Prideful.
And prejudiced.
There could be no other interpretation of the committee’s response when I offered to deliver a lecture on Victorian comedy at their science fiction book fair.
It is a truth universally acknowledged that organizers of sci-fi book fairs are in desperate need of more interesting speakers.
I told them so.
They told me to get out.
Ruffian interns shepherded me to the street.
I received a call.
“Did you hear they approved a symposium on Jules Verne?” asked my agent.
Another blow.
I had been drawn to Texas, confident of the community’s embrace. Thousands would attend the fair, each a potential fan of my work.
I needed to be heard.
The moment the fair opened, I dashed inside.
As the Jules Verne panel was preparing to convene, I climbed onstage and claimed one of the seats.
The host of the panel—a minor publisher’s rep—opened the event by reading a prepared statement by Catherine Martin, VP of Classic Literature at HarperCollins.
Partway through her remarks, another panelist arrived. There were no available chairs.
The flustered host asked, “Who are you?”
“Andrew Bingley,” the newcomer replied amiably.
There was applause.
His popularity did not bode well.
Names were requested. Schedules were checked. Guards were called.
I was marched out of the fair, finally receiving the attention I deserved, though poorly timed.
My early efforts to reenter were rebuffed.
(My photo had been distributed to security.)
Thank God for cosplay.
I approached a local seamstress and informed her that I required a costume in a rush. Something bland. I wished to be disguised without attracting attention.
She cut a triangular wedge from a huge block of yellow foam, then carved out a hollow for me to fit inside.
The outfit was absurdly bad. I looked like a slice of cheesecake.
Per our agreement, I gave her my iPad.
Three additional pieces of foam were then affixed to my face, giving me the sort of seamless appearance only a professional can deliver.
The disguise allowed me to waddle discreetly past security.
Roaming the fair, I encountered a familiar face. It was one of the authors from the Jules Verne panel. I cautiously approached.
“Hey,” he greeted me, “I feel bad about what they did to you. They shouldn’t have embarrassed you like that.”
I agreed.
I offered him a free copy of my novel. He examined the back cover, then returned it.
“Interesting,” he observed, “but not interesting enough to tempt me.”
I was about to share some observations of my own when he stopped me cold.
“Is this how you make a living?” he inquired, scanning me up and down. “Restaurant promotions?”
I began to experience doubt.
Perhaps attending the fair dressed as cheesecake had been a professional mistake.
I mumbled a clumsy goodbye and wandered off to a dark corner of the convention hall, where I stood beside an equally morose cosplay cheeseburger.
“Another writer?” the burger inquired.
I admitted that—to my increasing chagrin—I was.
“Don’t let that guy get to you,” he encouraged me. “Panelists only think they’re special because they win a lot of awards and sell a lot of books. But that’s entirely superficial. Craft, not art. The entire industry is rigged, designed to lock the genuine creatives out of opportunities.”
I had never agreed more with a cheeseburger.
“I’m Stanton Fenwick,” I announced, maneuvering my wedge to extend a friendly hand.
“Wickham,” the burger replied, shaking it.
“Did you write a cookbook, too?” he asked.
“No, Victorian comedy.”
After a brief silence, I asked, “Who was that guy I was just talking to?”
Wickham frowned.
“You don’t know him? That’s Darcy Pendleton. Stole one of my book ideas once. Won a Hugo with it.”
Wickham told me his story, and I told him mine.
We soon realized our time was being wasted complaining to one another rather than to the public. The two o’clock writers’ symposium on world-building seemed to offer us the best opportunity to be heard. We proceeded thither.
I would never have attended had I known that Darcy Pendleton—the poseur who slighted me in the lobby—was one of the facilitators, along with Andrew Bingley and the publisher’s representative.
It was a Jules Verne panel reunion.
Fortunately, the rep didn’t recognize me, though Darcy clearly did. He glowered when I entered.
Wickham had dignity. He didn’t enter the room behind me.
