Darcy had stopped breathing, because she agreed so much. She wished she could spin time backward and steal Imogen’s words, just to hear them in her own voice.
“I know,” she managed. “But it only happened once. . . .”
Last November, she meant, when that billionth random monkey had taken up residence in her head and helped her type Afterworlds.
“Right. Sophomore slump.” Imogen waved a hand, her intensity fading. “I was like that after Pyromancer. Because my first girlfriend was a pyromaniac, so maybe that was the only thing I could ever write about. Like it was all an accident. But books don’t happen by accident.”
Darcy nodded. Imogen’s certainty was contagious, and Darcy felt more real just standing here with her, the rain building to a roar and clearing the air around them. “So I just need to write another book, and I’ll be cured.”
“For a while. There’s one little hitch: I felt the same way again after finishing Ailuromancy. And Kiralee says that every book she’s ever written feels like an accident. We can all look forward to an endless sophomore slump.”
“That’s okay, kind of,” Darcy said. The slumps would be worth it, as long as there were more Novembers.
Imogen was smiling now. “So you can suffer a lifetime of angst, but you can’t deal with a few more whimsical apartments?”
“I remain steadfast.” Darcy looked at her list, but the addresses had begun to swim before her eyes. “Where do you live, anyway?”
“Chinatown.”
“Is that good for writers?”
Imogen laughed. “I live there for the food.”
“Oh, right,” Darcy said. “I like noodles.”
This made Imogen laugh as well, though it had sounded feeble in Darcy’s ears.
“If you hate everything up here, we can go look near my place. Got anything on your list?”
“A few, I think.” Uncertain of where Chinatown began and ended, Darcy handed over the printouts. “I’m not keeping you from writing a good scene, am I?”
“I don’t write when the sun’s up. Too unromantic.”
“Well, if we’ve got all day . . .” Darcy waited to be contradicted, to be told that Imogen only had another hour or two to spare, but Imogen said nothing. “Let me buy you lunch, then we can keep looking?”
“Great.” Imogen handed back the printouts and pulled Darcy into motion, despite the rain. “I know a place with noodles.”
* * *
Darcy’s budget, which was really Nisha’s budget, went like this:
Afterworlds and Untitled Patel had sold in a two-book deal to Paradox Publishing for the princely sum of one hundred and fifty thousand dollars each. Of that three-hundred-thousand-dollar total, fifteen percent (forty-five thousand) belonged to the Underbridge Literary Agency, and another hundred thousand or so to the government, depending on how much Darcy let Nisha finagle her taxes.
After a new laptop and some furniture, that left her with about fifty thousand a year for three years.
At this point, Darcy could do the math herself. Fifty thousand divided by twelve was a little over four thousand a month, which meant a maximum of three for rent. And a thousand divided by thirty was thirty-three dollars a day.
Neither she nor Nisha knew if that was enough to eat, clothe, and entertain oneself in New York City, but it sounded reasonable. And there were always noodles.
Though at this exact moment the noodles that Darcy and Imogen were eating—ramen with Tuscan kale, pork shoulder, and white miso reduction—had exceeded that amount already.
“Whoa,” Imogen said when Darcy was done explaining the budget. “You’re rich!”
“I know. Crazy lucky, right?” Even as she spoke, Darcy realized that when her mother used that word—how lucky Darcy was to have published a book—it made her unspeakably angry. But between Imogen and herself, lucky was okay. “I know everything I write won’t sell for that much.”
“Yeah, you never know,” Imogen said. “Kiralee’s books haven’t done well since Bunyip.”
Darcy looked up from her noodles. “Really? I thought Coleman was kidding the other night.”
“Nope. He says Kiralee’s books only sell about ten thousand copies each,” Imogen said.
“That sucks.” Darcy wasn’t sure exactly what that number meant, but it sounded low compared to her own advance. “And it’s scary. If a writer like Kiralee can’t sell books, how am I supposed to? I mean, everyone I know has read all her books.”
“The people you know read books.” Imogen gave a shrug. “But Bunyip broke into a much bigger demographic—people who don’t read books. Or, they read maybe one a year. Coleman says that’s where the money is in publishing—people who don’t read.”
“Whoa. That explains a lot about the bestseller lists.”
Darcy had spent every spare minute of the last four years in her high school library, surrounded by the Reading Zealots, who all had widgets on their blogs counting down to the next Sword Singer or Secret Coterie pub date, and who sent each other photoshopped YA covers with lolcat captions for Valentine’s Day.
But now that Darcy thought about it, that was only about twenty kids out of a thousand in her school—2 percent. What if the rest of the world’s readers shared those slim proportions?
“Now I feel guilty,” she said.
“You should. One-fifty times two? Crap.”
Darcy wondered what Imogen had been paid for Pyromancer, but Imogen hadn’t volunteered the number, so she felt weird asking. “Well, minus taxes . . . and Moxie’s cut. And the twenty bucks Nisha charged me to make that budget!”
Imogen grinned at this, and her eyes blinked in a slow, catlike way. Darcy wondered if that always happened when she smiled.
“Speaking of Kiralee,” Imogen said. “She wants to read Afterworlds.”
Darcy froze. “But it . . . it’s not even edited.”
“Yeah, she hates reading edited novels. There’s not enough to complain about. If you send me the draft, I’ll forward it to her. Maybe she’ll give you a blurb.”
“Um, sure.” Darcy recalled the mix of elation and anxiety at having her book analyzed by Kiralee, and wondered how gut-churning the examination would be once she’d actually read it. “So how serious was she the other night? You know, about my hijacking a god for purposes of YA hotness?”