We're so very nearly there now...
A Contemporary Satirical Fiction
A warm, British/Australian-style
sharply comic literary satire about books, writing, Hollywood, late-blooming
dreams and the real price of creative success. Funny and absurd on the surface,
but increasingly emotional underneath. A moving novel about what happens when
an ordinary man's lifelong dream finally comes true—and turns out to be
considerably more complicated than he'd hoped. Localad's decision about what
parts of himself aren't for sale is what makes the book matter.
More specifically, it sits
comfortably across:
- Satirical fiction — Hollywood, studio executives, market research, franchise culture, publishing, contracts and the commodification of creativity are all targets.
- Comic fiction — the humour is fundamental to the narrative voice rather than simply occasional jokes.
- Contemporary literary fiction — beneath the comedy, the novel is about ageing, grief, friendship, artistic integrity, regret, recognition and what actually constitutes a worthwhile life.
- Show-business / Hollywood satire — the transformation of Purradise from Localad's deeply personal manuscript into a Brick Holland action vehicle gives the middle of the novel a strong entertainment-industry satire.
- Late-life / second-chance fiction — Localad being sixty-four is important. This isn't the conventional story of a young writer trying to make it. It's about somebody discovering surprisingly late that the dream he thought had passed him by hasn't. And then discovering that getting the dream isn't necessarily the same thing as getting what he wanted.
- Books-about-books / metafiction-adjacent fiction — a novel about a novelist whose novel becomes a movie, after which the original novel becomes successful because readers ultimately discover that:
THE BOOK'S A LOT BETTER THAN THE MOVIE.
He spent twenty years writing his masterpiece. But Hollywood needed considerably less time to completely ruin it.
By day, he sells other people's stories. By night, he has spent twenty years writing his own. Purradise is an epic fantasy of cats, fallen knights, singing mountains, grief, courage and a mysterious Wound in the sky. Nobody has ever read it. Nobody is particularly likely to. And with the bank threatening to close Harbour & Page for good, Localad has rather more immediate problems to worry about than his literary immortality.
Then a Hollywood producer's car breaks down outside his shop. He enters to use the telephone and leaves with Localad's manuscript. And from there on in, everything goes magnificently, catastrophically wrong for his story.
Soon Localad is on his way to Los Angeles, where his deeply personal story is subjected to the full machinery of modern entertainment: studio executives, market research, script notes, franchise opportunities, demographic targeting and an action star named Brick Holland.
The cats became negotiable. The quiet bits are a problem. The ending needs a lot more explosions. And grief would test a lot better on screen if it involved considerably more revenge than the book offers. By the time Purradise reaches the red carpet, Localad can barely recognise the story carrying his name.
But Hollywood has overlooked one rather important thing. The original book still exists. And when readers finally discover it, eight innocent words begin spreading like wildfire across the internet:
It’s a warm, sharply funny and unexpectedly moving novel about books, writing, movies, friendship, late-blooming dreams, creative ownership, second chances and what happens when one ordinary man discovers that success and selling yourself are not necessarily the same thing.
Because sometimes the biggest story isn't about becoming famous at all. Sometimes it's about finally deciding which parts of yourself aren't for sale.
Now Before You Read any Further…
Stop.
Not for
long.
There is still
one hell of a chapter left for the last 32 posts you have just read, and I have absolutely no intention of keeping it
from you. That would just be cruel, manipulative and, depending upon where you
came across this book, possibly a breach of consumer law.
But we need
to discuss something.
Reviews.
Yes.
Those damned
review things.
Thirty two posts later, if you have
made it this far, you have spent a considerable amount of time with Localad,
Marjory, Desmond, Priya, Brick Holland and the inhabitants of Meridian Cove.
You have just survived Hollywood executives, lawyers, contracts, literary prizes,
explosions, independent booksellers and meetings attended by people who
possessed several notebooks but apparently no actual opinions.
You are
therefore more than qualified.
