Scribblers (16 page)

The total of self-published works by members quickly reaches thirty. I purchase most of these and read a good many.

There are some well-written gems and several handsomely designed volumes among them, but most can be identified as self-published from a distance of fifty feet. The cover design is below commercial quality, as is the interior layout. The prose, notwithstanding the editorial help the members have sought out and paid for, is in need of editing. I have a book that begins with “
Chapter 1
” and continues with “Chapter Two,” and in which the odd-numbered pages are on the right for the first half of the story, as they should be, and on the left for the remainder. I have another that begins at the top of
page 2
in the middle of a sentence.
Page 1
is profoundly blank, as are
pages 4
,
5
,
8
,
9
,
12
,
13
,
16
,
17
, and
20
, which gets the book off to a rather rocky start. All of this serves to reaffirm my belief in industry standards.

Then again, the big houses are not above putting out shoddy stuff, as everyone laments. Commercially published books—including my own—have plenty of embarrassing gaffes. And proofreading is a lost art even in the works of major authors.

The members have struggled at their desks as long as the pros, and they put greater effort into marketing their wares.

So why shouldn't they have a place at the banquet?

I drive an aged red Ford with an oil leak. Every time it downshifts going uphill, I expect it to leave its transmission on the pavement. It has a hole in its muffler. The steering makes noise. Worst is its worn-out wiring, which sometimes causes it to stall. I've spent a few hundred dollars on diagnostic tests to pin down this latter problem, only to be told that the car will likely have to fail completely before the defect can be identified.

The Ford has always responded to coddling if I need something special from it, as now, when I'm driving to Asheville. I overfill the oil, pour a container of leak-slowing chemical in the crankcase, fill the tank with premium-grade gas, and drive it through the automatic carwash.

It runs loudly but well the first hour in the rolling country through Statesville and Hickory. As I begin to climb past Morganton to Marion, traffic comes to a halt in a construction zone. Without air hitting the radiator, the engine heats up and the fan comes noisily to life. I can see and smell a light breath of oil smoke.

I've not slept well in my own bed lately, but slumber comes easily when I'm behind the wheel. Lukewarm root beer is my stimulant of choice. I pop open my second one of the afternoon.

The occasion is a party for several members of the writers' group, who will be giving a joint discussion of their newly self-published books at the main public library in Asheville. The principal attraction is Jack Pyle. Jack suffered a heart attack on Halloween and underwent double bypass
surgery shortly thereafter. It is now less than two weeks before Christmas, and his first public venture, to no one's surprise, will be to promote his book and to speak for the broader cause of writing. Eileen Johnson will be presenting, too. The event is judged to be of such moment that the group has canceled its regular monthly meeting in an effort to encourage people to attend the party. That really wasn't necessary, as all the members without obligations are sure to come. I hope my own effort in making the drive will help soothe any bad feelings I may have created with the Bill Brooks flap, but mainly I just want to enjoy the company and to hear what the speakers have to say.

I put down my root beer when traffic starts moving again.

If I have mixed feelings about their self-publishing ventures, I also acknowledge that they've accomplished more than I have lately. I've saved two weeks of vacation at the end of the year to work on my book. Unfortunately, I am presently editing a restaurant guide containing some two hundred and forty eateries. I find myself with fifty-three entries to go and only three scheduled working days. My most optimistic projections leave me with twenty entries to edit over Christmas. I'll also have to edit the contents page, the acknowledgments, the general introduction, and the six smaller introductions to the various sections of the book. Then I'll need to spell-check the files and enter all the author's corrections. Meanwhile, my own project will languish, I'll be surly at family occasions over the holidays, and I'll continue sleepless.

Despite its faults, the Ford is the best mountain climber
I've ever owned. It maintains an effortless sixty on the big hill up from Old Fort, where greater vehicles fail.

From the edge of my vision, I note the temperature gauge rising and the dashboard lights popping on one by one: SEATBELT, DOOR AJAR, WATER, SERVICE ENGINE SOON, OIL.

