantines, the work. What work was he doing? Like my father, he wouldn’t say. But he had a first-rate scientific mind, so I was sure he was at the labs, bent over microscopes, peering into the invisible world that threatened to crush us all under its lighter-than-air structure. This heroic picture comforted me, and I longed for him to find the cure.

I longed to be there, too, working with him side by side, like the Curies, excitedly discovering new things together. I was no slouch in the lab. He knew that. Dad knew that. But they both told me to stay put, that I’d be called in if needed, but the work was complex, the security clearances even more so.

Perhaps to comfort me – or, as I liked to think, perhaps because he missed me as terribly as I missed him – Roland started sending me poetry. He’d written snippets before, but now floodgates unlocked, and almost every day my handheld pinged with some portion of a longer work.

The trident spear of deep sleep
Struggles to pierce this restless soul
No rest comes.
Dreams unfold instead.
Aspasia.

Or…

You appeared to me today
A flash of flesh pink in glass
Gone in a whirl of light
Sighing away with my sighs
My longing
My ache that conjures up flashes of you
Even in cold, sterile glass

Or

Eyes like sun, I orbit you
Consume me in your fire

Each one I treasured. Each one I wept over. They seemed to arrive just as I despaired of hearing from him. We’d not seen each other in weeks now. Talk was almost as rare. He seemed…strained…when we spoke. If I complained, if I mentione something I’d read on the citizen boards, he’d shush me. “Azzy, my darling, be careful,” he’d say. “You’re an important man’s daughter.”

An important man’s daughter. I’d never thought of myself that way before. Dad had always been important to me, of course, and I’d always been aware of his many accomplishments and his respect, but I’d never thought of this as singling me—or us—out for special treatment or scrutiny.

Scrutiny, though, was everywhere. The orange-suited Q cops swarmed the streets. Not a day went by that I didn’t see them from the window. Gone were the days of subdued bodies on stretchers. Now the Q cops dragged them, literally kicking and screaming, from households. Surely, if they were strong enough to resist, they were strong enough to dominate the disease. I had to look away.

Why wouldn’t Regan answer my pings? Secretly, I climbed the stairs to her flat and knocked. No answer.

That night, Dad screamed at me. Why’d you leave the flat? What were you thinking?

How had he known, I wondered.

Security video, Azzy. Surely you know that they have to enforce the curfews somehow.

But videos in our building? Had they been there all this time, even before the plague? They must have been.

Dad said the disease was “insidious.”  That is, when he talked about it. Most of the time he claimed not to know details, but this was so obviously untrue that I wanted to scream back at him. He’d told me already it was another manifestation of “malaria.” I knew he knew more. I knew he was working overtime because of it. The Newsblogs were frustratingly vague. Some new “malaira” was in the air, but “quarantine efforts” were sure to subdue it soon.

Finally, Regan pinged me back. She and several of my other friends were being “relocated.” Their parents were ill, and they would be placed in a “children’s center.”  She said she’d read horrible things about those centers, that they were hardly more than prisons, run by sadists. Anyone eighteen or younger was sent to them, when parents disappeared.

I wanted to comfort her. Dad told me that if I tried visiting her again, he could not guarantee my safety. He’d told me this in such a voice—I’d never heard a voice like that from him—that I didn’t doubt it. He said he’d work from home, risking losing his job, if it meant keeping me inside and away from danger.

A strange gleam had entered his eyes, something frantic.

Roland pinged: Don’t despair. Be alert. Visitors make it through.

He was going to come see me!

***

VIII

Of course, he couldn’t tell me when. I had to be “alert.” I waited, like Penelope, for my beloved to return. I’d long since stopped doing schooling work. I spent my days reading blogs—the one’s not shut down by security forces—trying to ping friends, trying to ping or call Roland.

As I gazed out on a hollow steel day of gray cold rain, a van of Q cops pulled up below. With a disinterested sadness, I wondered where they’d head today. I’d caught a glimpse of someone coughing badly the night before in the apartment almost directly across the street from us. I suspected they’d go there, the poor woman turned in by a neighbor or even a friend. Those stories were everywhere.

Instead, they faced my building.

No!

Heart racing, I ran to the door. And then stopped. What was I going to do, who was I going to warn?

I pinged Regan. Qs on the march.

No response. I bit my lip. I tried Dad. What if something had happened to him, and I was being sent to the children’s center because I was eightee? Regan had said something about making up fake birth certificates. Why hadn’t I done that? Why had I thought that I’d be safe?

Because of Dad.

Even though I’d not consciously realized it, somewhere deep in my subconscious I’d always known we were in a different class.

I flew to the Notebook I kept handy in the kitchen. I clicked through programs, found the one Regan had mentioned. Not just a fake birth cert—I needed more than that. Proof of a job, of the ability to care for myself….

Doors were slamming open. Boots clambered up the stairs outside.  My hands shook on the keyboard as I typed in my name, gender, and a new date for my birth that would make me twenty-one. I would be too old for the children’s center.

“Dad, Dad, where are you?” I said, looking at my handheld. He wasn’t answering. No one was answering. Was this the end…

Just as I hit Print, someone knocked at the door. No, not knocked. Banged, a quick thud-thud-thud.

My heart beat so fast my chest ached. I ran my fingers through my hair. I let out a whimper. I had no time to conjure up other documents. I’d have to do with this one. I clicked through programs to file the cert on an alias site mimicking the official records ones.

Thud-thud-thud.

“C-c-coming,” I said. Then, clearing my throat, I said it again, stronger, as if I had nothing to hide. “Coming!” Hearing my stronger voice made me feel stronger.

I ran to the printer and pulled out the fake certificate, then folded it, folded it again. Threw it to the floor and stepped on it, trying to make it look old in a moment’s time. Even the perfed seal was in place. Silently, I thanked Regan for pointing me to this site.

Again, thuds echoed from the door. My mouth dry, I squared my shoulders and walked to open it, not hurrying but no longer delaying. I’d face this with courage, not cowering. Not simpering. Stopping briefly in the kitchen, I pinged a message to my father. Qs in the building, I wrote. He’d know what that meant.

I didn’t even bother to look through the viewhole but swung the door open wide with a fierceness that dared the intruder to confront me, closing my eyes for one second and sucking in a deep breath.

“What do you—”

Not Q Cops!  Roland! Roland!

