Turbulence

Page 66

 
 
Write later somewhere else,
**Taylor G.**
1 comment posted:
KayTROLL: So...Do I still need to comment on these posts now that we’ve met up in person? Let me know!
 
 
GATE C39

GILLIAN
Eight Weeks Earlier... I stared at my blank screen and held back tears. Time wasn’t healing anything between me and Jake, and every second without him was only making things worse.
It was taking everything in me not to call and reach out to him, and I knew I was being foolish by picking the lines with the absolute worst routes so we wouldn’t cross paths, but I couldn’t bear to see him in person right now.
Our last argument still left me feeling raw and allowed me to see that we’d finally reached the end of our relationship. There was nowhere else for us to go, and we needed to stay the hell away from each other before we ended up being even more messed up than we already were.
Unable to write a long blog post, I simply wrote, “I think this really was the end for us,” and hit publish. Before I could shut down my laptop, there was a soft pinging sound. An immediate comment from my personal troll.
(KayTROLL)—I’m pretty sure he’s thinking about you just as much as you’re thinking about him. Just my two cents. If I were you, I wouldn’t lose too much sleep over it.
I’d never responded to his troll-ish comments before, but with Meredith out of town and no one else to vent to, I typed a response.
(Taylor G.)—No, I think this was finally the end for us. It feels different this time.
(KayTROLL) You always say that. Then two days later, you go right back. (I’m not holding my breath on this one. Sorry.)
I groaned, typing. “Well, CLEARLY this time is different because it’s been more than two days. It’s been damn near TWO MONTHS to be exact, so quite honestly? Fuck you and your “two cents.” Since you clearly don’t have a life, go find yourself another random and obscure blog to bother on a daily basis, please. I don’t have anything else for you.”
There was one more reply before I logged off. A brief, “LOL. Still a hothead, I see. :-)”.
I couldn’t think of a decent biting rebuttal, so I slammed the laptop shut altogether and fell back against my sheets. I needed to figure out a way to be re-assigned to a different home-base city as soon as possible.
As I was thinking of the best possible excuse for a transfer, my phone rang. My mom. I immediately silenced her call. I didn’t need any additional doses of negativity right now.
It rang once more minutes later, but my finger hovered over the silent button. It wasn’t my Mom attempting a second call. It was a number I hadn’t seen in forever. One I’d avoided and loathed for years.
“Kimberly B”...
***
Her full name was Kimberly Bronson, and she was once my literary agent.
She scooped me up fresh out of graduate school—admiring my talent, promising me what every aspiring author secretly wanted: A book deal.
She swooned over my words with her infectious personality, and pitched my ideas to publishers while I interned under an esteemed editor at The New York Times.
Back then—just a few short years ago, life as a writer was good.
Publishers were handing out book deals like brownies—baking them early in the morning and holding them out for whoever wanted a taste in the afternoon. Magazines were hiring the eager-faced girl with ambition and a smile, and newspapers were printing about their infinite number of internships because there was so much that needed to be written. So much that needed to be said.
No one really cared who you knew, it was what you wrote. And as for me, small town girl from the outskirts of Massachusetts, even I wasn’t looked at like the know-nothing girl from a city no one gave a second-thought about. I was a fast-rising editor at one of the biggest papers in the country, and according to my supervisors, I was going to be lead editor within just a few years.
I arrived to the office two hours early every morning—coffee for the superiors in hand, just to show them how hard I was willing to work. I did the work no one else wanted to do, completed the research that everyone else found mundane, and double checked the facts even after they were cleared by our legal team.
Six months into my job at The New York Times, I was assigned to write about the sudden troubles and countless crashes in the aviation industry, how most of the airlines (except Elite) couldn’t buy good publicity.
First, there was the Asian flight that disappeared over the Indian Ocean—so suddenly and mysteriously that no one could (and have yet to) figure out what happened. Next, there was a series of unexplainable crashes at American airports—all apparently triggered by pilots’ lack of emotional stability. And lastly, there was the final straw that thrust the industry into an uncontrollable tailspin: An American pilot, flying for a foreign carrier, deliberately crashed his plane into the side of a mountain, killing all one hundred and fifty passengers on board.
I reported on each of these stories, exhaustively writing and rewriting the facts, and then I realized that, maybe, all of these things needed further research. Maybe they needed to be a book. And maybe, just maybe, I should figure out what Elite was doing right to avoid the issues that plagued every other airline.
I sent the idea to Kimberly and within months, a handful of publishers asked for more additional details. Some passed, some never got further than the initial interest, but three large publishers did. After all the deals were laid on the table, we went with St. Martin’s Press, since they seemed the most enthusiastic about the idea.
For six months, I was supposed to go undercover as a flight attendant—to try and get the real scoop about Elite Airways and the airline industry. And at the end, we’d “add a bit of a fiction to it for liability’s sake,” but it was going to be marketed as “the closest true account ever printed.”
The book was to be titled, The Truth Behind the Mile High Club, but my author name wasn’t going to be my own. It was to be “Taylor G.” since “Gillian T.” and “Gillian Taylor” were “far too plain,” “not commercial enough” and “way too pretentious.”
Everything was set.
Or so I thought...
Unfortunately, it was a lot harder to get hired as an Elite Airways flight attendant than I’d originally anticipated. I failed the interview session three times, so I had to temporarily settle for being a part time gate agent. It also turned out that publishers have a short term attention span—especially when the introduction of e-books and Kindles began to cause change.
Slowly, the publishers laid off editors— claiming this had nothing to do with the rise of digital media. But then the magazines and newspapers began to hand out pink slips, and Fifth Avenue, once with one of the biggest stream of writers, became a dried up gorge of heartbroken dreamers.
What was once celebratory and new hire parties in the morning, became the clearing of desks and teary-eyed phone calls in the evening.
I paid no mind to that at first, though. I was still safely tucked in my internship, and working as a gate agent a few times a week; all while writing feverishly for six hours a night.
When I completed the first draft of my book, the editor at the publishing house decided that it only needed a few tweaks, so it was given a release date that was nine months away. I was promised a small promotional tour, advertising in all of the best bookstores, and a pretty big print run for a debut author.