Pretty standard as far as Hollywood meetings go, Brett responds. They were just getting a sense of you as a person. Hard offers don’t come until later. Not sure what’s going on with Jasmine, though it does seem like the main interest is coming from Justin. I’ll keep you updated if there’s any news.
I’m impatient to hear more, but this is how things are. Publishing crawls. Gatekeepers sit on manuscripts for months, and meetings happen behind closed doors while you’re dying from anticipation on the outside. Publishing means no news for weeks, until you’re standing in line at Starbucks or waiting for the bus, and your phone pings with the email that will change your life.
So I head down into the metro, put my Hollywood dreams on hold, and wait for Brett to inform me that I’m about to become a millionaire.
I try to temper my expectations. After all, the vast majority of options deals go nowhere. All that an option means is that the production company has exclusive rights to package the story into something a studio might want to buy. The vast majority of projects linger in development hell, and very few ever get green-lit by studio executives. I learn this over the next few hours as I scour the internet for articles about this process, catching myself up on industry terminology and trying to gauge how excited I should be.
I’m probably not getting my Warner Bros. film. I probably won’t be a millionaire. The hype could still help me, though—I could still make some tens of thousands of dollars from Greenhouse’s option offer. I could sell a few thousand more copies based on the publicity from that deal alone.
And there’s always that elusive, tempting “maybe.” Maybe this will get picked up by Netflix, or HBO or Hulu. Maybe the film will be a massive hit, and they’ll do another print run of my book with the movie poster on the cover, and I’ll get to attend the premiere in a dress tailor-made for me, arm in arm with the handsome Asian actor they cast to play A Geng. Elle Fanning will star as Annie Waters, and we’ll take a cute selfie together at the premiere like the one Athena once took with Anne Hathaway.
Why not dream big? I’ve found, as I keep hitting my publishing goalposts, that my ambitions get larger and larger. I got my embarrassingly large advance. I got my bestseller status, my major magazine profiles, my prizes and honors. Now, with the sickly sweet taste of the Miss Saigon lingering on my tongue, all that feels paltry in comparison to what true literary stardom looks like. I want what Stephen King has, what Neil Gaiman has. Why not a movie deal? Why not Hollywood stardom? Why not a multimedia empire? Why not the world?
Eleven
THE ATTACKS START ON TWITTER.
The first tweet comes from an account named @Athena LiusGhost, created earlier this week; no profile picture, no words in the bio:
Juniper Song, aka June Hayward, did not write The Last Front. I did. She stole my book, stole my voice, and stole my words. #SaveAthena.
Then, dated a few hours later, several sickening follow-ups in the thread.
June Hayward befriended me a few years ago to get closer to my process and my work. She came over often to my apartment, and I would catch her rooting through my notebooks when she thought I wasn’t looking.
The proof is in black and white. Read my previous novels. Compare them to the prose in The Last Front. Read June’s debut novel, and ask yourself: is The Last Front a novel a white woman could have written?
For let’s be clear: Juniper Song Hayward is a white woman.
She’s using the pen name Juniper Song to pretend to be Chinese American. She’s taken new author photos to look more tan and ethnic, but she’s as white as they come. June Hayward, you are a thief and a liar. You’ve stolen my legacy, and now you spit on my grave.
Shame on June. Shame on Eden Press. Daniella Woodhouse must withdraw the current edition from bookstores and return the rights to Athena’s mother, Patricia Liu. All future editions should be published under Athena’s name alone.
Do not let injustice stand. #SaveAthena.
There’s a penultimate tweet tagging over a dozen prominent Twitter accounts, begging them to RT for visibility.
Then a final tweet, tagging me.
My vision’s gone fuzzy by the time I read to the end. I take a breath, and my bedroom tilts. I can’t stand up; I can hardly move. My mind’s fizzled out; I can’t form coherent thoughts anymore, I can only click REFRESH on @AthenaLiusGhost’s page, reading the tweets over and over again, watching as the thread slowly gains traction. In the first several hours, it garnered no likes, and I had a wild hope that this, like all crazy fringe accounts, would just fade into the ether. But all those tags must have grabbed it some attention, because fifteen minutes after I first see it, people start responding to the thread. Some book blogger with six thousand followers retweets the first tweet, and then some aspiring author who’s gone viral several times for their literary “hot takes” (which mostly have boiled down to “y’all need to take a critical reading course” and “not all villains are problematic”) quote tweets it with the addition Sickening if true. Oh my god. And then the floodgates are open. People start replying:
Are you fucking serious?
Where’s the proof?
Always thought there was something off about Song. Hmm.
Sounds like another Yalie “prodigy” is just a big, lying fraud.
WTF!!! SEND HER ASS TO JAIL!
I can’t move away from my laptop. Even when I finally get up to pee, my eyes remain glued to my phone. The healthy thing to do would be to shut down all my devices, but I can’t step back. I have to watch the whole disaster unfold in real time, have to see exactly who has retweeted it and who is responding.
Then the DMs start coming. They’re all from total strangers. I don’t know why I even open them, but I’m too curious, or too masochistic, to simply delete them.
Die, bitch.
June, have you seen these tweets? Are they true? You need to defend yourself if not.
You should burn in hell for what you did. Racist thieving whore.
You owe Mrs. Liu every cent in your bank account!!!
I was a fan of The Last Front. This is incredibly disappointing. You owe the entire book community a public apology, immediately.
I’m going to come to DC and beat the living shit out of you. Racist bitch.
It’s after that last one that I finally hurl my phone across my bed. Holy shit. My heartbeat is so loud in my eardrums that I stand up, pace around my apartment, wedge a chair under my front door (no, I don’t think someone’s about to barge in and murder me, it just feels that way), and then curl up on my bed, where I pull my knees up to my chest and rock back and forth.
Oh my God.
Oh my God.
It’s all over. People know. The whole world is about to know. Daniella will find out, Eden will fire me, I’ll lose all my money, Mrs. Liu will sue me, she’ll decimate me in court, Brett will drop me as a client, my career will be over, and I’ll go down in literary history as the bitch who stole Athena Liu’s work. They’ll make a Wikipedia page about me. They’ll write endless think pieces about me. You won’t be able to mention my name among industry professionals without knowing sneers and awkward laughter. I’ll be a meme. And not a single word I write will ever be published again.
Why in God’s name did I publish The Last Front? I want to kick my former self for being so stupid. I thought I was doing something good. Something noble—to bring Athena’s work into the world the way it deserved. But how could I ever have imagined this wouldn’t all come back to bite me in the ass?
I’ve been so stable up until now. I’ve done such a good job of managing my anxiety, of focusing on the present instead of all my terrors and insecurities, of compartmentalizing the horror of where and how I got my hands on that original manuscript, of moving on. And it all comes flooding back now—Athena’s hands flying to her throat, her bluing face, her feet drumming against the ground.
Oh God, what have I done?