It seems to run better when it's all lit up.

C
HAPTER
8

Ham-and-Eggers

I'm riding a bus with my daughter's fifth-grade class. I'm chaperoning a field trip to a science museum an hour away.

I've just begun reading a romance novel,
Essence of My Desire
by Jill Jones. On its hot-pink cover is an antique perfume bottle. In the center of the bottle, an inch-square peekaboo cutaway reveals a bouquet of flowers on the first interior page. After that comes a page with capsule raves from publications called
Affaire de Coeur, Romantic Times,
and
Belles and Beaux of Romance.

The story begins in New Orleans as Simone Lefèvre receives a mysterious package containing an unidentified perfume. The daughter of the late master perfumer Jean René Lefèvre, Simone has fallen on hard times since Englishman Nick Rutledge, her first lover, stole her father's secret formulas and left town. Meanwhile, in London, Nick Rutledge,
too, takes delivery of a strange perfume. Like Simone, Nick has seen his fortunes slide. Crafty Frenchman Antoine Dupuis tricked him into his theft of Jean René Lefèvre's life's work, then gained control of Nick's family's perfume empire, the House of Rutledge.

An ocean apart, Simone and Nick test the perfume and find it has a highly erotic effect. In their dreams, they are transported to a land of indigo mist and an hour of sizzling passion with … each other!

Simone is enraged; Nick Rutledge is her sworn enemy.

Nick is tormented; he is ashamed of his duplicity toward Simone.

Before long, Simone receives an invitation from Antoine Dupuis to come to London to interview for a position at the House of Rutledge. In England, she rents a cottage on a country estate. It is, she learns, the former home of a witch and the place where her mysterious perfume was concocted. Meanwhile, Nick decides to take a weekend at his country estate, where he has just begun renting out an old cottage to bring in some needed cash. He parks his Triumph roadster, saddles his Arabian stallion to go introduce himself to his new renter at the cottage, knocks on the door, and—

“Enjoying your book?”

It's the lady in the seat in front of me, another of the chaperons. She's been bending the teacher's ear up to this point and has apparently worn her out.

“Book?” I say.

“Are you enjoying your book?”

“It's okay.”

I go back to reading.

“Is it something for work?”

“No, I wouldn't say that.”

She's not accustomed to having her curiosity go unsatisfied, I can tell. Her daughter is the star of the class, and that ought to command a certain amount of deference from someone like me. She's turned sideways. I catch her looking over the seat every now and then, trying to see what it is I'm reading. I have to tilt the top edge down until the book is flat across my leg.

She finally leaves me alone—until we pull up outside the museum.

“What's that you're reading?”

I pretend I don't hear.

“What's that you're reading?”

“Uh, nothing.”

That answer, so flagrantly false, stuns her long enough for me to slip past, tucking the book in the inside pocket of my jacket, where it will stay until I can continue in peace.

I ask Jill Jones how it feels to be a moneymaker for the publishing industry and yet to be disparaged by many book people for being a genre author. I ask how it feels to be denied the luxury of writer's block but to be criticized for spewing formula stuff on a tight schedule. I want to know what it's like to be a guilty pleasure to people like me.

“Here's my answer,” she says. “Show me the money. Genre writers make more money than literary writers, and I am not embarrassed to be a genre writer. And no, we don't get the literary accolades and all that kind of thing, but it doesn't matter to me. I have people who write me wonderful
fan letters, saying things like, ‘I was sick and I read your book, and it took my mind off my worries,' or ‘You entertained me. You kept me up all night.' Those are the good words. Those are my critics.

“First of all, I don't get reviewed in a lot of the highbrow magazines, so that's not an issue. I feel like I'm in the entertainment business. I'm not necessarily in the literature business. And if I write a story that keeps people up at night and keeps them turning pages, then I'm entertaining them. That's the same as somebody who's on TV or somebody who's in the movies. It's just a different medium.”

