George Dunn sat in his cubicle at Peapod Press, a space small enough that if he stretched his long arms, he could nearly touch the fabric walls on either side. His pole-vault legs had never fit properly under the laminate desk, and he had to contort himself to avoid bruises on his knees. He’d spent much of the last hour working on edits to Up the Hill, though he should have been attending to the manuscripts piled two feet high on his desk and three feet on the floor.
When it came to reading submissions, George was old-fashioned, preferring printouts to electronic copies, even as he regretted the harm to the environment. He was also slow. Too slow, he’d been told numerous times by Ryan, Peapod’s publisher and editor-in-chief, and it was true. A tide of manuscripts flooded Peapod’s offices, and George gave each one too many chances to win him over. If the opening chapter didn’t succeed, he waited to see if the second one would. If the characters were flat, he thought of ways to make them compelling. He hesitated to reject them (though that was overwhelmingly what he had to do), because as a writer himself he knew what had gone into even the weakest manuscripts and how much hope was riding on them.
His phone chimed and a Crave notification appeared on the screen. It looked like someone was congratulating him on his success. Janelle, his agent, had posted the announcement that his book had sold on all her social media channels that morning. He supposed he should do the same, but he had mixed feelings about sharing the news. It felt like bragging, though everyone did it. At Peapod, he expected his writers to promote their work that way.
He tapped his phone and read P.J. Larkin’s nibble, then read it again, hoping it didn’t say what he thought it said. From the back of his chair, he grabbed a shapeless blue track jacket and pulled it on before reading the nibble again.
George remembered Larkin’s novel precisely because, like his book, it was about a politician who sexually assaults a subordinate, though that’s where the similarities ended. He’d admired Larkin’s choice to tell the story in part from the villain’s point of view, and it had inspired him to add a few chapters to Up the Hill in the abuser’s voice. That wasn’t plagiarism. Authors borrowed techniques from one another all the time. George emailed a copy of the nibble to Mary Chu, the editor at Saturn Books who’d bought his novel. “I read this woman’s manuscript,” he wrote, “but I already had a complete draft of mine. Other than both being #metoo books, they’re quite different.” He didn’t tell her about the change Larkin’s novel had inspired him to make.
The nibble had no munches. No one had nibbled back, either. Maybe no one would.
Join the meal—munch the nibble to show your approval or nibble back with thoughts of your own! the app prompted. George could almost hear the annoying sound the app made when you munched, that loud crunch like someone eating potato chips in a movie theater when you were trying to hear the dialog.
He clicked on P.J. Larkin’s bio and discovered that she drove for Ride With Me. He’d have to remember to use a different rideshare company. She wasn’t popular on Crave. He closed the app, then silenced his phone so he could focus on work.
On his desk, a jar labeled Best Value Olives held pens famous authors had recommended in an article about book signings. George picked out a thin Sharpie favored by a National Book Award winner and uncapped it. Flipping over the title page of a manuscript he was about to reject, he practiced the new, dramatic signature he was working on for signing copies of Up the Hill. When the page was covered with his name, he turned over the table of contents and filled that, too, before depositing the manuscript in the recycle bin.
Within the hour, Mary emailed back. “Don’t worry. Her agent submitted her book to us, too. It’s very different from yours.”
He supposed a claim like Larkin’s was just part of his new life as the author of a Big Book. His agent had assured him Up the Hill would be a Big Book because of the huge advance the publisher had offered. They’d need to sell an enormous number of copies to recoup their investment, and they’d throw the weight of the company and its powerful marketing division behind the novel to make that happen.
George could hardly believe his success. For the past thirteen years, he’d toiled in obscurity, editor for a small New York publisher whose books were purchased by a few hundred readers and then disappeared. He’d done everything there: read manuscripts, wrote cover blurbs, copyedited, proofread, checked layouts, sent out promotional copy. The advance was like winning the lottery. He’d signed the Saturn contract earlier that day, ten times thicker than the ones Peapod offered its authors and full of dense legal jargon, but the advance was straightforward enough: a million dollars. A sum he associated with sports figures and investment bankers, not writers.
He’d woken at two o’clock that morning sure he’d gotten the number wrong or dreamed the deal entirely, but when he checked his desk, the contract was there and inside it that elephantine sum. Yet even as he’d held the document, squinting at it in the dim light of his desk lamp, he craved assurance that it wasn’t a mistake, a misprint in the amount or in his name, a miracle meant for someone else. But he couldn’t ask his agent or Mary for reassurance. He had to act as if he deserved the money. He had to pretend the book was worthy of acclaim, though he wasn’t sure if it was any good at all. He just knew he wanted people to read it. And to be heard, to make up for the time when he hadn’t been, when it had actually mattered.
From the alley behind Peapod’s offices, he video-called his wife Kiara. “What are you doing?”
“Working?”
“Can you talk? For a minute?”
“Where are you?” she said.
“Outside.” Where the brick building met the asphalt, the usual detritus had collected: a Milky Way wrapper, an empty Bud Light bottle, a thick patch of lipsticked cigarette butts, as if someone had planted and watered them and their crop had finally come in.
“Hold on.” Kiara got up and closed her door. “What’s wrong?”
“The sale of my book was announced in Publishers Marketplace today. I’m famous. Kind of.”
“We’ll celebrate tonight.”
“We already celebrated,” George said.
“We’ll celebrate again.” Kiara wore a peach suit, a color that had been in style for less than a minute five years before. It didn’t matter. It wasn’t her clothes you remembered after meeting her, but rather the kindness that enlarged her russet eyes and smoothed the worry lines etched between them.
“A woman accused me of stealing her book. On Crave.”
“That’s weird.”
“Her agent sent it to Peapod a while back, and I read it, and we turned it down. It was about sexual assault.”
“Like your book,” Kiara said.
“Not really. It’s a big subject.”
“She must be mad you rejected it.”
“Funny thing is, I really liked it. I liked the voice. I cared about the characters. It made me cry.” In the sunless alley, he shivered, wishing for something warmer than the thin track jacket.
“Why didn’t you publish it?”
“We felt there were too many books like it.” Which wasn’t exactly true. He’d liked the novel enough to recommend to Ryan that Peapod publish it, and the editor-in-chief had read it and agreed. George had typed up an email to Larkin’s agent lavishly praising the novel’s straightforward prose and how well she captured the psychology of victim and abuser and the political climate of Washington, D.C. But then, reading the email over, he became afraid that if they published her book there would be less room for his own #metoo novel when the time came. Larkin’s book deserved an audience. Readers would identify with the protagonist and it would help them process their own #metoo trauma. The fact that it had been sent to Peapod meant Larkin’s agent was running out of options. George wasn’t planning to publish Up the Hill at a small publisher like Peapod. He had bigger hopes for it even then. But if his hopes didn’t pan out, if large publishers had moved past #metoo, or if they rejected his book for reasons that had nothing to do with its quality but because certain tastemakers had decided novels that year should be set exclusively on volcanic islands or written entirely without possessive pronouns, then he liked the idea of his book having somewhere soft to land. He deleted the offer in the last sentence of the email and replaced it with a rejection, writing that the market was saturated with #metoo books. He knew it meant Larkin’s novel might never be published, the years she’d spent writing it wasted.
“Did you nibble back?” Kiara said.
“Mary said to ignore it.”
“Probably best. Sorry that happened on your big day.”
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From A Complete Fiction by R. L. Maizes. Used with permission of the publisher, IG Publishing. Copyright © 2025 by R. L. Maizes.
