Longshot

Начало книги

I accepted a commission that had been turned down by four other writers, but I was hungry at the time.

Although starving in a garret had seemed a feasible enough plan a year earlier, the present realities of existence under the frozen eaves of a friend’s aunt’s house in a snowy January were such that without enough income to keep well fed and warm I was a knockover for a risky decision.

My state, of course, was my own fault. I could easily have gone out looking for paid muscular employment. I didn’t have to sit shivering in a ski-suit biting the end of a pencil, hunched over a notebook, unsure of myself, of my ability and of the illuminations crashing about my head.

The spartan discomfort was not, either, a self-pitying morass of abject failure, but more the arctic doldrums between the high elation of the recent acceptance of my first novel for publication and the distant date of its launch into literary orbit. This was the downside after the heady receipt of the first advance payment and its division into past debts, present expenses and six months’ future rent.

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