about a boy,
who was lost,
and thought he was found,
until he meets a girl,
the same girl,
who makes him wonder
if there's more to life
than just getting by.
-
[a Jem-centered novella/sequel to The Girl Who Saw Through Jem]
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Chapter Seventeen
From Pure Anonymity
Jem
The days that followed after signing with Danica as my literary agent became a blur of business dinners and endless appointments with all these people Danica insisted I just had to meet.
Within the next couple of weeks, she somehow managed to get my manuscript onto the desks of seemingly every publisher in London and soon, before I knew it, I had to quit working at the bar with Brecht and make regular flights between Amsterdam and London to meet with Danica to discuss the release of my book.
"You should honestly consider moving here to make things easier," Danica advised. "If you're worried about money, we can send you an advance on your manuscript. It's slated to make you more than enough money anyway."
And so, that was what I did. I applied for a working holiday visa and was accepted within a month. Danica's assistant managed to source me a flat in Clapham that I leased with no difficulty after the first advance on my book.
Saying goodbye to Brecht was tough but he was more than happy to see me go. "Come visit every time man," he said as he hugged me before I left for London, "And make sure you give our bar a shoutout!"
Moving to London proved to be tough and rewarding at the same time. It was busy and crowded the way New York felt: throngs of people during rush hour, slow walkers bullied by the locals, tourists galore in any noteworthy spot and only relatively enjoyable if you were within a sizable income. Regardless, I learned how to make a home out of nothing.
The flat Danica was spacious and warm- she even had taken the liberty of decorating it with furniture, ticking off one more thing of my massive to-do list. The hardware floors was covered in flannel rugs and boucle chairs, antique lamps and sandblasted oak walls. There was even a wood fireplace in the living room, just next to the home office. The home office was my writing room as the thick classic books still neatly stacked on the antique rolltop desk next to a sleek Mac laptop was the dead giveaway.
My home office was where Danica and I did our daily meetings as the release date got closer. She also introduced me to Claire Yen, an editor with an English MFA from Oxford. Claire was cutting and ruthless, but who turned out outstanding results. I had only worked with her through emails and word annotations for months before finally meeting her at a writers' mixer Danica had dragged me to, a chance encounter hosted in the British Musuem's Egyptian wing.
Claire Yen was an evil dictator of revisions and she was not one to mince words about how she really felt about certain types of prose. She once highlighted an entire paragraph and emailed it to him: this is garbage as her only criticism, alongside the commonplace automated sent from iPhone message.
Despite her caustic sense of expressing her distaste, Claire looked nothing like how she came across in email. A tiny brunette with a sweet heart-shaped face and warm brown eyes, Claire Yen's first acknowledgment of me was pursed lips and an expression of mildly stifled distaste. "So you're Jem Leighton," she said in a crisp Knightsbridge accept, sipping out of her Baccarat goblet, "Well, you sure look better than you write."
