Free Grub by Elise Blackwell Page B

everyone to bring their drinks into the living room.
    “I feel quite guilty,” she said, “for pushing Eddie toward a more plotted novel. I think it’s what he needs, but, well, I hate to think of him rushing through something just because I chided him for writing too fastidiously. It would be fatal to his career, I think, for him to hurry through something and have it be weaker than his last book.”
    “Do you mean Vapor or Sea Miss ?” Jackson asked.
    Unsure whether the absent-minded tone in which he murmured this question was real or feigned, Amanda backtracked: “I only meant that Sea Miss will be hard to top with a stronger book. He’s such a great talent and all.” She reached for her drink and sipped it, barely opening her lips.
    “By the way,” Jackson asked, “did you all read Quarmbey’s review of Fadge in The Times ?”
    Though he’d spaced out the words ‘you’ and ‘all’, Amanda could still hear the accent that Jackson had carried to and all but abandoned in Iowa.
    “Harshest review I ever read,” said Eddie.
    “Delicious, wasn’t it?” Amanda spun out. “When I heard about it, I thought it was too good to be true until I read it myself.”
    “Still,” Jackson said, “I suspect that Fadge is more of the future than Quarmbey and his ilk. I met him recently—Fadge, I mean—at a party, and we had a pretty decent chat. But he’s the funniest-looking guy you can imagine. Huge head on a short body. He asked me to send him something for The Monthly —preferably an essay on some aspect of the writing life or a profile of a writer, that sort of thing.”
    Amanda looked at Eddie to see if he was bothering to look interested. A profile in The Monthly could generate a little interest in his work, but he just didn’t think that way. Eddie popped a roll into his mouth and ate it whole. In his ballooning cheeks, she could see what he might look like if he really let himself go to rubber.
    “I sent him a piece ten months ago and am still waiting to hear,” Henry said quietly. “On the New Realism.”
    “He only reads the solicited stuff. It’s a waste of time to submit over the transom there.”
    “Then it hardly seems fair, does it,” Henry mumbled, “to say that they accept unsolicited manuscripts and to forbid simultaneous submissions. They’ve tied up my essay for almost a year.”
    “I certainly hope you don’t abide by that simultaneous-submission thing,” Jackson said, sounding truly alarmed. “You should have every story and essay you’ve ever written out to twenty places at once. You can even hire someone to do it for you so you don’t have to face all the rejection slips.” He drained his glass and allowed Amanda to take it for a refill. “Oh, get this. I was checking out the publication, and who do you think had an ad in the back? He’s selling ‘services for writers’, including submissions like I was just saying and of course manuscript triage. Any guesses?”
    “Don’t tell me it’s Whelpdale!” Amanda handed Jackson the new drink.
    “None other. He’ll even be your ‘nag’. For a fee, he’ll phone you weekly or monthly—or daily if you pay enough—and scold you into writing. You have to pay extra for the ‘overbearing mother’ version of the service.”
    “And to think,” Amanda said, “that I could have been charging Eddie for my services all along.”
    “But what would that make you?” Eddie said quickly, not meeting her eyes and instead turning to Jackson. “I suppose you’re right about Whelpdale. He sounds shameless.”
    “It’s the ‘manuscript doctor’ that gets me. A man who didn’t get a penny for his book and hasn’t written another one, trying to make a living by telling other people what to write. He claims that he recommends the books he likes, post-improvement no doubt, to agents.”
    “I suppose anyone can recommend anything to anyone—whether he knows him or not.” Amanda smiled at Henry, whose neck blushed