“Look Lizzie, it’s not bad, but you gotta cut this clockwork guy. You sell yourself as hardcore horror, you can’t have a protag who’s actually a protag. Stick to the anti-heroes, alright? They’ve done you well.”
Criticism was never easy to take, but Elizabeth Crimson was especially bad at it. Temper as it was, she was lucky she could keep an agent for more than a month, let alone a publisher. So instead of having a rational conversation about branching out and exactly why the character of Time was so important to the themes of eternity, she swiped the manuscript off the table, drove home without a word, and threw the words she had so lovingly worked on for the last three years into the fire.
Now, she would admit, fantasy was not something that came naturally to her. But this story, unlike any before it, was inspired. She knew it! A dark fantasy of Time – here personified as a clockwork automaton – facing mortality of everything, learning what happened to those souls once they’d been laid to rest.
She scowled, tears in her eyes as she watched three years of labor get swallowed up in smoke and flames, tossing the dim remains of her cigarette in after it. Not feeling up to clubbing or skeeving, she took straight to gin and bed, the last words of her wayward novel ringing in her ears.
“Everyone parts with everything eventually, my dear.”