We need to meet up. 2NITE!

Chapter 11

Jemima

Since sending Simi off for her audition that morning with a good luck hug and pack of tissues, Jemima had been trapped in a Facebook/Twitter/Instagram loop. All the while, behind her open browser pages lurked the unchanged Beverly Blake filth fest draft. As she liked her fifteenth kitten photo the klaxon ringtone she reserved for her agent sounded and she groaned.

‘Hi Shaheena.’

‘So,’ Shaheena said with gleeful reproach, ‘something you want to tell me?’

‘Nope. Just plugging away at the script,’ Jemima said, tensing.

‘A script in which you’ve made Beverly a scatologist?’ Shaheena said in a scandalised whisper.

Jemima face-palmed at her naivety. Of course Shaheena had found out about her misstep with Eve. She had an information network that could rival MI5’s.

‘We have a problem, Jemmy. I heard through the vine of the grape that Hudson Hicks are thinking of giving you the old Spanish archer, you know, El Bow,’ said Shaheena.

‘I know,’ said Jemima weakly.

‘So, what are you doing about it?’ Shaheena yelped.

Like Meagan, Shaheena was an agent who had little time for the hand-wringing of creatives. She was about solutions. If Hudson Hicks wanted romance, Jemima needed to serve it up with a side order of lurve. Even Jemima’s dilemma over how to source material was simple to Shaheena.

‘Nick it!’ came her tinny bark down the phone.

According to Shaheena, bookshelves were brimming with authors who’d ransacked other works for inspiration. Even the much-lauded The Cave was just Star Wars meets Pride and Prejudice set in a cervix, or so Shaheena claimed.

‘Look, Jemmy, whatever Hudson Hicks wants, Hudson Hicks gets because as far as other publishers go, it is slim pickings out there so crack on!’ she said signing off.

Jemima wilted back onto her bed. ‘Balls.’

She opened her laptop again hoping for an insight, a spark, anything. Options that were a definite no-no included stealing from other authors, returning her advance – the last of which she’d spent on her LA trip – and volunteering for the one-way manned mission to Mars. If she’d had more time, perhaps she could take a specialised writing workshop, read some sample texts, start from scratch but she had less than a month. She needed a rock solid solution – fast. She’d already established that her love life was too pitiful to be a legitimate source. Eve would be more appalled by a draft concocted from that than the filth fest. But if she couldn’t use her own experiences, was there somewhere else she could turn? She needed detail and emotional authenticity or it just would not work. She sighed heavily. The only love lives she knew as encyclopedically as her own were Meagan and Simi’s.