I really liked that one, deb. I was thinking about doing a stage one, but I couldn't work it out without being pretentious.

Allyson, very nice work. I can feel it. After reading it, I think I was there. I particularly like your Sally Ride bit, it makes it feel so real and just...present.

And it depends on how boring your boring details are. Can the reader pick up from context things like who Tim is? You shouldn't have to completely explain yourself and where you are.

(I hope this isn't too far off protocol. I was on the road during the last challenge, so I didn't get it in then. I still wanna post it, so...this is for 'under the bed')

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dog ears

Douglas Adams is not dead. He is bantering with Neil Gaiman. He still loves me and has adventures waiting in some galaxy just left of reality.

William Gibson is pondering fame and fandom, and comparing notes with Irvine Welsh. They conclude that they believe in the visceral.

Madeleine L’engle is debating philosophy and Greek architecture with Aristophanes. Aristophanes is winning, but one gets the distinct impression he is being humored.

And Dostoyevsky is sitting, crankily, in the corner, and refuses to talk to anyone.

Men and demons lie under my bed, waiting with silvered tongues to woo me into slumber.

I'm hoping that little paperclip cartoon in MS Word that pops up to ask if I'd like help writing a letter will just write the details for me. I mean, if it's going to be a presumptuous little fucker, it should have the skillz to back its smarmy little grin, shouldn't it?

I'm pulling a Minear and starting at the end. The glorious thing about paragraphs is that you can cut and paste them in chronological order if it all goes awry.

Yeah, cut and paste a very handy thing.

Liese, that's gorgeous.

winslow

On the commute home, I realized I could just go to the bookstore. I didn't have anybody waiting at home. No obligations. I could make my own plans.

When I had cried at the train station, this wasn't what I imagined. Married at eighteen meant I went straight from the folks' house to the dorm to our apartment. I'd never lived independently, and it seemed terrifying.

Instead, it was liberating. I didn't love him any less, and when he came home, I wouldn't be any less glad. But I would be more confident, less reliant, stronger.

I took the next exit.

Liese, that's extremely pretty.

A moment to indulge my memories - which have been running fucking rampant recently - with another First Time drabble. Also autobiographical, although unlike the last one, the conversation isn't precise.

Reverie: When First We Met

Sunlight streaming through windows, splattering the piano, the antique rug. We're talking, lazy, idle.

"It was at Woodstock."

"That was the second time." He shakes his head at me. "Six months earlier."

I blink at him. "What? No way."

"At a bloke called Peter's apartment. Just after Christmas. Big posh place on the Upper West Side."

"But...but..." I'm stammering now. "Woodstock. You were a newlywed. I went and cried behind a stack of amps. I'd remember an earlier meeting, wouldn't I?"

"Apparently not." The brown eyes move away and, with a shock, I realise I've hurt him. "But I do."

Aww, wow.

That's wild, because the whole line of things could have perhaps been different. And he thought you remembered.

It floors me, that I don't remember. I remember the party, because I'd been to a booksigning with my much-older journalist sister that day, and Peter Beagle had signed my copy of The Silver Stallion, and then she took me to this party where there were all these music industry types - that's what Peter did, PR or some junk - but I don't remember meeting N there. He said he remembered meeting me just fine - his immediate reaction, according to him, was "well, now, here comes something different."

But I still don't remember him being there.

Drabble 2, ripped out of an unfinished essay:

I discovered the Bronze in the Spring of 2000, just when I hit the wall of monotony at work. A co-worker made the fantastic suggestion that I think about what I was worth, divide that by what they were paying me, and the difference would be the number of hours I could spend doing jack shit at my desk. This gave me 1.7 hours of slack-time, if I rounded up, and I did. This was more than one full day of work I spent chatting with other people about television shows, life, and arguing about the wisdom of using stranglation as a means to torture a vampire, since, you know, they don’t breathe. I chalked it up as “flex-time.”