Finally, and with a sense of utter defeat, he did what he knew others had done, and created a website touting his own editorial skills as the author of two well-received literary novels and a longtime faculty member at one of the country’s best low-residency MFA programs. And then he waited.

Slowly, came the nibbles. What was Jake’s “success rate”? (Jake responded with a lengthy exploration of what the term “success” might mean to an artist. He never heard back from that particular correspondent.) Did Mr. Bonner work with Indie Authors? (He immediately wrote: Yes! After which that correspondent also disappeared.) What were his feelings on anthropomorphism in YA fiction? (They were positive! Jake emailed back. What else was he going to say?) Would he be willing to do a “sample edit” of fifty pages of a work-in-progress, so the writer could judge whether there was value in continuing? (Jake took a deep breath and wrote: No. But he would agree to a special fee discount of fifty percent for the first two hours, which ought to be enough for each of them to make a decision on whether or not to work together.)

Naturally, this person became his first client.

The writing he encountered in his new role of online editor, coach, and consultant (that marvelously malleable word) made the least of his Ripley students seem like Hemingway. Again and again he urged his new correspondents to check their spelling, keep track of their characters’ names, and give at least a tiny bit of thought to what basic ideas their work should convey, before they typed those thrilling words: THE END. Some of them listened. Others seemed somehow to believe that the act of hiring a professional writer magically rendered their own writing “professional.” What surprised him most, however, was that his new clients, far more than even the least gifted of his Ripley students, seemed to regard publication not as the magical portal it had always represented to him and to every other writer he admired (and envied), but as a purely transactional act. Once, in an early email exchange with an elderly woman in Florida who hoped to complete a second tranche of her memoir, he had politely complimented her on the recent publication of part one (The Windy River: My Childhood in Pennsylvania). That author, to her credit, had bluntly declined his flattery. “Oh please,” she’d responded, “anybody can publish a book. You just write a check.”

It was, he had to admit, a version of anybody can be a writer that even he could get behind.

In some ways, things were actually a whole lot nicer on this side of the divide. There were still astounding egos to contend with, of course, and there were still huge distances between the perceived and actual qualities of the stories and novels and memoirs (and, even though he certainly didn’t seek it out, poetry) his clients emailed him. But the honest, direct exchange of filthy lucre for services, and the clarity of the relationships between Jake and the people who came to his website (some of them even referred by clients he’d already “helped”) was, after so many years of false camaraderie … downright refreshing.

Even with semi-regular consulting work alongside his new Ripley responsibilities, however, Jake couldn’t make things work in New York anymore. When one client, a Buffalo-based writer of short stories, mentioned that she’d recently returned from a “residency” at the Adlon Center for the Creative Arts, Jake jotted down the unfamiliar name, and after the video call ended he found the website and read up on what had to be a fairly new idea: a subsidy artists’ colony doing apparently good business in a place he’d never heard of, an upstate village called Sharon Springs.

He himself, of course, was a veteran of the traditional artists’ colonies, which existed to offer succor and respite to serious artists. Back in his own halcyon period just after The Invention of Wonder was published he’d received a named fellowship to Yaddo, and flown out to Wyoming to spend a couple of productive weeks at the Ucross Center. He’d done Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, too, and also Ragdale, and if Ragdale had marked the end of his lucky streak a year after Reverberations was published, then at least he could (and did!) list those august institutions on his résumé and on his website for their sheer writerly luster. At none of these places had Jake ever been asked for a dime of his own money, however, so he had to read deep into the Adlon website before he understood what new entity this place represented: a self-sponsored artists’ retreat, at which the celebrated environment of a Yaddo or a MacDowell was made available, not just to the elite or traditionally advantaged person of letters, but to anyone in need of it. Or at least, anyone in need of it with a thousand dollars per week to spend.

Jake examined the photographs of the old place: a great white hulk of hotel, listing slightly (or was that merely the angle of the photograph?), and dating to the 1890s. The Adlon was one of several large hotels still standing in Sharon Springs, a former vacation town arrayed around sulfur springs and once dotted by Victorian spa buildings. Sharon Springs was located an hour southwest of its more celebrated counterpart, Saratoga Springs, but had been rather less prosperous even back then and certainly was today. The town had entered its decline at the turn of the last century, and by the 1950s its half-dozen hotels were variously collapsed, torn down, shut up, or withering away as their guests abandoned longstanding summer routines or simply died. Then, somebody in the family that owned the Adlon had come up with this novel idea to avert or at least temporarily delay the inevitable, and so far it was working. Writers had apparently been gathering at the hotel since 2012, paying for the peace and quiet, the clean rooms and studios, and the communally served breakfasts and dinners (plus lunch in a folksy wicker basket, discreetly left at the door so as not to interrupt the writing of Kubla Khan). They came when they wished, spent their time as they wished, and socialized with their fellow artists if and when they wished, and left when they wished.

Actually, the place kind of sounded like … a hotel.

At the top of the web page, he had idly clicked on Opportunities and found himself reading the job description for a program coordinator, on site, to begin just after the New Year. It didn’t mention a salary. He looked up the town to see if it was commutable from the city. It wasn’t. Still, it was a job.

He really had needed a job.

A week later he was on a train to Hudson to meet the young entrepreneur—“young” meaning, in this case, a full six years his junior—whose family had run the Adlon for three generations and who’d managed to pull this particular rabbit out of the hat. By the time they finished their meeting at a coffee shop on Warren Street, and despite Jake’s obvious lack of program-directing experience, he was hired.

“I like the idea of a successful writer greeting the guests when they arrive. Gives them something real to aspire to.”

Jake opted not to correct this remarkable statement in any of the ways he might have done.

It was a temporary solution, anyway. Nobody left New York for a tiny town in the exact middle of nowhere on purpose, or at least not without a plan to return. His own plan had a lot to do with the relative rent he was paying in newly fabulous Brooklyn and the one he expected to pay in Cobleskill, a few miles south of Sharon Springs, and the fact that he would be retaining his private writing clients and his gig work for the reconstituted Ripley Symposia even as he received a paycheck from the Adlon Center for the Creative Arts. All of it added up to an exile of a couple of years, three at the most, which was also ample time to begin and even complete another novel after the one he was writing now!

Not that he was really writing one now, or had the tiniest idea for another.