Title: Accounting for It All
Author: r.r. campbell
Publisher: NineStar Press
Release Date: November 19, 2018
Heat Level: 3 - Some Sex
Pairing: Male/Female, Female/Female
Length: 89000
Genre: Contemporary, LGBT, bisexual, porn, accounting, professor, fraud, grief, wlw, money laundering
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Synopsis
Former porn-star Robin Whethers has skated by as Pornucopia’s do-nothing accountant for years. And who can blame her? Her supervisor has only encouraged her dillydallying, and it’s given her oodles of time to do what she loves most: coach the talent at her mentor’s all-female pornography studio.
But then the IRS comes knocking. With her supervisor unable to bail her out, Robin can either come clean and risk her friendships and career, or buck up and find another way to skirt the system. No matter how she chooses, along the way she’ll have to confront both her blossoming feelings for the man she’s enlisted to teach her accounting and the return of the woman she’s always loved, who’s finally ready to try to make things work.
This lighthearted yet evocative tale of one woman’s quest for self-actualization is sure to please anyone who’s ever made the wrong choice for the right reasons.
A Writer’s Journey… through Desks
Having a comfortable workspace can make all the difference in having a productive writing session or one that comes up more than a little short—at least in my experience. Over the course of the last decade, I’ve moved more times than I’m willing to take the time to count, and, with nearly every one of those changes, I’ve had to find a new desk or workspace to accommodate the change.
Though I don’t have pictures going back through all ten years, I do seem to have some that will take us back to at least 2014, at which point I’d settled on the desk I’d wind up using until only a few months ago, which we’ll get to see at the end of this post!
With that in mind, let’s check out where it all began (you know, if we’re willing to take 2014 as our starting point).
Oh, to be young again. Or something. This is a snapshot of my desk as it appeared on January 15th, 2014—assuming the date in the top right corner of my “to do” board can be trusted. As we can see, I was working on my forthcoming science fiction release, EMPATHY: Imminent Dawn, back then, too, as well as some poems and a short story titled “Camarones.” Not only that, but I achieved my goals that day, as evidenced by the checkmark next to “did it” as opposed to “blew it” on my to-do board. Good job, past me.
This workspace was, needless to say, cramped, and it probably didn’t help that I had like 3,214 books stacked on top of it. Seriously, had I not heard of a bookcase? I mean, I did technically have two of them back then, but surely they were full already. If I remember correctly, at that time I’d actually just paid a visit to a secondhand bookstore whose name escapes me right now, but that might explain the stack of books on my desk’s corner.
So what came next? Well, not the below—there were a few different apartments this same desk found itself in before we got to what you’ll see below. I just don’t have pictures of the in-between times, apparently.
Oh, uh… what? Yeah, I’ve made a bit of a fort here. This photo, if its metadata can be trusted, was taken in August of 2017, prior to recording an episode of my r. r. campbell writescast for the Writescast Network, a podcast collective for writers, by writers. You can see we’ve got a microphone, a different laptop than the one that appeared in the first picture above, and I guess a speaker stacked on a bookshelf overlooking the desk, which is mostly there to hold up the blankets that presumably deafened any echo and improved the sound quality for the interview I was conducting that day.
This space is, again, cramped, though if we were to remove the blankets (as I always do and did after finishing recording), there’d certainly be more room on the desktop there than in picture one. Points to me for getting slightly more organized, I guess.
This isn’t really a picture of my desk, but it is a picture of one of my cats curled up next to my laptop at our dining room table. “What a happy, napping cat” you might say, but let me tell you: there’s about an eighty-five percent chance that, in the moments prior to or immediately after this picture was taken, Rhaegar here was nipping at my fingertips or trying to nap on my keyboard or forearms, as cats are wont to do. *sigh*
That brings us to this: my current setup. Very screen. Such write. It took me a while to save up for this configuration, but *slaps roof of car* this baby can fit so much discarded mail, old hard copies of manuscripts, printers, screens, and other things that have no business lurking on my desktop on it. Cool. I really need to go through that mail, huh?
I really want to redo the office décor, but let’s take a tour of what we’ve got in this image because you’ve already committed to reading this whole post if you’ve made it this far, and I think it’d be fun. Ready? Go.
Bottom right: a Wayne’s World mug. Party on, Garth. Above that, we’ve got a Puerto
Rican flag; my wife spent a year studying there during college and has made a number of trips back there since to visit friends. She even brought me with one time. What a gal.
Rican flag; my wife spent a year studying there during college and has made a number of trips back there since to visit friends. She even brought me with one time. What a gal.
Then, to the flag’s left, we’ve got a very colorful arrangement of soccer balls in a sort of pop art display. I’ve played soccer throughout my life with the exception of ten very injured months in 2018 and another gap during college, when I decided the fields were too far away from anywhere I lived to actually play intramural ball. I’m kind of ready to move on from that picture—not because it’s inherently bad, but because it’s been hanging up in my bedrooms, offices, or wherever else since I was in high school and boy oh boy is it time to fill that wall space with something else.