Bliss—as he swept me into his arms. Ecstasy—as he showered me with kisses. Oh, the smell of him—his tweed jacket smelt like earth and rain and sky and wind and him—him, him, him!

Rain, was that rain on my cheeks? No, tears of joy. Roland.

“Azzy, Azzy, Aspasia, oh, my darling, my sweet…” he cooed into my ear, twirling me around, laughing, rubbing the tears from my cheeks, kissing them away. In that instant, he was more to me than beloved. He was the world. He was freedom.

“I thought…” I began and couldn’t stop the tears again. “The Q cops….”

He brushed my lips with his thumb. “Shh…let’s not talk of that, of any of that, now. I only have a little while before they’ll miss me.”

“The lab?” I asked sniffling.

He nodded, his eyes narrowed. Then he looked around. “Your father’s not here?”

“No.” I shook my head. “He’s at work. I’m worried about him, Roland. I—I—” No, I couldn’t say it, not even to him. Not even to myself. I was worried he was sick, and the Q cops would come for him soon.

“Marry me.”

Had he said…no, I’d dreamt that, overcome by longing, a physical ache for him that grew worse each day, it had made me delirious. No, he couldn’t have….

“Azzy?” he whispered.

Hearing the fear in his voice, I knew I’d not imagined it. He had asked me to marry him.

“I know you’re young,” he said. “But you’re wise beyond your years. And time now is short for everyone. If you’ll marry me, I can promise to keep you safe….I’d wanted to tell your father. I don’t want him to think I’m stealing you away. I can tell him when I see him at the lab. Oh, Azzy, please tell me…will you marry me?”

I couldn’t speak. So overcome, I could merely nod my head and start laughing. I draped my arms around his neck and kissed him deeply. I never wanted him to leave.

***

IX

Before he left, in just a few minutes’ time, he pressed a ring into my palm. It had been his grandmother’s. A simple band with a pearl surrounded by diamonds. I tried it on, but it was too large. He promised to have it reset for me and placed a string around my finger to measure it, taking the ring back to have it worked on. I made him make me another string, a reminder that we were, in fact, engaged.

“Your family,” I murmured before he left. “Do they know?” I’d met both his parents, kind and gentle artists and teachers.

He frowned and shook his head, indicating he didn’t want to talk of it. But he answered, “They might have to go to a Q camp soon. I’m going to try to stop it.”

Farewells followed, too bittersweet to recount here. After he left, I stared at my makeshift ring for hours. I pinged Regan but got no answer. I tried other friends. I tried Dad. Only later did I look outside to the street below. The Q cop van was gone.

***

Did you enjoy this story? If so, please let me know! Email: Libby_Malin (at) hotmail (dot) com. And…stay tuned for the release of The Plague Jumpers, the continuing story of Aspasia and Roland. Here’s a quick sample:

The Plague Jumpers by Libby Sternberg

Chapter One

Bring me all of your dreams,
You dreamer,
Bring me all your
Heart melodies
That I may wrap them
In a blue cloud-cloth
Away from the too-rough fingers
Of the world.
                –Langston Hughes

Before he sets me adrift, like Moses into the bulrushes, my father mumbles words of wisdom. At least, I think of them as such. They are the last things I hear him say to me, so I’ve decided to hold them tight like they were sacred counsel.

We are hurtling through the dark streets of New York in a taxi he’d purloined at the curb. He “hotwired” it—who knew such a thing was still possible, especially in this age of digitalized security codes and anti-theft programming? My father is a scientist, not a mechanic.

No one owns cars anymore. We’re all expected to use public transportation or the occasional taxi. Ever since the Q cop battalions formed, the government is ever more vigilant about that, assessing steep fines and even more severe penalties fortransgressors. I didn’t even know my father could drive, let alone hotwire a car. My father is a genius.

My father is sick.

He rousted me from bed an hour ago, told me to dress in warm clothes—several layers, Aspasia—and paced in front of my door while he waited for me to get ready.  I didn’t disobey—I’m old enough that I don’t need to fight him at every turn, and he was obviously deeply infected by now with the Estuary Flu, the pandemic that has sent so many into quarantine.

Fear imprisons me. Roland hasn’t answered my texts lately, and usually his fingers fly over his Palmo’s tiny keyboard any time he gets a ping from me. But he could just be busy, right? He could be working on an experiment or finishing a poem just for me. He’s five years older than me, but it doesn’t matter. He’s kind and considerate. My father respects him. He’s brilliant too and always busy.  Maybe he’s fine, just taking care of his sick mother or father. He could be out.

But people don’t go out much anymore. And when they do, they wear blue biomasks over their mouths and noses. Roland refuses to use one. He says they don’t work and are scams thought up by greedy con men playing on our fears.

But it’s been so long since I’ve talked to him. Even longer since last I saw him. I stare at my ring finger, where twine twists below my knuckle, a symbol of the ring he was to have had fitted just for me…

I can’t. Think. About. It.

But I do. My stomach cramps with worry—Roland, friends and their families, now Dad. When will it end? I blink fast. Can’t. Think.

Roland’s mother went to the Quarantine Sanatorium three weeks now. Now Dad is showing the signs, and this evening I saw the orange-Hazmat-suited Q Cops knocking on an upper floor apartment door as we crept downstairs quiet as dreams.

The Q cops. They’re everywhere lately. They seem to have more power than the government itself. I loathe them, as does Roland and most everyone in my crowd, except fora few who try to persuade me that keeping order is essential in these rough times. It’s just temporary, they say. Temporary has lasted too long to remember.

My poor father, even in his addled state, knew he would be going next, leaving me an orphan until… Until I joined him. Until he returned. But no one’s returned yet.

Draconian measures have ruled ever since Chicago and Philadelphia were wiped out. Quarantine the infected as soon as they show signs of illness. Not a building in sight is without a white and orange sticker in the window warning people away until danger passes. Someone must have snitched on my father. His cough had grown worse in the past twenty-four. Even I, optimistic by nature and made delusional by heartbreak, had begun to worry.

And now, as he picks up speed and careens around corners, as he mumbles and shouts over his shoulder to me in the back seat, I am sure. Hallucinations are part of the package. A rash on arms and legs. Unrelenting fever will follow. Seizures and internal bleeding after that unless it breaks.

