Check it out! A drabble topic that's more or less on time.

Challenge #101 (disguise[s]) is now closed.

Challenge #102 is summer job[s]. Go to it.

For Teppy and my WIP readers. JP's POV, of course.

Summer of Eighty-Three (a Kinkaid drabble)

It was the first real catering gig she ever had, you know?

Should have been easy. First off, rockers? Easy to please. And they were my mates: the Bombardiers, celebrating going into debt to buy their own San Francisco rehearsal studio, south of Market.

Bree's damned good at what she does. But she was barely twenty, just out of the culinary academy. She was scared half off her nut. I couldn't understand why.

Of course, they loved it. It was only later I found out she'd changed every recipe with alcohol in it, because she was afraid of me lapsing.

A year of drama school behind me, I learned the script, and delivered it like a performance. Open, friendly half-smile, inviting the mark in on the joke.

They dropped us off at six, when Dads would be home from work, right around suppertime. For me they looked for upscale suburbs. I killed there, if I could get past the dogs.

(Bing-bong!) "Hi! I'm taking a survey, and I wonder if I could ask you three questions?"

On Friday nights, I'd find some family watching Star Trek, and subside quietly into the couch cushions, hoping they wouldn't ask me to leave during the commercial.

My Last Summer

Days in an amusement park, gosh how they fly.
Cleaning cars in the morning and testing the Gemini.
Bunked in a dorm by the Corkscrew I slept.
Did my days on the Mean Streak and the fairway I swept.
The nights were spent drinking and singing old songs.
Playing Cardinal Puff and quarters and dancing along.
I sped through that summer, like all young people should.
Working coasters of tubes and steel and of wood.
But the one thing I left that will never be found,
Was my last chance at youth, before life came around.

Damn, Aimee. That reads like a classic piece of Americana. Beautiful.

Thanks!

Oh, lordy. An exchange between me and my editor's assistant:

Her: "I have here the copyedits to Cruel Sister. Will you be home to sign for them if Fed Ex delivers them Thursday? They are due back 7 April."

Me: "Yep! Send it along. How extensive is it? Am I looking at major revisions, or is this fairly straightforward? Need to budget the time, since this is also (shudder) tax time."

Her: "Ah, yes, tax time. Well, it's the same copyeditor as last time. There's a lot of Post-Its. But the production editor says they're all very specific questions, about little things. Nothing major, from the looks of it."

Imagine my relief (and yes, that was snark, because the phrase "a lot of post-its" strikes fear into my heart).

Deer lowered, why can't they get you a copy editor with a brain?

Oh, the copy editor has a brain. What s/he doesn't have is commonsense. Also, s/he seems to think this is a literary treatise ort some junk, and it isn't. It's a frickin' NOVEL, yo.

I have the feeling this is the same person who was fretting because "Ms. Grabien is not referencing a single definitive version of the song for the chapter intro verses."

You know. The same one I wrote back that frosty little note, pointing out that the song - the original of which is in frickin late medieval lallans, as opposed to English - is as much in the service to the story as the story is to the song.

Gah. Ah well. Forewarned, forearmed, all that.

Summer Job

All that summer, the newsroom had an electric buzz, a feeling that something, something, something was going to happen. We jumped when the UPI machines chattered out copy, made excuses to see what the machines had typed on the long rolls of soft newsprint. I hung around after hours, asking if there was something I could do. "Watch the wire," they said. I used my steel pica stick to tear off each story and piled them on the city desk. What Did He Know And When Did He Know It? The 18 1/2 Minute Gap. The Smoking Gun. Nixon Resigns.