Yep - that gets it.

Nice, Gar.

Oh, very nicely done, Gar. I like that.

Thanks, Karl and Bev and sj!

Jilli, I think the whole thing is very exciting. Go sample chapters! You can do it!

AmyLiz, I think you just summarized your first drabble with:

I've never heard of Robert Clergerie! This is what happens when Sex and the City ends. All my fashion comes from Target lately.

Heh.

The Robert Clergeries are gorgeous! Now there's a heel I could wear.

Holy crap, my agent is good.

She sent me an article this morning, from the UK: Ms. Rowling (Harry Potter) just contributed a whole lot of money to MS research. Not surprising - her mother had the worst kind, rapidly progressive, and died of it.

Marlene said, now, THAT would be a blurb.

Um, yeah, no shit, Sherlock, but how do we get to her? I mean, do we go through the agent-agent channels? I write a nice heartfelt letter about the Kinkaids, talk about the fact that my protagonist had MS, drop Montel Williams' name, and hope Rowling ever gets to see it?

Says Marlene, my best friend in the UK went to med school with her husband; they've stayed friends. Let me check...

I'm actually leaning toward the heartfelt letter and the attachment of the part of WMGGW where JP is remembering the life and death of his bassist friend Jack Featherstone - who is completely taken from Ronnie Lane, who died from progressive MS.

But dayum, if I can make her a BNF?

Damn.

God, Deb, that would rock.

That would make for one seriously useful blurb, deb! Wow.

Congrats on the very fine dollars, Gus.

Damn - Shaffer can't. The Letterman schedule is 15-hours a day.

Ah well. On to Rowling.

Warning: I'm about to kill the thread. Sorry in advance.

This is on Teppy's topic, but not a drabble. More like a brain or soul dump. It's the opposite of all-access.

Relicts

I'm told someone's writing a biography of you.

He won't be asking me about you. How can he? He doesn't know I exist. I chose that road, long ago: stay invisible.

There were a lot of reasons for that. I could tell him wondrous stories, moments of intimacy, laughter, power, music, magic. I would kill to have your reputation be my right, in my keeping; lord knows, I'm as fiercely protective of you dead as I ever was when you were alive. But he won't ask me. My name's not on that guest list.

He'll ask your widow, of course, the woman you were married to those last few years of your life. She's the executrix, the keeper of the keys of your memorabilia, your stage wardrobe, your sheet music. She can give him all sorts of things for his literary scrapbook. It's possible that somewhere in her goodie bag, carefully doled out for posterity, there are things she can't identify, things that predate her. I wonder if one of those is a sterling silver man's ring, made from parts of ebony and ivory piano keys? I wonder if she found that, after you died. I wonder if a chill went down her back.

He'll ask your first wife, naturally, the woman who had everything I wanted, and kept it for all the wrong reasons. She was there for the money and fame years, Mrs. Rock Star. She can tell him all about how you two adored each other, how you kept coming back to her, how she was the great love of your life. She's probably right. Who am I to say?

I won't be asked. The golden circle will be incomplete - I made sure of that. If the book mentions me at all, it will be as the faceless unidentified girl he had an off-again, on-again relationship with during the 1970s. It must not have mattered very much, though, surely? Since he was still married?

When history gives you your due, they'll be there, those two women. I'll be shut out, excluded, barred, outside looking in.

Because in the inner circle of the women who apparently mattered to you, two had rings, and neither of them was me.

It seems odd to say something like this, because he was such a big part of your life, and I mean no offense... but I'm so blown away by the way you say what you need to. You're one of the few people I've ever come in contact with that has the ability to not only say exactly what they want, and what they need, but to say it so well. Your stories about him always hit me right in the heart.