“There are things in the bag for you. Food. Clothes!”  His eyes are wide as buttons and as shiny dark. I’m glad I can’t see the jaundice in the gloom. From practical he moves to philosophical, tumbling through a bullet-point list of things that veer in and out of importance. As he thinks of something he’s always wanted to tell me, he quickly jumps to something he believes I absolutely need to know. I try to hang on every syllable, memorizing the sound as well as the words themselves:

“Love is the most important thing, Aspasia. Most important thing. Your mother and I…..”

“You can always pretend to be mute…”

“Lots of things are in the bag.  Don’t lose the bag!”

“Oh…and a nice cape. Had it made special.”

“Don’t be afraid, Aspasia. Fear is friend and enemy. Fear is the start of every adventure…”

“There’s jewelry in there, too….your mother’s.”  Here, his voice breaks.

“If you find love, hold it. Love outlasts the ages.”

A sweet drop of nectar in this drought of anxiety–his mentioning Mom. Dad doesn’t talk about her much. She’s been gone–killed in an accident–since I was four. I barely remember her, just flashes of a tall, blonde woman, always smiling. And I’ve seen the digital pix that verify my memory. Of the crumbs my father would share, here was one: her undaunted optimism and belief in individual talents. Let your light shine, she’d say to me. At least that’s what Dad told me anyway. Usually when I was irritated with doing a math assignment. He knows I’m good at it. I prefer other subjects.

His talk of his own love takes my thoughts back to my own.

“Dad,” I ask as gently as I can, leaning forward. “Have you heard anything about Roland?” Even though everything’s shut down, maybe Dad’s been in touch with his colleagues about research, lab work, papers…something. Right? Roland worked in the labs.

“Roland?” My father’s head snaps up as if he’s been jolted by electricity. “He’s not here. Forget about him, Azzy. No good…You’ll be far away soon. No use thinking about it.…”

And he rambles on like that for what seems like eternity, in and out of sanity as I try to grab hold of anything resembling the truth. Roland is not here. Gone. To the Q Camps? Yes, the camps. Maybe. Don’t know. Don’t think about it.

It’s all I can think about. I grab the bag to my chest, holding it up as if it were armor.  Delirium could pass in a day or two, but in the meantime, he can get us both killed with his reckless speed and no headlights. Where is he taking me and how quickly can I get back to Roland and home? I am sick myself, with worry, and it weights me down. I slump back in the seat.

The Midnight Reality has begun to grip my soul, that time of night when hope dies. An Unthinkable steals into my heart—Roland is at the camps, Dad might join him, I will be left to fend for myself. I’ll never go to the Children’s Center, not at my age, and even if I were younger, there have been stories, terrible stories about children sold and abused.  I’m not stupid.

“You’re a bright girl,” he says in his normal voice, as if plucking the thought from my mind. I lean forward again, hearing the man I used to know, the brilliant scientist, both an astrophysicist and biometrician, a “Renaissance Man of the Sciences,” as the e-mags had dubbed him. He’s won a Nobel in biometrics, and was short-listed more than once for the prize in other fields.

“Dad, why don’t we go home now?” I whisper. “The cops are probably gone. I’ll take care of you.”

His grip on the wheel relaxes and his face softens, tension melting away. The taxi slows. I exhale.

But only for a second. In the way distance, somewhere far behind us, a siren wails like audible smoke reaching forward to warn of us fire behind. My father stomps the accelerator and we zoom off again, the cab rattling and shaking in protest.

I scream. The Hudson Riversparkles just ahead in the moonlight and Dad isn’t turning away. He yells back to me again, something about Mom and me and “love of his life, never any other, never…” and then he looks at the stars and his watch and floors the ancient vehicle so that it springs into the void over the banks of that steel gray river that ran through what was once my home town, my very life.

This is how he tosses me into a rippling gravitational wave, so that the sparkling Hudson joins with the sparkling stars and for a minute, or more accurately, two hundred years I see and feel nothing, consciousness ripped from me with my breath as I fall and fall and fall…

***

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Because I’m a freelancer, I work from home. This has led to some lazy grocery shopping habits since I can pretty much pop on up to the store any time during the day instead of doing one big shopping trip once a week.

This repeated exposure to the grocery store has made me feel like something of an expert in grocery store etiquette. No, let me amend that. I’m no Emily Post. I’m more like a General Patton, rolling quickly to destinations and judging sharply those who muck up the whole process.

My pet peeves, in no particular order are:

Cashiers who forget to hand you all your bags: You get home. You put things away. You seem to remember buying more meat than this, and you’re sure you put rutabagas in the cart along with lemons. As you review your receipt, you discover you had, in fact, paid for all those items. But the helpful cashier and/or bagger left that bag out of the cart. This has happened to me enough times that I now give the cashier’s station a good once-over before leaving, even asking if they gave me everything. Next time it happens, the store’s going to have to deliver the missing groceries to my door.

Aisle hoggers: Yeah, I know everybody does this on occasion. You leave the cart kind of in the middle because you’re just going to grab that “one thing,” and then something else catches your eye…  But you still move quickly if someone else comes along, right? I do. Not so with AHs. They blithely ignore the rattle and creak of carts coming their way until you simper “Excuse me,” forcing them to move. Okay, some folks might be hard of hearing and not catch the low cart rumble approaching. But that woman with the New Age baby sling and her cart diagonally across the rice aisle? She was just being self-centered and thoughtless.

The Impatient Check-Outs: Your bags have been loaded. You’ve slid your card through the scanner and are just waiting for the “approved” message to appear…and the shopper behind you nudges his cart up practically into your booty. I’ve actually said to one of these ICOs (smiling sweetly all the while): “I’ll be finished soon” (leaving off the “you antsy ratbastard” at the end).

The Chatty Cathy Shopper and Cashier: They know each other. They decide to catch up on all their news…while blithely ignoring the other shoppers waiting in line behind them. ‘Nuff said.

The Desultory Clerk: I ran into this one recently. He actually had a tag pinned to his shirt pocket that said “Cashier Coach.” He must have thought his coaching duties were way, way more important than actually working the register. Or maybe he was irritated because when he deigned to open up a new lane, he’d started to motion over another waiting shopper before noticing I was zooming his way (I was there longer. Trust me; he just hadn’t seen me.) He rang up my items with the air of someone slumming it for a season. When he announced my total, I thought, danged, but that’s cheap. Then I noticed he’d left numerous items on the belt even though they were clearly in front of the divider and belonged to me. After realizing this mistake, his mood changed. He became, oh, humbler, more cheerful, even wishing me a nice day. I offered him stony silence and left (after offering a happy smile and thanks to the bagger, who was quite pleasant).

