Maybe Next Time: Flash Fiction Offering

This week, between hectic days at work, I wrote a short little flash-fiction. I had  thoughts of sending it off into the wide world someplace and seeing if it would catch thirty dollars in some magazine, and then I realized ain't nobody got time fo' that before Thanksgiving, so instead I'm letting you read it. This was a fun exercise in an unusual (for me) POV. And if you're wondering, though the events are fictionalized, the tone and certain facts are definitely autobiographical. This is, in short, how it feels to walk downtown as Rachel Heffington. Ciao, ciao.

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Here’s the problem with being idealistic:

You always hope. Always. And when things don’t turn out your way, it’s almost pitiful how faithfully you smile and shrug. “Maybe next time.”

And your Experience says, “Yeah. Sure.”

And your Idealism says, “Yeah, sure!”

So this is why you find yourself (having locked your keys in your car by accident in a downtown parking garage) instead of cursing, thinking, “Hey, an inconvenience is just an adventure wrongly considered, right?” This is why you smile expectantly at the next car that passes, hoping they will notice your predicament.

They don’t.

Maybe next time.

You’ve got your purse, though, and your outfit is a power-house itself and there is a Place to Be, so let’s not allow imprisoned keys to set the afternoon counter-clockwise. You shove off the side of your car and swing your purse higher up your shoulder, headed toward the North stairs. The strap catches and dumps the contents of your purse’s outer pocket into the center lane of the parking garage. A BMW purrs up the ramp. It’s either dive for your Yves St. Laurent lipstick or let him run it into a woebegone, cinnamon-colored smear on the second-level ramp.

With the skill of a gold-medalling gymnast, you dart into the path of the oncoming Beemer, grab for the lipstick, and tumble to the other side. The driver blares his horn and throws his hands up, voicing everyone’s disbelief:

“What the heck, woman?”

Or some curried variation of the phrase.

 The horn-blast pierces back on itself as you check: all limbs accounted for. You go, girl. High-heels intact and everything. You smile and wave at the car’s taillights and reach the North stairs unaccosted.

Take the two flights down.

Exit on the quiet side of the street.

There’s a light mist in town. It isn’t exactly coming down thick enough to warrant the umbrella you left in the (locked) car, but it’s going to settle in a fine mesh on your hair, pulling it into damp, clinging tendrils. You had wanted to look especially polished. Well, you lost that one.

Two businessmen round the corner as you approach. You notice the vintage make of the taller one’s briefcase, the slim cut of his suit, the way his pocket-square matches his eyes. The broad set of his shoulders hunched against the vaguely-chill damp; his good hair and supremely wonderful beard. But it’s the compact, razor-burnt member of the pair who gives you a preoccupied smile. You return the expression, knowing full well his heart wasn’t in it. Still, a smile from a stranger is valuable, even though you might have been a mildly pleasant stocks-report for all the meaning in it.

Hurry now. Skitter around the corner, past your favorite restaurant, scents of anise, cumin, coriander, Chinese five-spice, and teriyaki wrapping exotic hands around your stomach. You flip the collar of your trench against the mist and hunger, wishing again for a real, live Burberry and a festive meal with friends.

You slowly pass your soul-mate store, tempting you with blank cards and paper for perfectly wrapping a yet-to-be-purchased gift for a yet-to-be-discovered Someone…dinner party invitations; placemats; card-cases; ink; cranberry-colored tassels. What you would do with a tassel doesn’t matter. You want one. You’ll find a use for it.

You wait for a string of fancy sports cars to finish their intricate four-way stop-sign dance and then hazard your chances getting across the intersection. After all, you don’t want to end up a woebegone, cinnamon-colored smear in the pavement. Plenty of people are gathered around the fountains in the Town Square as you flit by. You know you shouldn’t really stare at the couple having their date in the table at that picture- window, but you can’t help a quick peek. Bad news: they look up at you. The man laughs. His date narrows her eyes. Oh well. You cross again at the haberdashery store with its emblem of the Golden Fleece. Yeah, you’d need the corner market on the entire Golden Fleece trade to afford anything in there, but someday. Someday.

