Kate Flora: Sometimes, this writer gets sick of staring at the screen, writing words, erasing them, doing global search and replace to be sure the character’s names are spelled consistently, and searching for those words I leave out and don’t see. Sometimes then I sneak a chocolate from the hidden box of Valentine chocolates I bought on sale. And when I’m sick of eating chocolate and it is not yet late enough in the day for a proper daughter of New England to give herself over to drink, I do the indoor, writerly equivalent of going out to play.

I close the WIP, pull up my friend Gracie, and let her go have an adventure. Grace Christian is a somewhat wayward US Marshal who first appeared several years ago in a story published by Level Best Books called “Gracie Walks the Plank.”Gracie has voice and Gracie has attitude. She’s a true badass and it’s fun to see what she’ll think and say. After “Gracie Walks the Plank,” I wrote a second Gracie story about a battered wife and jewel heist called “All that Glitters.” Then, just for fun, because she’s a vacation from my other characters, I wrote “A Hole Near Her Heart,” and then Entitlements.” In a recent bout of playing hooky from quotas, I wrote “Black Widower.” I am gradually turning all the stories, plus more, into an entire Gracie novel.

Here’s Gracie:

Gracie Walks the Plank

The sound of a car door slamming brought Grace to the window. The car that had crunched up her gravel drive and now sat in a cloud of settling golden dust was new. Clean and dark and, until the dust finished coating it, shiny. It fit in this neighborhood of rust-blossomed double-wides like feathers on a turtle. The man who got out didn’t fit either. He was as clean and dark and shiny as the car. Wearing a suit, for sh#t’s sake, on a 95 degree day.

She stubbed out her breakfast cigarette in the butt-choked ashtray and checked to see if she was fit for company. Exiled to this crap job, she paid little attention to her appearance. The ratty housecoat was held together with a rusting safety pin, its once tropical colors as faded as her childhood dreams. Bare toes on the grubby brown carpet still wore traces of girlish pink polish, a color the little Vietnamese girl at the salon had called Blushing Dawn. Her unbrushed  mahogany hair was wrapped with the twist tie from a bread bag. She hadn’t yet put on a bra and her breasts bobbled gently under the thin cotton. The only touch of elegance was a diamond necklace, grand enough for a queen, heavy on her throat as the hand of God.

As the Suit’s demanding fist rose and fell against the tin can’s flimsy door, Grace wrapped a colorful Indian scarf—dots, not feathers—around her neck and padded across the room.

“Who’s there and what do you want?” Her voice, unused yet today, poured like honey over gravel. Billy used to say she had a big voice for such a small woman. Big enough to fill clubs, that much she knew. Big enough to make complete strangers cry. She wouldn’t mind making this man cry.

 All That Glitters

 Sometimes she just had to get out of the office. That’s just how it was. Ex-military and six years with the Marshal’s Service, Gracie was trained to conform. She could walk the walk and talk the talk, knot her tie and shine her shoes with the best of them. She knew shit from Shinola and she could pick the bad guy out of a crowd like nobody’s business. But once in a while, the urge to misbehave overtook her. Little stuff, like wanting to slam a jelly donut up against a wall full of wanted posters or put a fart cushion on some uptight asshole’s chair. Draw her gun at an inappropriate time and caress the barrel like it was someone’s precious dick. Stuff that could escalate if she didn’t tamp it down.

When it got so bad that she was, like the guy in the Elvis song, ‘itching like a man on a fuzzy tree,’ she’d leave the office, come out here to the park, and sit on a bench. Brick wall behind her to cover her back. And the whole roiling mass of humanity before her, doing its awkward human things. Spring drew people to the park like a picnic drew ants. Drew them in exuberant hordes, people who’d peeled down and were displaying swaths of bare skin to the sun’s warmth.

 So here’s a question for other writers: Do you ever escape from your works in progress and just go write playful stories? Dark stories? Poetry? Essays?