“Completely?”

I glance across the cluttered desk at Austen Sturges. I should have known I was in trouble the minute they’d assigned me a new editor named Austen Flippin’ Sturges. In his late forties, with salt-and-pepper hair, pastel-yellow sweater vest over a button-down dress shirt and paisley tie, the man puts the stuff right into “stuffy”. Austen arches a bushy gray eyebrow over his thick, round, tortoiseshell glasses.

“Did I stutter?” His voice is cool and calm and definitely collected. Much more so than mine, anyway.

“Mr. Sturges, if you could just—”

His withering glance softens a smidge. “Please, Cleo, call me Austen.”

“Fine, yes, I just—” I let out a sigh, cutting myself off in mid-stream. And why not? I’ve got nowhere else to go. Five minutes into meeting my new editor and he’s just set off a nuclear bomb imploding what I intended to be my next bestseller.

He softens still. “Listen, I know it’s not what you came all the way into the office to hear today, but I’m afraid I can’t see any other way to make this manuscript even…” Austen struggles to find a punchline, rattling his manicured fingernails across the title page of the 389-page manuscript in question. “Salvageable.”

“Salvageable?” I hear the harshness in my voice but can’t help it. Nor can I help all but bolting out of my chair in protest. “My manuscripts have been called a lot of things in the past, Austen. ‘Charming.’ ‘Dreamy.’ The phrase ‘Yummy’ has been used more than once, I believe. But this one isn’t even salvageable?”

“If you want to continue the First-Timers’ Club series here at Backstage Books, Cleo, then yes. A complete overhaul from start to finish. I’m afraid I can’t see any other way to, well…salvage it.”

Austen gives me an almost apologetic shrug, as if to soften the blow. It doesn’t. Not even a little.

“Can’t we just take out the parts that aren’t very eighties?”

I’m aware that I’m whining now—pouting, even, slumping back in my chair and crossing my arms over my chest and doing everything but stomping my feet up and down like a toddler having a tantrum—but again, nuclear bomb blast. Shrapnel piercing my poor little writer’s heart. No control whatsoever over my fight or flight response to this devastating news.

Complete and utter career meltdown here, people!

“Aren’t very eighties?” Austen tosses his first sneer back across the desk. I’ve been waiting for it ever since I walked in and he didn’t stand up to greet me. “Forgive me for saying so, Cleo, but this manuscript, as delivered?” He shakes his head with vigorous aplomb, as if saying “no” to a very bad idea. “Not even eighties adjacent.”

The fancy, city-bred snippiness to his voice leaves no doubt as to what Austen would sound like bitching to his age-appropriate brunch mates on a late Sunday morning, three mimosas deep and complaining about his poached eggs being “not even runny adjacent”.

This rye bread? Not even toast adjacent.

This mimosa? Uhm, I’m sorry, not even prosecco adjacent.

Adjacent. Who even says shit like that? Then again, he’s kind of got a point. I lean forward, placing my hands against his desk as if to keep myself from bolting out of my chair and, in five short flights, sprinting from the entire Backstage Books corporate headquarters itself. “Listen, I may not have been as rigid in my research on this one, I get that.”

“If we’re being honest, Cleo?” Austen’s chiseled face is somber, but also somewhat understanding. You might even say… understanding adjacent. “It shows.”

“Right, yes, I get that now, but why scrap the whole book just because of a few technology slips, am I right?”

“A few technology slips?” Austen looks offended, glancing down at the manuscript beneath his tapping fingertips. He rifles through it, yanking free a few pages from the middle. “Let’s just read a random passage chosen without preamble, shall we?”

I frown, stomach blanching at the very words. “Must we?”

“If I’m to get my point across, yes. We must.”

I beg him with panicking eyes and clenched fists. “It’s just that I dread hearing my stuff read aloud.”

“Be that is it may, and I’ll keep it brief, but allow me to prove my point?”