Despite that Place to Be, you pause to view the model in the show-window and your hand automatically slides up this side of the glass to touch his cashmere sweater, to fix his tie, to rest your palm on his chest and inhale the scent of his cologne. Some shop-girl with civil eyes and devastating cheekbones steps into the case and fixes the tie for you. So he, also, belongs to someone else.

They all do.

Maybe next time.

You duck against the mist that has somehow become a rain and press on through more businessmen in tailored suits, more women thinner, chicer, more successful in their careers  than you, skirt a few hopefuls dancing hip-hop to a beat straining from a rattled boom-box. A smile for them all. They don’t notice. Not most of them. But that’s okay. Smiles are cheap currency.

At last you’ve arrived. The sign ahead shines bleary-eyed against the rain and you hush into the simple, glass-fronted shop. Here, it is warm and dry. The others inside blink up against the dampness you brought. Laughter swells inside as you wring out your ruined hair and feel your heart pushing eagerly against your breast-bone. Adventure. Adventure. Adventure, it beats.

“You’re late,” the others say in their several, silent ways.

You laugh and whisper to no one, to everyone, “What’s new?”

“Meet any dashing strangers this week?” a girl asks from the far side of her earl grey latte. In the foam is drawn a plumy feather.

“Not a one.”

She sips her drink. Pewter daylight pings off her French manicure. “Pity.”

“Uh, yeah.”

You order a chai tea latte made with whole milk instead of water and wait as the new barista draws the foam. Will he make a string of hearts or a leaf or the latte-cat you’ve waited for your entire coffee-drinking life? He sloshes the cup across the bar and you catch it, scalding-hot against your palms.

“Thanks.” Then you see he didn’t know how to make the art, or didn’t bother to. Your foam is looking spectacularly like, well, foam…with a careless brown blob in the center. No leaf, no feather, no hearts. Definitely no cat.

Your heart settles into its everyday promise:. Maybe next time.

Carefully, so as not the spoil the art-that-wasn’t, you carry your latte to the corner booth. The booth that’s always empty every Thursday afternoon around four; the time you come. In you slide, down you slip, and even though it’ll come off on the cup’s rim, you swipe on some of the rescued lipstick. You never can tell when you’ll meet with an adventure.

Suddenly, the door jangles open and a swath of damp air matches itself against the back of your neck. Confident steps stride to the counter. The little hairs on your arms stand up tall. Something big just came through that door. You lift your coffee and sip, rotating just enough to watch the newcomer without it appearing to be your sole mission. Italian-looking shoes. Slim-fit, navy slacks. A trench-coat, belt knotted behind. A trilby, for lawd’s sake.

Adventure, adventure, adventure.

He orders black coffee, extra hot, takes one hand out of his pocket and pays for it. As he waits for the coffee, he surveys the crowd in the shop, like he’s a regular and they’re the newcomers, drumming the fingers of his right hand on the polished cherry bar. Polished till it gleams almost as dark as his hair.

Bluffing, you think. You’ve never seen him here on a Thursday at four.

As if he heard that thought, his gaze roves to you. The eyes crinkle and a grin –the best kind of grin—quirks at the corners of his mouth and finally cracks wide open, for you. He gives a two-fingered salute and you contemplate the consequence of trying to vanish into your latte.

“Black coffee, extra hot, for Grady?” bawls the barista.

He grins again, murmurs thanks, and sips his coffee. You decide it should be illegal for anyone’s jaw to do what his jaw just did. And just at the point when you’re beginning to wonder whether he’s a doctor or a lawyer (we can probably rule out Indian chief), he slides into the booth across from you, plunks down his coffee cup, and says:

“Mind if I sit here? Everywhere else is taken.”

You peer around the shop. Gosh, it’s true. You’re thankful for the decision to add lipstick and deftly rub off the evidence from the edge of your for-here mug. But before you have a chance to say anything even mildly intelligent, he takes his other hand from his pocket and clasps both around the mug.

“Chilly out there, isn’t it?” he remarks. Tiny drops of silver cling to his lapels, his shoulders, even his finely-etched face.

You nod, your heart a tiny, startled lump of chilliness itself.

“Didn’t expect it to start pouring like that.” He taps the fingers of his left hand against the mug, wedding ring clinking fatefully, as he stares out at the rain.

