Serial Monogamy Read Online Free PDF

a try?” he asked. “Stanek is an eccentric; marking the Dickens bicentenary is a pet project of his. And the serial is counter-intuitive; he likes that aspect. On the one hand, you’ve got one-hundred-and-forty-character blasts appearing on your phone every second; on the other, wait a week to run out to the good old newsstand and buy the next gripping two-thousand-word instalment.”
    “I’m not sure it’ll work,” I said.
    “Then why did you agree?”
    “I don’t have anything else on the go, and I like the idea of something so contained and written to such a tight deadline. I can be pretty sure I’ll live to see it through.”
    Frank swallowed and said nothing. People don’t want to hear that you might not get better; they tell you there are all sorts of fabulous treatments these days, as though maybe you didn’t know that already. I have an aggressive triple-negative breast cancer, triple-negative because it lacks all three of the common receptors they target with those nifty new drug treatments. The doctors never say much about the prognosis and on that night I was just trying to hold on to the previous day’s optimism. I quickly filled the awkward pause.
    “You guys are offering me pretty good money. And it’s a flat fee. You pay me whether the readers buy it or not.”
    “Yes. But you’ll care how it does…”
    “That’s true. I was really hoping you would edit it, but some assistant called me and set up a meeting with the weekend editor. We are supposed to have lunch after the holidays. What’s he like?”
    “Jonathan Torres? Decent-enough guy once you get to know him. You’ll figure him out. You’re going to love the challenge. Publishing fiction weekly, just like Dickens used to. I bet you’ve already got something mapped out.”
    I just smiled; it had been only two weeks since Frank’s party but by this point I was already deep into research on the Staplehurst railway crash. “I should get home to the girls. Guess you’ll see me in print.”
    —
    In my book, “decent-enough guy once you get to know him” is code for unprepossessing and not too bright but harmless. On meeting Jonathan Torres two days into the new year, I was not at all sure, however, that the man was harmless. He is tall and fit looking with curly black hair and would be good looking were it not for rather thick glasses that seem to displace his gaze by a few inches so that it is almost impossible to make natural eye contact with him. From the start he took a hearty tone with me that was audibly false. He came across as simultaneously awkward and smarmy. How appropriate, I thought, he’s a Uriah Heep. You could almost imagine him rubbing his hands together.
    Once we had shrugged off our heavy winter coats and settled ourselves in the cheerful French restaurant that offers about the best food you can get within walking distance of
The Telegram
, he read the menu quickly, picked out a steak, let me order a salad, and made a sound in his throat to indicate business will now begin.
    “Fabulous project the publisher’s got you working on,” he said. “Great idea. Love it. Do you know what you are going to write? I mean, I know you know what you are going to write. You’re a novelist, an awesome writer. Love your stuff. I haven’t read that much but what I have…I mean, the publisher loves your stuff and you’ve done this before obviously. Not quite in this form but I am sure you have ideas; I just mean…Well, do you have the plot worked out? We don’t want you to get going and thennot know…Well, I guess novelists always know what their ending is…”
    I listened as he tied himself in knots. He seemed to feel I was important enough that I had to be flattered but probably not good enough to actually do the job. I wondered if his world was full of people who were more powerful than talented. Or perhaps power was the only coin he recognized.
    “Yes. I have an idea, and a plot.”
    “Great.” He sounded very