I glance out through the window at downtown Atlanta, toward the coliseum where I’m due to see none other than the hottest band in the country, Torn Blankets, visible outside Austen’s office window, just a few short city blocks away. So close and yet, at the moment? A world away. He’s fumbling through the pages. I’m staring at the coliseum, as if I can will myself there to avoid the sound of him reading my words out loud.

“Aha.” He’s found a passage he likes. Or dislikes. Or likes to dislike. Either way, I dig my fingers into the armrests of my leather wing chair, dreading the next three point five minutes. Clearing his throat, Austen reads in a clinical tone, as if unaware of my poor little writer’s heart breaking with every wrong-headed syllable.

“Her playlist oozed from some unseen speaker, Madonna wailing in time to Emily’s pounding heartbeat. Brody’s eyes shone brighter than the pale moonlight filtering in through the open window at his back, taking the phone off the hook so they wouldn’t be disturbed.

“The thought of the captain of the pickleball team wanting her, and only her, undivided attention made her weak in the knees. Emily reached for the tennis sweater wrapped around his broad shoulders, struggling to untie it. Brody stopped her, big hands engulfing her own as the glow from his digital watch showed the time—six minutes before midnight.

“‘Holy shit!’ she gasped. ‘You have to take me home. I’ll be late for my curfew!’”

I wince. Not because I hear a ton of errors, but because once I’ve hit “The End” on my final, off-to-the-printer, no-more-chances-for-take-backs or last-minute-edits manuscript, I tend not to read my books ever again, let alone out loud. This is the exact reason why.

Utter cringe factor.

I stare back. Austen holds the pages out in accusation.

“Okay, and?” I press, all but waving my hands in the universal symbol for “hurry the fuck up and put this meeting out of its misery already!”

Austen sighs and sets the pages back in the manuscript where they belong. “So, there were digital watches in the eighties, as a five-second Google search might indicate, but what the internet won’t tell you is that more often than not a trendy frat chode like Brody would be wearing a Swatch of some variety.”

I nod, not seeing the problem. “Okay, so, ‘edit and replace’ much?”

Austen clenches and unclenches his jaw a total of three times before continuing. “Fine, yes, if it was just the watch. Every time you mention it, which is…a lot. I mean, we sure get hit over the head with this poor guy’s love for all things digital watches. It’s—and forgive me if I’m wrong here—it’s almost like you were trying to hit your minimum word count and figured describing this digital watch again—and again and again—might somehow burn through another hundred or two words?”

I blush and avoid his eyes. I so totally was!

He nods as if I’ve already acknowledged as much. “But wait, there’s more. Taking the phone off the hook? Yes. Gold-star effort. Clever little detail, in fact. However, the minute you do that in real life, the dial tone starts droning and doesn’t stop until you hang up the phone again, so they wouldn’t do that to ‘achieve undivided attention’. Also? Pickleball is a relatively new trend and sure wasn’t popular enough, or endorsed enough, to build a whole high school team around back then, so…”

I nod, face flushed. Big head deflated. Book tour canceled. Career ruined. I may even have to go off-grid for a few years just to recover from this epic fail. “Just so you know,” I bluff, avoiding his eyes with such vigor I’m afraid they’ll pop right out of my skull and roll across my poor, ill-conceived manuscript pages. “I did research the eighties for this. Like. A lot.”

But I didn’t. Not “a lot,” anyway, and if we’re being honest here? Barely even a little. I did a few image searches, bookmarked some song lists, movie titles, trends but romance is romance. A good book should transcend all that fussy research, right?

Austen nods, inching back in his chair as if to make me feel less threatened. “I can see that, Cleo. And don’t get me wrong—the book itself is great. It’s just, you can see how much work this would be to edit just in one sample paragraph. On one sample page, pulled at random. Now magnify that by almost four hundred pages? It’s not fair to let this one get a pass when all your others have been so camera-ready.”

I wince in advance before offering the vaguest excuse possible. “I suppose I thought the story itself was camera-ready.”

