Salon's just published part six of my novel-in-progress, Themepunks. In this installment, Tjan — the business manager — takes a job at a rival company and Andrea gets slimed by a dirty journo:
Andrea's PDA vibrated whenever the number of news stories appearing online mentioning her or Kodacell or Kettlewell increased or decreased sharply. She used to try to read everything, but it was impossible to keep up — now all she wanted was to keep track of whether the interestingness-index was on the uptick or downtick.
It had started to buzz that morning and the pitch had increased steadily until it was actually uncomfortable in her pocket. Irritated, she yanked it out and was about to switch it off when the lead article caught her eye.
KODACELL LOSES TJAN TO WESTINGHOUSE
The byline was rat-toothed Freddy. Feeling like a character in a horror movie who can't resist the compulsion to look under the bed, Andrea thumbed the PDA's wheel and brought up the whole article.
Kodacell business-manager Tjan Lee Tang, whose adventures we've followed through Andrea Fleeks's gushing, besotted "blog" posts…
She looked away and reflexively reached toward the delete button. The innuendo that she was romantically involved with one or more of the guys had circulated on her blog's message boards and around the slashdots ever since she'd started writing about them. No woman could possibly be writing about this stuff because it was important — she had to be "with the band," a groupie or a whore.
