Two
The bookstore “Ex Libris” Markus had managed to get Fey a job at was in the middle of the City, close to many tourist attractions and the subway station. It received a constant stream of customers, many just getting a coffee in the incorporated coffee shop or using the toilets, but just as many also strolling through the spacious book store, often leaving with a book or two. It had a very open floor plan, with islands of comfortable armchairs and couches and enough space to never feel crowded. The interior design was reflective of the different sections, the children's corner sporting lower chairs and a bright color scheme whereas the crime/thriller corner was darker and more subdued.
The coffee shop opened up at 7am to accommodate the commuters and early birds and as a result the book store had to open at the same time. Some of the baristas started right away, while some had shorter shifts and came in later, like Markus that day. Because the demand for books that early in the morning was not nearly as big as the demand for coffee, one salesclerk was enough to man Ex Libris, the other four to five salespeople usually came in at 9am and 11am. Today, Claire had opened up the store and was in the process of unloading the new books that had just been delivered.
“Oh hey Fey, good morning! Mind giving me a hand?” She greeted Fey cheerfully.
“Sure, here, let me take this. You do know that your cheerfulness this early in the morning is nauseating to most people?” She took out a stack of the new book “To love a Feather” by the famous thriller author J. Ambien.
Claire only laughed and continued to unpack the soon-to-be bestseller.
“Usually you're not one of them. You're a bit grumpy this morning, what's gotten in your porridge?”
“Ugh, it's
not even that important."
Claire gave her a look.
"Well, I don't want it to be important. Thing is, I hooked up with someone last night and he
turned out to be a jerk.” She took the last books from Claire and
went to the table by the main entrance to start stacking them in an
inviting fashion.
“Sorry to hear that. But that's probably not the first time that's happened, right? Besides, since when are you looking for a long-term relationship?” Claire was unpacking the promo stand up poster to go with the books.
“Yeah, no, that's not it. It was just not the nicest way to start my day. I'll forget about it as soon as I get my hands on one of those new Fabriacchi books. Those should be coming in today as well, right?”
“No, 'Golden Fall' is due tomorrow. Hey, if you wanna rant about the jerk and get it out of your system, be my guest. And if you think he's not worth the trouble of even speaking about him, great."
"Yeah, no, I'd rather not waste my breath on him."
"Great, then I think I have a distraction for you waiting. See those customers over in the YA corner? They look a bit lost, don't they?" Claire winked at her. It was an open secret that Fey was the best saleswoman for getting each customer their perfect book and she enjoyed a good challenge.
Fey's mood immediately lightened.
"Seems to me that they could use some help indeed."
Claire laughed. "Well, then go! I'm almost done with stacking here anyways." She took one final look at the display and when she turned to her coworker again, Fey was already halfway across the store, approaching the first customer. The day was already looking better.
“Sci-fi and thriller? Oh, try Lundson's 'Lazerscales Trilogy'. It's a silly title, but well worth the read!”
“This will be great, it has a princess and a farmer and a magical teapot, trust me!”
“Hm, so you didn't like 'Kind Death' because of the love story... Maybe 'Forrest of Blood' is more up your street. It's not the author you wanted, but trust me, this is much more gore than 'Kind Death'!”
With a friendly smile she rung up the last customer currently waiting to pay and took a look around. The morning had gone by quickly, her colleagues and her had been constantly busy with some customer or another and Fey had scarcely had time to eat her muffin or even just go to the bathroom. Now, as almost everyday right before noon, there was a lull in the bookstore while the coffee shop was once again brimming with patrons.
“Hey Fey, I'm gonna take my lunch break, you mind? Peter and Nina are decorating the children's corner for Halloween so you're a bit on your own.” Claire was obviously itching to go eat so Fey just turned and gave a significant look around the almost empty store.
“Go, eat, I'll be fine! If I don't die from boredom.”
Fey slowly made her way through the store looking for books misplaced by customers when she saw a young woman standing by the register waiting patiently for someone to ring her up. Quickly Fey made her way back to her.
“I'm sorry to make you wait. I hope you found everything you were looking for?”
The young woman across the counter blushed and nodded timidly. She hesitantly put the books she'd chosen on the counter.
Fey took the top-most book off the customer's stack and scanned it.
“Oh, second-year textbook for law-school. The semester just started again, right?” Fey liked to make idle-small talk while she rang up the books. When she didn't get a reply, she looked up to see her customer blushing deeply and avoiding her gaze. Feeling a bit awkward herself she picked up the second book and scanned it as well. “Ah, I don't think I've sold one of these in some time. 'How to flirt' is a bit of a boring title, though, don't you think?”
