Chapter 6

After checking the caller id, James picked up the telephone on the fifth ring. One more ring and the voice mail would have answered. Adopting a graveled voice, he said, "Sam's Mortuary, you stab 'em we slab 'em. Who do you need buried today?"

"James?"

"Okay, so the deceased person is named James. Where can we pick up the body?" James asked.

"James isn't deceased," his agent, Sam, answered taken aback by the question.

"Then why do you want to bury him?" James asked. Nancy was rolling her eyes and having a hard time keeping from laughing.

"Sorry, I have wrong number," Sam said and started to hang up. Groaning, he realized that James was in a mood to play. He caught himself and said, "James! That's not funny!"

Chuckling, James said, "I thought it was."

"You've got a sick sense of humor," Sam said in an irritated voice.

"If you say so," James said, "but I'm sure that you didn't call just to tell me that."

"Right."

"So why did you call?"

"There are a couple of chapters in your book that need to be modified a little," his agent said.

"Just a couple? Modified only a little? Gosh, I don't know if I can do that," James said. If his publisher had his way, he would end up changing the entire book. As far as he could tell, his publisher didn't have much of a sense of humor. He started to explain, "You see, if I start to change things then the whole story will unravel. The next thing you know there will be words spilling out the back of my computer and littering the floor. There would be other consequences besides having a mess to sweep up.

"Little character fragments will get trapped in this reality. They'll only be able to say a line or two in this world before fading out of view. The next thing you know, they would return ten minutes later to repeat it. They'd live forever in an edit loop waiting for some slob to hit the undo button on the word processor, but by then it would be too late.

"That reminds me of something and I've given it a lot of thought. There are a lot of folks who believe in ghosts. They aren't really the ghosts of dead people. Not at all. They are really characters who've been edited too much as a result of picky publishers. The torture their poor souls would..."

"Cut that out!" Sam said knowing that if James really got into it that they'd be on the phone all day. He swore that one day he'd tape record James and publish it as 'The Rants of James Leonard Foster.' It would be a best seller just because of the extremes that James usually took things.

"Shucks. Here I was just getting started. I didn't even have a chance to go overboard, yet."

"You went a little over board with the seven foot tall female cop with the gay short cop."

Smiling, James had known that his publisher wasn't going to like that. He asked, "Really? I thought it was quite humorous. I was pretty sure that he'd get an erection reading that part of the story."

"Like I said before, you have a sick sense of humor. Harvey wants you to change the characters a little," his agent said making reference to the publisher.

"I could make the tall cop a lesbian too," James said in what he hoped sounded like a helpful tone of voice.

"You know what I mean."

"Okay, how about I give the short one a stutter so that when he hits on the hero it takes him twenty minutes to say it," James said.

There was a low growl over the phone. Harvey, the publisher, didn't have the right to force any major changes to the story, but he could request some minor alterations to make it more suitable for publication. Sam said, "Cut it out."

"The whole chapter?"

"Stop making jokes. This isn't funny. Harvey is very upset, particularly since you named the gay cop after him," Sam said. His ears were still ringing from that discussion.

"Oh, so that's the problem. Harvey is always telling me how sexy my heroes are. I thought I would give him a chance to live vicariously through my story a little," James said winking at Nancy.

"Harvey is not gay! He's just a little effeminate," Sam said.

"Okay. We'll change the name of the cop to Poindexter," James said. He always had wanted to meet a cop by that name.

"You will?" Sam asked hopefully.

"Sure, why not," James said. Such a little change meant that Harvey had something even bigger that he wanted changed.

"Now about the love scene where they hit heads..."

"Not changing that for all of the money in the world," James said. He meant that.

"At least give her some breasts," Sam pleaded.

"She's got breasts," James said feeling particularly proud of his description of them.

"Reading that section made me think she had pancakes instead of muffins for breasts," Sam said.

"Sometimes I'd much rather have pancakes for breakfast than muffins," James said. The comment earned him a puzzled look from Nancy.

"Look, you described it as though someone had turned her around and glued erasers to her back. No tits and no aureoles, just large pink nipples sticking up from a broad expanse of skin," Sam said reading the offending sentence.

