One of Our Thursdays Is Missing - Jasper Fforde [95]
Bowden climbed out to join me. I got on better with him than I did with the character who played my father, but that wasn’t saying much. It was like saying sparrows got on better with cats than robins. Bowden had a thing going on with the previous written Thursday, and when he tried to hit on me at the Christmas party, I’d tipped an entire quiche in his lap. Our relationship on and off book had been strained ever since.
“That was just plain embarrassing,” said Bowden. “You were barely even trying.”
I’d taken over from Carmine the second I got home, so I couldn’t blame her. I should have let her just carry on—she was doing fine, after all, but . . . well, I needed the distraction.
“So we had a bit of wastage,” I said. “It happens.”
Reader “wastage” was something one had to get used to but never did. Most of the time it was simply that our book wasn’t the reader’s thing, which was borne with a philosophical shrug. We’d lost six readers at one hit once when my brother Joffy went AWOL and missed an entire chapter. It had never been more tempting to hit the Snooze Button. Mind you, in the annals of reader wastage, our six readers were peanuts. Stig of the Dump once lost seven hundred readers in the early seventies when Stig was kidnapped by Homo erectus fundamentalists, eager to push a promegalith agenda. Unusually, terms were agreed on with the kidnappers and a new megalith section was inserted into the book. It messed slightly with the whole dream/reality issue but never dented the popularity of the novel. On that occasion the Snooze Button was pressed, which accounts for the lack of a sequel. Kitten death—even written kitten death—carries a lot of stigma. Barney eventually handed over the reins to a replacement and works these days at Text Grand Central; Stig is now much in demand as an after-dinner nonspeaker.
“So what’s up?” asked Bowden. “I’ve seen more dynamic performances in Mystery on the Island.”
I shrugged. “Things aren’t going that well for me at the moment.”
“Man trouble?”
“Of a sort.”
“Do you want some advice?”
“Thank you, Bowden, I would.”
“Get your ass into gear and act like a mature character. You’re making us the laughingstock of Speculative Fantasy. Our readership is in free fall. Want to go the way of Raphael’s Walrus?”
It wasn’t the sort of advice I was expecting.
“So you’d prefer the old Thursday, would you?” I replied indignantly. “The gratuitous sex and violence?”
“At least it got us read.”
“Yes,” I replied, “but by whom? We want the quality readers, not the prurient ones who—”
“You’re a terrible snob, you know that?”
“I am not.”
“You should value all readers. If you want to mix in the rarefied heights of ‘quality readership,’ then why don’t you sod off to HumDram and do a Plot 9?”
“Because,” I said, “I’m trying to do what the real Thursday wants.”
“And where is she?” he asked with a sneer. “Not been down this way for ages. You keep on banging on about the greater glory of your illustrious namesake, but if she really cared for us, she’d drop in from time to time.”
I fell silent. There was some truth in this. It had been six months since she’d visited, and then only because she wanted to borrow Mrs. Malaprop to put up some shelves.
“Listen,” said Bowden, “you’re nice enough in a scatty kind of way, but if you try to add any new scenarios, you’ll just make trouble for us. If you’re going to change anything, revert to the previous Thursday. It’s within the purview of ‘character interpretation.’ And since she was once that way, there’s a precedent. More readers and no risk. Who the hell is the Toast Marketing Board anyway?”
“It’s a secret plan,” I remarked defensively, “to improve readership. You’re going to have to