But the Number One Grocery Shopping Pet Peeve is:

Carts that stick together when you grab one from the bunch at the entrance to the store.

We can put a man on the moon, but we can’t design shopping carts that don’t stick together? Really, people? Really?

____

Wanna help me pay for my groceries?Buy my books! Check them out at my website. Or go directly to Amazon to grab my latest, Aefle and Gisela.

I’ve had four literary agents since I first started writing fiction seriously, a little over ten years ago. Actually, more like five. At the outset of my publishing career, a small press publisher (Bruce Bortz of Bancroft Press), who enjoyed my work but wasn’t publishing in my genres at the time, represented me for a short period, an amicable relationship.

I learned something from my dealings with each agent and have wanted to share my lessons for some time. But as my observations began to gel into something coherent, I kept coming back to these questions:

• Had I been a problem client?
• Had I been difficult to work with?
• Was that why these relationships didn’t work out?

If you survey my former agents with those questions, my guess is you’ll get variations on a “yes” answer from most of them, with, perhaps, two exceptions—that publisher I mentioned above and my last agent, a sweet, aggressive woman I’ll talk about a bit later.

As I delved deeper into the reasons why my former agents might consider me a problem child, however, a theme emerged. I was a problem because I expected my agents to deliver. Deliver contracts? Sure, that would have been nice. But I’m not stupid. I know that sometimes stuff doesn’t sell, no matter how good the project or the one pitching it is.

No, I expected my agents to deliver the following:

a) respect for me as an author and as an intelligent human being;

b) reasonable responsiveness to my questions and suggestions;

c) due diligence when  handling contracts;

d) keen insight into books and the book business;

e) valuable advice on my writing career, based on informed observations of the publishing world coupled with what was best for me;

f) oh, and honesty, too, would be nice.

Too often, one or more of those items was lacking. So, instead of literary agents, I ended up with transmittal agents. The agent was good at “transmitting” the manuscripts I wrote to various editors, but little beyond that.

It’s not usually politic for writers to talk frankly about their former agents, but I’m going to share some information about mine, without using agent names, in an attempt to help other writers who might share similar situations. My overall advice to writers struggling in a so-so agent relationship – it’s probably not you that’s the problem.

I’m jumbling up the order these agents appeared in my life, too, to help obscure their identities even more. I’m not saying these are bad agents, after all. They were just bad for me.

AGENT A: She was with a prestigious agency. She had sold some blockbusters, one of which would be immediately recognizable even to those who don’t read a lot of fiction.  She handled “up-market” fiction, even some literary fiction. And she liked my stuff, my serious stuff, not the lighter material I was writing to try to break into the market. She agreed to represent a serious historical mystery of mine.

She talked to me about revisions, and it was a thrill to have someone discussing “marrying theme with character development” rather than what genre markets were hot. But revisions seemed to drag on. I was a fast writer. She would take weeks to respond to my latest revision. Finally, she made one last suggestion—maybe I should consider changing who the murderer was in the story.

Changing the murderer in a murder mystery isn’t a revision. It’s a new book.

I balked; she backed down. But that suggestion started taking the air out of the relationship. Maybe she didn’t have as keen an understanding of books and the book business as I’d originally thought. I recalled an early conversation with her about a famous favorite novel. I remembered being a bit unsettled by her complete lack of understanding of a core part of this famous book. Now I began to wonder—was she good or was she just lucky?

Submissions began. Rejections came in. Her office would fax them to my husband’s office since I didn’t have a fax. This became problematic. Faxes didn’t come through. I’d wait, wanting to hear if something in the letter would provide guidance for further revision, and I’d wait some more.

But, while her office would bungle this and other clerical tasks, they were quick to bill for copying and messenger service. Too quick, in fact. They double-billed me once.

A contract did come through, though, that she negotiated. But it was for a book I’d had on submission prior to signing with her. Although she did a fair job with the contract, she muffed the announcement in Publishers Lunch, using the wrong title for the book and the wrong name for me.

After a round of submissions of the literary mystery failed to deliver a contract, it was clear she was tired of me and I was tired of her. She suggested we part ways, a relief since I’d been engaged in anguished debates with myself and my writer friends on whether I should let such a prestigious agent go. I’d been on the phone with one of those friends discussing that very topic, when Agent A called suggesting we break.

AGENT B: This agent represented a light work of mine, and I have no quarrels with her aggressiveness. She seemed to leave no stone unturned when submitting, something I respected and still appreciate. But she discouraged me from writing outside the genre she was representing, and she treated with disdain suggestions I would make.

Tension surfaced during submissions of a light women’s fiction manuscript, her specialty. My first YA, published without an agent’s help, was getting wonderful reviews. It was similar in tone to the manuscript she was trying to sell, so I asked her if perhaps dropping a note to the editors who had the manuscript, sharing some of the great reviews, might be helpful.

I’ve worked in public relations, you see. And I know that “expert endorsements” might not persuade nonbelievers, but they can affect the outlook of “leaners” and help those who like your point of view by providing them with ammunition in debates. So, while the reviews wouldn’t flip a “no” into a “yes,” they could help push a “maybe” toward a “yes,” and help a “yes” get the manuscript past an editorial committee.

But Agent B didn’t like my suggestion to send along the reviews to editors.  Her attitude seemed to be: I’m the All-Knowing Agent and you’re the Know-Nothing Author, so be quiet and sit down until I pay attention to you.

She, like Agent A, didn’t always pass along rejections in a timely manner. I’d get them sometimes when they came in and other times when I happened to “rattle her cage” for news.

An aside about timely rejections: it bothered me to learn a rejection had been sitting in her office for a while before I learned of it because it made me feel foolish. Like most authors, I have a hard time suppressing hope that such-and-such editor might be reading my manuscript at this very moment and liking it. To learn that while I was hoping, the editor had been rejecting made me feel silly. I preferred bad news straight up with no delays. A small thing, perhaps, but important to me.

Back to Agent B’s refusal to send my good reviews along to editors…I later learned that she might have been sending reviews along to editors anyway. She just hadn’t been telling me.

The break came, though, when I wanted her to rep some serious fiction I was writing. She agreed but wasn’t enthusiastic and even suggested I pay for these submissions—copying and messengering—when that had not been part of the original contract.  It was time to move on.