More
qualified, frankly, than some professional critics.
So, before
witnessing the final chapter of this story's success, I would like to ask you to please consider leaving
this book an honest review.
It doesn't
have to be an essay.
Five stars
and “Quite good, actually” would be perfectly acceptable.
Five stars
and “Changed my understanding of the human condition” would also be
acceptable, although perhaps difficult to defend under cross-examination.
Four stars
will be tolerated in good faith.
Three stars
will be investigated.
Two stars
will cause Marjory to sigh most disappointedly in your general direction and
could even set Mrs. Alvarez off.
One star
and Priya (the lawyer not the other one) will be in touch.
Of course,
this is not a threat.
Priya has
specifically advised me to make that clear, although Jasmine does carry a sword.
But the
truth is much simpler.
Reviews are what help books like this get noticed. They help complete strangers decide whether to take a
chance on a story they have never heard of, written by someone they have never
met. And sometimes that stranger tells another stranger.
And
another.
And
suddenly a small book like this isn't quite so small anymore.
Which, when
you think about it, is rather appropriate. Considering how this particular story went.
So, if this
story has made you laugh, think, swear at Hollywood, become emotionally
attached to a fictional bookshop, or simply postpone something more
responsible, please leave a review wherever you found it.
It would
mean an enormous amount.
Thank you. And go tell ten to tell ten, to tell ten. That's the way to do it.
Right.
The absolutely
humiliating begging portion of this programme is now concluded and we look
forward to hearing what you think.
Thanks again in advance. Ta ta for now.
Chapter Thirty-Two: The Final Page
Sitting peacefully in his busy bookstore, Localad begins
writing his next novel, knowing his first story had fully survived the machine.
Autumn turned to winter, and winter, in the
particular slow rhythm of Meridian Cove, turned eventually back to spring, and Harbour
& Page Booksellers stayed open through all of it, its shelves a little
fuller than they'd been two years earlier, its cracked bell finally, at Marjory's
quiet insistence, replaced with a new one that rang clean and bright every time
the door opened, though Localad found, in the weeks after the replacement, that
he missed the old broken sound more than he expected to, and kept the cracked
bell anyway, hung now on a nail behind the register, a small, private reminder
of everything the shop had survived to get here.
“You asked me to fix the old bell for years,” Marjory
said.
“I was preserving its voice.”
“You were procrastinating.”
“Those are neighbouring arts.”
Purradise had ceased being a phenomenon and become
something better too. It became a book in its own right. People discovered it after the noise
had moved elsewhere. Booksellers recommended it. Readers lent it, failed to get
it back and bought another copy. Its pages softened. Its covers bent. Sentences
were underlined by strangers Localad would never meet.
Purradise had settled, by then,
into a steady, unspectacular, entirely sustainable life as a genuine literary
success. Not a phenomenon anymore, not a viral sensation, simply a well-loved
book that continued to sell, quietly, print run after print run, to readers who
found it through word of mouth or through a bookseller's recommendation or,
occasionally, through the lingering long tail of a film adaptation that had,
itself, faded almost entirely from public conversation, remembered now mostly
as a footnote in articles about the book that had outlasted it. The film had faded now into streaming menus
under the category BECAUSE YOU PREVIOUSLY WATCHED SOMETHING WITH SWORDS.
Harbour & Page prospered modestly.
Modest prosperity suited the shop. Real wealth would
have made it nervous.
The roof no longer leaked. The heating worked in three
of the four corners. The History shelf had been reinforced in a manner that
respected both engineering and ideology.
Localad had started something new. He hadn't
told anyone yet, not even Marjory, exactly what it was about, a habit he'd
learned, this time, from experience, understanding now that a story needed its
own quiet, private space to grow before it was ready for anyone else's
opinions, even well-meaning ones.
At seven each morning, before the town had fully
assembled itself, Localad made coffee in his grandmother’s chipped press pot
and opened a fresh notebook.
