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.”

Liese, I love, love, love your under the bed drabble.

OK - is there any reason at all you can't lace the book with some of these drabbles? Because that acts as a damned near perfect introduction to the section on the Bronze. And after all, the drabbling? Definitely part of fandom.

So it's appropriate, surely?