Robert MacLean

Keeping a Straight Face: Three Rick Coyne Novellas Robert MacLean

A ROMANTIC GRUDGE MATCH:
When Rick, a writer with a million-dollar advance on his novel The Understated Stud, tries to pick up a woman at the Park Plaza bar, she pretends to be brain-damaged and puts him on.
Upstairs at the book launch she turns out to be a journalist. They trade insults on camera, he wins, and she's fired.
Vanity Fair hires her to sleep with the "Stud" and write an article on it, and the two begin a contest that involves New York society and the writer's estranged young son.
She gets him into bed and publishes a humiliating report on the encounter, and he can save his career only by marrying her.
Hah! Fat chance! But then she's offered a book deal as big as his and has to go through with it....
In SEX AND LOVE he's a teenager struggling with same. Later, IN THE CLUTCHES OF ART, he's a struggling writer, struggling with same.