Jill lives in Montreat, east of Asheville, where she works part-time as an administrator for the Swannanoa Valley Museum. Her husband owns a travel agency and is a gourmet chef and a cookbook author. Jill enjoys house painting and home restoration. Indeed, I catch her with cement on her hands when I reach her by phone. She's been laying tile.

Born in Oklahoma, she grew up in the oil patches of Texas and Louisiana. After earning a degree in journalism and professional writing, she worked for fifteen years in advertising—“the ultimate fiction,” she calls it. It was after that when her thoughts turned to the possibilities of love.

“I joined the Romance Writers of America, at the recommendation of a friend who was a romance writer wannabe,” she says. “I went to one of their conferences, and I didn't even know what the romance genre was at the time. There were eight hundred people there, and they were among the most professional writers I'd ever met. These were 99 percent women. The guest speaker was Mary
Higgins Clark, and the luncheon guest speaker was LaVyrle Spencer, and it was kind of an eye-opener for me.

“And so then I joined an RWA chapter. I had a critique group, and I was very lucky, because I was the only unpublished writer in the whole group, so I had a lot of mentors.”

Jill's writing breakthrough came while she was working on a manuscript with a reincarnation theme. She happened to purchase a self-hypnosis tape designed to help listeners touch their past lives. One day when she entered her trance state while playing the tape, Jill visualized herself standing in a hilly countryside covered by tall grass. To her left were a man and a woman locked in an embrace. It seemed that they were afraid of being caught together. The name
Emily Brontë
came to Jill just before she departed her trance.

She then conceived a story in which Emily Brontë was not the lonely spinster of popular belief but rather had a forbidden Gypsy lover, who became the model for Heathcliff in
Wuthering Heights.

“Do I think I was Emily Brontë in a former life?” Jill says. “No, I don't, but it was fun to try to jump into her skin.”

“How much of a leap was it?” I ask.

“I don't know how I wrote that, but I didn't change a word of it, and my editor didn't change a word of it. And I ran it by some of the people that I met in the Brontë Society, who are nuts about the Brontës. They know every little detail. In the diary part of the manuscript, I made mention of a hawk that Emily had rescued on the moors, and I made it at a date after which the hawk had died. Well, he got redlined, but that was the only change. And I felt like if that's
the only thing they could find, then I did my homework. And they all loved the voice.”

That book,
Emily's Secret,
won Jill a Maggie Award and launched her career. Since then have come ten more books in less than eight years.

“So you've been writing them at nearly a rate of three books every two years. Is that a matter of contractual deadline pressure, or do you set your own pace?” I ask.

“Well, I can pretty much set my own pace, but two things. You need to be out there at least once a year if you're in the mass-market arena, to keep your name in front of people. And to make some money. You know, one book a year is about the minimum for genre fiction. Now, if you're writing the Great American Novel, people can take ten years to do it, I suppose. But if you're writing romance or mystery or suspense or Westerns or sci-fi/fantasy—the paperback market—you've got to keep something out there about once a year or more.”

Given that pressure to maintain a presence in the marketplace, competition for space in bookstores is stiff. Genre fiction has a high turnover rate and therefore a small window in which to grab a readership; romance novels, mysteries, and Westerns are pulled from shelves quicker than, say, psychology titles and history books. It's a testament to the popularity of genre novels that they can sell three or four times—first in retail bookstores and then repeatedly in secondhand paperback shops and at flea markets. In fact, if you want to peruse the full set of titles by Jill Jones or anyone else who isn't a top-ten name in their genre, the best place to do so is an aftermarket store.

I hesitate to share this with Jill, not knowing how she'd react, but my own copies of her novels came from a secondhand outlet. My
Essence of My Desire
bears the initials of a previous owner—
GB
or
GR,
I can't tell for sure which.

But I am bold enough to inquire about her attitude toward such outlets: “How do you feel about aftermarket stores? Are you glad to have the readers, or do you resent that you get no royalties on all the copies that are resold?”