Chapter 26: Success
I made lunch. Real lunch this ti. There was beef in the fridge and an entire functional kitchen at my disposal, and I had been watching cooking videos in my downti for years.
I made a steak. Pan-seared, with butter and garlic and rosemary that was fresh, in a glass jar, on a wooden cutting board like I was a person in an ad.
The steak ca out... fine. I had overcooked it slightly. The garlic had gotten more aggressive than I’d intended. I burned a finger on the pan handle because I’d forgotten that big heavy pans stay hot for a while.
But it was my burned finger, in my kitchen, eating my slightly overcooked steak, in my house, looking out at my lawn.
I ate every bite of it standing up at the island and decided this was, in fact, probably the second-best al of my life. The first being the one Zero had cooked
in Velham with the can of corn I’d brought through.
I missed her, actually. It was a small thought, and it surprised
a little, and I sat with it while I rinsed the plate.
’I am dating my sugar mommy in another world and apparently making out with my aunt in this one. The harem-MC starter pack is coming together. Look out, world.’
I went back to the desk.
...
The afternoon went the way afternoons go when the writing is working. Which is to say, it didn’t. I sat down at three and at so point I looked up and the light coming through the window had turned that long-yellow color that ans it’s late, and my back hurt, and my throat was dry from not drinking water, and I had finished Chapter twelve, edited Chapters one through ten for the upload pass, and written most of Chapter thirteen.
The clock said six-forty.
’Three and a half hours. I just vanished for three and a half hours. What a healthy way to live.’
I stood up and my spine made a noise it hadn’t made before. Damnation. Am I getting old?
I needed to go to Velham. That was the plan for the evening. But I also needed to not be in front of a screen for at least a few minutes first, and the bedroom upstairs had that big bed in it.
A two-hour nap. That was the deal I made with myself. Two hours. Then Velham.
I climbed the stairs, faceplanted onto the bed without bothering to fold the blanket back, and was unconscious in about thirty seconds.
...
When I woke up, it was full dark outside. The big window frad the river under moonlight, the lawn pale blue, the woods on the far side a solid dark line.
My phone said eight-fifty-one so, more like two and a half hours. Close enough.
I lay there for another minute just looking at the ceiling.
This is mine, I thought. This room. This view. This night. All of it.
A quieter voice, the paranoid one, the one that had been my roommate for most of my life, said: And what if it isn’t, tomorrow?
’Then I’ll deal with it tomorrow,’ I told it.
I got up.
...
Before jumping, I ran the platform check. A very bad habit. I always checked stats before bed and before jumps.
I opened the app. And I had to read the number twice, because my eyes initially refused to parse it.
Followers:
217 (last 24h)
Two hundred seventeen.
In one day, on a novel I had uploaded a few hours ago, while drinking coffee at the kitchen island in a towel. Two hundred and seventeen people had hit the follow button on a brand-new third novel from an author whose biggest previous launch had taken a full two weeks to clear two hundred.
I scrolled to the comnts.
The comnts were, mostly, good. There were the people who always show up to be kind. There were the people who pointed out a typo, helpful.
There were the people complaining that the heroine was too smart and the people complaining that the heroine was not smart enough, who were, as usual, the sa person typing from two different accounts.
And there were a lot of people saying the Chapter eleven choice had hit them in the chest, asking when Chapter twelve was up.
’Chapter twelve’s already written, my friend. I’ll upload it tomorrow and you can suffer about it.’
Cliffhangers always worked.
The donation page had moved too. Eighty-three new sustaining donors at an average of around ten dollars a month, the standard tier most casual readers picked. That was an extra eight hundred and thirty dollars a month.
I sat down on the edge of the bed because I needed to.
I’d been writing on this platform for nearly five years. My first novel had taken eleven months to get
to a stable thousand a month from donations, which had been the proudest financial achievent of my life up to about three days ago when Mira had quoted eight hundred thousand for a single gold bar over lamb chops.
The math of my life had cracked open in a single afternoon and was still in the process of rearranging itself.
So part of , the part that had spent a decade being told it was wasting its life on a hobby, wanted to cry about it.
The rest of , the bigger part, the part that had sat in front of a screen alone for ten years writing into a void, said simply: finally.
A few one-star reviews, sure. Always are. Soone called the prose "trying too hard." Soone called the heroine a thinly veiled Mary Sue.
One particularly dedicated comnter had taken the ti to type out, in detail, exactly why my book was bad and the world was stupid for liking it.
’Cool, cool. Welco to the club, friend. The club is mostly , ignoring you.’
I closed the app, set the phone on the nightstand, and pulled on a fresh shirt from the bag of stuff I’d brought from the apartnt that morning. Black this ti, not yellowed.
Ti to see Zero.
I closed my eyes and made the jump.
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