"Such a way with words -- nipples sticking up from a broad expanse of skin. It almost sounds like poetry. Did anyone tell you that you should be a writer?" he said. Nancy shook her head at the description. She wondered where he came up with things like that.

"Those are your words," Sam growled.

"Gosh, maybe I am a writer after all," James said with a laugh.

"Look, you can leave in the comic relief that you call a sex scene if you give her real breasts," Sam said.

"It's too late for that. She's a little old for them to grow in now. I'll have to give her silicon breasts. Rock hard mountains of flesh supported from within by silicon and topped with aureole like snowcaps -- nipples jutting up to the sky like radio towers signaling her excitement to the world at large."

"You are one sick man," Sam said shaking his head. The sad thing was that he actually enjoyed that description.

As images of John Denver singing Rocky Mountain High flashed through her mind, Nancy said, "That's horrible."

"Just give her large breasts without going to a plastic surgeon," Sam said.

"I can't do that. She has this whole history of going through life flat- chested. If I give her real breasts, I'll have to change the entire story," James said.

Sam frowned and looked over at his copy of the manuscript. He said, "There wasn't anything about that in the book."

"Maybe it didn't make it into the book, but that's her history and I'm sticking with it," James said.

"You're sick," Sam said looking up to heaven wondering how he kept walking into these kinds of exchanges.

"You keep saying that," James said, "Maybe one of these days I'll believe you."

"I'm sure that Harvey will accept fake breasts," Sam said giving up while he was ahead. He was pretty sure that James would suggest that one breast was a full cup size larger than the other.

"I've got an idea," James said.

"I'd rather not hear it," Sam said cutting him off before he could begin.

"So that's it. Change the name of the gay cop and have the heroine visit a plastic surgeon. Anything else?" James asked.

"Just one more little thing," Sam said taking a deep breath.

'This is the kicker, ' James thought. There was always one major thing the publisher wanted changed regardless of what kind of story it was. The only reason the publisher called his agent was because he wanted James to make some major change to the story. His publisher hoped the agent would be able to talk him into it based on career rather than literary reasons. He asked, "What is it?"

"Uh, drop the last chapter," Sam said.

"What?" James shouted a little louder than necessary, "He wants me to rewrite the last chapter? It was the best chapter of the whole book."

There was a long moment of silence on the phone while Sam tried to recover his hearing. He had known that James would react like that. After counting to ten, he said, "He wants you to drop the last chapter, not rewrite it."

"Oh," James said with a grin. He should have been able to predict that. He asked, "What didn't he like about having the hero walk off into the sunset? I even had that in my outline. Don't all heroes walk off into the sunset after saving the heroine?"

"Not when they are standing on the edge of a cliff," Sam said thinking about Sir Author Conan Doyle who tried to kill off Sherlock Holmes. James' hero wasn't a Sherlock Holmes, but he was popular and could probably fill another couple of novels before the audience tired of him.

"I wasn't graphic. I just had two final words. 'Oh Shit... ' It was a merest hint of disaster," James said. The last chapter was less than half a page in which his hero, Dr. Dud, stood on the edge of a cliff admiring the sunset and then walked into it.

"Well, it was just too much of a hint. You do want to keep earning royalties in the future, don't you?"

"What's that got to do with it?" James asked knowing exactly what his agent was going to say.

"You can't kill off a popular hero if you plan to earn money writing sequels," Sam said knowing they had covered this matter on the last two books.

"Really? You mean I can't do a Son of Doctor Dud?"

"You could if he had a son," Sam answered. He wasn't quick enough to mention that there wasn't such a son.

"Well, he did have rather inept sex with the heroine in this book. I thought that getting her pubic hair caught in his watch was the height of literary creativity for a sex scene. Who knows what such a masterful performance in bed could produce?" James said winking at Nancy. She grimaced at the thought of having her pubic hair caught in his watch.

Sam groaned over the telephone. He knew it was too late to stop James.

Getting into the spirit of things, James added, "I'm sure that a son could have resulted from that. I even have a great name for him. I'd call him, Art Dud and make him a painter. I'd even give him a business card with his name on it, A. Dud."