Writers are weird ducks. And the wives of writers find themselves putting up with mood swings, inexcusable inattention at inappropriate times, and what probably seems to them like vapor-brained absent-mindedness.
Now to me, having a book ready and close at hand is one of life’s necessities. Think blood to a vampire. It wasn’t long before I was fidgeting, shifting through the junk in my truck, looking for something, anything, to read.
I skimmed through an old Braves program; scanned some faded movie tickets; rummaged through the glove compartment, but my son Scott had removed the owner’s manual for some reason. Drat! I felt like a junkie desperate for a fix.
Then I unearthed a decrepit flyer that was blank on one side. After I’d read the printed side (several times) I thought, well, if I don’t have anything else to read, I’ll see if I can come up with an idea for a story.
So I found a pen, and jotted down the first thing that popped into my head on the back of the flyer:
“Amelia liked their life just fine, before Allen decided it was time to grow a family.”
And that’s when Martha showed up. I put the flyer aside, and we set off walking. But that innocent line, scribbled down in haste, had wormed its insidious way into my mind, and I couldn’t let it go. I turned it this way and that, played with it like a dragon with a hapless knight, and a story began to flesh out around it.
Once, driving home from a meeting in another city, an idea for a story popped into my mind, and I lost myself in fantasy. When I finally returned to the real world, I was thirty miles from where I’d started, on some strange road, with no idea where I was or how I’d gotten there.
So by now, Martha knows that when I grow quiet on our walks, and stumble over roots like a zombie, or almost blunder into the creek, that I’m lost in some story world. And, bless her, she tolerates my weird behavior. To an extent.
By the time we finished our walk and returned to our vehicles, I’d worked out the ending. That evening, I wrote the story in one setting. It’s a horror story called “Something Special.”
You can get “Something Special” at the Kindle store and from Smashwords. I hope that, after you read it, you, too, will think of it as something special.
Now it’s back to work on Seed, my novel in progress. Chapter 35 revisions await!
