I'm Your Girl. J.J. Murray

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СКАЧАТЬ not going in there. I’m…I’m thinking about the book.

      I’m not nervous about the reviewers as much as I was about the revisions Trina suggested I make. She had me add more profanity, sex, attitude, and drama to what was originally a simple love story. I’m a little embarrassed about it all. I even had to add stereotypical, one-dimensional characters who are more like caricatures than people. Noël would barely recognize the novel, mainly because it wasn’t originally multicultural.

      You mean, it wasn’t originally interracial.

      I prefer the word “multicultural.” We are all, after all, from the human race.

      True.

      My simple, sweet little novel had two lonely white people meeting, getting together, and falling in love. Nina had agreed to represent my manuscript if I changed a few “colors” and added some more “colorful family and friends.” I ended up padding the word count with gratuitous sex, adult humor, and cursing—all of which seems to be in vogue in today’s literary world. “The book needs more dramatic, guilty pleasures,” Nina had advised, and I had still wanted that dream even if I didn’t have Noël and Stevie to share it with me, so…I did it. I even rationalized that since there is a glut of same-race romances out there, I would be breaking new ground. The world was changing, the literal face of the nation was and is darkening, so I supposed with a few touches here and there—

      If Noël had been here to do the final edit, I know it would have come out better. She had helped me to write the original woman’s part, and in many ways, she’s like Noël: sensibly curious, honestly shy, spiritually worldly, and glamorously uncomplicated. My character and my wife were beautiful homebodies.

      Like I’ve become.

      Except for the beautiful part.

      True. I can’t remember the last time I’ve left the house.

      You bought eggnog, Kleenex, and coffee two days ago at Food Lion, remember?

      That was two days ago?

      Yes.

      Time flies when you’re not having fun, too.

      Get back to the book.

      I had told Trina early on that I wasn’t up to making appearances or traveling to promote the book because of what’s happened, and she had understood. “That’s okay, Jackie,” she had said, in her Brooklyn accent, “we weren’t planning on you making any appearances anyway. You’ll be the non-gender-specific D. J. Browning on the advance review copy.”

      Non-gender-specific, a name that could apply to either a man or a woman.

      You’ve been neutered.

      So, here I am on Christmas Day, an anonymous, neutered man waiting on the next day’s mail missing…Noël and Stevie.

      God, I need to stay busy.

      So, get busy.

      But where to start…where to begin? Time to get up off this love seat and do something.

      Right.

      The toys.

      The toys?

      Yeah. Stevie’s toys. Other kids need a nice Christmas, too, and though they’ll be a few days late in getting to them, at least—

      At least you’ll be moving.

      At least I’ll be moving.

      Start with the simplest things first, and then it will become easier.

      I hope so.

      5

      Diane

      When I’m not working at the library, I stay home nights and read.

      A lot.

      As in four to five books a week, up to three books on the weekends alone.

      I used to read like this as a kid, but it took joining the Mid-Atlantic Book Review to kick-start my reading habit. At first, we’d all read the same book and post our reviews at the MAB.org Web site. When authors started using blurbs from our reviews for their book covers, we later branched out into posting reviews at Amazon.com and Barnes & Noble’s Web site. Now, since we’re one of Amazon.com’s top one hundred reviewers, we get advance review copies from publishers and authors from all over the world.

      And I don’t have to pay a single dime for any of the books I read anymore. Just about every other book in my library is an advance review copy from some author or another.

      If I like a book, I give it four or five stars and write extremely long, glowing reviews in the hopes that my name will travel around the world on the back of some best-seller. At least my name will get out of the house. That’s only happened a couple of times, but it is still quite a rush to see my own name in “lights” whenever I go into a bookstore.

      Now if I hate a book—and I’ve hated a lot more books than I’ve liked—I give it one star, though I often write something like, “If I could give this book no stars, I would.” Then I write reviews so short or so overly critical that not even the most imaginative writer or publisher can squeeze a kind, ellipsis-filled comment to put on the back of a book.

      It’s funny, but of the hundreds of books I’ve reviewed, few have scored between one and four stars. I guess you could say it’s all or nothing with me as a reader. “Grab me early and grab me often, Mr./Mrs./ Miss Author, and don’t you let me go”—that’s my reviewer’s credo.

      I like reading romances the most, not that romances aren’t ridiculous at some level. Most of them are pretty out there, but occasionally I run into one that almost sounds realistic, like what happens to the woman in the story could really happen to me. I usually give those books higher marks, even if they aren’t or will never be best-sellers or be made into movies.

      I don’t watch many movies, romantic or otherwise. They are so much more unreal than even the most far-fetched books I’ve reviewed. I mean, in real life, brand-new cars usually start 99 percent of the time and don’t break down on lonely wilderness roads where beady-eyed strangers with maniacal thoughts happen to show up out of the Technicolor blue to help, despite the fact that the population of said wilderness is 0.5 people and 95 squirrels per square mile. In real life, drivers usually insert the correct key in the ignition the first time, and home owners find the front door key in milliseconds, not dropping the key ring while the masked man with the machete slinks closer at 0.2 miles per hour. In real life, most dead bolts hold and don’t break the first time the cop or villain (or cop/villain) kicks in the door, and the doors don’t splinter because most of them aren’t made out of real wood anymore.

      And the people in the movies aren’t real, either. In real life, people have gas, runny noses, diarrhea, weak and/or small bladders, and constipation. Unless filmmakers want to do a teen comedy or get an R rating, their people have to be sniffle free and regular so no one will have to use the restroom for one hundred minutes.

      In real life, children aren’t always cute; don’t have snappy, adult-sounding comebacks; usually have some piece of green snot or other bodily crud somewhere on their bodies; СКАЧАТЬ