I envisioned myself as James Bond, the super spy who drives fancy cars and has all the gadgets to get out of any uncomfortable predicament. Instead, I’m tailing a mother of three. The baby drooling on her shoulder, the middle one whining, the eldest walking circles around them all. After following her for a week, I’m finding it difficult to imagine this rundown woman who hasn’t showered in days is part of the knock-off designer bags ring. I pull my hat lower, a poor disguise as I pass them and spot the Prada diaper bag, nearly tripping. I’ll be damned.

This is the quickest micro story I’ve written to date. It’s one of those moments where it simply wrote itself and dragged me along for the ride while I tried not to poke and prod the words too much. The book Counterfeit stars a mom under pressure with a two-year-old who’s not talking yet. One day, she runs into a clingy friend from college who wants to enlist her in a counterfeiting ring. I won’t give the plot twist away, but I will confess it surprised me. I borrowed a portion of their luxury bag scheme for this story. 

This tale has a far more humorous vibe than expected, but sometimes that’s how writing works. An idea comes to mind and you stew on it for a while, envisioning something of epic proportions, but when you write, there’s no telling which way things will go. 

Don’t believe me? Last year, I wanted to write a Christmas story to share with you. The idea was to write 12 days of pure chaos unfolding in the quest for a perfect Christmas. I outline the 12 days and what horror awaited my unsuspecting characters. When I finally pulled those notes back out, I realized I could expand on the chaos a lot more if I wrote a novel length story about it. I imagined a lot of laughing, a few groans, and many of us saying, Saw that coming… based on life experiences.

Then I started working on character sketches. Those pesky little things I slap together so I know what I named each person, and suddenly my funny little Christmas story had some serious emotions unfolding. At the time I’m writing this, I’ve waffled so much I’ve still yet to write more than the briefest of scenes for it. Ahh, but take heart, Dear Reader, it’s in the pile of story ideas.

I’ve prepped myself to work on it in December by overloading my library card with every Christmas read I could find. My hold list isn’t looking much better, nor is my audible account. And let’s not mention those Christmas reads I snagged at Target on the weekend. I pulled up a Spotify instrumental Christmas playlist, and am completely prepared to go overboard as I dive into a draft 0 of this book next month. I’m ecstatic, even if a few helpful people have informed me that November is far too early for all this Christmas business. 

The prompts for this story were:

Genre: Spy
Action: Tailing a suspect
Word: Disguise