Monday dawned cold and crisp and Jane was reluctant to get out of bed. Fred was snuggled under the covers, still sleeping, and Jane was loathed to disturb him. After all, it wasn’t yet six in the morning and it wasn’t his fault she was awake.
Jane lay there, contemplating getting out of the cocoon of warmth when the decision was made for her by George. George rumbled himself wake and instantly demanded that he be petted and fed at the same time. Jane reluctantly slipped from the covers and into slippers and a robe and headed toward the kitchen.
George fed and coffee brewing, Jane silently went and got dressed. Returning to the kitchen and taking her steaming mug of coffee, Jane headed for her office only stopping to turn the thermostat up a couple of degrees along the way. Drapes open and George curled up in his spot, Jane sat down at her desk to enjoy the sunrise as it streaked pinks across the morning sky.
The laptop on the desk fired up and Jane realized she had a large backlog of emails from the weekend to wade through, her least favorite chore on a Monday morning but she refused to check emails over the weekend. Handling the junk mail first reduced the number of emails to be dealt with considerably. There was only one email that caused Jane more than a second thought, the one from her publisher demanding to know when the final edit of the book would be completed. Jane fired off a response and then closed the mail program.
Jane sat back and sipped her coffee, lost in thought. Her office was the exact opposite of the rest of the house. It was utter chaos. There were stacks and piles of books everywhere. Two walls had floor to ceiling bookcases filled with books in no particular order to an outside person. George was asleep in the picture window which faced East, although to be fair he had to wedge himself in and out of stacks of books and old maps that tumbled on his pillow cushion. The last wall was covered in a wide variety of photographs stuck through with brightly colored pushpins into the corkboard that covered the remaining wall.
Jane was a writer of historical fiction. Her heroine, Pippa, darted about the universe never knowing when her next adventure might occur. Her last novel had seen Pippa stumble across an antique Celtic brooch lost from a traveling museum show. Pippa had found herself transported to Ninth century Scotland learning the history of the brooch and the people who loved it.
Pippa, and all the women in her family for generations, had this amazing and, yet weird, connection to old things that had been created with love and devotion. Pippa had been to First Century Rome and Sixteenth Century Poland in two previous novels.
Jane’s work had been well received and her publishers wanted her to churn novels out faster and faster. They utterly failed to grasp that the reason Jane’s novel were successful is the amount of time and research it took to make time-travel novels possible without being labeled a Dr. Who or Jasper Fforde copycat. It wasn’t like Jane could sit in front of the computer, put a search term in and have the world she wanted to write waiting for her.
The novel her publishers were chomping at the bit for, saw Pippa in colonial America experiencing the Revolution and the formation of the country in the company of Abigail Adams. It was basically complete but Jane was still struggling with some scenes involving the founding fathers but she knew she was close to completion of the novel.
Fred walked into her office, kissed her goodbye for the day and smiled as she absent mindedly returned the kiss still lost in thought. She was startled from her pondering however when Fred popped his head back in and said, “Hey love, don’t forget that delivery from Auntie Liza is due today.”
Jane’s head popped up, “Oh bother, it had completely slipped my mind. Any idea when they are due?”
“Nary a clue my love. I’m off, I’ll be home this evening. I’ll pick-up dinner on the way. I have a feeling it is going to be a heck of a day for you. I will call when I’m on the way home with dinner. Love ya doll.”
“Love you too,” Jane called out as her husband disappeared from view. Her brain already back on trying to solve the problem that was the wording that bugged her immensely in the manuscript.
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