How to Catch a Runaway Sheep, Maybe

rejected book chapters! IP, 2017

Hi! Okay so this one requires some backstory:

In 2017, because I was taking so long to get my shit together on my own book, my very patient, first-ever book agent asked if I’d throw my hat in the ring for an IP project.

An IP project means: someone else owns the intellectual property, which means no royalties or rights to future franchise expansions. You, the writer, get hired on contract. Some people scoff at this:

“I suppress a scoff. IP—intellectual property—work is for mediocre writers, or so I’ve always been told. It’s cheap, work-for-hire labor for people who couldn’t manage to sell their original projects.” - June Hayward in Yellowface, by Rebecca F. Kuang (fun-stressful-thriller-y-without-the-nightmares-kind-of-book, btw)

But listen: It still would have been my name on the book. And it would have been a JOB. I love money! And! This particular project had the sparkly promise of potentially, maybe, being made into a movie or TV show. Bright lights, big city, baby. So I was like, “SIGN ME THE FUCK UP.”

But signing me “the fuck up” still meant I had to audition. Below is a chapter from my audition. In total, I think I had to submit 6K words; I won’t bore you with all of them. I’m also not going to provide you with the plot/treatment because we are a litigious country and I don’t want to be SUED today, thank you very much!! What I CAN do is assure you that the below first chapter is one enormous exercise in throat clearing. A literary loogie, if you will. It has nothing to do with the treatment, or anything at all. Total stream of consciousness. I was on a very tight deadline; this was me throwing nun-chucks at any writer’s block that threatened to stop me on my path to IP fame.

I did not get the job :( The editor/the Simon Cowell of this publishing house decided I was “a little too New York quirky,” and so, off I went, back to procrastinating on my own IP.

**PS I had to copy and paste the below from a PDF so the formatting might be weird and also, IDK how to tab/indent on Substack.**

Chapter I

In what was a rather startling revelation, Laura realized she’d never actually seen a sheep before in person. This one looked like a mix between a black Labrador and a prehistoric horse. Its teeth were surprisingly yellow.

A conversation between she and the sheep’s owner just a day earlier began to play: the pack, or the bundle, or whatever a bunch of sheep was called, had been recently sheared, hence the coat’s dog-fur-like appearance — the wool sold to a local man who turned it into yarn which he hawked at the same general store where the sheep owner sold the same sheep’s cheese. Of course. The woman was handing over the keys to her white-washed, wood-paneled converted barn of a home to Laura and her friend Danny for the weekend. Danny was there for work, Laura had tagged along. It was a blip of an escape from the city, and part of the fun — or so it had seemed while booking this quaint colonial country house — was that a “gentleman’s farm" came with it.

“The caretaker will handle the animals,” the woman had told them. “Feel free to ignore them entirely.” Laura planned on taking her up on the offer of negligence. It was Danny who decided she needed to go make furry friends, who told Laura that she had to at least pat a sheep to see how gross her hand would smell after, especially if she’d never done it before, and who wanted to try and bond with any baby chickens who might be in need of cuddlier mothers.

The sheep barked. It sounded like it had been stabbed. Laura would later learn the term for this was called “bleating.”

“Eas-y,” she said, bringing her hands out like a “T,” her voice low, singing the “y" as though she were placating a sugar-high toddler holding a rusty tent stake.

When she was 10, Laura took exactly five-and-a-half group horse back riding lessons before quitting. The instructor was always saying “easy” to the ponies who ran away with the kids.

“Eas-yyyy.”

If she were a rogue horse trying to get a kid off her back and someone said “easy” with the same lilt as a Swedish phone-sex operator, Laura didn’t think she’d listen either. But without a leash or a lasso or anything even remotely useful, and this wide-eyed freak of a sheep on the loose, “easy” was all she had. Laura had no idea what else to do and no clue where Danny had gone. She just really, really wanted to be sure she’d still get her security deposit back.