The rep from HarperCollins kicked off the event by sharing the many lessons she had learned from Catherine Martin, VP of Classic Literature, on the importance of proper world-building.
The baton was then passed to Bingley.
Andrew Bingley was a happy man. After a series of bestselling novels, he had just completed his tug-at-the-heartstrings autobiography, Confidence Building through Wealth.
Darcy Pendleton followed. It turned out his “claim to fame” was a book about a guy who gets stuck on Mars. It sounded terribly boring.
Only afterward were attendees permitted to speak. As an exercise, we were instructed to “build a world” in the form of a book pitch.
I proposed a Regency comedy about matchmaking.
Their stares said, “Why are you here?”
Fine.
I pitched the fanatics a story called Last Ship from Lydia.
“On the geologically unstable planet Lydia, soon to explode, five people are placed in the unenviable position of deciding who will escape death on the final available spaceships. They each choose themselves, secure in the knowledge that no one will ever know. But a final transmission leaks out.”
The publishing representative’s jaw dropped.
She loved it.
I was terribly depressed.
The rest of the hour was too boring to relate. People talked about their books. Nobody cared.
As I was leaving the symposium, Darcy grabbed me by the wedge and whispered, “That cheeseburger is bad news.”
I wriggled free.
“He told me you stole his book idea,” I challenged.
“No, the truth is very much the opposite. Wickham is notorious for his unethical behavior.”
I cleared my throat.
“Just so you know, I was unsatisfied with the symposium and will be giving you a one-star rating,” I said.
Darcy sighed.
I marched out.
When I found the burger in question, I shared Darcy’s accusations.
Wickham scoffed.
I asked, “What plot idea did Darcy steal from you?”
“A guy goes into space,” he replied.
There was an unexpectedly long pause.
“And?” I prodded.
“Well, see, he runs into technical issues. He spends the book fighting them.”
“How does it end?”
“He fails and dies. He is found, five hundred years later, mummified in his spacesuit.”
Another unexpectedly long pause.
“That’s very dark,” I suggested.
“Thanks!” he replied.
The HarperCollins rep came running up.
“How fortunate it is that I was able to find you,” she observed.
I was wearing a gigantic foam costume in a large open space. How fortunate could it have been?
“I was just on the phone with Catherine Martin, our Vice President of Classic Literature,” the rep said. “You might have heard me mention Catherine before.”
I had.
“I told Catherine about your fun, sciencey book idea. She loved it.”
The rep paused, permitting me to bask in the praise of some random publishing veep.
“Your book is just the sort of timely starter project I need to get my foot in the door,” the rep continued. “Space is hot, so we should act quickly. I want a sample to take to Catherine. How soon can you have that ready?”
I explained that I wasn’t interested in writing Last Ship from Lydia.
Besides, I didn’t have a single fun, sciencey idea in my head.
The rep wouldn’t accept my refusal. After considerable back and forth, I told her I would write a treatment for a fifty thousand dollar advance.
I then gave her my agent’s number so she could negotiate with him.
It was a harmless bluff. Such a ridiculous demand should have been enough to scare her off. But it cost me a friend. She left to give him a call.
Wickham asked what the conversation had been about. I told him about my gag novel proposal and the rep’s enthusiastic response.
He laughed rewardingly. He called me a brilliant satirist. Wickham was a burger with taste.
Tired on my feet, I made my way out of the fair to remove the foam suit. After grabbing a bite to eat, I refoamed and headed back in to attend the evening gala.
While cosplay wasn’t atypical during the day, it was almost de rigueur at night. Never had I been more at one with the crowd while less among my people.
The HarperCollins rep spotted me. I quick-waddled in the opposite direction.
I found my agent.
“Did a woman from HarperCollins call you?” I hurriedly asked.
“Yes, she told me you wanted a huge advance on your sci-fi concept,” he confirmed.
My agent studied me closely.