So he, also, belongs to someone else.

They all do.

And just like that, your heart begins to chug again, pulling itself back on the tracks, steaming along through life to the rail-song, Adventure, adventure, adventure. Somehow you make small-talk and he finishes his coffee and you finish your latte and he leaves and nothing is different than any other time in your young, long life except that maybe you’ll put him in a book someplace.

For a second, you thought it had happened.

You’re a little ashamed of having thought it was happening. Wryly, you notice how you’ve been knotting your hands in your lap, biting your bottom lip. You stop all that. There’s always someday.

Probably someday an adventure will come your way and the dashing stranger won’t be married and maybe you’ll buy a coat and you’ll find a twenty in the outside pocket and perhaps Diane von Furstenburg will start making dresses in a size fourteen and maybe, you know, someone will give you an inheritance or you’ll go on a road-trip and end up by mistake in a town called Accident. It happens, you know.

You grab your purse, slide out of the booth, and return the lipstick-stained mug to the dish-rack. You wave goodbye to the girl with the foamy feather and step back into the rain, smiling again at the people who don’t notice.

Maybe next time.

And at any rate, there’s still the matter of what to do about your keys.

The Fifth of November: Celebrating The Fallow Year

"Read. Read constantly. Read the kind of stuff you wish you could write. Read until your brain creaks. Tolkien said that his ideas sprang up from the leaf mold of his mind: your readings are the trees where your fallen leave would come from."

"The first thing is that writers should be voracious readers. We live in a narcissistic age, which means that many want to have the praise that comes from having read, without the antecedent labor of actually reading. Wanting to write without reading is like wanting to grind flour without gathering wheat, like wanting to make boards without logging, and like wanting to have a Mississippi Delta without any tributaries somewhere in Minnesota. Output requires intake, and literary output requires literary intake."

"Read like a reader and not like someone cramming for a test. If you try to wring every book out like it was a washcloth full of information (and nothing but information), all you will do is slow yourself down to a useless pace. Go for total tonnage, and read like someone who will forget most of it...Most of what is shaping you in the course of your reading you will not be able to remember. The most formative years of my life were the first five, and if those years were to be evaluated on the basis of my ability to pass a test on them, the conclusion would be that nothing important happened then, which would be false. The fact that you can't remember things doesn't mean that you haven't been shaped by them."

All of these very, very excellent quotes come from a slim little volume by Douglas Wilson titled Wordsmithy. I was given this book in the coffee shop I'm sitting in now. It was a gift from a friend who, I hope, didn't feel like giving it to me because she could sense my drought. I must confess the year 2014 was a year of output. Massive output. I published two novels and a novella, started a new job, and worked my precious little butt off. The understandable assumption was that the year 2015 would be the same. It was not, however. 2015 has been a year of immense personal schedules. The girls I mainly nannied in 2014 I am now schooling, which adds a dimension and a half. I now plan their lessons, teach them, and have had the huge privilege of seeing them go from their alphabet to real books, explaining our ridiculous English language, and showing them the world, such as it is. This year I have also rediscovered my love of reading.I'm sorry to say that I forgot about it for a little while. Not about my love of stories - that never faded. But of how easy and delicious it is to lose oneself in a book. To nose so deeply into the pages and words and characters that one forgets present constraints. Is it summer? Is it autumn? Does it rain outside or are we having dry weather?
I forgot about this love because I consciously kept myself in. I am a book drunkard. I give myself up entirely to the story and if I lose myself early in the day, I am lost until whatsoever time the book has coughed me up ashore like a word-soaked Jonah. Knowing this about myself, I was careful not to get too entangled in a book. I only read if I deemed I had time to read. And, predictably, my word output shriveled. If I had no time to read, I certainly had no time to write and here was the vicious cycle. Friends, however, gave me books for my birthday. I visited the Holocaust Museum in Washington D.C. and bought a couple more. Pretty soon I had a stack of unread books waiting on my shelf. Waiting for that day when I had "time to read." The temptation was, quite simply, too much. Since summer began, I have given into my passion and picked up Wodehouse's Summer Lightning. I don't have hours upon hours to read - I am a busy working woman. Still, I elbowed other things to make time. From Summer Lightning, it was a short step to swallowing Schindler's List piecemeal between bouts of more Wodehouse. Harper Lee's Go Set A Watchman grabbed me and shook me by the throat as I soared through it in two or three days, and Wordsmithy dribbled through my fingers as well. Cocktail Time rounded to a close and Blandings Castle was waiting, all uncracked-spine and crisp pages. And do you know what? I found a piece of myself that had gone into hibernation. Ever so slowly, I'm coaxing her back out. I do have time to read. I can choose to put aside my phone, to postpone that drawing commission, or to go to bed a little early and pick up a book before sleep. I can choose to spend my evening reading rather than watching White Collar or The West Wing, as painful as that choice is.

