I accidentally started writing a new short story.
This sounds like a good thing, and it is – but this story was not on the schedule! 🙂 I have a lot of deadlines jammed close to one another, and am doing my best to stay focused – but this story got stuck in my head at the end of last week, and I finally gave in and wrote the opening on Saturday. Fortunately that got it out of my head – at least for now…
“I know you’re there,” Joey said, his voice wavering. “What’s your name?”
The room was silent.
He swallowed. “If you’re going to live under my bed and scare me, you can at least tell me your name.”
Joey held his breath and listened, but there were no more sounds. Maybe there wasn’t a monster there after all. Maybe it was just his imagination.
“Phil,” a small voice said.
Prickles ran down Joey’s back. The monster had replied! There really was a monster underneath his bed!
A monster named Phil.
“That doesn’t sound like a monster’s name,” Joey said.
“Why don’t you stick your foot over the edge of the bed,” Phil said. He chuckled. “Then you’ll see what kind of monster I am.”
– from the first draft of the unnamed monster-under-the-bed story
Another distraction was that I won a Chromebook at my day job! It was a complete surprise, as was the fact that I found the whole thing inordinately exciting. It’s super easy to cart around, and now I use it if I want to make notes in another room, and can leave my laptop plugged in to my two big monitors. It’s been super handy already!
I have two short stories coming out in the next few weeks. One is in the Once Upon a Quest anthology, which is a collection of adventurous faerie tale retellings; the other is in Beauty and Wickedness, the first volume in the fairy tale series I’m organizing. It was a complete coincidence that the dates for both collections ended up so close together, but it’s also kind of fun. I’d never written a story based on a fairy tale before, and now I’ve written two!
And on that exciting note, I’d better get back to writing before something else distracts me. I have a feeling that something else might be named Jasper or Rosie… 🙂
