It isn’t every day that I drive past a house that literally leaps off the lot at me and demands that it be added to my current WIP (work in progress), but a few days ago, on my way home from a writing date with my dear friend and #PlotSister Jude, I simply had to drive back after I passed a little charcoal grey cottage on the west side of Far Hills Ave.

It’s an unassuming little cottage, with two front porches, a room with large windows separating them. My writer brain began to spin into action, “Annie would use the one room with an exterior door as her “office”…. perhaps she leaves that door unlocked, would her stalker boyfriend find her here in the woods?

Or, she turns on the electric kettle for her morning pour-over and walks across the sunlit wooden floors of the large front room to a comfy chair where she picks up the single wine glass on the table from the night before…

An excerpt:

“I have a good feeling about you, Annie Jacobs, I think you’re going to learn to love our small town of Danbree, Kentucky after all.” Sadie Campbell walked ahead of her up onto the porch of a small cabin.
Annie slowly nodded, so many thoughts swirled in her head, “I hope so, Mrs. Campbell, I really hope so,” She needed to make the new teaching job work; she needed this whole new life to work. She was leaving a trash heap scrap of a life back in Dayton, Ohio.
The older woman unlocked the door to the small house on Dowler Lane, the painted porch still smelled of fresh paint. A large window on the porch showed the simple furnishings inside, “Call me Sadie, dear, we aren’t so formal here in Danbree.”
Annie smiled and wiped her feet on the mat outside the front door, “this really is a charming place. I think we will all be quite at home here.” She set the cat carrier down near a chair in the front room, “I’ll let Abigail get a bit more used to the place before I let her out.”
Sadie walked her through the little house, talking about all the features, pointed to a sign with the Wi-Fi password, and said some other things that Annie did not make out; she was not here, not completely anyway, in body, yes, but her mind was really two hundred miles away in Dayton.

Back to the WIP, this book won’t write itself.

But in between the writing sessions, I will admit to indulging my imagination, fixing a cuppa something delish and sitting down to spill the tea with Annie about that old boyfriend…