“You really don’t want to write the book, huh? I mean, your preposterous demands aside, I probably could have gotten you a few thousand dollars.”
“No, I don’t. And the rep is here at the banquet. I think she wants to harass me about it.”
“She wants to talk to you, Stanton.”
After a pause, he added, “We both do.”
What was that supposed to mean?
I found out when the rep arrived and handed me a legal document and a pen.
It seemed my agent had written a book of his own—a scandalous tell-all, spilling his clients’ shameful secrets.
HarperCollins had signed him to a deal.
Now the rep wanted me to grant permission to include stories about me.
Legal formality or not, I refused.
(Just as you should refuse to purchase that tawdry collection of slanders, published without my consent.)
As we talked, Darcy Pendleton and Andrew Bingley passed by.
I acted as nonchalantly as one can in cheesecake.
“Oh, Mr. Pendleton! And Mr. Bingley!” the rep called out. “Won’t you join us?”
They did so with visible reluctance, revealing an enthusiasm gap between the meeting’s organizer and the remaining attendees.
The rep observed how fortunate the encounter was, as she wanted to solicit their opinions of my workshop idea. She hadn’t given up on Last Ship from Lydia.
“Put it out under a pen name,” Bingley advised.
“You can’t be thinking of publishing it, can you?” Darcy asked. “We all heard the pitch. You’ll ruin the poor man. Can you imagine what gibberish he would produce?”
His comments drew blood. So arrogant. I lashed out.
“Just because sci-fi isn’t my thing doesn’t mean I’m incapable of…”
“What genre do you write?” he interrupted.
“Victorian comedy,” I explained.
The group roared with laughter.
Even my agent, who already knew that I did.
“You’re fired,” I told him.
“I figured,” my ex-agent shrugged.
“Stick to your weird brand, Fenwick,” Darcy advised. “No attempt of yours to write sci-fi will ever sell.”
“I’ll bet Last Ship from Lydia would sell if you wrote the foreword,” my ex-agent prodded, out of habit.
“If I did,” Darcy scoffed, “you might as well call it Last Words from Pendleton.”
“True,” my ex-agent agreed. “Stanton would be terrible for your brand…for anyone’s, really.”
I stormed out.
Physically and spiritually exhausted, I returned to the sanctuary of my motel room.
In the morning, I suited up and raced back to the book fair. I wanted to reach the breakfast buffet before they ran out of scrambled eggs.
The person ahead of me cleaned out the chafing dish.
I registered my displeasure.
A convention center employee was hurriedly dispatched to the kitchen for a refill.
I was thus trapped in line, for what seemed like forever, next to Andrew Bingley, who was a morning person, in the worst way.
(Retreat was unthinkable. I would not relinquish my claim to the eggs.)
To my shock, Andrew offered to write an introduction to the Lydia novel.
“Provided,” he added, “it isn’t total crap.”
(To think, the man had won literary awards. I was hoping for better dialogue.)
My integrity, at that moment, could be purchased for a very low price. I shook Andrew’s hand with an enthusiastic smile and stepped out of line, yielding my scrambled egg rights to him, in perpetuity.
I dashed back to my motel.
A morning spent crafting my best sci-fi, ruthlessly editing, and honing the product to a fine edge left me with an outstanding opening sentence.
I was anxious to share it with Andrew, to prove my worth.
He didn’t respond to my text messages.
Knowing that people appreciate a warm, in-person visit after a text, I returned to the book fair, but Andrew was nowhere to be found.
Instead, I was accosted by Darcy Pendleton.
“Are you busy?” he asked, rhetorically.
“What do you want?” I groused (wondering where I could go to escape him).
“I was informed that my treatment of you could be misconstrued as rude.”
“So you’re here to prove it?”
“No, I’m here to make a peace offering. I want to help you, with the least potential reputational exposure to me. As so few people are aware you exist, my publicist and I agreed the risk of association is tolerably low for someone in my position.”