AGENT C: When I signed with Agent C, I thought I’d finally found the perfect one. Unlike Agent B, this one seemed sweet-natured and kind. Unlike Agent A, she seemed really savvy. In fact, she impressed me right away by taking on the literary mystery Agent A had not been able to sell and deciding to resubmit it to different editors at some of the same houses. She just retitled it and branded it a “revision.” A cynical move? No, a smart one, in my opinion. Some of the editors on her list might be more open to the kind of book I’d written, and she didn’t want them to be prejudiced by the previous rejection by that imprint.

Unfortunately, I came to discover that Agent C might not have been as savvy as I originally thought. She was new to agenting, and she often consulted the agency owner for advice. This all began to have a “mother, may I” feel to it, delaying actions, and I began to wonder if I’d mistaken a kind nature for a timid one.

Timidity showed up, too, in her edits of my manuscripts. She’d send them back to me with the faintest pencil marks in the margins, as if she were unsure of herself.

The break ended up being messy. Oh, at first it was fine—a simple “this isn’t working” talk. But after that, one of the projects she’d repped gained film option interest, due to my own efforts, not hers. It also sat with several editors due to my own efforts.

Since she was agent of record for the project at the time of the film interest, her agency’s film agent began negotiations. They were painful. He would communicate with me when I agreed with him, but if I had a question or a suggestion, he fobbed me back to her. And she didn’t seem to have the courage or inclination to stand up to him. It was far easier to think, I’m sure, that I was the problem with all my pesky questions and insistence on knowing what the agent’s approach would be.

One dismal afternoon, she called me to say the film people wanted to buy the book rights, too, since the book wasn’t under contract anywhere. I had to decide by close of day what to do. I asked her if that meant close of day eastern time or California time. She said eastern time because she would close up shop at five that night. So, with barely two hours to consider, I had to a) get back to book editors who were then reading the book to see if they did want to buy it, letting them know they had to tell me pronto; and b) decide if I was willing to let the book rights go if no editor bit.

She did not lift a finger to contact editors for me. She didn’t even offer. Her attitude was: all editors were used to authors telling them about film deals and they’d “roll their eyes” if she contacted them about it.

The rest of this negotiation could fill pages. But here are the highlights: the agency head – the one to whom she always deferred – tried to convince me that everyone in Hollywood was a “snake” and if the deal went south, it was no heartache (uh, it would have been to me); a friend, the small press publisher mentioned earlier in this post, ended up helping me sort through the deal and make up my mind about various contract provisions – he’s also a lawyer, and his help was invaluable; the film agent wanted me to hire a lawyer he recommended to give the contract one last look but I resisted shelling out the money for this “service” (uh, Authors Guild legal help told me this is unethical and grounds for breaking the contract with the agent); former Agent C told me she’d felt she’d earned her few hundred dollars commission on the option and didn’t want to deal with it.

So, she wasn’t nice. She wasn’t savvy. And she wasn’t aggressive. Ironically, the people who ended up being the nicest as I dealt with them in the following years were the film “snakes,” who negotiated extensions in a forthright manner even when we disagreed over some terms.

AGENT D: Okay, this is a good story. I still like this agent, even though she doesn’t represent me any longer. After breaking with Agent C, I felt burned. I wasn’t even sure I wanted another agent. Maybe I’d just use a literary lawyer to negotiate contracts.

But as I started submitting material on my own, I grew weary. I just wanted to write. I didn’t want to research editors and imprints and what they were buying. I wanted someone to do that for me. So I started querying agents again.

One of them was Holly Root of the Waxman Agency. I’d read an interview with her on a writers email group. She’d impressed me with her smart answers, not the usual cookie-cutter responses but insightful comments on the industry. She seemed refreshingly honest.

And that’s the way she was when I contacted her. She liked my stuff. She knew I’d had bad luck with other agents. She knew that my publishing success, such as it was, had come largely due to my own efforts. She frankly told me that she wanted to make sure she could give me what I wanted. I appreciated that. It told me she was wondering if she could be the kind of agent I needed.

Then I got a call from Sourcebooks wanting to buy Fire Me, the manuscript that had been optioned for film. It was free and clear of encumbrances from the previous agency now—I had pitched it to Sourcebooks on my own. So I called and asked if Holly wanted to take it on. She agreed.

And thus began a beautiful relationship. She sold that book and a second one after it. She tried to sell some others, in particular a YA. She gave me a green light to pursue a contract with a small press for a “book of my heart,” even telling me she’d take no commission on it since the contract was so simple and straightforward and the advance so small.

She had no illusions about the industry. She knew sometimes great books were published, but sometimes great books were rejected. She didn’t view editors and publishers as her superiors. She was more than just a “transmittal agent” and she treated me with respect and attention. And although she wasn’t able to snag any more film deals for me, her attitude was: you won’t get one unless you try, and she was willing to try.

We parted ways only when I couldn’t write the kind of stuff she was beginning to represent more and more. We had one heart-to-heart about it when I wanted to branch out into a field she wasn’t dealing with. We decided to keep going. Then when another manuscript didn’t quite fit with her stable, we decided it was the end of the road.

But I still exchange emails with her occasionally. And I’d recommend her to other writers.

IN CONCLUSION

Was I a problem client? Only if you define “problem” as expecting that a promised service be delivered.

Was I unreasonable to expect quick turnaround on manuscript revisions, on submissions, on hearing about rejections or editors’ reactions to my works?

I can only answer that by saying that I feel the passage of time acutely. I started writing later in life, when I was in my 40s. I don’t like wasting any more time now that I’ve “given myself permission” to pursue this lifelong passion.

Besides, at my current age, I’ve learned a lot, and I’ve accomplished a great deal. I refuse to be treated as if I were incapable of understanding how the business works. I refuse to accept “it’s always been done this way” as a rationale for poor or inefficient approaches. I refuse to be a “good girl,” patiently waiting up to a month to hear from an agent who sometimes acts as if she is honoring me by coming down from the mountain to deliver a tidbit of news.

Sure, I understand that agents have a whole group of writers they’re dealing with, not just l’il ole me. But if they can’t stay on top of each client’s business, they shouldn’t be representing them, or they shouldn’t balk when those authors want to handle a few things on their own.

At this point in my writing career, I don’t see myself using another agent. If I have a deal to negotiate, I’ll probably call on my former agent, Holly Root, to see if she’d want to do the deal, or use a literary attorney, paying a flat fee and no commission.

