"I remember we were nervous." I felt a little embarrassed: not much about her had stuck with me. "Didn't you read the tarot for me once?"
She nodded. "It was on the last night of the workshop. The cards said your writing would make you happy and you took it as a joke." She fished the cherry out of her manhattan "Such a skeptic." She nibbled it. "You don't believe in magic, do you?"
"No. Can't say that I do."
"But you use it sometimes in your work."
"A literary convention. Readers accept it without believing in it."
"I've seen some things that would curl your hair. Down in the jungles, high in the altiplano. Laws start to break down. Government laws and the laws of science are intertwined, you know, interdependent. When one fails, the other no longer applies." I guess my eyes were glazing; she must have noticed. "But you don't believe that," she said and popped the rest of the cherry into her mouth.
"No, I guess I don't. But I've never been in a jungle. I suppose I should try to keep an open mind."
"But you won't." And then she laughed and I laughed too. She could really be quite charming when she tried. We talked for a while about the writer's life. She wanted to know how much I got paid for the stuff she'd read and couldn't believe it when I told her. "But you can't live on that. You'd have to write forty, fifty stories a year."
"One reason people write novels," I said. "But I'm really lucky: I have an understanding wife. Who works."
Celeste let that go by. "What would you say if someone offered you double the going rate? Say as a commission to write a certain story?"
"Why? You going into publishing? Celeste Montero's Riveting Magic Realism Magazine?"
"Maybe someone has a story she wants told."
I patted her hand.
"Kessel gets jealous if I collaborate with strange women."
"And what about the understanding wife?"
"Barbara trusts my judgment." I thought she was just flirting. "At least in literary matters."
She nodded. "Well, I'm not talking about a collaboration anyway. You write it your way--do your best work--sell it where you want and collect. You just put certain things in: people, places."
I shook my head. "I don't like it. First I have to make some kind of emotional connection with my characters. Everything flows from that."
The waitress returned; Celeste ordered a rum coke and then excused herself. She was gone a long time. Her rum coke came; I finished her manhattan. Finally she returned and started to tell me about herself. And wouldn't stop.
)
While attending an sf convention, James Patrick Kelly is propositioned (ahem) to work on a project that reveals more about an overbearing colleague than he really wants to know. (Note that while the people in this story are real, none of the events depicted actually took place, it's fiction).
