Nineteen

I finished and submitted my nineteenth story of the year this morning, a 4,300-word confession. This story also owes its existence, in part, to Left Coast Crime.

Rebecca and I stopped in Amarillo on our way to Santa Fe and had dinner in a Mexican restaurant. I wondered aloud, "What about a confession where the narrator is a waitress in a Mexican restaurant?"

That isn't a story. That's barely even a complete thought.

While we were kicking around ways that the narrator might meet a customer, we noticed that the restaurant had a small, glass-topped freezer and every so often a little kid would reach into it and pull out a single-serving ice cream cup.

That's when we knew the narrator's love interest would have a child. Many children. Then her love interest morphed into a T-ball coach who accidently leaves one of his young players behind in the restaurant.

We had the set-up.

I wrote the first 2,000 words in various hotel rooms in Texas and Santa Fe, but put it aside to write story eighteen when I returned home. On Wednesday, while sitting through a power failure at one of my clients' offices, I plotted the last half of the story on a scrap of paper. Yesterday I returned to the manuscript and, between other chores and deadlines, wrote the last 2,300-words.