Danny was barefoot and attempting to run, out of breath and sweaty, thrilled and exhilarated at the sheep-catching idea that had just come to her, but the bottom of her feet hurt and she was scared of ticks so she had to put on shoes and cover her calves first—plus she needed a towel for her grand plan to work.

She flew up the porch steps and flung the screen door open. She scanned the mudroom and immediately lost focus, making a mental note of how her future house had to have a porch, a screen door, and a mudroom equipped with pairs of knee-high muck boots for guests, just like this. After selecting a pair in her size, Danny leaned over and clapped the boots together with her arms stretched outward, moderately terrified of what could be inside the dusty boots’ dark cav- erns. Her arms were too short to make for a safe distance if there were something crawly in there, but luckily, nothing came out with a tail.

Mission one accomplished, Danny jammed her feet into the boots, clomped to the guest bathroom and grabbed a monogrammed towel off the rack. She would use this to blindfold the sheep so that it’d have no choice but to succumb to her gentle guidance. She saw this in a movie once. Next, she ran to the kitchen where she ripped a massive chunk off a crusty baguette from the night before and flew out the door. She’d use this to lure the sheep over. Then she ran as fast as she could without choking. (She’d taken a bite of the bread in the process.)

As she ran up a small hill, she spotted Laura about 15 feet away from the bottom, feet planted in the tall grass, knees bent, arms curved outward—like a bucolic pro-wrestler about to drive her body into an opponent’s armpit, body still, face set, eyes locked in concentration with the sheep. Behind Laura was the brush-lined, winding path that led to a gate, which opened to the road, a road that was mostly quiet and sleepy save for the occasional truck-and-trailer that flew by out of nowhere and rattled the wooden fence.

The gate was wide-open. Danny and Laura made the executive decision last night to leave it just so. They reasoned that if kept shut, it might look like they were purposely trying to keep out a potential passerby-murderer, which might tempt said potential passerby-murderer into breaking, entering, and remote-weekend-house-murdering two women who had decided to leave their cellphones in the city and give only three people the house phone number. It made sense at the time. So far no murders, though.

It wasn’t until this very instant, actually, that Danny regretted not having her phone with her. It was a shame she couldn’t capture the standoff between woman and beast up ahead. They looked sweaty and tense -- they had to be, knowing Laura, sheep in general, and probably anyone in Laura’s predicament, but, from this far away, Danny couldn’t help but imagine them as two neighbors who’d run into each other in a supermarket, blocked by a cart’s distance between them and the aisle shelves beside them. Danny pictured them both in a rush, both shifting their body weight around like, “Well, Margaret, I should get going,” without actually saying it, neither totally sure how to get around the other one. Only a third party person such as she, Danny, could save the day by way of interruption. Speaking of.

Someone would have to make a move. Danny had to be at a book signing in one hour—the whole reason she was in this part of New York for the weekend, not that she was complaining.

Danny had just published her second book. Her first had been a series of interviews with couples who’d been together for over 30 years and credited a large portion their relationship success to birds: bird owning, bird watching, dressing up like birds (that was only one couple, but still). A beaked-and-feathered hobby, Danny had noticed in graduate school, was the common denominator among all her friends’ parents and grandparents who weren’t separated, so she started interviewing them. She had couples send in their own self-shot family-and-bird portraits to accompany the story. She submitted the project for a year-end assignment, and, rather miraculously, one of her professors (big bird watcher, it turns out) took enough of an interest in it to help Danny get it published after she graduated.

Danny wasn’t exactly passionate about the topic but she loved the people, and the book, though niche, was successful. In a plot twist no one saw coming, the book amassed a small but loyal following of bird fanatics, many of whom were looking to meet other bird fanatics, both for friendly and romantic connections, or other bird-loving couples to double-date with. They bought the books for friends and family, attended local book events, and left rave book reviews on bird blogs. The book was printed in three different languages: French, German, and Simplified Chinese.