Agents aren’t bad people. They just have different priorities, different timetables, different outlooks that don’t always jibe with those of the authors they represent. Authors have to remember that they are giving agents one thing and one thing only—the right to market their books. They’re not ceding over their lives, their pride or their dignity.

LESSONS I LEARNED WORKING WITH AGENTS:

• If an agent tries to make you feel your intelligent suggestions are unwanted because she is The High and Mighty Agent and you are the Lowly Author, she might be the wrong agent for you.
• If your views on literature don’t jibe with your agent’s, don’t expect the agent to understand your work.
• Don’t mistake timidity in an agent for niceness.
• If film or other subsidiary rights are important to you, make sure the agency handles them and handles them well.
• If your agent or her agency regularly bungles small things, what makes you think they’ll get the big things right?
• If your agent doesn’t respond to you in a timely manner, ask yourself if that agent is excited about you and your work any longer.
• If an agent is suggesting you confine yourself to one genre when you want to write in others, she might be wrong for you.
• Finally, if you’re multi-published, many editors will read your work without an agent—you can always find one or a good literary attorney to negotiate any deals.

______

Libby Malin’s  latest book is a comedy, a sharp satire of academe titled Aefle & Gisela. It’s available for Kindle, Nook and other e-readers at:  Amazon, BN.com or Smashwords.

By Libby Malin

When I was a graduate student at the University of Gussberry-on-Hornsplat reading for my doctorate in “Humor and Humorlessness in Nineteenth and Twentieth Century Proto-European Monographs,” my professors often referred to a theory they loosely called “The Banana Peel Slide.”

A great humorist, Mark Twain. Unfortunately, he's dead.

This meme postulated that a humorous trope—such as the man-falling-on-banana-peel— loses its ability to trigger amusement after it becomes part of the greater eco-social-spiritual consciousness, leading to a revolt by sophisticated elites against populist humor grounded in laughing at another’s misfortune, and eventually coming round to popularity again throughout the entire societal continuum when the joke takes on a wry postmodern irony encapsulating the laughing-at-the-laughter-of-those-who-laugh at such simplistic slapstick (See I.M. Gully-Bull, “They’re Laughing With Me, Not At Me, an essay on the struggles of a stand-up comic in the world of spelunking,” Psychiatric Journal of the Criminal Mind, Jan. 09, 43-57).

In other words, slipping on a banana peel was HIGH-LAIR-EE-YUS when first viewed by Cro-Magnon Man, until his momma rapped him on the knuckles for laughing at another Cro-Mag hurting himself, and then became funny again when Momma started giggling about it herself.

But humorous tropes grow stale, so the banana peel gag loses its luster (or “lustre” as we were instructed to write at UGH) when viewed too often.

Another great humorist, Ambrose Bierce. Unfortunately, he's also dead.

Humor, of course, varies from place to place and generation to generation (see Habe R. Dashery, “A Most Dreadful Hat: Materialism and Comedy in the Works of Jane Austen,” Oxford Community College Press, 1998, 90), but one thing remains constant—laughter usually accompanies surprise. One expects the man walking down the street in his fine new suit and boater hat to find his path smooth and journey uneventful. Then—surprise!—banana peel, meet foot. What’s not to love?

Nonetheless, humor writing is more than the mere description of slapstick moments which are, in reality, difficult to capture succinctly while retaining the laughter-inspiring elements. Written humor, in fact, depends a great deal on the effect of the words themselves, their groupings, their compilation, if you will, into a contextual image that ignites some inner Jungian childhood-pleasure-memory within the reader (see Diep Krappe, “Syntastic—Grammar, Puns, and Humor from Iambic Pentameter to ‘Yo Momma’,” Journal of Polska Witticisms, Aug. 01, pp. 3-87).

This is not to say one can’t describe slapstick effectively on the written page. As the great humorist J.P. Sartre (not to be confused with her more well-known and morose second cousin Jean-Paul), once wrote: Je vais chercher du bon vin a la cave, which, loosely translated, means: “It is possible for anything to be funny as long as the writer knows how to effectively communicate the core elements of the humorous situation, whether they be a physical action, a tres amusent observation a la ‘but other than that, how did you enjoy the play, Mrs. Lincoln,’ or even, perhaps, the acting out of despair in a completely unexpected way. It is not the full bottle of wine in the wine cellar that makes one smile. It is the empty bottle of wine in the . . .” (the rest was lost to posterity, but the major components of Sartre’s take on humor appear in the brilliant essay by Dom. Pear I. Gnon, “The Banana Peel and the Descriptive Verb: Physical Comedy in a Linguistic Setting,” Wine, Laughter, and More Wine, Lots More Wine, More Wine . . . Please, June 02).

What luck! This humorist, Libby Malin, is alive! Buy her books - help her put food on the table!

So, what, aspiring authors ask, is the secret to writing a successful humorous novel? Good spelling and grammar help (see Strunk N. White, “Spats, Spoofs and Spelling: The Dialectics of Inter-Class Dialogue in the Works of George Bernard Shaw,” Auckland Council Kanberry, ACK Journal of Pedants and Proofreaders, Sept 1910). But beyond that, a funny story is really any one that makes people laugh or smile. If it does so for you, the author, you might be on the right path toward igniting the same reaction in others.

Humorous fiction comes in all varieties, from the zany (L. Malin, My Own Personal Soap Opera, Looking for Reality in All the Wrong Places, Sourcebooks 2010) to the zanier (L. Malin, Fire Me, a Tale of Dreaming, Scheming and Looking for Love in All the Wrong Places, Sourcebooks 2009) to the apex of zaniness (L. Malin, Aefle & Gisela, Istoria Books 2011) and more.

There’s no telling what will tickle any one particular person’s funny bone at any one particular moment. There is no formula for success, in other words, just a keen power of observation—keep your eye on that banana peel, sweetie—and the ability to write characters readers care about even as they face unrealistic situations that could make them laugh or cry (see Gloria Steinmart, “That’s Not At All Funny,” Feminism Yesterday, April 1971).

If you’d like a peek at my latest oeuvre, Aefle & Gisela, go to Amazon, BN.com or Smashwords to download free samples (after which, of course, you will buy the book. Right? Right? Right? Oh, please, oh, please, oh, please, oh, please….) It tells the story of  a timid college professor, an expert on an obscure poetry-writing medieval monk named Aefle, who stops a wedding on a dare…and ends up, well, slipping on a banana peel….