I marveled at the man’s arrogance, conceit, and selfish disdain for my feelings.
“So here’s the deal: if your science fiction writing isn’t hideously embarrassing, I’ll write a foreword for your book under a pseudonym. Though, if I do, I’ll be brutally honest. I’ll pull no punches.”
I have rarely felt such powerful antipathy for someone, but then I don’t get out much.
“I would pull my book from the market before I’d ever let your name appear on its cover,” I announced haughtily.
He blinked. I could hear the shock in his voice.
“You can’t be serious. Against my better judgment, I am offering to lend my prestige to your book. And not only do you refuse it, but you show no gratitude whatsoever? This, from some weirdo with a Victorian comedy fetish?”
I detest a genre snob.
“I never asked for your pity. I plan to write a legendary sci-fi novel. After all, how hard can it be?”
He turned to walk away.
I twisted the dagger.
“Also, Bingley offered to write an introduction for me, so I don’t need you.”
Darcy turned back.
“Andrew won’t be doing any such thing, Stanton. He told me so himself.”
I felt reputational exposure.
“That can’t be! Why would he change his mind?”
“Because I talked him out of it. Life is finally going so well for him. He doesn’t deserve a…you.”
“You’re just jealous.”
“I won a Hugo. Try again.”
“Then what is it?”
“I told you. I’m protecting Andrew.”
“I think the actual reason you drove Bingley away…”
“I wasn’t influenced by what your agent wrote,” he assured me.
“…is that you’re planning to steal my book like you stole Wickham’s. Wait, what did you just say?”
“You should have taken whatever money that publisher’s rep was putting on the table, Stanton. She’s a go-getter. She got your agent ten minutes on the main stage after lunch, to read excerpts from his book. Invaluable publicity. As an author at your level, that’s not the sort of mistake you can repeat.”
After a pause, he added, “At least he’s getting your name out there.”
“For public humiliation,” I replied coldly. “What did that traitor say about me?”
Darcy sighed.
“Stanton, a writer must develop a thick skin. The slings of critics and the arrows of gossip…”
“So now you’re Shakespeare?” I mocked.
“No, I’m a successful author, something you’ll never be.”
“You may be successful, but you couldn’t write a decent Victorian comedy in a million…”
“I’m done,” he replied.
He stormed off.
Technically, he had not withdrawn his offer to write a foreword for my book.
I pulled out my cell phone to make sure the conversation had recorded properly.
It had.
It never hurts to have insurance.
I was in a workshop about writing narrative from an alien’s point of view, hoping to ask a question about Victorian comedy, when my phone vibrated.
A series of text messages from Darcy Pendleton arrived in quick succession.
“Look, I don’t mean to cause further offense,” the chain began, “but I would strongly suggest you stick to your genre. If Victorian comedy is your passion, that’s what you should write. Strive to be as authentic as possible, while remaining marketable, if extremely niche.”
I’m unique, not niche.
He was blind to the distinction.
“And I must repeat my warning about Wickham,” the messages continued. “You are aware of my hit novel? Well, Wickham stole my original idea for it. I planned to have my hero die at the end.”
What was with these modern authors and their depressing endings?
“I was new to the book-fair world when I met Wickham and trusted him with the plot. He released it as a sloppy novella before I could publish. That’s the only reason my protagonist lives. I was forced to make the change.”
I had no idea why he thought I would care.
“Wickham once hurt a young writer I cared for by leaving her a viciously cruel book review, in person, at a book signing. She was so hurt she gave up writing entirely. Mind you, Wickham was correct. Her book was absolute rubbish. But you don’t say that to someone’s face at a public event.”
I struggle to reconcile his Wickham stories with the burger I knew.
“On that note, since I genuinely can’t remember, I’m sorry if at any point I’ve called you, or your book, rubbish. I know how hard it is to hear critique when you’re an absolute nobody. Please understand I bear you no ill will. Best of luck, Darcy Pendleton.”
