Re-entering the mind space of a novel

The blizzard's here. Thick snow. Blowing wind. I'm not sure what this day will bring, and so I make a quick stop at this blog from the office depicted above.

I mentioned yesterday that a bungled transition (once identified) can give an author a new lease on her own book—a new way in. Yesterday I entered into a home, in my novel-in-progress for adults, that I'd only ever observed (in those pages) from the outside. The broken transition took me here:

Cloris pressed her hand against her heart and stared at Sophie through the wire mesh of the door. Now she exhaled and looked again at Sophie’s feet. “Come in and see her. Come say hello.”

“Oh no, Cloris, really. I can’t. I’m behind on a deadline.”

“Just a moment, dear? It would mean so much.”

“Maybe later today, after she’s rested.”

“Honey, you’re young, still,” Cloris paused. “Aren’t you?”

Sophie didn’t feel young. She shrugged.

“Let me give you a preview of life going forward: Sometimes time is of the essence. Sometimes we do what we can right now, because we don't get a second chance at second chances.”

Sophie stared at Cloris and felt her worrying pressing in. She turned and studied her own dull house from the impossible yellow of Cloris's stoop. She glanced at the bowl at her feet.

“I don’t have much time,” she said.

Cloris jiggled the door handle, let Sophie in. Purple and green splashed the walls—lime green straight up to the wainscot, lilac up above, like an Easter hyacinth. The paintings that hung in Cloris’s house weren’t paintings; they were dioramas—cardboard cutouts in picture boxes depicting scenes from Alice in Wonderland. “It’s my fetish,” Cloris had once said, when Sophie had asked. “The Queen of Hearts. The White Rabbit. Alice big and Alice small. There’s so much dimension to it.”

“But where did they come from?” Sophie had wanted to know.

“A garage sale,” Cloris had answered. “Best garage sale in the history of the galaxy, down by the Boulevard.”