Free How I Became a Famous Novelist by Steve Hely Page B

know how you feel,” he said aloud, as he looked into Lincoln’s somber face and laughed.
    Suddenly he was aware of two figures in the room. He wheeled. “How did you—”
    Across the rug, two men in dark suits, both clutching titanium briefcases, faced him. One had dark eyes and a military bearing, and stayed rigid, but the taller man held up his hand.
    “No need to worry, Mr. President. We’re friends.”
    “But how did you get in here?”
    The taller man smiled. “We’re men with . . . access. This is Riggs. You can call me Hopkins. Our names are not important.”
    Tipton, baffled, wondered whether to call for security.
    “Mr. President, this briefing isn’t on any schedule. In fact, for all intents and purposes, no one knows we’re here. But we need to discuss a matter of the utmost urgency,” Hopkins said.
    Riggs opened his briefcase and removed a thin file. “Sir, how much do you know about outer space?”
    —page one of the unfinished novel Angels in the Whirlwind by Pete Tarslaw

Since all this went down, various critics and bloggers have asked why I didn’t just write a trashy airport thriller instead of a literary novel. In fact, I tried exactly that. Here’s what happened:
    After I’d been fired, the novel project took on a real desperation. I’d sit in my boxers and stare at the blank screen. Above my desk I’d taped a picture of Preston Brooks shoeing a horse.
    Writing a novel would be easy if it wasn’t for the frills. Take, for example, the scene early in The Tornado Ashes Club where Luke parachutes into Normandy a month before D-Day. The local resistance fighters find him, and together they celebrate his arrival over a bottle of calvados in a Bayeux root cellar.
    This scene took me two days . Lots of Internet research was required to find out pesky details like what they drink in Normandy, and the name of a town, and what kind of parachute they used in World War II. Plus, since this was a “literary” novel, I couldn’t just say “they drank some calvados and it was terrific, everybody shook hands and got blitzed.” I had to describe the
warming, burning apple brandy that first arrived in a vapor, wafting along his nostrils before the harsh pure wetness enlivened his tongue. Carried with it was ahistory of orchards and harvests and aging time in old oak barrels. Visions that transcended that dank and dangerous place, and the fear of death, stark and present now like a cat perched on a bookshelf. The amber liquid carried visions that transcended even the war. Luke smiled as he sipped. The bottle said 1928. Carried inside were tastes wrought before there was a war, tastes that would remain long after the tanks had gone to rust and the generals gone to flag-draped graves. Tastes that would linger epochs after soldiers turned to fathers and lovers and warped-fingered old dreamers of memory, inhabiting languid houses on tree-lined streets where children ran and sang and played. Not even the war could take away these small, good things, flavors remembered, and preserved, and stored away.
    Exquisite material but it took a lot out of me. So I’d take long breaks. I’d go down to the store on the corner and tally the total number of pornographic magazines (eighteen varieties, eighty-four total magazines, with Shaved Sluts in especial abundance). I’d walk to the only newsstand in the Somerville area that sold Take Five bars, and I’d listen to the half-witted proprietor monologize about the Yankees and Israel (both enemies of his). I’d study the movement of squirrels, name them, and choose favorites based on temperament and style. I read the Boston Globe every day, from cover to cover, including “Mallard Fillmore” and the death notices and the names of all the racing greyhounds.
    During one of these readings, I came across an article in the business section:
    FOR AUTHOR DREW, BIG BOOKS ARE BIG BUSINESS
    He talks about branding, market saturation, and revenue margins. But Tim Drew