Reading opens massive, massive worlds. How could I ever have let it go? Since picking my books back up, I have found that my mind is brighter. I am not at a loss for things on which to think. Words spring readily to mind. I've almost finished the first draft of my story for the Five Magic Spindles contest with the overflow. But you know what? The paradigm shift was as subtle as it was important: I did not read to turn the words like so much straw into WIP gold. I read for reading's sake; for the sake of losing myself in another world for what might be half an hour, or a full afternoon. I found the joy again of diving so deep that when I emerged, I had to shake myself a bit and look about and remember where and whom I was.

Farmers rotate crops so that a given piece of ground is not stripped of a particular nutrient; different crops suck different things from the soil. And though the farmers, by rotating the variety of crops grown on that piece of ground, can keep the soil fairly healthy and thriving, fallow years are necessary. A year of rest for the soil. A year of building up again the depleted stocks, of fertilizing the ground and waiting. A year where nothing will grow that is lucrative, but wild-flowers and grasses will knit its wounded, harrowed soul back together, leaving that field fresh-faced and ready for the following spring. 2014 was my insanely productive year. 2015 has been my fallow year. But a fallow year is necessary, and I will not apologize for (unofficially) taking it. I will only turn back to my books with a fond smile, write as I can, and thank God for the great, great joy it is to be literate and to know the thrill of traveling lands afar through the wilds of an unread book. I feel myself healing. Oh, rest is a beautiful, needful thing.

It has been a year today since my last release of 2014.  A warm happy birthday to my dear first mystery: Anon, Sir, Anon! If any of you feel like burying yourself deep for a cozy, British afternoon, head thataway to say hello. Supporting independent authors is a wonderful way to explore deeper waters in the joy of reading. Buy a copy for yourself, for a friend, or to show a lonely little mystery that though the promise of a sister-mystery has been delayed, it has not been forgotten.

All My Love,
         Rachel

NaNoWriMo Therapy: Helpful Things For Your Sanity's Sake

Today is the first of November, which means that every day from now until December 1st, the writing will fall into its peculiar autumnal hush. Except from this corridor because I have never participated in National Novel Writing Month, hitherto referred to as "NaNoWriMo." I don't do well under that sort of pressure and besides, I prefer sleep to word-count, which could be my main issue. But since I know that many if not most of you will be participating in NaNoWriMo, I've filled this post with happy things for you, as my Instagram begged just this morning:

Wishing all my friends who are doing #NaNoWriMo (National Novel-Writing Month) a great kick-off and a full prescription of tea and toast. You have the chutzpah of a tigress in the Euphrates and deserve malleable plots. Cheers to you! 😘

A photo posted by Rachel Heffington (@lipstickandgelato) on Nov 1, 2015 at 6:47am PST

I love all of you and I'll be back with a celebratory post in just a couple days because, get this, Anon Sir, Anon will turn a year old on the Fifth of November, which really calls for celebration! "Remember, remember, the fifth of November." Maybe, to help it feel as grown up as it is, it is time to purchase a copy of your own? But for now, I'm here to nourish your massacred soul which stands upon the brink of a thirty-day howl and begs mercy.

And because I am trying to help ease things along for you, I'm also sharing my recipe for a single-serving clean-eating brownie because you writers need to eat healthily, but you also need chocolate. I love you! 

