One of the reasons why Sejeong wanted to work for Blue Bird, despite the fact that she was their best selling author, was because she wanted to be involved through the entire publishing process. The idea came to her on a random evening. Her publisher had nudged her to begin her new project, when suddenly, the prompt popped up in her head: a book hating intern working for the country's biggest publishing firm. Sejeong's notebook was filled with dozens of ideas, but she instantly gravitated to this one. All of her past main characters were somehow similar to her, like a reflection of her past obstacles. But this new project would be different. The protagonist would be a man, serious, and rigid; the complete opposite of Sejeong.
That's how she ended up at Blue Bird, to immerse herself in the experience of her new character. When writing, her philosophy was to never be a phony, meaning, she would never act like she knew until she truly knew for herself.
And boy, did she know now. In the six months of her employment, everyday was a non-stop sprint. She had no idea how much work went into one book, one author, and she came everyday exhausted from the workload. She was in the what was called the Debut Unit, which main job was to read through submitted manuscripts and determine which authors were worth their time.
Because she was the intern, Sejeong's job was to categorize the first round of manuscripts, meticulously reading through every single email that was sent.
She tried to keep an open mind to the manuscripts. Not to long ago, she too, was in the same position and knew how desperate the authors were as they pressed that send button. But regardless of that desperation, most of the manuscripts were bad. Plain bad. Unoriginal ideas, cliches, and plot holes, 99% of all manuscripts were sent to the trash.
Sejeong let out a deep sigh. She was on the 30th story of the day and all thirty failed to catch her attention. "Pass," she said, mercilessly deleting the email.
"You're quite ruthless, Ms. Sejeong," Manager Seo said. "We're not going to be able to publish anything if you reject everyone."
"That story was a complete knock off of an American TV series. With bad grammar too! The audacity."
Manager Seo brushed through his hair with fingers. Unlike his usual neat look, his hair was messy and his tie was loosened. Dark bags shadowed his eyes and Sejeong could swear that she actually heard him yawn. Robots didn't yawn! That was a little inside joke between her and Minju.
"Find me something worth our time," he replied. "You have until today."
"Today?"
Just because he demanded it, that didn't mean that she could just find good work! Talent was rare, like finding a diamond in a rumble of dirt and trash.
"Today." He walked off back into his office.
'What an asshole!' Sejeong thought to herself. 'He should be grateful that I'm eliminating all these filler emails. Does he think that good writing just appears out of thin air? Why doesn't he go bother the people in charge of the later stages of selection!'
She complained under her breath and opened up another submission.
"Mary Painter and Her Adventures of Magic School? C'mon, this is just plagiarized off Harry Potter!" She punched the air and slammed her face into her desk. "It'd be better if I just wrote my own books at this point..."
Sejeong jerked her head back up like a lightbulb had flashed on top of her head.
'I could just write my own books. I'm a goddamn author!'
She could work on the manuscript of her newest project, the one that made her work here in the first place, and submit it to Manager Seo by the end of the day.