Room 428 waits under a single hanging bulb, its light pooling over uneven stone and towers of books that lean in like old friends. Pages lie scattered across the floor, a few still warm from the last flurry of work. Somewhere in the corner, the others are already here.
Doris, whining, wiping pretend sweat off her brow as she stabs at her keyboard: Oh my gawd, the writing isn’t even the hard part! It’s the technology! I’m drowning in buttons, menus, and pop-up boxes that vanish when I try to click them. I’m still not sure what half the icons in Word actually do. I bought Scrivener, opened it, and it might as well have been written in Martian. And this blog! It took me two full days and several hours of muttering at my screen just to figure out how to make a link work — and even then, I wasn’t sure if I’d linked it to the right thing.
Grace, Doris’s muse, bone-dry: This is the downside of waiting until you’re old to write your book.
Calliope — Audrey’s unseen companion since the day she was born — snickers from her perch on the arm of Grace’s chair.
Doris: Uh huh. And just how old are you?
Grace: I’m older than dirt. And I’ve been waiting for you to be ready for decades.
Doris, folding her arms: Those decades had to pass to give me the emotional space to write the story.
Grace, gently: I know. We just have to patiently work our way through the technology pitfalls.
Doris: Can’t you just wave your magic wand? Laughs. I know, I know — you’re not my fairy goddess mother. Anyway, you can bring Baby out of the shadows. I finally wrote that first scene, the birth scene.
Calliope slips off the chair arm and disappears into the stacks. She returns cradling Baby — the brand-new opening scene of the story made flesh. The room hushes. She steps into the circle, and for a moment, all the fussing about software and links and lost decades falls away. Grace and Doris lean in, hands reaching, voices soft with wonder, as they welcome the story’s first breath.