Logline
Overwhelmed and out-of-touch with her feelings, a failing creative writing student gets wrapped up with a writer that pushes her out of her comfort zone. When her past resurfaces, she has to confront all the feelings she had been ignoring to succeed at her passion.
Blurb
Stoic college junior, Kelly Rivers, is balancing a string of heartbreaks, a pile of unread manuscripts, five summer courses, and an internship on top. And she's doing quite well--at least that's what she wrote on her résumé.
No one tells the truth on those anyway.
The truth is that her composure is slowly cracking and her mental health is degrading.
Things only get worse when the editor she works for asks her to help sign a deal with promising but eccentric writer, Miles Whitman. Not only does he complicate her job, but he also makes it a point to break through her façade and find out why she has been ignoring her feelings for years.
What's a girl gotta do to catch a break?
First 1,000 Words
Summer was teaching me a lot of things lately.
For instance, sweating was my not-so-well-hidden superpower. And the world's best anti-humidity serums couldn't battle the frizz out of my hair.
It was the most unbearable season despite the misleading popularity and the advertising tricks. Why, exactly, had I decided to take five classes in the middle of it?
Someone should have told me not to. I probably wouldn't have listened, but still.
Most importantly, summer revealed people's true colors. Especially when the A.C. stopped working in the middle of the day. The most reserved student of the class had already snapped at the guy in the seat next to him twice. And Mr. Crawford's usual, poorly-restrained irritation had reached an all-time high.
I was not unaffected. At this nagging temperature, the smallest of sounds was too loud. Only self-control kept me from walking over to the guy whose music I could hear through his headphones from the back of the room, and I would've asked him to stop being an idiot.
The heat seemed to make it more obvious how much smaller this room was compared to all the others at Duke. There were only ten other students, but we were all wordlessly competing for space and air. No wonder Mr. Crawford was always in such a bad mood.
The sound of something breaking above my head startled me. I looked up to find Mr. Crawford scowling at me and holding a pencil snapped in half.
He had done this often enough that I no longer wondered if it hurt his palms. My habit of choosing the front row made me his preferred target.
"Well?" he asked.
I offered a sheepish smile. "I'm sorry. Did you say something?"
"As I was saying, are you ready to share what you've been working on, Kelly?"
This brought my attention back to today's assignment. I knew without glancing at what I'd been writing that I didn't have anything substantial to share. I hated Workshop Friday. My classmates' generic compliments and clever-sounding feedback were the last things I needed.
I shook my head and avoided his eyes until he moved on to someone else.
I stared at the open document in front of me, but I saw everything except the words I had just typed. I knew they didn't make any sense, but I couldn't muster the strength to erase them.
The only thing I could focus on was the cursor jumping around on the screen as I frantically slid my finger across the touchpad of my laptop.
I took a deep breath, focused on the screen, and let out my hundredth sigh of the day.
I massaged my temples, remembering how some guy earlier that morning knocked my coffee out of my hand. He had shouted an apology over his shoulder as he kept on running to wherever he had to be.
I remembered staring at the warm drink splashed on the ground with regret, wondering how I would survive Mr. Crawford's class without it.
Regardless of what it looked like, I was definitely not anxious. I didn't know what that word meant. I had everything under control.
Tucking my feet beneath me was pointless. No position would ever feel comfortable on this creaky, unforgiving chair.
I stayed still to avoid disrupting my classmates' inspiration flow. It felt much safer to remain invisible.
Soon, everyone started packing up. I closed my laptop and lingered in my seat, waiting for everyone else to leave.
When I stood, Mr. Crawford glanced at me, somewhat annoyed.
"Ms. Rivers," he said with a sigh. "You're still here."
I assumed it was obvious why I had lingered behind. It was for the same reason I had been visiting his office so often that past month. Yet another negative feedback on one of my most recent submissions.
But this one hit harder because I had actually tried.
"I don't understand." I lifted the sheet of paper covered in red marks to his eye level as if it was a warrant I had urgently requested from a skeptical judge.
Mr. Crawford never graded his assignments with a normal rubric. Instead, he covered every blank spot on my sheets with his finely printed, handwritten feedback. His handwriting reflected everything else about him with painful accuracy—from his neat clothes to the tidy bottom of his desk's drawer.
He looked at the paper for too brief a moment to have read all the notes he had written.
Making no attempt at subtlety, Mr. Crawford glanced at his watch.
"What's wrong with this one?" I asked.
I knew this one was my best work yet. I had spent days working out the intricacies of the characters. I believed it was my most beautiful prose yet.
"It's not—" he paused, waving his hands around in front of him, as to stimulate the right words—"real. While reading this, do you know what I was thinking about?"
Mr. Crawford was known for overusing rhetorical questions, but I offered an answer, anyway. "Such impressive writing! I've never read anything quite like it?"
He did not seem to spare a thought at my attempt at humor, "You know what I say to all of my freshmen every day?" He held up a hand to stop me from suggesting an answer the second I opened my mouth. "If I stop reading to congratulate your vocabulary, then something's not right. I do not care about your ability to use 'aplomb' in a sentence. If I wanted to read words, I'd pick up my dictionary."
I knew better than to make another attempt at speaking. His brown eyes narrowed, appearing much darker. They always did whenever he got invested in condemning a particular junior just trying to get through college to a lifetime of Fiction-Writing failure.
"But, here's the thing, Kelly. That's what I tell my freshmen. So, why do I still have to tell you that your stories lack heart?"
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