The lieutenant spoke through a megaphone. “Come out, Baskin, with your hands up. And leave the manuscript behind.”
“I won’t!”
Won’t what? thought the cop. Come out? Leave the ms? Writers could be infuriatingly imprecise. “Look. We just want to talk.”
“No you don’t,” shouted Baskin. “You want me to play your game. Well, I won’t, and you can’t make me.”
The other cops shrugged. It was midnight. A small crowd gathered in front of the modest rambler, drawn by squad cars and flashing lights. They were a feisty bunch, women in robes, men with cans of beer, and not at all inclined toward sympathy. There’s a reason readers don’t read. And it’s not the readers.
“Jump!” someone yelled, and the rest laughed.
A woman took the megaphone. “Mr. Baskin. This is a writing coach. Come out, and tomorrow we’ll start emailing queries, like everyone else.”
“That doesn’t work!”
“For $150 dollars I’ll trim it up.”
“No!”
A distinguished, bearded man in an ascot stepped ahead. Allow me, he said. “This is Dr. McDowell, from the English Department at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. For God’s sake man, get ahold of yourself.”
“Go to hell!”
“I’m teaching an intro to writing course, online. Now if you just sign up, I’m sure we can… ”
“Hey Dr. McDowell. How does Hamlet’s soliloquy in Act Two shade our understanding of Ophelia’s madness, given her eventual suicide?”
The professor blinked rapidly. A few in the crowd tittered. McDowell handed back the megaphone. “Shoot to kill,” he told the lieutenant.
A procession of others followed. The village librarian, a local poet, self-published, a newspaper editor, himself looking for an agent. The author would listen to none of them. Finally his wife took up the megaphone.
“Baskin, come out. Think of the children. The dog. Think of me. Your obsession with publication is driving us all crazy. We can’t take it anymore!” An uncomfortable silence ensued. A pregnant pause. You supply the cliché. A door opened, and pages began to be thrown out.
“What are you doing?” the lieutenant shouted.
“It’s the first chapter. I want everyone to read it.”
“But no publisher will consider any part of a manuscript previously distributed for general readership, foreign or domestic.”
“I don’t care!”
Clearly, the situation had turned desperate. They deployed flash-bang grenades and rushed the home. The author was seized and led away by two men in white coats. “I just wanted to be a writer,” Baskin sobbed, his face wet with tears. “That’s all I wanted.”
“We know, buddy. We know.” And they did. Where he was going, there were plenty more like him.
Richard Donnelly lives in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Classic flyover land. Which makes us feel just a little… superior. He publishes a weekly column of essays on the writing life at richarddonnelly.substack.com