Dying to Get Published Read Online Free

to figure that one out. And when the murderer slipped a tube into her bathroom and she almost brushed her teeth with it, I practically died!
    "And stop that infernal bobbing, Teri. I think you do it just to annoy me." April patted her rounded stomach. She was in the fifth month of her second pregnancy and already over her weight-gain limit.
    Teri drew her head up from her knees and folded herself into a round ball up against the foot of the sofa. "Sorry." She threw a contrite look at April. At twenty-four, Teri saw motherhood as some far distant, mystical experience to be revered, but experienced in some other lifetime.
    Jennifer looked at the three women and tried to decide if they were dedicated writers or eccentric twenty-somethings who had somehow got lost in the space-time continuum. 
    Monique cleared her throat, and everybody turned toward the maple rocking chair that served as her throne.
    "Jennifer has come to us with a plotting problem. She's not writing to please you or to come up with yet another clever way to bump off her latest victim. She is trying to devise a plot that will sell, and personally, I think a gun might have more appeal than poison fish or toothpaste. Tell us what you have in mind, Jennifer. It's refreshing that you're soliciting advice in the outline stage for once—before you've set Maxie off on some… unique adventure."
    Jennifer didn't exactly hate Monique, but a plot about a dead, one-book, holier-than-thou author was involuntarily forming in her mind.
    "Say a man decides to kill a woman," Jennifer said aloud, "and he decides to use a gun."
    "But a gun?" Teri whined. "Get real, Jen." Her body was now twisted into something resembling one of the pretzels Leigh Ann continued to eat.
    "You use guns all the time in your books, Teri," Jennifer reminded her. "In that chapter you read us last week, Yasmine Simone had a gun secreted in that ruffle eyelet pillow on her bed."
    "That's because I write romantic suspense, and my characters have to be prepared. Besides, guns are sex—y. Don't let anybody tell you any different."
    "I'll say," April murmured. "When Yasmine and her man even think about danger, they hop into the sack."
    "Sex is life-affirming." Leigh Ann sighed between bites. "But you haven't answered Teri's question, Jen."
    "A gun is easier to control than a knife, less risky than poison, and less messy than explosives."
    "But you're in control of the story," April insisted. "When Whacky the Duck wandered into that construction site that Mama Duck had told him to stay away from, I knew he'd be all right because I wrote in Barkley the Dog to protect him. We're the creators, Jen. We control what happens in our plots. And pass me those damn pretzels."
    Leigh Ann scooped up the bowl and took it to April, setting it on top of her rounded stomach. "If you'd let that duck get eaten by Johnny the Junkyard Dog, kids would learn to listen to their mothers."
    An exasperated intake of air from the direction of the rocker silenced the group. Leigh Ann quietly took her place on the sofa.
    "You were saying, Jennifer?" Monique said.
    "I want to write something more reality-based, something that might even happen. That poison toothpaste stuff doesn't occur in real life, product tampering aside."
    "Give us a scenario," Monique ordered.
    "Say the victim is an influential businesswoman living in one of those plush, high-rise, security buildings in Atlanta. You know, the kind with a doorman—the works."
    "First your murderer's got to get past the muscle," Teri declared.
    Monique threw her a withering stare.
    "No problem. He can pose as a delivery man with a basket of fruit," Leigh Ann suggested.
    "What if they won't let the murderer take it up to her door?" Jennifer asked. "Some places won't, you know."
    "A fumigator—how about that?" Teri threw in.
    "The doorman would call the tenant and maybe the extermination company to check."
    "Insurance."
    "What are you babbling about now?" Leigh Ann asked April.
    "It's