Marjory, respected his boundaries while objecting to them
recreationally.
He wrote it the same way he'd written Purradise,
twenty years earlier and then again, more urgently, in the two years before
Desmond Ferris's car broke down outside his window: in the quiet hour before
the shop opened, coffee brewing in his grandmother's chipped press pot, note
book open on the counter, no one watching, no notes to satisfy, no deadline
dictated by anyone's marketing calendar.
He glanced up, one morning in early spring,
from the page he was working on, and looked around the shop — the shelves he'd
restocked himself, the New Releases table where his own book still held a place
of honour beside newer arrivals, the reading chair by the window where a
stranger had once sat down and read three chapters without looking up, the
small hand-painted sign in the window that still read, beneath the shop's
restored name, HOME OF PURRADISE. And he felt something settle over him that he
recognized, after a moment, as simple, uncomplicated contentment, a feeling he
had spent most of the last two years too busy or too frightened or too far from
home to properly notice.
Marjory came in a few minutes later, letting
the new bell ring its clean, bright note, carrying two coffees from the diner
because the shop's own coffee, she liked to say, was an acquired taste she'd
acquired decades ago and had no plans to inflict on herself before nine in the
morning.
"How's the new one coming?" she
asked, setting one coffee down beside his note book, careful not to look
directly at the page, because she had learned, over the years, exactly how much
space he needed before a story was ready to be read by anyone else.
"Slowly," he said. "Which I
think means it's coming along exactly right."
“Good slowly or avoiding-the-ending-for-two-decades
slowly?”
“Good slowly.”
She sat in the reading chair by the window.
The same chair Desmond had once occupied. The same
window through which Localad had watched the car die and his old life begin
making other arrangements.
"So what’s this new epic drama called?” she asked without
looking at his page.
Localad considered refusing an answer.
Instead, he turned the notebook slightly toward
himself, protecting the sentence while allowing the title to remain visible.
Marjory read it.
“Singular cat?”
“For now, but there will be more. A whole clutter or clowder
of them.”
“Will there be a film?”
“Absolutely not.”
“You said that very quickly.”
“I’m growing. And I’m deliberately writing out all
possibility of any cinematic release.”
What's it about then?"
He considered the question, turning his pen
over in his hand, looking out the shop's front window at the Harbour beyond it,
boats knocking gently against the pilings, the tide coming in the way it always
did, indifferent and constant and, somehow, exactly the amount of company he
needed on a morning like this one.
"I'm still finding out, but there will
be a lot of water in it" he said, which was true, and which was, he had
come to understand, the only honest answer a person could give about a story
still being written, still being protected, still being allowed to become
entirely and only itself before the rest of the world got a chance to have an
opinion about it.
He picked up his pen, and Marjory settled back into the reading chair by the window with her coffee and a paperback of her own.
The new bell rang as Mr. Okafor entered for his morning
newspaper.
Mrs. Alvarez followed with a tray of butter croissants
and a freshly cut rumour about the mayor, both of uncertain structural
integrity.
The shop slowly filled.
Localad closed his new notebook, served his customers
and repaired a child’s wooden boat with just a strip of sellotape and a sheet of
card.
At nine-thirty, when the brief rush of trade had passed, he
reopened the notebook.
In the new story, a fresh lead, Jasper-Cat, stood at the edge of a
world that had been told too many times what shape it ought to take.
The cat considered this world.
This newly created world, having met cats before, became
nervous.
Localad smiled and wrote his next sentence.
He did not know whether it was going to be any good yet.
But this no longer frightened him.
Outside, the tide came in without asking permission.
Inside, Harbour & Page held its books, its people and its repaired
punctuation. Marjory read by the window. The old bell hung behind the counter,
cracked but more or less complete.
Purradise had survived the machine. More importantly,
so had Localad. And so would what was coming.
And now, with no studios waiting, no market notes
arriving and no one telling him how loudly the ending ought to explode, he
began working on the next true thing.
