“I finished the first issue of my comic!”
“Yeah?” Reed shoved a pen behind his ear and set aside whatever he was doing to give the boy his full attention. “Will you show me?”
Intrigued, Cecily shamelessly eavesdropped. The pair of them dropped companionably onto the floor, cross-legged. The boy pulled a sketchpad out of his backpack and handed it over. Reed paged through, reading with the kind of focus he might devote to a best-seller.
“The artwork is fantastic, Austin.”
The kid perked up before giving a wary frown. “But?”
“Well, you’ve created a guy who’s a hero straight out of the gate. That doesn’t make for a real interesting story. Why are we supposed to root for him?”
Austin jerked a shoulder. “I don’t know. ’Cause he’s awesome. That’s why he’s called Captain Awesome.”
“But surely Captain Awesome wasn’t totally awesome from the get go. Something made him awesome.”
“Like radioactive sludge?”
“A classic for a reason,” Reed agreed, “but I’m talking about character arc.”
“What’s that?”
“Well, instead of starting your character out here, think about building him. No hero starts off as a hero. You gotta give your readers somebody they can relate to in the beginning, more their level, who grows into being a hero. Think about Peter Parker. He started out a little geeky dude. Smart but picked on by others. And then he gets bitten by that spider, gets super powers, and suddenly has the skills to start helping people. But even then he’s not automatically a hero. He has the skills, but he helps himself first.”
Cecily watched him, head together in deep discussion with the boy, and her heart sighed.
Brenda came to perch on the arm of the sofa, her embittered face softened with a smile. “He’s always doing stuff like this.”
“Yeah?”
“He’s a big softie. Always going out of his way for other people. Can’t think of a single other reason he’d have hired me after my divorce. I’m sure there were other more qualified people, but he saw me in a jam and gave me a way out.”
Reed Campbell knew the value of investing in people. Except, instead of investing money, he invested his time—possibly a rarer, more valuable commodity. Her family would like him. She liked him. It was just too damned bad that he’d never be able to get past the family ties she couldn’t escape.
~*~
“—I built the site with Wordpress, which is really user-friendly, so I can show you both how to update things once you decide who’s going to be responsible for what.”
When Cecily glanced up at him, Reed fought the urge to point at someone else in a Not me gesture.
“I swear, it’s not that bad once you know what’s what.”
“What kind of stuff would we update it with?” Brenda didn’t look anywhere near as alarmed as he’d expected. Maybe a challenge would be good for her. And generating website content would keep her focused on work instead of him. She’d stopped outright hitting on him, but there was still a low-level flirtation that made him uncomfortable.
“That’s up to you. There’s an integrated calendar, which will enable people to add an event to their calendar at the click of a button. You could use the blog to share book reviews. In fact, that might be a great way to really make your customers feel like they’re a part of things here. Give them a chance to write a guest book review for the store blog. Free content by local people. They’d be proud of what they did and tell all their friends, which gives you word-of-mouth traffic to your target audience.”
Reed nodded, seeing the brilliance in that. “I know at least a dozen people who would be all over that. What else?”
The phone in his pocket buzzed. As Cecily named a half-dozen other things that had his head spinning, he slipped it out and read the text from Selina.
What are you up to?
Reed: Having my mind blown.
Selina: Not sure how to take that…
“— the sort of thing that would be easily cross-posted on all the integrated social media.”
Reed’s head shot up. “We have social media now?”