The beginning
"Darling, don't leave me."
Lena Powell's hands fell from the keyboard and she sank her head onto the desk, the touch of the cool wood easing her aching mind. It was the fourteenth time she had tried to draft delicate Lady Burgundy's parting words to Baron Fledgwright before he departed to France, but whatever she did, it didn't sound right. It was driving her mad, she could feel her mind ache with a million possibilities, none of them natural feeling flooding her head. A multitude of Lady Burgundies, a multitude of partings.
Secretly, she knew it didn't matter. Nobody would care what Lady Burgundy told Baron Fledgwright as long as it oozed romantic despair and made the heart strings of middle aged housewives everywhere flutter. But despite having learned this lesson many times over, Lena couldn't help but cling to dying shreds of her professionalism. She wrote cheesy romance novels, but it didn't give her an excuse to write cheesy, halfassed romance novels. As long as her career was careening off a cliff, she could at least make sure it was careening gracefully, and doing little things like caring about what her incredibly soppy, stylized characters said kept her sane while she wrote. it convinced her that what she was writing was not totally irredeemable.
She risked a glance at her other book. At the real one, the one that she thought was The One, the book that would get her stuff off of the grocery store book shelves and into the bestseller list. It felt like it was watching her, like it judging her with every accursed adjective she wrote about Baron Fledgwright's beautiful chiseled cheeks. If it was possible, the real book was ashamed. Of course, she had a new real book every few months. They just got rejected, shot down like empty pop cans on a stump. She was beginning to reconcile herself to the fact that the only writing she was good at was the scandalous Victorian romances that were so cheesy they could make macaroni. Though this was no great boost to her ego, it paid the bills.
Nonetheless, the gradual crushing of her hopes and dreams had to be cushioned, and thus whenever she could afford it she bought sushi or fried takoyaki, ramune, ramen noodles. Japanese junk food didn't provide the correct atmosphere for writing Victorian romance, but it was comfort food and stopped her from losing her grip and doing something drastic like killing off Lady Burgundy with a freak falling piano. Right now there was just one takoyaki ball left on her desk, next to the computer, almost cold.
A phone call, and she leapt for it. Was it a publisher? She had sent her real book out to one, maybe... "Hello?" she answered breathily. "Uh-huh. Uh-huh." Slender fingers gripped the phone tight in anticipation. "...Oh. Yes, I see. Well, thank you. Thank you anyway." With an exasperated sigh, she threw herself on the desk and beat her fists.
Unnoticed, the takoyaki fell and rolled under a cabinet. Presently, Lena got up to run a bath and relax the disappointment away. The food was forgotten.