The town of Meridian Cove went on with its
quiet morning, unaware and completely unbothered, the way it always had been,
of just how far one of its own had travelled, and how good it felt, finally, to
be back home, writing the next true thing, one honest page at a time.
The Book of CAT. Could it really be the next big thing?
THE
END
Chapter Thirty-One:
The Award Night
Localad wins the literary prize, delivering a
powerful acceptance speech about protecting creator rights.
The
Literary Foundation's Annual Calder Award Ceremony was held in a hotel ballroom in the
city two hours inland of the book store. It was considerably smaller and
quieter than the somewhat overpowering red-carpet premiere Localad had attended
a year and a half earlier. There were no photographers calling out names at the
door, no velvet ropes, no marquee with anyone's face on it at all. It was just
a room full of writers, editors, booksellers, and readers, several hundred
people who had, in one way or another, given their working lives to books.
Tonight, the carpet contained a pattern apparently
designed to conceal both spilt wine and existential collapse. There was no red
carpet, no screaming photographers and no enormous poster of Brick Holland
staring toward a horizon he intended to punch.
Localad
found, walking into that room in a suit he had chosen and bought himself, that
he felt more at ease than he had at any point during the entire, glittering,
exhausting Hollywood chapter of his life.
He felt immediately at home.
This room was all about books: and people whose formal
clothes looked borrowed from the more confident versions of themselves.
Marjory
sat beside him at a round table near the front, along with Priya, who had flown
out specifically for the occasion and had brought, unexpectedly, a bottle of
champagne she'd been saving, she said, "for exactly this kind of night."
A bottle of champagne and a folder,
because she did not trust celebration unaccompanied by documentation.
And there
was Mrs. Alvarez and Mr. Okafor, who had driven the two hours together and had
spent the entire ride, according to Mrs. Alvarez's own cheerful report, arguing
about whether the diner should stay open late to celebrate if Localad won.
Mrs. Alvarez wore sequins and informed three finalists
that Localad had once repaired her toaster.
Mr. Okafor wore a dark suit and the expression of a
man prepared to witness history without inconveniencing it.
Localad won.
His name was called.
For several seconds he remained seated because the
name belonged to an author and his body had not been informed that this now
included him.
Marjory squeezed his arm.
“Stand up.”
He did.
The
moment itself passed strangely, the way Localad imagined most such moments must
pass for everyone who experienced them. A name being called, his own name, a beat of
disbelief before his body remembered how to stand, applause that felt both
enormous and somehow very far away, Marjory's hand gripping his arm for one
brief second before he had to let go of her to walk to the stage.
He
had written a speech, of sorts, three different drafts of it sitting folded in
his jacket pocket, and standing at the podium under lights considerably gentler
than a soundstage's, he found that none of the drafts felt right, and he set
them all aside and spoke, instead, from the same place he'd been speaking from
since the very beginning of all of this. Plainly, honestly, without polish,
the way he'd learned to write only after twenty years of trying to write some
other, fancier ways first.
At the podium he unfolded his speech, looked at it and
placed it aside.
"I
wrote this book at a counter in a bookstore that was, for a long time,
failing," he began. “Mostly before
opening, because fear is easier to manage before customers arrive.”
The room laughed.
“I
wrote it for twenty years. This was not discipline. Well, some of it was
discipline. But a considerable portion was avoidance with stationery.”
He spoke about the bad novel that had made him angry
enough to finish. About Marjory telling him courage was doing the thing while
frightened. About selling the film rights and paying the debt that would have
closed Harbour & Page.
"I
wrote it because I was angry at a bad novel I'd read, and because I was scared
of finishing something that might turn out to not be good enough, and because a
friend of mine told me once that being brave doesn't mean not being scared. it
means doing the thing anyway, while scared. I sold the film rights to this book
eighteen months ago, and I want to say, honestly, that I don't regret that
decision. I don’t regret taking
the money. It paid off a debt that
would most certainly have closed my family's shop. It's not a story where the
money was the villain. The villain, if there was one, was believing gratitude required agreement. For a
while, every note arrived wrapped in praise, and I treated the praise as a
debt. I thought saying no would make me difficult, unprofessional or
ungrateful.”
