Hello my Bindery Babes! I'm so excited to share the first chapter of Creative Differences by Annabel Paulsen & Lydia Wang with you.
THE BOOK IS NOW AVAILABLE TO PRE-ORDER BTW!!!!! Tell everyone you know!!!!
This is from the POV of Ramona (aka the character of the right side of the cover) and was written by Annabel! Amelia's first chapter, written by Lydia, will be coming soon so stay tuned for that Bindery post coming sometime next week <3
Remember, if you sign up for the Sapph-Lit Producer or BRAND NEW Literary Salon tier, you'll get a physical ARC of Creative Differences shipped to you!
Also, thank you all SO MUCH for your feedback on the Swanboat logo. We took everything you voted on & your comments on that post into consideration and the Bindery team made some adjustments.
PRESENTING THE OFFICIAL LOGO BELOW, followed by Chapter 1 :) xoxo Nina
CHAPTER 1
Chicago, IL
“I’m not playing that song.”
Ramona Sloane has lost track of how many times she’s said so. And it’s not like Patrick isn’t listening—he definitely hears her.
The first time the station manager suggested she play “Emergency Contact,” Mia Wells’s latest chart-topper, Ramona politely declined. The second time, it was clear the suggestion was more of a request, which she less than professionally flouted. The third time, when she was greeted at her desk by some very angry-looking capital letters, she may have stuck a half-chewed wad of Extra onto the hand-scrawled directive and slapped it onto the door of the recording booth.
So, yeah, he definitely hears her.
And yet here he is, gum be damned, towering above her with that expression that says, I resent you more than Journey’s 1981 single “Don’t Stop Believin’.”
Ramona swivels around in her chair, pushing her headphones behind her ears. “Patrick, your request has been logged. Please expect a response in five to ten business days.”
“Sloane, I’m not asking this time. And you’re not a bank.” Patrick runs a hand through his gray flop of hair. “In fact, you don’t handle the money at all. I do. You know what my niece told me?” He answers his own question before Ramona can even open her mouth. “She said, ‘Uncle Pat, how come your radio station never plays anything cool?’”
Ramona throws her hands in the air. “Whatever happened to creative freedom?”
Patrick continues in an imitation of his niece’s voice. “‘My friends and I want to hear Mia Wells, not this random B-side from an album that came out twenty years ago.’”
“Really?” Ramona raises a dubious eyebrow. “Your niece said that?”
“I happen to know that playing this song on the air, regardless of your feelings about it, will increase listenership by a significant margin,” Patrick finishes, apparently satisfied with his defense. “And advertisers only want to pay for airtime on a radio station that actually has listeners.”
Ramona sighs. “You hired me to bring some ‘fresh blood’—your words—into this station. Because I have my finger on the pulse. Now you want me to take my finger off the pulse and put it on a cadaver.”
“Okay, that’s morbid.”
“Patrick, I’m doing you a favor. If you want a heartless android picking the songs, you should just plug in a Spotify algorithm.” She stares him down, watching him wince. She knows she’s hitting the Walkman-carrying Luddite where it hurts. She clasps her hands together, infusing her voice with entirely unconvincing sweetness. “I’m preventing us from turning into another Top 40–-worshipping slop station.”
“Sloane.” Patrick pinches the bridge of his nose. “You’re killing me here. Who the hell cares if it’s on the charts? It’s still indie, and people wanna hear it.”
Ramona scoffs. “Mia Wells is far from indie. She’s signed to fucking Interscope.”
Patrick holds up a hand. “There’s genre crossover.”
“Indie is short for ‘independent’—”
“I don’t give a shit. Listen. It’s not like I’m spinning ‘Emergency Contact’ in my free time either. But when people are on their morning commute, and our station isn’t playing their favorite song, they switch to one that is.”