This was followed by a screenful of social media links.
After waiting a full minute to ensure the barrage was over, I replied, “We should talk. Call me.”
Then I blocked his number.
Returning to my motel, I found a package waiting for me at the front desk: a signed first-edition Darcy Pendleton novel.
I was disgusted, though I considered the resale value when electing to keep it.
I plopped into my motel room’s uncomfortable chair and opened Darcy’s book with relish.
It was horrifying. I kept laughing. I didn’t want to.
He cruelly failed to be unfunny.
I set the book down and stared at the ceiling. Perhaps, as others had suggested, I knew nothing about literature, after all.
It was a somber thought.
Momentary, but somber.
I considered returning to the convention center, but since my costume was giving me rashes in unsettling places, I decided to skip disco night.
The following morning, I once again donned the foam and headed back to the fair.
My former agent ambushed me near the entrance.
He said, “I know you’re in a hurry, Stanton, but what I have to tell you is more important than scrambled eggs. I’ve been made aware of something extremely damaging to your reputation. You may not believe this, but I still want to help. Can you come with me to a short meeting?”
I followed him to a small side room.
Within, at the head of a long conference table, sat an imperious woman, who glared at me.
My agent made introductions.
“Stanton, this is Catherine Martin, Vice President of Classic Literature at HarperCollins.”
“I demand you explain yourself,” she greeted me politely.
Her desire for further self-expression delayed my response.
“First, my quisling comes forward with an intriguing book idea—from you, of all people—attached to an outrageous price tag. Then I ask five important people their opinion of it, only to watch you throw my hard work away.”
She turned her computer around.
On the screen was a book listing.
Specifically, it was a listing for Last Ship from Lydia, by Stanton Fenwick.
I felt like I had stepped into a seminar on parallel universes.
“I didn’t write that,” I protested.
“So you made a book proposal in public, followed by the sudden appearance of the very book, with your name listed as the author, and you have no idea where it came from? That’s the best you can come up with on the spot?”
She scoffed, “I can see why you needed AI to write Last Ship from Lydia.”
Catherine was my new least favorite person.
I pointed at the listing.
“Lady, I may have my authorial deficiencies, but I wear them proudly. AI doesn’t write for me. I would never publish something like that.”
“Then we have something in common,” she observed.
“Now, if you want to consider a book I actually wrote…”
“The Stone Age comedy?” she interrupted.
“Victorian.”
Another scoff.
“What if it had a foreword by Darcy Pendleton?” I tempted her.
“That’s not happening.”
I felt a rising dread.
“Is Darcy…”
“…a HarperCollins author? Yes, he is.”
“So you…”
“…would never allow him to do something so reckless? Correct. There will be no foreword to any novel you self-publish by Darcy Pendleton.”
We closed the scrum with a mutual exchange of indelicacies.
I staggered out.
Back in the hallway, my ex-agent said, “Wickham.”
Right. It had to be.
I wandered off in a daze. It felt like a setback.
In addition to angering an industry giant, Wickham had rendered my name mud in the sci-fi book fair world.
I was no longer viewed as the man I once was, dignified even when dressed as cheesecake.
Now I was considered an AI cheat.
I walked to the end of a long hallway and rode an escalator to the second floor. I wished to be alone.
Above the book fair, a hospital association was hosting a conference. I found myself in a crowd of surgeons, none of whom had chosen to engage in cosplay.
As nothing could be more demeaning than returning to the book fair, I lifted my nose and shuffled past, to the sound of medical snickering.
The crowd’s amusement drew the attention of a security guard. My identity was compromised. He began his approach.
I scurried back the way I had come, but my foam suit was generating too much friction against the escalator walls. I was embarrassingly easy to catch.
Keeping a firm grasp on my arm, the law marched me back toward the convention center’s main exit.
I put on a huge grin as if enjoying the situation immensely.
It was all I could do.