He found Desmond’s face in memory, Trent’s conference
room, Priya’s clauses, Brick’s unexpected kindness and the film’s enormous
artificial sky.
“A story can survive many changes,” he continued. “But
every story has a few things that are not decoration. They are load-bearing
truths. You are allowed to know what they are. You are allowed to protect them.
And you should decide before the room becomes expensive and everyone in it
tells you that surrender is collaboration.”
The room was silent.
He
paused, finding Marjory's face in the crowd, steadying himself against it
before he continued.
“My three things were Jasmine, the sword and the Wound
staying open. It took me far too long to understand that the third thing was
also about me.”
He lifted the glass award.
“It isn't the same thing. I learned that the
hard way, and I'm standing here tonight holding this award because, eventually,
I learned it in time to do something about it. To every writer in this room who
has a story that someone with more money than you is asking you to make louder,
smaller, faster, easier to sell in fifteen seconds, I'd just ask you to
remember that you're allowed to know which three things matter most, and to
protect them, even when protecting them costs you something you thought you
couldn't live without. I promise you, you can live without it. What you can't
live without is the story being actually, truly yours, all the way to the
end."
The
applause that followed lasted longer than Localad expected, and he stood at the
podium holding the award, a simple glass plaque, considerably less ostentatious
than anything he'd seen handed out at the film's premiere a year and a half
earlier, and, to him, immeasurably more valuable. It did not shake walls or generate content. But it
meant more.
Localad thought, with a clarity
that felt like the culmination of everything he'd been through since a
stranger's car broke down outside his shop, that he had never once, in this
entire strange and difficult journey, felt more certain that he had made the
right choice than he did in this exact moment.
The applause rose for one last time.
Afterward, Priya opened the champagne.
Mrs. Alvarez, famed for her poise, tact and diplomacy, drank from the award because she mistook
it for a strangely shaped glass.
Mr. Okafor shook Localad’s hand twice.
Marjory kissed him where everyone could see.
For once, Localad did not become embarrassed.
He had spent much of his life imagining himself being grand
in secret. Standing in that modest ballroom, holding an award for the quiet
ending he had nearly been afraid to write, he finally understood that grandeur
was not being watched by everyone.
It was about knowing what you had done when the room went
quiet.
Thank you for reading thus far. Click here to read the full story from the beginning.
Chapter Thirty: Standing Tall
Localad turns down millions, choosing his own
artistic independence over Hollywood fame.
Localad’s latest refusal had made its way, eventually, into the same industry newsletters that had
once covered the film's disappointing opening weekend, framed this time, more as a
curiosity.
The industry reported Localad’s refusal as though he
had recently declined the presence of gravity.
SELF-PUBLISHED AUTHOR REJECTS MILLIONS!
PURRADISE CREATOR WALKS AWAY FROM FRANCHISE!
AUTHOR
TURNS DOWN STUDIO SEQUEL DEAL, CITES ARTISTIC INDEPENDENCE!
ONE MAN SAYS NO TO HOLLYWOOD!
This final headline was totally inaccurate. Many
people had said no to Hollywood. Most of them simply did not receive a full-on press
release immediately afterward.
Customers arrived at the store to congratulate him on his immense courage.
Some even asked whether he had lost his mind. Several actually managed both in the same
sentence.
Mrs. Alvarez placed the article beside the till and then charged tourists fifty cents each to hear “the real story,” which somehow contained three
invented helicopters and a fistfight in the studio lobby.
“There was no fistfight,” Localad said.
“Not with that attitude.”
"And helicopters?"
