FORKS AND SPOONS

Rain beat erratically against the windows of the study, and wind whistled in the chimney, but Sara did not hear it.

“Sara!”

She jerked her head up from her book. Vicki stood in the doorway, her hands on her hips. “I’ve asked you twice already to set the table! I’m not going to ask you again.”

Sara rolled her eyes. She hated it when Vicki tried to act like Mama.

“Get up and go set the table!”

“Just a few more minutes, Vicki, please. I just have to find out if Nancy and Bess and George are going to be okay. They’ve been in a car crash!”

“That’s what you said last time!” Vicki marched over to their father who was sitting at his desk in the back of the room. “Dad, tell Sara to set the table.” She glared back at Sara. “Now.”

Dad took his earphones off and looked up from the papers he was grading. “Sara.” He turned in his chair. “Please go set the table.”

Sighing tragically, Sara put down her book and followed a huffing Vicki to the kitchen. She sighed again.

“Knock it off!” Vicki said. “You think I don’t have a book I’d like to be reading? You’re not the only one who hates this arrangement.”

Sara glanced at the clock above the stove as she grabbed utensils out of the drawer. Mama was late. No wonder Vicki was so crabby. Rain always made her grumpy, cooking always made her grumpy, and Mama’s new job really made her grumpy—probably, Sara thought, because it meant she had to make dinner on the days Mama worked.

Sara dropped her handful of silverware onto the table with a loud clatter.

“Knock it off, Sara!”

“I didn’t do it on purpose!”

Vicki glared at her.

Sara glared back, picked up a spoon, and dropped it onto the table. It clanked several times before lying still.

“You little brat!” Vicki threw down the wooden spoon she was stirring the spaghetti sauce with and rushed toward Sara.

The telephone rang.

Read the rest.

Finding appropriate places to send my writing—especially my fiction—takes a lot of time and is a lot of work, and I just don’t have the energy for it these days.

And I know that once the babies come, I’ll have even less time and less energy. And whatever time I do have, I won’t want to spend it researching obscure journals that might or might not be interested in publishing what I’ve written. And even if they were interested, they wouldn’t pay me. The privilege of a byline is all most those magazines offer by way of payment.

Since that’s the case, and since the thought of writing in a vacuum, with no one beyond my critique group reading what I write is, well, depressing, I have decided to periodically publish the short stories that I think are publication-ready on my website. At least this way, a few people might read the stories, and that feels a heck of a lot better than having them sit unread on my hard drive for the next who-knows-how-long.

So I’ve set up a new fiction page (in place of the old Speaking page—because let’s face it, I’m not going to be doing any public speaking for the foreseeable future) and have posted my first story, “Rose at Dawn,” a little romp of a fairy tale/romance that I wrote last fall.

I feel sheepish asking this, but I’m going to anyway: If you like the story, would you please send the link to a friend whom you think would enjoy it, too?

And, of course, I’d love to hear your feedback—the more specific, the better, as that’s what will help me learn what I need to work on in my storytelling.