Page 76 of Alice Carver Manifests Her Perfect Life
Mark: Very successful in the Eighties. Fell off the radar.
Drunk Stephen: Don’t they all have intros by JJ?
Mark: Obviously you’d lose the intros. Or is it still too much of a risk post Operation Yew Tree?
Cara: Yes. What if someone posts an old one on social?
Harry Piles: That’s your job and PR’s. We’re not re-writing history for the wokes. Pull up some old titles, Mark.
Mark: Um,Discover Shooting for Boys,Discover Sewing for Girls, Discover Hunting for Boys, Discover Baby Animals for Girls.
Drunk Stephen: Those titles hardly scream ‘now’.
Harry Piles: People want traditional. Think how many copiesThe Dangerous Book for Boyssold. People like security, especially in times like these. Couple of tweaks is all we need; hide the rest under the umbrella of ‘retro’.
Drunk Stephen: We’d need to re-shoot at the least.
Harry Piles: Expensive. Use the umbrella. Let’s get creative, Stephen.
Drunk Stephen:(shares his screen)All the kids are white. The books are exclusively either for girls or for boys. JJ is literally in photos with children. How creative can we get?
Harry Piles: Fucking shame we didn’t think of this pre-Christmas. Could have stuck a cracker over his face, like Simon and Schuster. What did Hachette do with Enid Blyton – goblins, was it?
Me:(sarcastically)Well, it’s coming up to Easter. You could always use eggs. CombineDiscover Hunting for BoysandDiscover Baby Animals for Girlsin one handy volume perfect for Gen Alpha. Cover up the paedophile’sface with eggs. Add some colour. But… will it solve the fundamental issue that the topics are dated and won’t sell?
Harry Piles: Fucking great idea, Alison; look into it. And aren’t you marketing?
Me: It’s Alice. And no. I’m an editor.
Harry Piles: Okay. Great. It’s your job to make lemonade out of this shit. The idea’s top drawer. See, Cara? Someone in your team gets it. Stephen – can you stick eggs on the kids’ faces? And JJ’s? Then it might as well be diverse ’cos no one can tell. You’ll have to colour in the hands.
Drunk Stephen:… Um. Yes. That’s just the kind of representation I dreamed of as a child.
Harry Piles: I love it. Deep backlist, no advances. Creative adaptation. Let’s bring the Discovery series back in a big way. That’s what I call blue-sky thinking.
So that was the headline from yesterday.
Back in the office today, and it was super-boring. Guy Carmichael out again, so nothing to distract me. Plus I broke my headset by sitting on it. Everyone gave me space, assuming I still wasn’t feeling great, and I wallowed in it. Same at home. I’ve barely seen Astrid and Aziz since Sunday (and I don’t think they’ve seen each other at all – they’re both working crazy hours) and it’s suited me well.
But… enough is enough. That Guide Post resonated. It’s already the middle of the week. Haven’t heard from Matthew and in a couple of days it will be the weekend again. Getting on was clearly a one-night thing for him. Time to move past last weekend.
I’m going to wait for that next wave, and get on with the manifesting.
I am grateful for:
Guide Posts
Yaz, who let me borrow her headset (she doesn’t like lending her stuff)
Date: Thursday 19 JanuaryTime: 11.55pm
My thoughts and reflections:
I’m going to feel rough tomorrow…
Yaz invited me and Drunk Stephen along to meet her parents at the members’ club at the Royal Festival Hall for happy hour (well, we kind of invited ourselves when we heard she was going) and her parents insisted we join them for supper – they’re really nice despite the fact that their idea of a good night out is a ‘smorgasbord of song and poetry and spoken word’, followed by ‘dramatised readings by NHS heroes of excerpts from six Booker Prize longlists’. I never had Yaz down for having parents like that (Yaz sounds decidedlyEastEnders) but it does explain how she got into Carsons. I’m fairly sure her mum was wearing a genuine Hermès scarf.
Once Yaz and her parents had nipped off for a fun evening of intellectual pursuits, Drunk Stephen did not hold back on his feelings and said that whilst he liked Yaz’s parents, he always knew she was a fake, and why would she affect a downwardly converged accent whilst working in an industry that was so elitist. I joked, ‘Maybe that was the only way she managed to get into Carsons, on the diversity quota.’
