buswoman's holiday

On hiatus from writing, what's a writer to do? Write, but something else.
Virginia Woolf liked always to have one or more projects going, something to take up when a novel got slow or difficult. In her honor, and more practically, because why not, I've been working on a story while I let the novel steep and stew.
Excerpt from a no-name story:
Janine unfolded one of the lawn chairs, extending the footrest, and sat on it, leaning back to look up into the night sky. She got out her cigarettes and lit one, the rasp of the match muted, the sound was sucked up into the air. She had claimed not to remembe the man's name, the man in the motel in Arkansas, but it was Geoffrey. And it was actually Oklahoma, a brand-new Days Inn where she stopped on her way to Kansas City. Geoffrey had been married, that was true, and she'd met him in the motel bar. But he wasn't, as she'd implied, a businessman. He'd been camping out by some tiny lake, and the wind, that house-lifting, wicked-witch killing Midwestern plains wind, had been so strong that his tent had started to move along the ground. Even with him and all his gear inside, he said, laughing, and it was going toward the lake.