I said that I would do it and indeed I did!

(Pardon my breaking into My Fair Lady music. :) It has been far too long since I have given my mind to seriously writing Puddleby Lane. I got busy (though that's no excuse) and though I can write in spurts and snippets, I find it makes for choppy inspiration, so sometimes I'd rather not write at all. It's rather like trying to draw in pen-and-ink with a leaky pen.
ANYway, last night I thought I would beard the lion in its den, so to speak and try to make some progress of some sort on P.L.

Enter me, armed for battle with a cup of black currant tea and some Scottish shortbread, fortified with a pound of butter. My attempts did not begin under the most auspicious of occasions. I sloshed my tea by accident and it wet the shortbread through. Anyone who's anyone knows soggy shortbread is a calamity. I ate it anyway and flumped down onto the stool in the office and opened up the Puddleby Lane document. Oh joy. I had left Cora in a rather hum-drum conversation that did have a point but was not the most enlightening scene I'd written. Well, I had to get her out of there by hook or crook. It might be painful, but it had to be done. (Oh, and I think I ought to change the color of Ann Company's hair...the feisty red-head is WAY overused in literature.)
I took a deep breath, poised my fingers over the keys, and wrote. I didn't write much. I can't say it was brilliancy, but I think it was a start, and certainly a pardonable attempt for one who has Been Away from her story for several weeks. Would you like to read the very little bit I managed to scribbled last night? I will pretend you do:

She flipped the page and sighed, content.

The minutes tip-toed past on swift wings and it hardly seemed any time at all before Ann Company pushed Cora’s book out of her face and, laughing, announced she was finished.

“Then let’s hurry. It looks horridly cold out there.” Cora shivered, reluctant to leave the warmth of the pot-bellied stove. She warmed her hands one last time, placed her book back on the rack and followed Ann Company onto the establishment’s plank porch. Ann Company turned the key in the lock and dropped it into one of her cavernous pockets. Then, arm in arm, the two girls began their walk toward home.

A salt-scented Wandering Jew of a breeze whisked up the bluffs to meet them. Cora leapt down the twisting embankment behind Ann Company. She was becoming proficient in the art of leaping from hillock to hillock like a deer—she’d gotten her Puddleby legs, as Ann Company had called them.

They stepped through the Needle’s Eye into November dusk, beautiful as anything Cora had ever seen. The fading light hung suspended above the beach like an airy, amethyst wine. It purpled the red clay of the bluffs and bewitched the roar of the breakers to a hushed sigh like a weary child lulled to sleep. The sand stretched before them, an undulating tapestry—silver where the ripples crested and ebony in between. A sliver of white moon winked at the girls where it rose from the regions beyond the reach of the eye. Cora squeezed Ann Company’s hand and they stood in silence, the utter peace of the shore seeping into her very soul.

“For the beauty of the earth, for the glory of the skies,” Cora began the song and Ann Company joined her rich alto to the melody. “For the love which from our birth over and around us lies, Lord of all, to Thee we raise this, our hymn of grateful praise.”

A lone sandpiper, the last of the birds to go to bed, scuttled across the tapestry and broke the reverie with a sleepy twitter. Ann Company drew Cora’s hand through her arm and they walked on.

Cora sighed. The perfection could not last, and she had known it. But oh, what a sweet glimpse of perfection it was!

There you have it. The fruits of a tardy mind attempting to drop from the tree of....It's Been A Long Time. But I think I'll keep it for now. What say you? :) ~Rachel