Localad
found, reading the coverage from behind his own counter weeks later, that he
felt almost nothing about it at all, no vindication, no regret, simply the
quiet, settled satisfaction of a decision he had already made peace with, before
anyone else had a chance to weigh in on it.
Marjory
asked him about it only once, directly, on a walk along the harbour one evening
in early autumn, the same walk Localad used to take alone after closing the
shop, back before any of this had happened, back when Purradise was still a
secret he kept from the whole town except for the woman walking beside him right now.
"Do
you ever think about the money?" she asked. "Not to second-guess you.
I'm just curious whether it's a clean no, or whether some part of you still
turns it over."
He
considered the question honestly, the way he tried to consider most things she
asked him, because she had a talent for asking the version of a question that
actually needed answering rather than the version that was easy to answer
politely.
"I
think about it sometimes," he admitted. "Not the way you'd expect,
though. I don't think about what I'd do with the money. I think about the
version of me who took the first deal, eighteen months ago, sitting on that box
of paperbacks in the back room, and how certain he was that the money was the
whole point, the only point, the thing that would finally prove the book, and
by extension, himself to be worth something. I feel for that version of me. I
don't think he was wrong to say yes. I just think he didn't yet know what
saying yes was going to cost."
"And
now?"
"Now I know the cost," he said. "And knowing it, this offer wasn't actually that hard to say no to. I already have the thing the money was supposed to buy me. I have proof the story matters. It's sitting on my own shelves, in my own words, selling to people who found it themselves because they wanted to, not because a trailer told them to. That's worth more to me than another six figures in the bank and another eighteen months of somebody else deciding how loud my ending gets to be. Now the book matters without needing me to sell it again.”
“That isn’t what I asked.”
He smiled. Marjory did not allow emotional answers to
disguise themselves as literary criticism.
“Yes,” he said. “Sometimes I imagine the roof being fully
repaired, the accounts being full, never worrying again. Then I remember the eighteen
months of meetings explaining why a quiet scene should remain quiet. That’s
when the money stops looking free.”
They
walked in silence for a while after that, past the same boats knocking against
the same pilings, past the diner with its flickering neon signage, and Marjory
slipped her hand into his without either of them making any particular
announcement of the gesture, the way two people do when a thing has been true
for a while before either of them found the moment to say so out loud.
“I don’t regret the first deal,” Localad said. “It
saved the shop. It also taught me the cost. I needed both truths.”
"For
what it's worth," she said eventually, "I think Purradise is all the better
for it. The whole world you built. I think it needed you to be the kind of
person who could say no to that offer, or it wouldn't have deserved the ending
you gave it in the first place."
“That sounds suspiciously profound.”
“Don’t spread it around.”
"It's
a very generous way of saying I'm stubborn."
"You
are stubborn," she agreed. "It's one of my favourite things about
you. It's also, apparently, the thing that saved your book."
He
laughed at that, the easy, unguarded laugh that had become more frequent in the
months since he'd come home, and they walked the rest of the way back to the book store together, in the particular, comfortable quiet of two people who no longer
needed to fill every silence with something, because the silence itself, at
last, felt like more than enough.
They stopped outside Harbour & Page.
The store's newly restored sign moved gently above them.
Inside, the shelves waited in the dark, holding thousands of endings that had all
refused sequels for a lot less.
Localad turned to Marjory.
“I love you,” he said.
The three little words arrived flawlessly without any prior rehearsal and therefore
survived the situation.
Marjory looked at him for a long moment.
“I know,” she said.
“That seems unfairly brief.”
“I’ve known since 1998. I’m exhausted.”
Then she kissed him.
The cracked bell, stirred by the door behind them,
gave one small broken note.
It had none of the grand, polished, and
emotional qualities of a professional movie sceen.
No harbour fireworks began. Nobody applauded except for Mrs. Alvarez, who had been locking the diner and considered privacy an urban myth.
It was better than cinematic.
It was truth.
Thank you for reading thus far. Click here to read the full story from the beginning.
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