I’ve been a little discombobulated lately — too much going on in too short a time. But I had a story due to a magazine, so I came out to the shed this morning to do a final read-through (I always read my stories aloud as a final step in finishing them, yes, the novels too — it helps a lot with smoothing out the language).
(NOTE for editors: please don’t hesitate to solicit me for your magazines / anthologies. I rarely write short fiction these days unless I have such a solicitation, just because I’ve been focusing on essays and book-length works. But I do like writing them. 
)
The cat came out for a pet and then curled up at my feet. It started raining while I was working, and the further I got into the story, with the rain pattering down, the calmer I felt. Ah right. I do know how to do this. Sometimes I forget.
I really like the end result — hope they do too. Sent it off now, so we’ll see. Next step, dash through the rain back to the house, refill my tea, take a look at the to-do list for the shop opening.
I think making some botanical resin bookmarks is next on the list, and measuring my tables to see if there’s one that’ll fit in the booth, and after that, I might bake some wolfberry scones for the autumn treat boxes, and assemble some blends of chocolate-chai tea.
*****
“It ended with expulsion. That’s what happens when you try to cheat, and cheating was exactly what Anju was doing, kneeling on the floor of the headmaster’s office, trying to jiggle open a lock with a hairpin. Nothing in her life up till now had given her reason to train in lockpicking. Behind the lock was a drawer, and in that drawer were the test scores, the critically important test scores….”