It Comes Down to This
an excerpt

“Good morning. How are you?” It was her boss, Lainey O’Dell.
“I’m well,” Ellie made a point of infusing warmth into her voice. “How are you?”
“Fine, thank you.” Lainey launched into a barrage of questions and list of to-dos, combined with a smattering of gossipy suppositions about mutual acquaintances. Fifteen minutes later, Ellie’s eyes were practically rolling back in her head.
Ring. Ring. Ellie had never been so grateful to have the main line light up. She said a quick “Goodbye” to Lainey and switched to the other line. The call was accomplished quickly and Ellie finally was able to get back to her e-mails. She responded to each of them with happy efficiency and, after hitting “get e-mail” one last time and having no new e-mails dump into her inbox, she closed the e-mail window, threw away the wrapper from her breakfast sandwich, took another sip of coffee and surveyed the mess that was her desk. While she knew where everything was, it did rather look as if a whirling dervish had swirled over her workspace, leaving a path of messiness.
Knowing that her mess of a desk was a reflection of her mess of a mind, Ellie determinedly went through each pile, filing what needed filing, throwing out what needed throwing out and eventually, over an hour later, ended up with one pile that required more detailed attention. She glanced at the clock. 10:30. Time for a coffee break. She opened the Internet and signed into her e-mail. Two junk e-mails were all that had been received. Delete, delete. Sign out. Close. Coffee break over; back to the pile.
At 12:59, Ellie stretched her arms over her head with satisfaction. She had gotten through the pile. Her desk, except for the need to be dusted, was neat and sported actual work surfaces. She put the answering machines on, put a sign on the office door announcing it was lunch time, reheated her now-cold coffee in the office microwave, and sat back down at her desk to attend to her lunchtime e-mails. Not one greeted her, and so she navigated to a blog site to do some creative writing. She loved to just write whatever came into her head, rather than writing about something definitive. Some might call that a cop-out, keeping her from committing to a substantial body of work. She preferred to think of it as getting warmed up to the time when she was ready to write the Great American Novel. That time would most definitely come. Most definitely! “Practice makes perfect” and all that.
She was on a roll and so Ellie’s thirty-minute lunch became a forty-five-minute lunch. While she turned off the answering machines and took the sign off the door, she continued to write and likely would have written longer if Lainey hadn’t made an appearance, sailing into the office as if she owned the place; which she did.