Edible Therapy:

1 teaspoon coconut oil

1 Tablespoon honey

1 pinch baking powder

1 pinch salt

1 Tablespoon + 1 teaspoon flour (or almond flour)

1 Tablespoon cocoa powder

1 Tbs. chocolate chips or chopped chocolate bar (70% cocoa or higher)

Place first two ingredients into a ramekin or oven-safe mug in the oven, preheating to 350 degrees Fahrenheit for one minute till melted together. Mix with other ingredients. Press chcoolate into the top. Bake for 5-6 minutes or until no longer jiggly. Eat warm! 

Best of luck to you all! <3

Even More Snippets!

I've been getting a bucketload of reading done lately, partially because our home wifi has been ought and my cellular data doesn't support overmuch lazy Facebook/Pinterest/Instagram scanning, leaving me way more time for actually productive pursuits. Also, since my sister and I carpool to work most days and she gets off half an hour later than I do, I have spare shreds of time that I've been filling with reading rather than browsing. Maybe by the time we get this sorted out, I'll have reformed to a creature who doesn't fulfill all Millennial stereotypes? Anyway, I've rediscovered the depth of my love for reading which had been forced dormant for a while. I've also been getting a lot of words into The Spindle and The Queen via "word-wars" with friends such as Meghan Gorecki. I had never given much credence to the helpfulness of friendly competition until I tried it and realized I really didn't like losing. Sunday afternoon found me having written three-thousand words, give or take. I like this trend. I also finally dragged Cottleston Pie out of my trunk, discovered my trunk has a leak and the file had become a hotbed of disease and black mold, tied a scarf around my face and extracted blurred words from the page and copied them into a file on my computer, and generally felt like I would fall prey to the Bubonic Plague any minute. Update: I'm fine. I've finished Schindler's List, read Go Set A Watchman in record time, am a chapter away from rounding off Wodehouse's Cocktail Hour, and am the same distance from finishing Wordsmithy by Douglas Wilson. I have so much to say on the subject of all these things...about reading in general, reading as regards writers, about my story, and about the value of other art forms serving as inspiration. In short, I've got a lot to say and about ten minutes in which to say it. So I'm not going to waste my breath. I'll write it out when I have time (tomorrow?) and leave you with a few snippets from The Spindle And The Queen instead.

The producer’s phone rang once, twice, three times. Heath glanced at the minimalistic wall-clock and calculated that if it was seven o’clock here, it would be noon in New York and nine in L.A. Brendan Fischer was likely finishing his second mimosa, wiping his mouth on a monogrammed napkin, calling for Natalie to reschedule his nine-fifteen appointment an hour later so he could cram some yoga into his routine and swing by the juice bar before hitting the office. Heath winced as a deafening crackle birthed a dubious connection between two continents.

“What’s up, man?” Brendan’s voice sounded suntanned.

Silence. Silence so firm and cold you could skate across it.

After confessing the non-plausible plausible solution to Flavian, the man had quietened, suggested he might have someone who could help the case, and invited Heath into the street with him. Every cell in Heath’s composed, civilized brain told him this was what travel guidebooks called “a compromising situation” and suggested the American traveler at all costs avoid. 

They passed skinny boys and gangly men, shapely women with braids swinging to their hips, fat women with hair combed into thick knots at their necks. No one seemed in a particular hurry to close themselves into their homes for the evening. All doors were open to the street. Half the children ran naked, chasing a ball down the center of the street. Dogs skulked between legs and cats hid in potted petunias, their eyes catching odd shards of light leftover from the setting sun. Everywhere the streets reeked until Flavian led Heath and the boy into a clean, white lane set with the most opulent mansions Heath yet seen. The contrast between the sector through which they’d just trekked and this celestial glory hurt Heath’s eyes almost physically. He blinked a few times and caught his breath while Flavian spoke to a slender gypsy man smoking against a gold-painted fence. Daniel climbed the fence and swung by his hands on the top spikes, making faces at the grand house in its beautiful cage.

“I am supposing the spirits brought me to you.” 

Heath looked at him curiously. “You believe that?” 

“Of course. What do you believe? Are you Orthodox?” 

“I’m not saying it’s a popular belief and I’m not saying I don’t sometimes forget I believe it, but I’m a Christian.” He laughed. “The only Spirit I have dealings with is the Holy Spirit.” 