Ramona huffs. She knows he’s right. “Emergency Contact” is already ubiquitous, and she somehow knows all the words without ever listening to it of her own volition. She just thought she could keep this space, her allocated five-hour daily broadcast of WBQR Chicago’s Home for Indie-Heads, free of the dirty-blond Best New Artist nominee that is Mia Wells. Or, that she’s become.
Patrick sighs. “Look. I don’t need to know about your personal life, or whatever, but I know you know her. . . .” He looks at Ramona and waits, clearly hoping she’ll pick up what he’s putting down.
She doesn’t.
The truth is, Ramona doesn’t know Mia Wells. She knew Amelia. And if she were bitter, she might say she never really knew Amelia Wells at all, because she left their band to go solo, move to Silver Lake, and shop at, like, Erewhon. But Ramona isn’t bitter.
Everything Patrick knows about Ramona’s relationship to Mia Wells can be read in a four-sentence paragraph on their band’s Wikipedia page, and Ramona would prefer to keep it that way.
“Just . . .” Patrick starts again. “Try to separate any personal feelings from this, all right? This is just a boss, me, telling his employee, you, to do your job. Simple as.”
“Uh-huh,” Ramona says, straight-faced. She can tell he’s getting agitated, and yeah, it’s not the best idea to piss off the guy who signs her paychecks, but she can’t help it.
“I’m sure you’ve always aspired to have an early-morning block at a dying local radio station five days a week,” Patrick deadpans. “So if you wanna keep living the dream, I’m gonna take that as ‘Yes, Patrick, I’ll add “Emergency Contact” to the eight o’clock hour tomorrow morning.’”
Then he turns and walks out of the sound booth. Ramona salutes his retreating back, slips her headphones back over both ears, and flips the microphone on. “That was ‘Hysteric’ from the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, and before that, the new single from Ratboys. I’m Ramona Sloane, and you’re listening to 103.1 WBQR. One more from me today before I pass it over to my friend Kate Breed. This is illuminati hotties with ‘(You’re Better) Than Ever.’”
Then Ramona flicks her mic off and places the headphones on their stand, leaning back in her chair and feeling the tiniest kernel of satisfaction. She may have to bow to Patrick’s musical whims eventually, but that day is not today.
***
There are a lot of reasons Ramona moved back to Chicago after college. One, she missed her parents, who still live in her childhood house out in the suburbs. Two, she never really liked Boston, and she hates New York even more than she hates LA. And three, the first actually warm day each year after eight brutal months of lakeshore winter.
As she walks through downtown toward Millennium Park, she thinks to herself that the air smells kind of good—mildly springlike. Spring-adjacent. On the first actually warm day, everyone is in a great mood. Patrons tip their baristas extra well. No one’s blowing a gasket trying to find parking, because they all decided to walk.
Ramona crosses Michigan Avenue into the park, passing Crown Fountain. Kids are already playing barefoot in the interactive art installation, despite the fact that the water feature hasn’t been turned on for the summer yet. She can’t help herself—she smiles.
She rounds the footpath and finds a patch of grass on the Great Lawn, several yards away from a shirtless man doing push-ups. Normally, she would scowl at the sweaty display of machismo, but today, she’ll cut him a break. She sits down and pulls a bag of Miss Vickie’s out of her canvas tote.
Around her, she hears the playful shrieks of children yelping and giggling giddily. A young woman in a bikini top squints at her laptop screen, the camera evidently off on her Zoom call. Sitting on a faded astrology-themed tapestry, two art students gossip about someone dating someone’s ex.
On a day like today, Ramona almost doesn’t have to listen to music.
Almost.
She opens the Bandcamp app and searches for a new album from a band whose debut she remembers liking. Then she slips in her earbuds—wired, thanks—and lies down in the grass, watching the clouds drift over her. She closes her eyes.
The fourth track is interrupted by the rhythmic buzzing of an incoming call. She checks the caller ID before answering: Celeste Nguyen, her manager.
“Good tidings, Celeste,” Ramona answers.
