Poetry Stories: The Novelist
Chapter 7. You couldn’t say no.
Chapter 7
Megan had over 100,000 followers on Twitter, which was why Wednesday night had been a total cliff-edge, at least to Laura.
Laura’s own audience was nothing much. About three hundred followers, many of whom she mostly ignored. Except for Megan. Megan had a way of delighting Laura with tweets about her daily tea habits and her burgeoning business.
On Wednesday, around 8 pm, Laura had tweeted to Megan, “I want your new Bagatelle.”
“One Bagatelle, and I’ll raise you a novel,” Megan had tweeted back.
“Writing for tea? Now that would have been a solution for the British empire,” Laura returned.
“Writing for me,” Megan had typed.
“I’ll write you a tea fortune.”
“No deal. I want a novel. September sounds good.”
Megan had added the hashtag #amwriting to her final challenge tweet, and a good number of the writing audience that paid attention to that sort of thing had retweeted the challenge. After that, Laura had to lie down, she’d felt so weak in the knees.
The thing about Megan was, you couldn’t say no to her. This was how she’d been building her tea empire, one contact at a time, a truckload of tweets a week, and with trips to India and China.
So Laura had come to the blank screen today, if only to assuage Megan with, “I tried.” After which, she hoped Megan would drop the matter, and Laura could go back to entertaining Megan with her catchy copywriting-style tweets about simple things like tea baskets and the alternative uses for Lipton tea bags.
Tea baskets. Where the hell had hers gone off to? The house was only 8oo square feet. More like a cottage really. Geoffrey always said it was the perfect size for his Little Basho, a remark which secretly irritated her, because what she wished she had—not to be ungrateful—was a house with a small sitting room and a window seat where she could create trails of treasures like the pearly orange-cupped seashells she had found when they went to Long Island one weekend.
She consoled herself with gathering such treasures into poems instead…
At the end of the Sound,
where the pines have been pushed back
by an unrelenting salt wind,
you will find that jingle-shell beach—
where little cups of pearly lemon peach
stretch out endlessly. Put your hands to them
and you will not know
where to stop.
So much beauty,
so much unrelenting jingle-chiming
beauty.
She had mentioned once, to Geoffrey, her desire for the treasure room with its pearly peach seashells, and he broke out in an uncharacteristically loud laugh, “You’ve got a whole house to yourself, Laura! What do you need with a room for souvenirs and kitsch?” She had gone very quiet then, and he apologized for laughing, saying she was a quirky little poet after all, and this was probably what made her so prolific. People without quirks had less to write about. That was his theory.
If Laura was so prolific with poems, and in truth she was, then what was the problem with Megan’s request? Couldn’t Laura, with a little doing, keep stringing together line after line of words and construct, in time, a novel? It seemed logical, but there was the matter of finding an idea and sustaining it. Only fire could do that. The fire of rebellion.