Free Looking for a Love Story by Louise Shaffer Page A

to bed and stayed there for eight weeks.
    I might still be in bed if I hadn’t been hit with a nasty shock—I was running out of money. I know you’re asking how come my financial situation came as a surprise to me. I wasn’t a kid; I should have done the math and figured out that it had been a long time since I’d earned anything more substantial than the occasional tiny royalty. And by then I had a hefty payroll with all those home deliveries. But I’ve always had a major math phobia, so when I was married Jake handled our finances. Before him, my parents had taken care of that stuff—and I can’t remember ever having a conversation with either one of them about anything as crude as cash. Alexandra’s brand of feminism was about marching and self-fulfillment, not the size of her paychecks. And Dad never wanted me to trouble my sweet little head about mundane things like paying the bills. But now I had to. Quickly.
    “I’m scared,” I wept to Sheryl on the phone. “Thank God, theadvance for the Swedish edition of Love, Max just came in, but after that’s gone I don’t know what I’m going to do.”
    If I’d expected sympathy—and to be honest I’d been begging for it—it wasn’t going to happen. “Get a job,” Sheryl said, going into problem-solving mode.
    “Doing what?” I wailed. “The Well of Loneliness Theater is out of business.”
    “I saw Nancy and Lan Ying Marigold last week—and I don’t care what Sissy says, that name is going to be a problem for that little girl someday—and Nancy told me she knows writers who find freelance work online.”
    It took me a second to realize that the answer had come back awfully fast. “You saw this coming,” I said. “You never liked Jake.”
    “There are several ways of looking for private work—ghostwriting, I think they call it. That means—”
    “Some wannabe hires a professional author to write the novel or whatever they’ve tried to write and can’t,” I broke in.
    “I can get a list of websites from Nancy and send it to you,” said Sheryl.
    I wanted to snicker in a really snide way. No way , I thought. I’ve been on the New York Times bestseller list. I had one of the hottest agents in publishing. You think I’m going to try to hire myself out to write vanity projects? Please .
    Sheryl broke into my thoughts. “According to Nancy, you should announce that you’re looking for work on your own website and your blog.” That idea was even worse than trolling for gigs on other people’s websites. My blog and my website had been set up for me by Gramercy’s public-relations department when Love, Max turned out to be such a success. The idea was to stay in touch with my readers, who would be eager to hear about all my comings and goings, and I’d increase my fan base for the nextbook—which, as we all know, never materialized. So I’d abandoned the blogging and the staying in touch. To be honest, I’d been too embarrassed to keep it up—I mean, what was I going to say? I’m now the poster child for writer’s block? But in my golden era, I’d been proud of the website and the blog, and the idea of using them to solicit gigs felt like a huge defeat. On the other hand, there was the maintenance on the co-op to be paid. And I really wasn’t ready to do without amenities like food and my phone.
    “Great suggestion,” I said to Sheryl. “I’ll start on the blog entry right away. And if you could send me that list of ghostwriter’s websites, that would be very nice.”
    “I’ll email it tonight.”
    “Thank you.”
    “And Francesca? Jake isn’t a horrible person. He’s just all wrong for you.”
    SO I WROTE a blog entry advertising my availability as a writer, and I posted a notice on my website saying I was now a writer for hire. I tried to sound charming and funny and prayed I hadn’t come off as pathetic. Then I joined the horde of freelance writers trying to land a job. Basically, that meant I spent my days sending