“Oh.” Flavian eyed him slyly. “Ah...Pentecostal.” 

Heath grinned. “Baptist.” 

“Okay.”

At the balancing point in all awkward interactions when some decision or another must be made, the farther door opened the queen who had once been beautiful entered.

Behind-the-Scenes: a writing tag, answered

Hi, Kids! Still obnoxiously in the land of NO WIFI (can I scream like the first-world woman that I am?) so posts are still scarce as pre-boiled hens eggs, but I'm here at Starbucks again and I'm going to post by crikey. The Spindle & The Queen runs apace. I still haven't thought of a better title and I'm still angsting over getting all the details correct but I am happy with how it goeth.
There is much happy news in my land. My friend and editor, Rachelle Rea, has had published her second novel, The Sound of Silver! My friend, the ever-inspiring Mirriam Neal, has landed a contract for her wonderfully unique Paper Crowns and I'm pacing like a caged tiger to learn more details about it. I want to know by WHOM and WHEN we'll get to read it and all of that jazz. Patience. Bah.
I was also tagged by Elisabeth Foley to do the Behind-the-Scenes writing tag. I don't usually participate in tags but I figured that it could not possible hurt to help you peer into the foggy mist that is my writing process. It will help you cheer me on and that's something. Questions, then!

a blessing on your head, mazel tov, mazel tov.

Is there a certain snack you like to eat while writing? Hazelnut in dark chocolate. It began as my editing chocolate and is basically Nutella, deconstructed. I solemnly swear there is something in the molecular structure of this particular chocolate that is conducive to word-count and general productivity. It seldom, if ever, fails.

When do you normally write? Night, afternoon, or morning? Night. I would naturally prefer writing in the morning, but having a "real job" negates the possibility of morning or afternoon writing, except on Wednesdays which I have off, on principle.

Where do you write? Wherever is nearest to an outlet, as my mother's laptop (which I'm using till I buy a new on on Cyber Monday) cannot operate off-charger.

How often do you write a new novel? Ha. Hahahahahahaha.

Do you listen to music while you write? So rarely as to be a firm "no." If I do, it is instrumental, as I can't listen to someone else making words while I'm trying to.

What do you write on? Laptop or paper? Laptop, generally. I have fewer excuses if I write on Google Docs, which I can access anywhere. If I write on paper, there is far too much leeway for leaving it someplace like a car trunk for weeks on end (ahem).

Is there a special ritual you have before or after you write? Nope.

What do you do to get into the mood to write? Read someone else's work. Wish I could write like that. Decide I never will if I don't keep writing. Then I write.

What is always near the place you write? My inspiration journal, in which I keep all my research notes.

Do you have a reward system for word counts? Getting to stop without shame?

Is there anything about your process that others might not know about? I have a hard time tacking down plot. Characters, setting, dialog, writing itself are so much more natural to me than plot. I basically have to chase my story down a dark alley and buffet its head before it will respond with plot.

I tag Meghan Gorecki, since this tag has already been pretty well around my blogging circles. Cheers & stuff.

The Spindle And The Queen

Though my story for Rooglewood Press's Five Magic Spindles contest is yet untitled, for now I am calling it The Spindle And The Queen. I have begun a Pinterest board for the story for those of you who are curious for the photographic inspiration behind it. I am thrilled to have set The Spindle in Romania at the beautiful Peles Castle. I'm privileged to have been twice to this location and to have hands-on research to help me in my writing...paired with the historical research required (Princess Maria of Romania was a legitimate person and died at the age of three), I'm quite excited and stocked-up-on-ideas for this story. Let me practice pitching The Spindle And The Queen to you:

Hunted by a rabidly envious gypsy-witch, Maria, princess of Romania, must decide in which era she truly belongs. Carlotta the Maleficent meant to keep a century between herself and her arch-rival, but when American Maria Weid stumbles into the past through a shattered bookcase in Peles Castle, the gypsy's carefully-sculpted plans are destroyed. If Maria, heir to the Romanian throne, discovers her true identity, she will alter the course of a history selected for the world by the maleficent lady. With Maria's intern hunting the truth this side of the century and the young princess, in possession of The Spindle, struggling to make sense at the other, Carlotta must wage her war. 