He nods as if desperate for something positive to latch on to just so I won’t walk straight into traffic after leaving the building. “Look, it’s not the writing, okay? Let’s get that out of the way first thing. Fact is, we love your books, Cleo. Obviously…”

Austen swipes a hand at the bestselling book covers lining his walls, blown up to poster-sized and framed like fine-art prints. There are twelve of them hanging around the office and, not to brag or anything, three of them are mine. Make that the first three installments of the First-Timers’ Club series. “You’ve been integral to Backstage’s success and we’re eternally grateful.”

I wink and slither a little to the end of my chair. It’s late afternoon, the concert starts in three hours and I want to pregame at this trendy new downtown club I saw on Slicktok so I’ve worn my brand-new champagne-colored, off-the-shoulder, glitter-bedecked jumpsuit to our meeting. It’s skimpy, but not too revealing. Stylish, but not slutty. Slutty adjacent, I might say. Still, my flesh feels ready to burst out in this position. “So can’t I get a pass on this one, Austen?”

He frowns and wrinkles his nose and sits back in his chair all the farther. “I’m afraid not,” he says with dismissive finality.

I straighten up. “Oh, okay then.”

He picks up my manuscript and sets it aside, as if indicating that’s where my career is heading if I don’t shape the hell up. “I do appreciate you coming in today, Cleo. We could have just as easily done this on a Zoom call.”

“Happy to,” I insist, struggling to keep the illusion that I drove all the way to Atlanta just to hear how shitty, gross, dumb, shoddy, slapdash and downright unrealistic my latest manuscript is. He doesn’t need to know about the concert. “I just wish, well, things had wound up different, that’s all.”

“Different efforts produce different results,” Austen pontificates, sitting back in his desk chair as I stand, sweeping the cute little beaded handbag I’d bought for the concert over one bare shoulder. It’s shaped like a goldfish, with alternating orange and yellow beads, in honor of Fish Food, my favorite song by the band.

He nods at it. “Cute purse,” he says.

“You like it?” I hoist it up for his benefit, batting my lashes and striking a pose like I’m about to take my first selfie of the night in front of the coliseum.

“It’ll be perfect for the concert tonight.”

I take an involuntary step backward, almost stumbling over the chair where I’d heard the verdict about my “unsalvageable” manuscript. “W-w-what concert?” I stammer like some bumbling side character in my own life.

“Torn Blankets,” he points out, waving a fancy pen at my purse. “Your ticket is sticking out.”

I glance down and, sure enough, there it sits, poking out of the thin space between the goldfish-shaped clasps at the top. “Dammit!”

“It’s fine, Cleo. You deserve a little fun. But tomorrow? Once you’ve washed all that glitter off your face and put your feet on ice after a night in those heels? Straight to work, okay? We’ll need that manuscript by early September at the latest if it’s going to be in shape for holiday sales.”

I give a half-hearted salute. “Aye-aye, Captain,” I tease, hoping to salvage what’s left of this very bad, miserable, horrible, borderline apocalyptic editorial meeting.

He offers me a placid smile, the same kind I’d give some breathless reviewer who obviously hadn’t read my book but still wants an “exclusive” interview anyway. “Before you leave?”

I’m halfway through the door already, teetering on my brand-new high-heeled sneakers—also champagne-colored, also blinged out and also totally fab, if I do say so myself. I nod at the door, his brass nameplate so fresh I can still smell the glue they used to hang it there. “But I thought you already gave me my marching orders, right?”

Austen offers a rare, handsome, smile followed by a borderline comforting nod. “No, I meant before you leave the building, Trixie would like a word.”

“A word?” I croak, almost dissolving right there in my four-hundred-dollar jumpsuit. “With Trixie?”

“You’re not in trouble,” he insists, not very reassuringly. “Honest.”

I roll my eyes. “Then I must not be, Austen, since the one thing you are is absolutely, utterly, brutally honest.”