Studio Note
The first page: the only honest light in the building
Sunday, 7 June
Three weeks out
Three weeks until Conflict of Interest, so here is where it starts. I wanted the first thing you saw of Celeste to be her competence, not her heartbreak. A woman alone in an empty office at night, fixing a cover that three other people signed off on, because she is the only one who can see what is wrong with it. Nobody is going to thank her. Nobody is even going to know. She does it anyway, and that is the whole of her before Dominic ever walks in. The light table was the image I built the book around. Everything else in that building flatters. The light table does not. It is the one place in Aperture where a thing is exactly what it is, and she is the one person who stands over it every night. He is going to stand there too, soon. Watching her work. You will know what he is. She will not. Read the opening below, and then, please, do not read the last chapter of book three first. I know some of you. I love you. Do not. Vivienne x From Conflict of Interest, chapter one: The cover was wrong, and Celeste Bianchi had three days and an empty office to make it right. The lights were off except the lit table. It was the only honest light in the building anyway, clean and white and merciless, the kind that didn't flatter and didn't lie. Everyone else had gone home hours ago, back when the windows still held a little blue. Now the windows held the city, and the city held its breath, and Celeste held a loupe to a transparency and saw, for the fourth time, exactly what was killing the February cover.