“Hi, Ramona,” Celeste chirps. “You’re sounding chipper today.”
“Sue me for being in a good mood,” Ramona responds. “I’m not sure if you’re aware, but it is a balmy sixty-eight degrees in Chicago right now.”
“I wasn’t.” She pauses. “But maybe I should start checking the weather before calling if it stacks the odds in my favor.”
Ramona sits up. “Now you’re making it sound like you have bad news.”
“No, no.” Ramona can practically hear Celeste shaking her head. “It’s not bad news! I swear.”
Ramona crosses her legs. “So then what? Why are you making it seem like you’re about to ruin my beautiful day?”
“Okay, listen to the whole thing before responding, okay?” Celeste can’t help but tack another “okay” at the end of the question, which is how Ramona knows she’s about to say something that will ruin her beautiful day.
“Go on,” Ramona says because she doesn’t have a choice.
“Okay,” Celeste says again. “We were approached by Interscope about a summer tour.”
Ramona thinks. “A tour for me?”
“Yes.”
“Why? I’m not signed to Interscope.”
“I know.” Celeste pauses, waiting for Ramona to understand.
For the second time today, Ramona wishes everyone would just say what they mean. Although, if it’s what she thinks it is, she’d prefer Celeste to not say anything at all.
Her face grows hot with indignation. “If you’re about to ask me to fucking open for Amelia on her latest victory lap, the answer is absolutely fucking not. We don’t even make the same kind of music anymore, not to mention the fact that I don’t talk to her.”
“No!” Celeste assures her, already trying to do damage control. “No, that is not what they’re asking. No one’s opening for anybody.”
Ramona sighs, blood still rushing. She pops a sea salt and vinegar–flavored chip in her mouth to calm down. “Well . . . good.”
Celeste must take her response as a positive sign, because she finishes the pitch. “They want all three of you. They want a Swanboat tour.”
It takes a moment to sink in. All three of them. Swanboat. A tour. “They want . . . a reunion?” The word comes out twisted and high-pitched.
“Kind of. Well, yes.”
Ramona grimaces. “Aren’t I too young to be part of a reunion?” she asks between chip crunches. “Aren’t those for, like, glam-rock bands and musicians, I don’t know, over the age of forty? I know I’m not totally killing the game right now, but I’m not completely washed up.”
“Let’s not get ahead of ourselves.”
“Who’s getting ahead?” Ramona squints at the light reflecting off the skyscrapers. “I’m just asking why any rich label exec would want to revive a band that broke up five years ago when they already have a cash cow in one of its members.”
“That’s kind of the point,” Celeste explains. “Beatrix is making that weird techno on a farm in Indiana, which has resonated with a niche fanbase I didn’t even know existed. And Mia is clearly having a moment—”
“Yeah, that,” Ramona interrupts. “Amelia’s successful enough as it is. There’s no way she’d agree to this.”
Celeste pauses. “Amelia already said yes.”
Ramona’s jaw goes slack. A half-dissolved kettle chip falls dumbly out of her mouth and onto the grass.
She tries to make sense of it. The band dissolved years ago. And yeah, she’s still friends with Bea, because they were always friends, even if they did meet on Tinder. But she hasn’t spoken to Amelia in five years, since the last night of their first and only tour, which fell apart as quickly and seamlessly as it came together.
And besides, Amelia is wildly successful, especially for someone who started as an indie darling. Pitchfork named her sophomore album Best New Music. But most importantly, Amelia has fans. More than that, she has stans—teenagers who have her face as their profile pictures and call her “Mmother.” When they were a band, they sold out extremely small venues filled with fans mostly their own age, who talked to them outside the van after the show. That’s nothing like what Amelia has now.
Ramona swallows. “What about Bea?”
“Their team told me to ask you first.”
Ramona rolls her eyes. “So they told you they’d do it if I said I would.”
“Yes.”
“Awesome.” Her tone is flat.