One princess buried , one gypsy queen vanished, one hundred-year gap. One book, which achieved it all, suspended between.

And now for the snippets, because I know all of you are absolutely dying (har, har) to read about the Sleeping Beauty!


The glass casing hummed beneath her hand, its beauty physically drawing her near: hundreds of unfamiliar stories in unfamiliar languages, made friends by their livery of leather and cloth and gold-leaf. If only there was no barrier between her and the books. If only she could touch them—just touch their spines and run her fingers across a page or two…the glass…how strong could it be? Would they even have an alarm system?

Don’t panic, Itty. Don’t you dare panic. She forced several calm breaths. See, that’s air. That’s oxygen. You’re fine. It loomed behind her memories, though, older than nightmare: a great blackness—layers of it—blotting out light, just as if she’d been put in a heavy, narrow box.

“Karl!” Elisabeth’s tone stung more than she intended and her husband’s blue eyes darted, troubled, to her face. The look melted her. Cold he certainly was, but he was not cruel. “Karl,” she tried again, “do you ever wonder how different our lives might have been if…”

A high, cadenced ceiling rose up, up, up above her; a ceiling just like music.

She tucked a strand of hair behind her ear and smiled. “P-pace.” There was no hand offered to shake so she went for the traditional cheek-kiss. The man backed away.

Monks. Right. Monks.

Heath was too clever to fall for the favorite “Americans are stupid so I will try to lie to them” trick. “Ma’am, all I know is that your bookcase swallowed up my boss and there is an entire film company in America who will be beating down the doors of this castle unless you tell me where she went.”

The tour-guide’s honey-hued eyes riveted Heath as if she’d taken her hand and tipped his chin to force the connection. He found an alluring, unsettling conviction in their touch. “Peles,” she said melodically, “is a palace, not castle.”

Could a more pleasant Alpine afternoon be asked for? Heath forced himself to notice the wide, forest-lined avenue and the sound of a river purling a short distance away. He passed a sign warning the pedestrian of possible bear sightings, and grimaced. If a bear would show up now and take care of everything for him, he’d probably not mind as much as he would have this morning. Before Maria had been so asinine. Before she’d vanished in a wall four inches thick.

“So unlikely,” Carlotta muttered. How many times had she searched through the tour groups, knowing that Maria, daughter of Elisabeth of Wien, would, by Fate’s hand, try to come home? How many times had her suspicion landed upon a woman fair in form and face, light and laughing as the child had been last she saw her? How many times had she watched such women, guided them away from the bookcase, sing-songed them to the safety of the outer court? And this one—this very American, brown-haired, green-eyed person, slightly plump and not graceful in movement—had slipped past her notice. Why? Because she had not considered a Romanian princess could have been so wonderfully…commonplace.

A young Romani boy—a gypsy, as were the rest of her household—scuttled off the front porch and came to her. She ruffled his hair and put away her golden magic for a time.

She took his hand in her own and swung her arms. “What has Tamara made for dinner?”

“Sarmali.”

“Mmm. Did you go to school?”

Daniel scuffed his toes in the clean white gravel of the courtyard and looked off to the rose-beds. Carlotta sighed and chucked under his chin.

“Daniel, you know you must attend school.”

“Why?”

“Because.” She pulled him along.

“Because why?”

“You are a gypsy. You know what they think of us.”

Daniel’s dark eyes searched her face mischievously. “What? That we cannot learn?”

“That we are too shiftless to want to learn. I know that is not true. And so do you.”

“Maybe I do not want to learn.”

Carlotta’s voice dipped to the coaxing tone to which she seldom stooped. “You want to learn to make magic, don’t you? Like your ancestors?”

His black eyes riveted on hers. “I want that.”“Mmmmm. Good,” she hummed, and pushed open the heavy, gilded door.

Out of desperation, she had traded her Toms for an ensemble resembling more a feed-sack tied with a woolen scarf than anything recognizable as fashion, and a pair of ugly leather clogs. The trade had hurt her worse than she’d thought it would. Those glorious Toms…formed exactly to the shape of her foot….gone to an old, sewage-scented woman who appeared to be growing a beard of all things!

