Sour grapes (Five minutes freewrite)

marie-jay (61)in #freewrite • 6 years ago (edited)

Darla hated her job or, to be more specific, the part involving face-to-face meetings with new authors she personally didn’t like. And there were many of those. Like the scruffy young man seated in front of her, sipping a tall beer and grinning excitedly. His book had already been accepted and the sole purpose of this meeting was to go over details and ‘make sure we don’t lose the guy’.
With such limited literary interests and complete ignorance of the art of good-writing, Mr. Clement’s sole concern was money. That’s not news, all bosses are like that, but it was Darla who had to deal with these indie authors of dubious success her company wanted to promote to stardom. Take, for instance, this guy, Bradley Hart, wearing a Metallica shirt at a business dinner and calling her Darla, instead of Ms.Brent. She’d read the manuscript, which horror-of-horrors had been sent to her as a read-only document. She was not allowed to make any changes, as the sensitive Mr.Hart maintained his book was ‘good as it is’.

‘Star-crossed’ - an almost impossibly hard to follow love story that spanned across millennia and various parallel realities had created quite a buzz, especially among young people. And now, the book was to go mainstream and Hart had been signed for two more volumes of the ill-fated love story. Because people loved the raw feelings and the weird circumstances fate brought the lovers together - like that bloody chapter when she was a flower and he a monarch butterfly. No punctuation, no paragraphs, no way of knowing which character is talking - flowers talking!? - and she wasn’t allowed to add a single comma. Splendid!
Not that she had anything against romance, but she liked her stories with real characters and a story that made sense. Something people can relate to, not flowers, insects and oddly-shaped clouds chasing each other over the sky.
Darla was just about to broach the delicate subject of ‘minor alterations’, when the man’s phone rang. By the way his eyes lit, she could tell it was a woman. ‘An emergency’ that cut their meeting short, leaving Darla alone with her apple-pie and a sour look on her face. At least, she got them to wrap up the leftovers, for old Percy to enjoy after his evening walk.
It was a short walk, as the sky was covered, but as hard as she looked there were no heart-shaped clouds. The house was cold, no point in leaving the heat on when there’s no one around. Except for the dog, that is. She allowed herself a small glass of red wine - good for the heart, as her mother used to say - and climbed into bed to rest her aching joints. As was her habit when sleep would not come she started thinking about her book, the one she would write when she retired. With her experience in the industry it was bound to be a success. And there will be love, too, of course, the real kind, not fancy nonsense like this Hart wrote. A whole chapter - ‘The story of D’ - the guy she didn’t marry 30 years ago. And the dog - ‘An autumn with Percy’. Sleeping in front of the radiator, the dog whimpered in his sleep - he was old too and his joints hurt in this bleak weather.
She fell asleep rewriting the first paragraph in her mind. ‘I came into this world on a crisp winter morning…’