Preternatural Too: Gyre

"Go backwards," Jenner repeated as traffic began to creep forward again. They were going to be late, no way around it. "Find the future in the past. So what if you guess wrong? Or are you vain enough to think your novels are going to survive into the next millennium for future readers to make fun of?"

Rohmer laughed nervously. "Did Chaucer? I hadn't even thought of it."

#

"What about poetry?"

She had glitter-green nails and an eyebrow ring and probably read a lot of Anne Rice. Why did they always ask about poetry? The answer was simple: Adolescents, if they wrote anything at all, wrote role-playing games that they thought were movie scripts, or poetry.

"I've never sold a poem," Karen said, "so I'm hardly in a position to answer that. There are, however, lots of literary magazines that you can submit to - college publications, the so-called 'little' magazines, but -"

"How much do they pay?"

Oh, this one's not too aggressive! Karen thought. At s/f cons she always made allowances for the loudmouth with no social skills who popped up like a gopher in any sizeable crowd, asking multiple questions and outshouting everyone else. She'd learned how to handle him in con-text ("Sir, may I suggest that if you're unhappy with my fiction, you go home and write your own?...You have? Who publishes it?...Oh, I see, you still have it on your hard-drive, but as soon as you get an upgrade - right! Next question!"). But college crowds were usually more polite.

"How much do they pay?" Repeat the question, an old time-buying trick. Resist the urge to say "By the way, honey, eyebrow rings are passe," because Catholic school kids always took a few years to catch up. Counter impoliteness with politeness; it confuses them. "Usually they pay in authors' copies."

"Huh?"

Articulate, too, Karen thinks. "Yes, they send you a few copies of the magazine your poem is printed in - "

"You mean they don't pay in money?"

Karen leans forward confidentially. The crowd is smallish, no more than twenty, and ever-changing, a constant flow of traffic in the back as people stick their heads in to decide if whatever's going on is worth their time, and she's done what she usually does under those circumstances - pulled her chair out from under the table or down from the dais or whatever separates her from her listeners and brought it into the midst of them, projecting from the diaphragm to make sure everyone can hear her in this more intimate setting. But Little Ms. Eyebrow Ring is breathing on her and it's time to back her up a little.

"Hon, let me ask you: When was the last time you bought a book of poetry?"

Ms. Eyebrow Ring thinks that's hilarious. "Well, like never."

"I rest my case..." Karen sits back and scans the crowd for a more intelligent question, thinking of cloak pins and pitchforks and a man with warm dry hands and a tender mouth and a voice that wrapped itself around her like a blanket, who simply hadn't bothered to explain his reasons until it was much too late, thinking: Maybe it's going to take a thousand years!

#

"How's about I take the S.oteri a thousand years into the future?" she asked Tony when she called him back, the talk at the college leaving a lingering bad taste in her mouth. Jenner had been extremely apologetic about the lack of turnout, but it wasn't that. She'd played to smaller crowds before. It was quality, not quantity, she needed. Or something.

She needed. On the practical side she needed a project and an income. Anything else was going to have to wait for a thousand years. Maybe in a thousand years the S.oteri would stop sulking and come back to play. Maybe in a thousand years she'd be able to stop thinking about Raymond, stop lulling herself to sleep every night by imagining his long arms around her, his warmth pressed against her spine, the sough of his breath in her ear, the quiet thunder of his heart. Yes, it was beginning to look like a sequel.

She could hear Tony chuckling to himself. Some of his clients were more thick-headed than others. "How's about you do? But get me chapters and outline to pitch before the first one disappears from the bookstores. We don't want them to lose interest."

He is talking about editors, not readers. Half the time the readers don't even know the book is out there. Karen mutters something about the attention-span of gerbils. Tony, as usual, is finishing his thought:

"And, a word of advice: This time don't make it so autobiographical."