Ramona stares at the grass. She likes her job, even if she has to wake up at the ass crack of dawn to start her shift. She likes curating morning drives and sharing her favorite songs with loyal listeners. But she didn’t ever dream of working at a radio station; she dreamed of making the music they played. And she used to do that, even after Swanboat disbanded. For those first three years post-Swanboat, after she finished her degree, Ramona made an honest attempt at a solo career—before she got dropped from her label and started losing more money touring than she was making.
When Celeste first broke the news, Ramona felt like her life was over. So young, she’d held in her hands what so many spend their whole lives grasping for. She was good, she knew that, but she’d also been lucky. And sometimes people needed to make “tough business decisions” about their investments, ones that almost made Ramona wish they’d never bet on her in the first place. All of a sudden, she was twenty-four—young enough to start over, but old enough to feel like she already knew what she wanted, and that it was never going to change.
Celeste, who offered to represent Ramona back when Celeste was still some hotshot music exec’s assistant, told her to use the time to “focus on her craft.” Instead, Ramona decided to just consider it a fate-imposed break, until Bea taught Ramona what they knew about production, and she started releasing music independently, like they did when Swanboat first started. For two years now, she’s maintained a real adult job with a meager but steady paycheck, and played the occasional show to small rooms of people drinking PBRs, as long as she’s been able to get there in her 2004 Subaru Forester. And if you ask her, she’ll say it’s been good. But the truth is, working adjacent to music isn’t the same. Working in the business of music isn’t the same.
When she was twenty-one, she had a small, rich taste of what her life could be: making music she loves with people she loves even more. And now that she’s twenty-six, the tug in her gut tells her she wants it again.
Amelia already said yes. Ramona tries not to think it, but it comes anyway: Amelia wants to see me. But she doesn’t know that. And she won’t hope for it. Because she hoped for Amelia once, and it just left her a bigger mess than she already was before.
“I don’t take handouts,” Ramona warns, aware that she sounds prideful. She’ll be damned if she lets them take her last modicum of integrity.
“This isn’t a handout,” Celeste says. “Trust me. No one I know in this industry would risk investing the kind of money they’re talking about throwing into this tour if they didn’t think they’d make it back tenfold. As your manager, I’m obligated to tell you that this is a great business move.” She sucks her teeth. “Actually, and don’t kill me for saying this, it might be your only move. It’s been a couple of years now since things changed. This is the best possible way for an A&R rep to finally see what they’ve all been missing out on, and it’s just fallen into our lap.”
Since things changed is a nice way of putting it. Ramona almost laughs. Since Ramona failed at the only thing she’s good at is more like it.
“You’d be on everyone’s radar again,” Celeste says, voice gently prodding. “But you have to make the best decision for you. If you don’t want to do this, you don’t have to.”
Over the past several years, Celeste has handled Ramona’s prickly nature with more than the appropriate amount of patience. Even now, Ramona can tell she isn’t being pressured in one direction or another, even though it’s clear one direction would be significantly more beneficial to Celeste.
Ramona leans back in the grass, tilting her face toward the sun,; hoping for the universe, or the stars or something, to offer her some clarity. Frankly, it’s exceedingly rare for her to do anything she doesn’t want to do—Ramona is very, very good at saying no. It’s the reason she was never featured in her school yearbooks. But this is different.
She knows saying yes won’t make her happy; she’s also fairly certain saying no won’t make her feel . . . anything. And this decision impacts more than just her and her career—it impacts Celeste, and Bea, and a whole team of crew members and musicians who would get paid if she says yes. The only casualty would be her sanity.
“Can I think about it?” she asks, blinking in the bright sunshine.
“Sure,” Celeste says. “But not for too long. They want to start planning ASAP, so I’ll need to give them an answer soon.”
“Got it.”
The line beeps, then disconnects. Ramona lets herself fall unceremoniously back onto the grass. She groans. Then she texts Bea, who responds immediately.