Hope you like it—or that degree from UGH was a total waste of time!

_______

Did I mention that Aefle & Gisela is only 99 cents for a limited time only? Yes, I know, it’s a steal — go on over and steal it for 99 cents! Don’t wait! Who knows when the price will go up to its true value– a case load of gold doubloons! Think how hard it will be to send that to Amazon or Barnes & Noble or Smashwords. Better get it now while the price is manageable in every way!

___________

Libby Malin did not attend (nor go anywhere near) the University of Gussberry-on-Hornsplat. In fact, she holds a bachelor’s and master’s from the Peabody Conservatory of Music. When she finally turned to her first love, writing, she began penning women’s fiction and young adult mysteries (which she writes as Libby Sternberg). Her first YA mystery, in fact, was an Edgar nominee. Her three previous  humorous women’s fiction books (Loves Me, Loves Me Not, Fire Me!, and My Own Personal Soap Opera) garnered critical praise. Here’s a sample of some of it:

MY OWN PERSONAL SOAP OPERA by Libby Malin:

• Malin creates a world of wit and chaos that is …smart and insightfully written. – Booklist
• Malin’s latest is heavy on humor… (she) coaxes plenty of laughs…- Publishers Weekly
• I wholly recommend this romance… You’ll not be disappointed. Trust me! Rating: 5 Stars. – Love Romance Passion

FIRE ME by Libby Malin:

• This fast-paced, humorous book kept me giggling throughout the night. - A Novel Menagerie
• Fire Me …had this reader chuckling out loud. – Jo-Anne Greene Lancaster Sunday News
• Libby Malin pens a tale that is hilarious while still being poignant and introspective. – The Romance Studio

LOVES ME, LOVES ME NOT by Libby Malin:

• The love story is charming and will be appreciated by any woman with bad taste in men who somehow inexplicably ends up with Mr. Right. – Washington Post
• A whimsical look at the vagaries of dating… an intriguing side plot adds punch and pathos to the story… - Publishers Weekly
• Malin’s clever debut toys with chick-lit stereotypes and offers quite a few surprises along the way. – Booklist

They had me at the first “smite.”

I’m not sure when I’ll make this feast. It’s not something hubby would like, so maybe it will have to wait for an evening when he has a dinner meeting, with leftovers for subsequent lunches.

Must have.

As the fellow in the ad says, “Mmmmmm.”

Buying this meal mix got me to thinking about how Velveeta makes such a terrific grilled cheese. So I bought some just for that. Way to go, Madison Avenue! You done good with this ad.

With this one, too:

Fiber makes me….sad. Haven’t we all thought that during our dark nights of the soul?

And yes, I now have some Fiber One bars in my pantry. But not those sad ones. The brownie ones. Mmmmmm….

If Madison Avenue snagged me with these lures, they don’t get me with others. For example, when I went to buy dish detergent, I was first attracted to the Dawn power scrubber variety, until I saw the label that said it supports wildlife.

Now, I’m not against supporting wildlife. Just don’t try to sell me dish detergent with a smarmy add-on about it, okay? Own up to who you are — a multinational cleaning products company intent on making a buck by using the latest feel-good trend to reel in customers. Just sell the darn detergent. Don’t try to sell me on environmentalism. It makes me….mad.

On the shelf above the Dawn were some “green” or “eco-friendly” dish detergents. But I wouldn’t be suckered into purchasing these, either, oh, no.

Dish detergent that makes me...happy.

Call me crazy, but it seems to me that the glop they need to mix together to make a detergent probably at best produces a murky shade, at worst a dubious brown. Yet these “pure” and “green” varieties were either clear or yellow or green. Methinks their purity is besmirched by color additive besmirchers.  So much for the green label. It makes me…skeptical.

I ended up buying the Dawn baking soda variety. Nice lemon scent. Nice artificial yellow color. Nice absence of charitable exploitation. It makes me….glad.

Okay, down to today’s topic.

I am happy to report that a new romantic comedy has hit the e-shelves by none other than yours truly — in this case, Libby Malin. Titled Aefle & Gisela, it tells the story of Medieval History Professor Thomas Charlemagne, who is so eager to slay his childhood reputation as “Timid Tommy,” that he takes a dare at a bachelor party and stops a wedding the very next morning.

Only problem — it’s the wrong wedding. A comic romp blended with biting satire (of academe), Aefle & Gisela should appeal to all my fans (yes, both of them!) who enjoyed Fire Me! and My Own Personal Soap Opera. It’s available for Kindle, Nook, and other e-reading devices. Please check it out and take advantage of the summer sale — it’s only 99 cents for a limited time.

I really enjoyed writing Aefle & Gisela. But if you’d told me ten years ago that I’d get so much pleasure from writing something as light as romantic comedy, I would have cried in your face. You see, I always wanted to be a Serious Writer of Serious Fiction that Serious People took Seriously.

But because I didn’t see myself being accepted into that club (yes, I know, Dr. Freud, I had a classic inferiority/superiority complex about writing), I didn’t bother to try getting in. I didn’t try to get published.

I couldn’t stop writing, though. It was my addiction. My beloved sister knew this. She’d been kind enough to read some of my stories over the years. She knew that’s what I had the “fire in the belly” for. So she suggested I try my hand at romance.

Romance? Why, shut my mouth, that should be a walk in the park for someone like me, who, after all, had spent years writing Serious Fiction that Serious People Would Take Seriously if I ever bothered to get any published.

So I got me some Harlequin romances, sat down and penned a quick proposal, sending it off to the editors, sure I wouldn’t have to wait long to hear back from them with a breathless “yes, yes, yes, we want this amazing, wonderfully written story even though it’s far, far too good for our humble imprint.”

I waited a long time for that note. In fact, I never did get it. I did get an impersonal but very polite thanks, but no thanks.

In a great display of magnanimity, I forgave those hapless editors, sure that my next effort would have them falling all over themselves to publish me.

Wah-wah-wahn. No dice. The Romance Goddesses, they no like me.

By this time, however, I became committed to learning how to write a romance novel, not just playing at it, but really figuring out what made them tick. I read Nora Roberts and Jayne Ann Krentz and bunches of category romances that I actually outlined in a marble notebook. I joined Romance Writers of America and became a member of their various email groups. I entered their chapter contests. I went to a state chapter conference.

