Not his fault on that day, in that claustrophobic café with the noise and her pinched face, that he wasn’t able to keep himself in the land of tolerance.

His time had been no longer his own. His contract had demanded delivery of his third manuscript in four weeks—the progress of which hadn’t been going so well. He had been still trying to stay on top of promoting his brand, as Morris called his novels and him. Thanks to this mission, ridiculous bloggers had littered his inbox with so many invites for interviews, he struggled to invent original answers.

And what was a v-logger, anyway?

How do they help sell books?

And if someone asked again, Are you worried you won’t repeat the success of the first book?, murderer would be the next addition to the description of skills in his bio. He’d begun imagining a knife sticking out from interviewers’ chests, same size as the one they now twisted into his career.

He felt entitled to be a tad tired of stupid.

Tired of stupid! Hmm, that was a good phrase which he’d noted for future use in his writing.

He never used the phrase, except in his head because he’d forgotten it until now. What he remembered, in vivid color though, was looking at his mentee and thinking that as a hobby she’d become a tiresome project. If she couldn’t respect the publishing rules, then as far as he was concerned this was game over. She could make her own way and see where she’d end up without his sage counsel.

“That’s not helpful, William,” she had said, interrupting his musings about her.

She stared with those big, arrogant eyes as if he’d spoken in a foreign language she didn’t speak. Maybe he did. Now that his hobby had rebelled, she’d become a liability. He had heard a whisper of warning his response might be an overreaction, but he had batted that away as if it was an insect with no rights to land upon him.

Then the dam of emotion burst. Every little thing that had gone wrong fueled the next words which erupted from his mouth.

“Of course, you know everything about publishing, do you Miss Wannabe? Let’s get real here. You worked in a bookstore. That’s it. No-brainer job as a sales clerk. On my side there is experience, unique creativity and what some have labeled genius.”

He cringed a touch at genius, the harsher critical comments for his second book overlaying the title with tedious, uninspired, clichéd. Too late to stop though. Once a train is a runaway, not a hell of a lot halts its momentum. Until it crashes. And crash it did.

William cringed as he recalled what came next, wondering now what had gotten into him because being cruel was, up to that point, never part of his nature. How success must have changed him.

He fixed her with a haughty stare—one he only dragged out when he’d decided he didn’t like someone—and said, “Writing is for the most part, hard work and compromise. Something you will need to learn.”