She knew the way to the palace. She felt odd, knowing, for it was clear to her that Peles was not entirely built. Workmen and carts crammed the road which led to the castle. Here a long-eared, sad-eyed donkey looking as if doomsday drew nigh, there a random knot of sheep and a lanky shepherd. She knew more of the palace than the palace knew of itself. It dizzied and enchanted Maria, and for one fleeting moment, she forgot her terror.

Illiteracy, Red Stairs, And A New Hashtag

Hello, chaps and chapesses! I wanted to pop in for a few reasons. First and foremost is to let you know that yes, I have been writing and yes, it is going well and the reason I've been so incognito on the blog is that our home wifi is null and void and has been for the past two months and by the time I get to Starbucks or another wifi'd place, work for my food + fashion blog has stacked up so much, all my time is spent playing catch-up for that. So this is going to be a fun post because I have twenty minutes to cover a multitude of sins and I'm going to go at it at a running pace.

Teaching:

Tuesday, September 8th, was International Literacy Day! It baffles me to think there are, by some accounts, 757 million adults in the world who cannot read. When I stop to consider how different my life...heck...how different I would be had I never learned to read, it it almost too much to handle. As the primary teacher of two little girls, one of whom is on that precarious brinking of reading-but-not-quite, I feel like I'm up close and personal with the subject of literacy and "can we read," or "can we not read." The following infographic (brought to my attention by Grammarly) gives you a little more insight into the problem if illiteracy and where the highest problem-areas are.

Please don't take for the granted the fact that you can read and write and all the worlds that have opened up to you because of it. And if you ever get the chance to teach a child to read...do it. It brings the subject into such a different point of view!

Reading:

I'm working through Cocktail Hour by P.G. Wodehouse as well as slowly tromping through the rest of Schindler's List (it's so heart-rending I find I can only take very small doses), and reading through (over breakfast each morning) Julia Child's Mastering The Art of French Cooking. I heard this past weekend that Rooglewood Press is officially and permanently offering one of its author's stories as a free download, and Hayden Wand's The Wulver's Rose (from their Five Enchanted Roses collection) as chosen as the featured title! So definitely go download that and see if it tempts you into buying the whole collection.

September has also been a great month for another friend of mine, author Rachelle Rea, whose second novel, The Sound of Silver, Whitefire Press releases on October 15th! She's been busy all month sending out e-ARC copies to fellow authors and I just know it will be as huge a success as the first title.

Writing:

My untitled Sleeping Beauty story. I'm still not sure whether I will enter Rooglewood's Spindles contest with this story, but I am writing it to that end. If the story wants to stretch itself and get bigger than the allotted word-count, I'm not going to cramp it and make it fit. I have a good feeling about this story and if it wants to become a full novel (though I'm not saying it will) I want to give it its freedom. Also, Cottleston Pie, which is being conducted on paper, has been locked in my trunk for two weeks. But it is so much almost finished I keep forgetting I need to actually do the deed.

Just now, as they mounted the red stairs again, the Queen weighed the cost of asking the one question to which she already guessed the answer: “When our sweet Mariechen died, did you swear to never again love anyone, even her mother?" But, as always, she hesitated. Already so strained, what might honesty add to the turmoil? No, far better to accept the coolness in place of warmer emotions and, philosopher-like, remark that the weather was pleasant enough to require only a light wrap. She placed her arm in his, reminded him of their evening engagements and, at the door to his study, parted from him with a sensation like frostbite pulsing in her throat

Changing:

The hashtag for #wordplaywednesday! I know I've trained all of you to hashtag your weekly posts with that, but apparently we share it with something entirely different. So from now on, #wednesdaywordshare is the name of the game, okay? If you think of it, please share the news around so that we can all get grouped up again! :)

I will be back as soon as I can with a full snippets post, but I wanted to pop in while in the presence of wifi and say that I hadn't died, rotted, or abandoned ship. The Inkpen Authoress is still alive. Somewhat more stressed, busy, and wifi-deprived than of yore, but as full of words as she ever has been. Cheers, darlings!