Read The House on Olive Street for Free Online

people and things. They doubled the size of the family room. At least the result included an expanded master bedroom upstairs, a sitting room and dormer in which Barbara Ann could work and store her writing business. They built a detached garage—the original two-port garage barely kept the rain off their bicycles and athletic gear. Now they were a six-car family. Her driveway and the street in front of their house looked like a used-car lot. The boys had inherited their father’s flair for mechanics, so every vehicle but hers was in a constant state of repair or improvement. They put in a pool and laid a slab of concrete for a basketball hoop. There was a lawn mower motor that Mike had been meaning to repair all winter sitting in her bedroom, for God’s sake. Every dime of her book money went to household improvements to make it seem as though they weren’t stuffed into this large house.
    Her income had grown without her work going better, without her feeling more successful. She had entered the business on a wild lark nine years ago. A friend of hers had taken up writing category romances and miraculously sold a book. Barbara Ann followed, quite literally. She joined a writers’ group, attended several seminars and conferences, read dozens, if not hundreds, of romances, set up a typewriter in the bedroom and took on the challenge. Within two years she sold her first book. She sold a second before the first was out. Her income in three years’ time was seven thousand. In four years it was twelve thousand. In five years it was twenty-two and in six years it was forty-six. Now, soon to release her twenty-sixth novel, her income this year would be in the neighborhood of sixty-eight thousand.
    Wasn’t that a lot of money?
    Not for all that had gone wrong. Or, rather, had not gone. She had a twenty-seven-year-old editor who had insisted she revise and rewrite her last proposal twice, taking her three months to get a final, twelve-page draft that they would accept and pay her the first half of a ten-thousand-dollar advance. She was averaging three paperbacks a year and the woman who was accepting or rejecting her work was an art major who’d worked her way up to editor nine months ago. In her nine years of writing, struggling in this business, Barbara Ann had watched several acquaintances shoot past her, personally knowing too many who’d signed million-dollar multi-book deals. Their writing was no better than hers! Their books were not that much different! And Barbara Ann was still toiling, writing her ass off at least forty hours a week, and begging for these ten-thousand-dollar advances.
    “You haven’t developed a strategy yet,” Sable had told her.
    “Great. Give me a strategy. Tell me how you did it.”
    “You’re missing the point, Barbara Ann. There are fifty reasons why the way I did it won’t work for you. Some of the things I did twelve years ago don’t work now. The trends change too fast for you to catch up with them. The people in the business are all different. It’s not as though you can write the same type of book I write and get rich and famous. There are already a million books like mine that aren’t doing much.”
    “Then how the hell do you expect me to develop a strategy?”
    Heavy sigh. “Everyone has a personal version of success, Barbara Ann. Are you sure you want the same kind I have? Maybe true success is a happy family?”
    “Don’t be patronizing, just tell me how. Please!”
    “Well, I’ll try, but it’s just not the same for everyone, you see. You have to uncover what it is you can do better than anyone else, that hasn’t already been done to death, and then you have to find the right people to help you do it and then you have to go about selling it in ways that haven’t already been tried by every other midlist author. It’s very cagey and creative and above all, individual. Plus, it is loaded with risks. You have to decide if you like where you are—which brings in