You know those days when you have so much going on that everything is all organised and planned down to the moment? You have not a list, but a run sheet of how the day will go.  Replete with times.  And items to tick off as you go.  So it’s satisfying as well as frenetic.

I have that day today.

Take the kids to school, chat with other Mums in case there’s stuff you’ve missed (there always is), go to post Office to post the Mother’s Day things, get some staples from Coles, go to BigW to get stockings for the kid because Queensland Winter has arrived, take the cat to the vet to have her frigging eye checked AGAIN, pay the bills, get the swimming stuff ready for after school, do two loads of washing, do a basic tidy of the house in case aliens arrive and assume all humans live in squalor, go to the solicitor to chat about the contract for the book deal you may have coming up, book the car in for a service, see if you can fix the moody printer that is stuffed (again), make some patient phone calls…

Hang on.  Wait.  What?

A book deal?

Yes, that’s right, maybe, just maybe, that might soon be a thing.

So I’m stopping EVERYTHING.

I have found a cosy cafe, with a spare spot in the window, where us writerly types can sit and watch the world go it’s way… I can look, wistfully out, whilst I muse about.. my musings.  The sun has come out.  It’s Queensland Winter and I am sitting here in a t-shirt, about to slam a capp and a benny, the warm of the sun touching my arms and making my skin tingle as I feel the Vitamin D metabolising, the warm of my very insides bursting out to a smile that I can hardly contain.   I am cradling a contract in my arms as if is my firstborn.  I have a book contract.  Unsigned and incomplete at this stage, but still, a starting point.  So I am hitting the stop button on this day of lists, and for a short while I am going to smell these roses coffees, and imagine that a secret secret that I’ve always held quietly in the deep convolutions of my intestines, mightcouldmaybe happen.

It might never amount to anything, but for today I am gonna play the imagination game that I’m so good at, and pretend that it will.

‘Cos Mark Twain reckons sometimes ‘Truth is stranger than fiction, but it is because fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities; Truth isn’t.’  And that sounds all right to me.

What is your secret secret? (You don’t have to show, but I did show you mine…)

How good is a good list?

…From The Ashers xx