Yep. Sometimes I can do both - if the situation is less personal and less emotional and more purely visceral, I can absorb and record at the same time. Somewhere in this house there should be a notebook containing seventeen handwritten pages, the sensory basis for the second half of And Then Put Out The Light. There are freeform nonstop do not pause for breath notes on everything from the polyglot chatter going on around me to the stones-not-sand freel of the beach to the way the light moved on both the Med to the south and the hills to the northeast.

Mostly, though, it's a two step process, at least. Absorb, then channel.

It can take me a long time to write about stuff, if it is painful or confusing stuff.

Dear god, this one is hard to write.

A Memory, Returning After Thirty Years

The first drop was almost invisible.

Had I known it was there, had I looked at it closely, the survival instinct that runs bone-deep in all of us would have told me that something was very wrong. This blood was the wrong texture; spongy, diluted. Just a drop, so small, so very small.

Another drop of blood, wrongly textured, edging out over the elastic of one silk panty leg. A sudden cramp, a thin streaming flood. Panicked, I reached for the phone.

I hadn't known I was pregnant. I hadn't known there was something, blood, anything at all, to lose.

you give me cold chills, Deb.

Another happy question from me, but how long do they leave up crime scene tape?Because all of the articles I've read have just convinced me I'm not the only wannabe Simon out there...that yellow tape makes a lot of reporters swallow The Big Book of Metaphors or something.

122 words for the 'something small' drabble topic. I couldn't tighten it more than that.

---

I look at a playing card he handed me.

"So this is going to revolutionize gaming?"

Kyle swipes another sip of my coffee sitting on the table between us, nods.

"I like the art. The rules look really … mathy, though."

"The guy who designed it is a math professor. But it's going to be huge."

I shrug. We stop talking about his new job, instead gossiping about the live-action vampire game we're both in. Before he takes me home, Kyle tucks the card into the band of my top hat. I don't know it, but the card holds my future; a new job, travel, a husband. All I see is some better-than-average fantasy art, and rules text I don’t care about.

Aww, the history of Jilli and gaming, all in one drabble.

Jilli! That one's a sweetie.

Wondering about submitting a short story or two here.

I've got a few friends with stories already published there or accepted there - Kate Maloy, Susan Ito, Russell Rowland - and it's tempting. I'm worried about Vonnegut being their gold standard, though...

Submit, Deb. The chances are 50-50 going in, without any other considerations at all. Spare? Your writing is both spare and elegant. Go for it.