“I don't... well...” The young woman mumbled and didn't finish. “I'm sorry.” She added, seemingly as an afterthought.
Fey chuckled softly. “Why are you apologizing? You didn't write or edit or publish this, did you?”
“I- no, but, well...” She stared at Fey with wide eyes, not knowing what to say or do.
The saleswoman was taken aback by how troubled her vis-a-vis was by even this casual exchange.
“It's alright.”, she said in a calm voice. “Take a breath and take your time. I was just making small-talk and you don't really have to answer. It was sort of a rhetorical question anyways.”
Her counterpart took a breath and stopped playing with the hem of her sweatshirt.
Fey smiled and got a timid smile in return. The woman looked down to where her hands were playing with her sweatshirt.
“Thank you.” She said in a small voice.
“No problem.” Fey hesitated. “I don't want to intrude, but you might not be ready for that book you're getting.”
The woman across the counter avoided looking directly at her and mumbled almost unintelligibly. “I have to start somewhere...”
“Well, start by talking to people, friends, fellow students, professors-” She was interrupted by her counterpart in a surprisingly firm tone of voice.
“Easy for you to say! You don't have any problems talking to people, you don't lose your voice whenever someone makes eye contact, you finish your sentences, you can just do it!” She huffed, staring at Fey, waiting for an answer.
Fey was at a loss of what to say, maybe for the first time since middle-school. Her silence didn't last too long though.
“Apparently so can you.”
The young woman looked stunned and only now realized what she'd accomplished.
“Well, no, but...” She took another deep breath. “That was really hard though. You- you just made it sound so easy and that made me mad.”
“I'm sorry.”
“Thanks.” She fumbled for her purse. “How much do I owe you?”
Fey fumbled for the receipt and told her the price.
“Here you go.”
“Thank you. Here's your change.” Fey hesitated for a moment. “Hey, I know this might sound very strange and I usually don't approach people like this, but would you like getting coffee sometime? Not as a date or anything, but you could maybe practice talking to me and... well this will sound like bragging, but I have a bit of experience when it comes to flirting and dating and I have a bit of a record with setting people up and... I- It was just an idea and you seem nice and I thought maybe we'd get along, I like meeting new people...” She had talked faster the more she'd gotten caught up in her rant, playing nervously with the hem of her polo. She trailed off when she realized how weird it was to ask out a customer on a friend-date. “Sorry, nevermind, that was a silly idea, I-”
“Alright.” Fey looked up to see the young woman look as surprised about that answer as herself.
It took her a moment to find her voice again.
“Awesome! I mean, cool. I'm Fey, by the way. Please don't mind the name tag.” That comment earned her a chuckle from her new acquaintance.
“Lilian. But most just call me Lily.” She tucked a strand of her long dark brown hair behind her right ear, mirroring Fey's smile. “So... can I get a refund for that book?”
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Canary word: Present
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125,004 Literary Works • 672,792 Reviews
Enjoyable chapter. Errors aside, this chapter flows very nicely. The interactions between Fey and her acquaintances highlight her personality nicely. Overall, I'm really enjoying this character; very tough.
See mine (notes) and /*edits*/ below.
I look forward to the next entry.
I ship it already.
I think you emailed this one to me with the first chapter, right? But I’ll review it anyway. Since you know how much I love it, I’ll focus on the few improvements I think need doing at this point.
One is that the speaker sometimes unclear, particularly once Fey meets Lily. Like this bit, for example.
As I read on, it became clearer that Fey was speaking, but we should know from the start. If you want to leave off dialogue tags, just make sure you’ve got some sort of action or other indicator, i.e. “Fey’s face was as red as a tomato,” “Fey stumbled over her words,” “Fey brushed the hair from her eyes,” etc. That way we’ll know she’s the one speaking without having “she said” every other line. Actually, “she said” wouldn’t work that well for this scene anyway, since two women are talking to each other. Like this part.
This time I knew exactly who was speaking, simply because of how the conversation was going, but “she said” still didn’t work because “she” could refer to either woman. Even though it doesn’t. Since the customer’s name has just been introduced, you could say “Lily tucked a strand…” but you could also go with “the young woman” or “the customer.” (“The young woman” would be clear, even though both are young women, because there’s no reason for Fey to be referred to as “the young woman” when we’re in her perspective.)
The only other thing I have for you is: I love Fey’s characterization, but I’d like to see more dramatization of her interaction with customers. Not with ALL of the customers, obviously, since that’s not the main point of the story and it might get dull after a while. But like in this part:
Maybe show us a bit more of her interaction with the final customer so we get a further feel for the report she has with them. Kind of like this.