R: just talked to celeste.
B: and??????
R: thanks for putting me on the hook, btw
B: i thought it should be yr decision
R: well you should know by now how much i hate making those
B: ha ha
B: seriously, i’m cool either way. could be fun tho
Ramona pulls herself back up. She digs around the bag for another chip, but finds none. “Goddamn it,” she mutters. Then she shoots off another text to Bea: how’s farm life treating you?
Bea responds with a photo of a baby goat. Ramona sends a fury of emojis.
R: you’d be ok leaving it for two months?
B: i already talked to mar about it and she said she could hold it down.
Marin is Bea’s partner of five years. The two of them met the first day the band was recording the album. Bea had picked up coffees from the small café across the street from the studio, and then insisted on running out for more every time someone finished their cup. Everyone thought Bea was developing a legitimate caffeine addiction before they realized the reason for Bea’s fixation was a certain bisexual barista.
Another text from Bea comes in. IF that’s what you want.
Ramona chews on her bottom lip. What does she want? She wants to enjoy the uncomplicated delight of a sunny spring day. She wants to finish listening to this new record. She wants one more chip.
She also wants the money that could come from merch sales or a reissue of the LP. She wants to make records again, in a real recording booth, with a real budget. She misses the thrill of waking up somewhere new, and stopping at roadside diners for breakfast specials and drowning them in ketchup while Bea and Amelia mock her from the other side of the booth.
It makes her chest hurt to think about. Their friendship, the alchemy between the three of them, was unlike anything Ramona had ever experienced. It still is. When they first met at a goddamn frat party during their first semester at Emerson College, it was like the universe exploded in front of them. Well, technically Ramona met Bea a few hours before that, in a previously agreed-upon park on campus, holding a bottle of screw-top wine in one hand and two paper cups in the other. After conceding there was absolutely no romantic spark between them, they decided to dive headfirst into friendship—and the humid, sticky basement of Phi Delt. Then they met Amelia, who was stranded in the corner of the room, clutching a red Solo cup like it was her only anchor to reality, and Bea told her she looked like Penny Lane in Almost Famous, which led to a whole conversation about the best uses of diegetic music in film.
It was everything. And then it was nothing.
it won’t be like it was, Ramona types. She sees the three dots bubble up.
B: what if it is?
Ramona looks away from her phone.
It wasn’t perfect. But somewhere between the petty squabbles and the writing sessions, the nights spent in the school’s reserve-by-the-hour recording booths and watching the sunrise over the Charles River, they started to approach something sublime.
There’s no way Amelia has loosened her iron grip on her life, which means there’s no way Ramona won’t be tearing her hair out upward of ten times over a multicity tour. Ramona used to think she and Amelia were like Buckingham and Nicks: They fought like hell but made great art. After five years of distance and reflection (if you could call watching interviews and privately seething “reflection”), Ramona has realized that she and Amelia weren’t twin flames that stoked each other’s creative fire. They were actually just a bad idea.
Another text from Bea: plus wouldn’t it be nice to tour with actual accommodations in actual beds instead of a pile of dirty clothes on someone’s floor
Ramona snorts. Bea is right—neither of them has ever toured on a major label’s dime. They’re used to squeezing into a single shitty van packed with equipment and instruments, couch hopping, and taking turns driving. Ramona’s young, but she’s too old to do any of that again. Her back can’t take it.
Ramona sighs, squeezing her eyes shut, relishing the last minute of her beautiful day before doing what she does next. A message to Celeste: fine.
She lies back down in the grass, ignoring the buzzing of her phone, and thinks about what she just agreed to.
And then she hears it: the opening notes of Mia Wells’s latest single, “Emergency Contact.” The same one Patrick practically programmed into her playlist for her. She opens her eyes, searching for the culprit contaminating the public airspace, and sees the art students bobbing their heads to their tiny speaker like it’s their own personal Lollapalooza.
Fucking art school.
