Chapter 1

They say that you can’t choose your parents, and I for one, can heartily agree with that. My own parents, Duke and Daisy Smithers, should have had a better upbringing if there had been any justice in the world. Their own two sets of parents were aging hippies, living in a commune and growing odd plants.

I’m not saying that they were bad people on the few times I had met them, merely spaced out for most of the time. I’m still not sure if my parents had actually married, but the five of us children all bore the surname of Smithers.

CHAPTER 6
That day was one for bimbling. Sunscreen slathered, floaty dresses and floppy hats donned, or shorts and T-shirt in Lil’s case, and it was a slow amble past a wide variety of shops and tourist traps, with the occasional pause for ice cream, or a cold soft drink. We eventually emerged at the seafront, where all the usual sorts of souvenir cabins and eateries lined one side of a broad footpath, the other dropping onto a sort of beach.

Torn from his own world and stuffed into the body of a villainess, facing the end of a doomed route he himself wrote, "Amelia" must navigate a world she really should know - too bad she was never great at worldbuilding.

Stuck in a world she (maybe) created, Amelia quickly finds that reality has filled in the details she failed to describe. The characters who were so flat when she wrote them now have nuance, and motives. The kingdom she wrote into existence is experiencing internal strife she never even thought about. And let's not even get into the complexities of the magic system, or the demon that forced her into this situation to begin with...

Oh, and then there's the fact that she's about to be arrested and executed... but surely she can come up with a way to write herself out of that, right?

...Right?

The dial tone buzzes in his ear like a trapped wasp. Caden taps his fingers against the desk — once, twice — before the receptionist finally picks up. "First available is Thursday at two," she says, the words clipped. He books it without asking questions. The phone clicks back into its cradle with a finality that feels heavier than it should have. Petra's number glows on the screen beneath it, untouched. Data first. Then emotions.

Goody A New Maid

From the time I got up this morning till now, today has been one shitty day. I ended up having to get my car jumped because of a dead battery. The service I paid for to handle such occurrences taking their sweet time to get here. Thus I arrived late for work missing an important meeting, my immediate boss livid that I had missed it. Then my computer failed a little after eleven A.M. requiring the IT guys to replace the hard drive. Three hours of work that I had performed this morning lost in the process. Then the final touch to my horrible day occurred.