Or whatever.
Then, when Lily mentions how she was watching Fey’s interactions with the customers, she could even refer to that particular interaction, which is then also something we can connect with, because we saw Fey doing that, too.
You read it! And you liked, yay! ^^ Thanks for the review, I'll take note of it and go over it again in my draft, though I probably won't go to the trouble of changing it here.
Hello and happy review day!
I was going to read the first chapter but then someone snatched it out of the green room before I could, so now here I am.
Anyway! I think you have a cute premise here. I like the bookstore vibe and the fact that the plot is getting moving now because of a few book selections.
I love contemporary romance stories and this is a nice breath of fresh air from all of the fantasy I've read so far today. (Not that they were bad by any means, just that contemporary romance is way more my jam).
I'm not sure I'm feeling that first paragraph. It does a nice job of setting the stage and you get a lot of information across without it feeling too much like an info-dump. However just looking at it, it looks like a giant intimidating block of text. If a chapter starts out with a giant intimidating block of text, your reader might be hesitant to keep going (even if the first chapter was super good). So, there are two options. One, find places you can break up that big paragraph into a couple of smaller paragraphs. Two, comb through and find things that aren't necessary to say at this exact moment and trim it into a shorter paragraph.
I liked that you started with the morning shift and had that little exchange between Fey and Claire. It does a couple of things - it acquaints the reader with this location and gets them into the scene, it shows the personality of these two girls, and it introduces a potential little plot seed with this Fey/boy business. About that little seed, to me it feels unfinished. I think you could expand this conversation a bit more and make it longer. I want to know more about her experience with this boy and the way Fey operates with boys. It's brought up and then dismissed almost immediately. I'm not sure if it's important or if it was put in there to give them something to talk about until more important things start happening. If it's more of a filler, take it out. I have a feeling you'll want to keep it because at the very least it shows each girl's personality, I just want more of it.
I don't think you need the *** break in the chapter. The chapter isn't super long (which is 100% fine) so you don't want to split it up even more with a chapter break. I think the only time that's necessary is if there is a huge break in the chapter, like a day changes or a scene completely changes. They're still in the book store and it's the same day, so I think you could transition that with words.
Also, I feel like these two things:
and
these two things are connected.
Like these little pieces of dialogue are showing us how she enjoys helping customers and how good she is at doing that. I wouldn't separate them with a chapter break. You could include a paragraph or two in-between these things that show that the store opens and people start showing up and they have to start getting to work. You could include something about what work was like that day (boring, stressful, fun) and then show Fey helping some customers.
And then this ending with the interaction with the woman. I get that it needs to happen because this is probably the catalyst and a big chunk of the book is going to center around this encounter. It's a really interesting way to get a plot moving and I'm curious to see what's going to come of this, but I thought the whole interaction was suuuuper awkward.
Like the advice: why would she give advice? She sells books. This woman is not looking for her advice, that's why she bought a book about it.
Then I'm surprised the woman even answers her. If that were me, I would be out of there and I might not come back. And the conversation gets really personal really quickly. I just have a hard time picturing this happening and everything escalating the way it does so quickly.
Maybe the woman leaves and comes back another day and she's mad because she didn't like the book and didn't find it helpful and she wants a suggestion for something better (since Fey seems to know everything is her reasoning) and now that there's a bit of rapport between them Fey could make her proposal to help this person?
Definitely curious to see how this is going to go down. I wonder if this is going to turn into some sort of female version of the movie Hitch? (I love that movie). There are some other chapters of this in the green room so perhaps I will see you again later! In the meantime, let me know if you have any questions or if anything I said was confusing!
Hi, thank you so much for your review! I wasn't happy with the exchange, but it's hard to write.... -_- I did rewrite it in light of your review, would you mind giving it a read and letting me know if it's any better now? Thank you so much for the kind words!
Amazing amazing!I loved the first part and I just fell in love with this second part also!
You could tear apart one or two long sentences but it is still fine this way.I did not see errors in the grammar.Well,I just enjoyed reading too much so i may not had seen.One last look is not a bad thing to do!The plot is developing very well.I am interested in the future parts that will come out,I hope?Heh.Anyways,just go on.I am with you. ;v;)/
I love the shy personality of the new girl that came in this plot and whole situation.Lilian?Yes!Adorable name also.She is like the opposite to Fey!
I just hope Lilian does not put her eyes all over Marcus.I just do not want it to happen! XD
Go on!
I only now realized that I never thanked you here for the review! ^^