Regarding your invitation to be on your podcast, I would love to!
The message continued but Amy didn’t care.
“Oh my god, she said yes!” she squealed. “She fucking said yes!”
“Yay!” Rachel cheered from the phone.
“Holy fuck, I’m going to be interviewing Jillian Ashley! This is…This is un-fucking-believable!”
“Congratulations,” Rachel said. “Can I go now? My Saturday just won’t be complete without a nap.”
After saying goodbye, Amy hung up and then sat back on the couch and let out a relieved breath.
Wow!
Now that the initial exuberance of Jillian’s acceptance was out of her system, Amy read the rest of the email. It was mainly Jillian asking for details about the day and time for the interview, stipulating that it had to be in the late afternoon or evening because she was always busy during the early part of the day. She also asked about the technical requirements for participating in the podcast.
Amy pulled up her calendar. If it were up to her, this interview would be happening today, but she knew that was impossible. She thought about suggesting tomorrow, Sunday, but many people were often uptight about being disturbed on Sundays. Sunday was a family day. But wait...Did Jillian have a family? Was she married? Did she have kids? There was so much Amy didn’t know about her favorite author. So, Sunday was out. But would Jillian also think that Monday was too soon? Amy didn’t want to appear overeager even though she was, in fact, very overeager.
Tuesday?
Tuesday sounded right. It was far enough away that Jillian wouldn’t feel hounded by Amy. It also gave the impression that Amy was a cool customer; like, “Oh, well, thanks for agreeing to be on my podcast but I think we can wait until Tuesday to get this done.”
So, Tuesday.
But what time?
Jillian’s email was frustratingly vague in this regard. “Late afternoon or evening” covered a lot of hours. Not only that, both of them were open to interpretation. What did Jillian consider late afternoon? Three o’clock? Four? And would Jillian prefer early evening or late evening? And when did early evening become late evening? Five o’clock? Six? And speaking of evening…when did Jillian usually have her dinner?
Shit!
Amy wanted at least an hour of actual interview time with Jillian. But before the actual interview could begin, there would need to be checks done to make sure Jillian had no trouble connecting to the podcast software; then of course they’d spend a few minutes introducing themselves and just chatting a bit before Amy hit Record. All told, she’d need about ninety minutes of Jillian’s time.
After a quarter of an hour deliberating with herself, Amy finally settled on suggesting 4 p.m. to Jillian. She then spent another quarter of an hour composing the perfect reply to Jillian, one that was appropriately grateful but also chill, like, Hey, this is no big deal, really.
When she finally hit Send, Amy then sat back and looked at the screen, waiting anxiously for a reply before rolling her eyes at her own silliness. She was acting like a lovestruck teenage girl waiting for the girl she had a crush on to text her back. Besides, the Jillian Ashley probably received a bazillion email messages every day. Not only that, but Jillian was probably way too busy to be sitting around anxiously awaiting Amy’s response.
Just as she was about to get up and refill her wine glass, though, the laptop pinged and Jillian’s reply magically appeared in her Inbox. Amy didn’t hesitate opening this one.
Tuesday at four is perfect!
Chapter 6
On Tuesday afternoon, after work, Sally took a deep breath before shutting off the engine of her BMW in Max’s driveway. She wondered if what she was feeling now was how an actress feels when about to walk into an audition. Only, this wasn’t an audition, she reminded herself. She had the part! All
she had to do now was perform it.
She gave herself another look in the rearview mirror because for some reason Max had promised this Amy Whatever-her-name-is that this could be a video podcast episode.
“I really need Jillian to start being seen,” Max had explained last night over the phone. “I’ve been keeping her hidden for too long. Any longer and my readers are gonna start rebelling.”
Sally had understood. She had been following Jillian Ashley on Twitter since Jillian’s first book was released. Frustratingly, Jillian had never tweeted a photo of herself. Her profile picture on Twitter was the same one used as her author photo in her books: an image of a dark-haired woman, seen from behind, looking out to sea. The various Jillian Ashley Twitter topics which Sally followed often contained tweets by others wondering what Jillian Ashley looked like and why she only consented to written interviews.
Max let her into his large, two-level house in Oceanside which was just a two-minute walk from the beach and which offered fantastic panoramic views of the Pacific Ocean from the upstairs picture windows. Upon entering, Sally immediately made for the floor-to-ceiling mirror Max had in the foyer and once again examined her appearance.
“Come on, you look fine,” Max said, gently taking her elbow and leading her away from the mirror and deeper into his house. “We only have twenty minutes before Jillian is supposed to dial in and I need to explain the set-up.”
After crossing his sunken living room, Max led Sally to his den, a room decorated in the art-deco style. Sally had always admired Max’s sense of style. His entire house was tastefully decorated with artworks and stylish contemporary furnishings that were cosmopolitan but not overly masculine. There wasn’t a sports poster or a picture of bikini-clad bimbo holding a bottle of Miller Lite to be found.