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Today I have been writing! Costa Rica is fabulous, and we’re enjoying Jaco. Walked out for breakfast this morning and later on to the super mercado for groceries. My high school Spanish is, luckily, coming back in leaps and bounds.

I’ve been working not on a story set here, though, but one in Vegas. Here’s the beginning of what is looking like it will hit novelette length at least, “Carpe Glitter.”

Carpe glitter, my grandmother always said. Seize the glitter.

And that was what I remembered best about her: the glitter. A dazzle of rhinestone, a waft of Patou Joy, lipstick like a red banner across her mouth. Underneath all that, a worry little old lay with silver hair and vampire-pale skin.

Not that she was one, of course. But grandmother hung with everyone during her days in the Vegas crowd. Celebrities, presidents, they all came to her show at the Sparkle Dome, watched her strut her stuff in a black top hat and fishnet stockings, conjuring flames and doves (never card tricks, which she hated), making ghosts speak to loved ones in the audience and when she stepped off the stage, she left in a scintillating dazzle, like a fairy queen stepping off her throne.

All that shine. And at home?

She hoarded.

I mopped sweat off my forehead with the hem of my t-shirt and attacked another pile of magazines. No cat pee – I’d been spared that in these back rooms, closed off for at least a couple of decades. Grandmother had bought the house when she was at the height of her first fortune, just burst onto the stage magician scene, a woman from Brooklyn who’d trained herself in sleight of hand and studied under the most famous female stage of her time.

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Work goes forward on the novel. 1500 words so far, a little chunk that fits into the book early on, just after (sort of during) the riot at the gallery. Once the Redmond lunch-time traffic has died down, I’ll go reward myself with an Italian soda.

Here’s a teaser, still very rough:

She was a tall woman with gleaming gold hair, obscured beneath a dark cloak. She tried to shrug the woolen fabric more securely around her shoulders, but it caught on obstructions beneath, and half swung away to reveal feathers the same color as her hair.

“Lookie, lookie, look,” said a voice from behind her. She swung, almost dizzy with panic to see several figures step out towards her from the deeper darkness between two refuse heaps.

She stood between the dull red bricks of two enormous warehouses. Chalked scrawls, melting in the misty rain in luminous trails, marked the lower walls ““ political slogans rendered illegible by moisture. A strip of moonlight marked the middle, a narrow path barely large enough to contain Glyndia. Midnight edged the sides of her cloak.