Start with: If you must know…
“If you must know, I am the woman in charge of this place. You fellows are pretty lucky that I happened to walk by the security room and saw your faces plastered all over the cameras. Do you know what security does to intruders? Security detains them, call the cops, and then the intruders get arrested. Do you know why that happens? Because I told them to do it that way. Do you realize that by having security bring you to my office, I’m breaking my own rules?”
The three men all had their jaws dropped to the floor. They exchanged looks of puzzlement to one another, but none of them spoke. They didn’t even dare to look me in the eye.
I glared at them. “Well?”
“We sort of… got lost, I guess you could say. We didn’t even know you worked here, Rebecca. Alan, Shawn, and I were just roaming around until we came across this building. We didn’t think anyone was around.”
“Well, you thought wrong, Matt.” I sighed and rummaged through the things on my desk. I picked up a stack of binders and handed them to Alan. “Hold this; I need a figure out a place to put them. My shelves are so full that I don’t have any room to put anything anymore.”
“Uh,” Alan held out his arms as I dropped four heavy 5-inch binders in his possession. His knees buckled from the weight, but he managed to stay standing.
“You guys owe me big time, you know that? Sit down.” I continued my lecture as all three of them obeyed sitting down on my leather couch on the opposite side of the room.
“Do you know what people are going to think of me? They’re going to think I choose favorites.” I sighed.
“You’re not choosing favorites, though. It’s not like we work here and you’re taking our side when we were in the wrong.” Shawn shrugged his shoulders.
“I mean intruder-wise.” I scoffed.
“But you know us. We’re your friends. Anyone would want to help out their friends. If we were strangers, then you wouldn’t have given us a second glance.” Shawn explained further.
A knock came at my office door. “Now what?” I growled. “Yes, come in.”
“Is everything alright in here?”
“Yes, everything is fine, Lyle. These three are friends of mine who came to visit. They just didn’t know how to get into the building. It was a mistake. Get back to work.” I dismissed the head of security with a wave of my hand.
He dipped his head backing out of my office and shut the door.
I cleared off one of the shelves in the closet and placed those binders and notebooks in a filing cabinet. I grabbed the binders out of Alan’s hands and fit those onto the shelves.
“What is all of this, anyway?” Matt questioned as his eyes scanned the room. Alan shook out his arms now that he didn’t have the weight anymore.
“It’s my office, I told you that.” I sat back down at my desk, turned on my laptop, and opened my planner to the next month. I flipped through the pages, while jotting down some notes in that and on my iPad.
“What do you do here? We didn’t realize you had a… job.” Matt cleared his throat.
I chuckled. “Writing is my job, you know that. I volunteer here.”
“So you don’t get paid to be here, even though you seem to be obnoxiously busy and are in charge in everything.” Shawn raised an eyebrow skeptically.
“I created this place for writers. It’s a big writer’s group for people of all ages. We have security because of the high technology we use here.” I explained. “Plus, there are a lot of writers here who have made big bucks on their novels.”
“How come you’ve never told us about this place before?” Alan wondered. He was now wandering around the room looking at all the notebooks, binders, and books on the shelves.
“I have never told anyone about this place before. Other than these people, I don’t have anyone to discuss writing with. What do you think my friends and family would say if I told them I ran a large community for writers?” I looked up from my laptop as the printer turned on itself and started to spit out documents and articles.
“We would have understood.” Matt nodded his head looking to Shawn and Alan, who agreed with him.
I grabbed a few empty file folders from a cabinet and brought them back over to my desk. “You guys thought this was my job because you didn’t know I had one; even though I am a published author that pays my bills and more.” I took some papers out of the printer and sorted through them, stapling them together and storing them into the folders.
Alan, Matt, and Shawn stared at each other in silence. They hung their heads and didn’t say another word.
I smirked at them, but didn’t dare to explain any further. If I didn’t have any friends or family to support me and my writing, then I needed to find supporters myself and that was through creating a writers group.
Of course, seeing the guilty expressions on their faces, I was sure that they were going to be asking about my writing more often. Maybe they would even read one of my books.
Modified from “The Write-Brain Workbook” by Bonnie Neubauer