The guard led me straight into the belly of the beast. Half of Texas seemed to be in the lobby. There was much pointing, both of fingers and camera phones.
Suddenly, before us, stood Catherine Martin.
She stared down the security guard.
“I demand you follow me,” she introduced herself.
He was immediately taken with her (as I had been).
“Lady, get out of my way,” he ordered. “Who on earth do you think you are, anyway?”
“I’m someone who provides money—and I mean a lot of it—to the people who pay your salary,” Catherine replied, “for now.”
The woman, to her credit, was an effective communicator. She had his attention.
“I am heading upstairs to speak with the event organizers. They are meeting with representatives of the convention center, as we speak. They need to know their biggest sponsor was just insulted.”
She snapped a photo of the security guard.
“I will be sharing my side of this story,” she informed him. “Whether you wish to relate yours is for you to decide.”
She turned and strode away.
With a grunt, the guard followed. We caught up with her at the elevator.
As soon as the doors closed, the veep laid into me.
“Mr. Fenwick, you are an intolerable nuisance. I don’t know precisely what you’ve done, but you have made my stable of authors very upset. Darcy Pendleton practically blackmailed me this morning! He threatened that if I didn’t use HarperCollins’ weight to get your plagiarized novel pulled from the market immediately, he would boycott the rest of the book fair. The fool!”
“Darcy? Are you sure?”
“I am. We had a long chat. Darcy made me aware that you’re nothing more than a patsy…a simpleton…an easy mark. Wickham started this trouble, and I will have my revenge. I signed that cookbook of his to a development deal. I plan to make his life a torment. I can string him along for years.”
She smiled.
“But it will never be published.”
I considered a career change.
The elevator arrived on the second floor. We followed Catherine to Bluebonnet Meeting Room B.
She threw open the doors, entered, and began speaking over the person at the whiteboard.
There was general shock.
A man detained in cosplay cheesecake might have registered as highly unexpected, but Catherine’s story was genuinely stunning. Apparently, someone was still trying to write Victorian comedy.
“So you see, this sad, little man was a victim of fraud,” Catherine sniffed. “If you forcibly remove him, it will cause no end of headaches for HarperCollins. I demand you release him, at once!”
It is a truth universally acknowledged that organizers of sci-fi book fairs are reluctant to issue apologies.
But I was set free.
I staggered from the room, only to encounter Darcy pacing the hall.
“You?” I gasped. “You’re the reason I didn’t get thrown out?”
Darcy took a bow.
(I found it a bit much. I mean, it was only a book fair.)
“I did something better than that,” he revealed. “I got you a reserved slot on the schedule to deliver your talk on Edwardian Comedy.”
“Victorian,” I corrected him.
“No,” he corrected me. “I read your book. It’s Edwardian.”
“You…read it?”
He chuckled.
“I did. You may not write well. You may not be well. But I couldn’t help but laugh.”
“At my book?”
“Of course! You have a knack for writing the comedic fool. Most authors would struggle to write such a ridiculous protagonist. You make it look effortless.”
I smiled, hoping for more.
“It was…surprisingly good,” he added.
I didn’t agree with the entirety of Darcy’s appraisal, but he was a very successful author. Who was I to question his judgment?
If he said my book was a classic, I had to accept it as fact.
I thanked him, unblocked him, then hurried away to research Edwardian comedy.
(He was correct. My book is Edwardian. I researched who Edward was.)
The organizers assigned me the coveted 6:45 to 7:00 AM slot at the small stage near the concessions area on the fair’s final day.
Many, many people passed by. I think I reached them.
My mission completed, I returned home.
I missed my iPad.
Desperate for money, I self-published Last Ship from Lydia under a pen name. Darcy Pendleton wrote a foreword, also under a pen name. But everybody knew it was him.
It remains my best-selling work.
Non-commercial educational use, including classroom
distribution and excerpting, is permitted without prior authorization.
Stanton Fenwick 