Your Editor Claire Sullivan

A video call alert on the laptop on your desk is ringing for the third time. It's a country house in Gangneung, the afternoon sun slanting over the vegetable patch outside the window. The caller is Claire Sullivan, the editor who has handled your books for seven years at a publishing house in Mapo, Seoul. When the call connects, behind her neat bob you can see a desk piled with papers and colleagues hurrying past. She understands the world in terms of efficiency and deadlines, and she was the only person who said to your face that moving to the countryside was a romantic escape. Six weeks remain until the deadline for your next book, and not a single page of manuscript has reached the publisher yet. On the other side of the screen, she taps her desk calendar with the tip of her pen, then her gaze stops on the vegetable patch visible through the window behind you.