As for the other portion of sales that continued to trickle in, Danny suspected most people purchased the book ironically, but she figured “so what” given that the formal byline and small (small) amount of royalties legitimized every time she had panicked and asked herself, “What the hell am I doing spending money on an MFA in creative writing?” She was a full-time free- lance writer otherwise, but the book-thing buoyed her.

Her biggest fan was probably Laura, who’d graduated from her own business school program a year ahead of Danny and went straight into a full time job as an investment banker. God bless her. Laura bought 30 copies, asked Danny to sign all of them, and kept them in a closet to give as gifts each time she had to attend a wedding or a housewarming party. Danny and Laura were friends with a batch of strangely prolific home-owners and wedding-havers, and Laura had an admirably punctual gift-giving track record (Danny was about two to three years behind on hers and was riding the hope that her married friends hadn’t noticed). She was only just now starting to run out of her personal stock and promised to order a new shipment the moment her last present was wrapped and delivered.

Danny’s new book was fairly different from the birds thing. It was a book of essays about growing up. That you magically transition into an adult one day was a concept something that had always interested her. She was pretty sure every grown-up she knew was still a kid in many ways, and she’d known so many actual kids -- Laura had been one of them -- who were adults from the age of reason onward. Danny felt perpetually in between. It was as if she had a younger ghost, age 11, maybe, who’d lurk behind her during her most adult moments and tap to interrupt with something.

But occasionally, she and her metaphorical ghost were on the same page. Like right now, for example: Standing on the lawn of a weekend rental in a pair of muck boots and her underwear with a loaf of bread in hand all because she wanted to pet a sheep was a fairly accurate portrayal of Danny. She made a mental note to ask see about recreating this for her author portrait.

Laura took a small step forward. The sheep took a small step backward. Laura stopped. This dance was getting old and the whole thing had quickly gone from worrisome, to novel, to kind of funny, to annoying. She was ready to give up and let the sheep take fate into its own hooves when she spotted Danny at the top of the lawn, still pants-less, somehow, despite the acquisition of a pair of rain boots, a half a loaf of bread, and a towel.

Laura was scared to raise her voice and startle the sheep, but what the hell was Danny doing?

“What are you doing,”she mouthed, just incase Danny could read her lips from up there.

“I’M GOING TO BLINDFOLD THE SHEEP,” Danny shouted.

Laura watched a crescent of white appear around the sheep’s creepy orange iris and saw its nostrils flare.

Oh god.

“D o n’ t m o v e,” mouthed Laura, bringing her finger to her lips. The sheep’s other eye bulged, its hind-end quivered.

Laura could see Danny motioning toward something with the towel and the bread. Was she going to chuck the loaf at them?

“What?” Laura shouted, accidentally—oh crap.

The sheep’s tongue darted the air as it bleated for all of Ireland, and with an absolutely mind-boggling amount of agility for anything of that height and body shape, the sheep spun on its haunches and took off galloping.

Laura watched as her security deposit ran for its life away from the road (thank god), toward a large pond on the property. Laura had no idea if sheep could swim, but from her own short interaction with it alone, she strongly doubted it. Danny held the loaf of bread out toward the sheep with a “here kitty, kitty” motion.

The sheep banked left.

Danny dropped the bread, and in a heroic yet strange move, quickly stretched the hand towel out to her side like a toreador’s cape and began flapping it toward the sheep, shepherding it away from the water.

The sheep went right and caught sight of its pen. Laura held her breath. The sheep was running straight toward the pen's gate. Which was closed. How the hell did this sheep get out in the first place? The other sheep were bellowing a desperate chorus of “baa,” the chickens were flipping out. And then just when she thought the sheep was about to ram its head straight into the middle plywood railing, the sheep, bless it, jump-squeezed between a space in the middle of two planks like a hamster, slow-motion flipped over, made it to the other side and landed with a soft thud. The four other sheep all ran toward it to stare, to tell him to never pull a stunt like that again, to ground him, probably, and to ask what it was like in the outside world.