From contest judges, I learned that my heroines were sometimes unlikable (when I wanted readers to hug them to their hearts) and that I didn’t need to use so many ellipses because readers understand from the context when dialogue is supposed to sound halting. I learned from one kind soul that I wasn’t formatting my manuscript correctly — not a deal-breaker if the story was terrific, but why distract an editor you’re trying to woo. And from one inept judge I learned that I used too many weak verb constructions (when she circled every “was” in my entry, incorrectly chiding me for using so much “passive voice”).

And I learned how encouraging it was to hear “attagirl” when manuscripts placed in contests and how comforting to get “so sorry to hear” emails when my latest proposals were rejected after initial enthusiasm from an editor.

The romance writing community, unlike some other writing communities, is an extremely supportive one. Writers cheer each other on and help each other out. They share information about editors and agents and trends.

In that community I became comfortable with myself, and I learned how to write. Not just romance. I learned how to let that voice inside me loose and get it to sing my song, not the Serious Fiction that Serious People would Take Seriously song, but my quirky, funny, sometimes bittersweet tune. I found my voice.

When I have the chance, I tell writing students that they should try to write romance if they really want to learn how to write. Romance has a formula (go look it up if you don’t know what it is — I’ve blogged about it), and it’s very hard to make characters real, a plot believable and a story compelling when readers know implicitly if not explicitly what the formula is.

Those of you who’ve read my bio know I went to a music conservatory, not a liberal arts college. Learning to write romance was my degree in creative writing. It was my Writing Seminars Program.  I highly recommend it for any aspiring writer — even those who have gone through a college writing course of study.

Now, hurry on over and get a copy of Aefle & Gisela! Here are the links if you missed them up above:

For Kindle, click here.

For Nook, click here.

For every other e-reading device, click here.

It will be released by Five Star/Cengage in hardcover this fall. Five Star markets primarily to the library trade, and I happen to also read manuscripts (making recommendations to buy or pass) and edit for them.

Selling to them wasn’t a slam-dunk, though. It just meant I’d get a quick read and some good vibes. In fact, selling Sloane Hall to them required a strong sales pitch along with the merits of the book itself. Here’s why:

Although it’s women’s fiction, Sloane Hall is written in first person from a male point of view. It’s set in old Hollywood but inspired by the classic romance Jane Eyre. The genders are reversed, with the protagonist, John Doyle, in the role of servant–a chauffeur–to a silent screen starlet about to make her first talking picture. She’s the Rochester figure. He’s the Eyre one.

I wrote Sloane Hall, oh, maybe eight or so years ago. Yes, it’s a long time. And if you’d told me then that it would take this long to sell it, I would have covered my ears and started humming loudly to drown out such a gloomy prediction! I’d heard stories of other authors taking that long to sell a favorite tale, or going through eight or more revisions of a novel. I just couldn’t imagine it happening to me. I couldn’t believe I’d keep trying that long.

But I couldn’t let Sloane Hall go. I love the Jane Eyre story. I’ve read it so many times that its emotions don’t pop the way they used to. So I wanted to hear the story again, with all the powerful moments fresh. Thus, my desire to reimagine it, to make a drastic, fundamental change that would force the reader — and myself, the author — to view the story as if it had never been told.

My first iteration of this manuscript, in fact, was practically a point-by-point mirroring of the original Bronte tale. My critique partner loved it and the characters. My agent at the time was tepid. And rejections from editors told me it wasn’t heating up their hearts either.

But one editor told me this — the story has to work separately from Jane Eyre. It has to be something on its own. Of course it did– this made perfect sense. If people want to read Jane Eyre, they’ll read…Jane Eyre.

Back to revisions. This time I looked at the characters and asked myself how they differed from Bronte’s. If they were different, how would that affect how they’d act. How would it change the story?

I wrote and wrote, sculpting an altered story, one in which the main characters shared some of the characteristics of Jane and Rochester, but also some flaws that were more pronounced, that led them down different paths.

Again, back to submission, this time with another agent a little reluctant to send out the manuscript since it had been submitted before.

Alas, still no deal. But the rejections! Some of them read like back-cover blurbs. Here are two of my favorites:

“(The) story has all the elements of a perfectly developed read: a colorful cast of characters (Eleanor is incredible!), a good sense of era and setting, and a compelling major plot line that feels complete and yet leaves you wanting to know what happens next.”

“Libby Sternberg did a wonderful job of capturing 1920s Hollywood in all its drunken, tragicomic glory. John and Eleanor were very appealing, sympathetic characters, and I loved exotic Marta and mysterious, crabby Julia. . .”

These editors and others passed because of market reasons–not being able to envision the book on their list, mostly. One editor at a major house did want to buy it, but couldn’t get her editorial team’s okay.

One editor, the same one who’d told me before to make sure the book worked without the connection to Jane Eyre, was kind enough to again pass along meaningful advice with her rejection: “This needs to be a big book at a small house,” she said.

And that’s when I woke up. Up until that time, I’d been thinking that Sloane Hall could be my “breakout novel,” the one that moved me up farther, that maybe, just maybe, would get me on a list or two.

But I loved this story so much, it absolutely pained me to think it wouldn’t get published by anybody at all, that it would sit in my documents file collecting cyberdust until maybe I decided to go Kindle with it. By this time, I’d revised it yet again, changing the setting back a couple years into the tumultuous time that Hollywood shifted from silent to sound pictures.

So as I was editing some Five Star manuscripts, I thought: why not submit it to them? I mentioned it to a fellow Five Star editor I know, and she was enormously supportive. Yes, she said, submit it — and I want to be your editor.

As I said, it still wasn’t a slam-dunk. The male point of view was a big hurdle because Five Star’s women’s fiction usually features a strong female protagonist. The editor and I came up with a list of examples of male POV novels that had done well with readers, especially women readers. We came up with the many Internet and social media groups devoted to fans of Jane Eyre. We pointed out the strong female characters in the book, despite its male POV.

And, after holding my breath for a few weeks, I got word that Five Star would buy it. An immense sense of relief as well as joy went through me.

I have printed copies of the book now, and I still love this story. And I’m so glad the earliest version of it isn’t the one being published. I am also so, so grateful to the people who’ve helped me get it to print, including the editor who rejected it twice but with advice that really resonated with me, ultimately spurring me to revise and resubmit . . . and sell.