Upper left: another flag. This one is for the state of Rio Grande do Sul in Brazil. I’ve been to Brazil a couple of times, the first time to teach English and Spanish to university students, and the second time for the World Cup in 2014. The first time I was there, I was actually sleeping in a converted garage in the state of São Paulo, but for the World Cup I spent a month living out of the guest room of my friends’ place in Rio Grande do Sul, which is the southernmost state of Brazil. It’s right down there butted up against Uruguay and Paraguay, the former of which is also an awesome place to visit if you ever get the chance.
So that’s it—my desk as it exists right now. Well, not right now now, because as I type this, our other cat, Hashtag, is actively attempting to knock my stapler off the desk and/or dip her paw in that Wayne’s World mug because she has no manners. Cats, you know?
Excerpt
Accounting for It All
R.R. Campbell © 2018
All Rights Reserved
Chapter One
Miami, Florida—April 2017
Thursdays are my favorite days at Pornucopia.
For starters, it’s payday, and second, it’s in-house filming day, which means after a whole week of waiting, I finally get to work as a talent consultant again.
But it’s the simplest of things that make Thursdays the best of days, and there isn’t anything more predictable than the Thursday morning safe-looting operation.
Before I make it to the safe, though, I stop in the doorway of Jerry’s office for our routine Thursday conversation. “Morning, Jer.”
“We’re still doing this, huh?” He says it with a grin, so between that and me being—in his words—“a prized former starlet,” I know he doesn’t mind my teasing.
“I’m betting we only have a few thousand in the safe this week. Still want me to—?”
Jerry throws his hands up, pretending to look all exasperated as his double chin wobbles around. “Always. Go. To. The. Bank. Every Thursday. No matter how much or how little is in there. Always. Go. To. The. Bank.”
I repeat “always go to the bank” with him as he says it for the second time. “Right. How could I forget?”
“Never forget.”
“I won’t,” I say. And I never have.
I keep moving my way down our skinny, second-floor hallway and enter my office through the last door on the left. After I plop to my knees at the base of the filing cabinet, I ease out the bottom drawer. It slides with a terrible squeak—Jerry still hasn’t lubed it up with WD40 like he promised—and I lift the half-rusted safe from it, my palms running along its cool steel.
I punch in the combination and the safe clicks open, revealing the fat stack of cash inside. If Jerry’s makeshift receipt can be believed, we’re a tick under sixty-two hundred bucks.
As I double-check Jerry’s count, the graininess of each bill wears on my thumb. It’s probably my least favorite part of the safe-looting scheme, what with how tedious it can be. Honestly, for as much as I love the Thursday morning charade, I’d much rather be back talent-consulting full time. Or heck, even acting.
It could be worse, I suppose. Really, Jerry’s not bad where supervisors are concerned. He may be a ham-sandwich-pounding son of a gun, but since he’s the only person actually doing any accounting around here—and because he’s the only one who knows he’s the only person doing any accounting around here—I’ve got no plans to betray his trust.
After all, getting paid for five days of work a week when I really only have one? That’s a pretty sweet deal, if I do say so myself.
I wrap up counting Jerry’s stack of bills—a bit under six thousand two hundred, just as his scratch-paper receipt says. No need to count again; they’ll do that at the bank anyway. I wad it all together with a rubber band and exit my office.
Out in the hallway, I figure I may as well tease Jerry one last time before slipping downstairs and out the door. “Hey, Jer?”
My eyebrows knit when I hear nothing from him. I could’ve sworn I heard him shuffling around hardly a minute ago.
“Hey, Jerry.” Again the only response I get is my own breathing and the soft pad of my ankle-cut Chuck Taylors on the tiled floor.
I step into his office. “Hey, Jer. Looks like we only have a few thousand—”
There, facedown on his desk, rests the motionless body of Jerry Chalmers.
I drop the chunk of cash and rush to his side. “Jerry. Hey.” I shake him. He doesn’t stir. My fingers fly to his neck, then to his wrists in search of a pulse. Nothing.
After dashing back to my office, I fumble through my purse for my phone and dial nine-one-one.
Thursdays are normally my favorite days at Pornucopia, but this Thursday might change all that.
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Meet the Author
Born Ryan Campbell, r. r. campbell is an author, editor, and host of the r. r. campbell writescast. His work has been featured in Five:2:One Magazine’s #thesideshow, Erotic Review, and with National Journal Writing Month. He lives in Madison, Wisconsin with his wife, Lacey, and their cats, Hashtag and Rhaegar.Website | Facebook | Twitter | Instagram
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11/27 MM Midnight Cafe
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