A Sweet Deal

 by Marti Attoun from the, yes, September 18, 2023 issue

Tagline: When Caroline borrows her brother's dirty truck to haul furniture, she's in for a handsome surprise at the car wash.

Stream of Consciousness Observations: I found a Woman's World from September tucked in a pile of crap on my desk. UGH! Needless to say, I'm very behind in analyzing these two stories. Here are my off-the-cuff comments and observations on the first story by one of my favorite WW authors, Marti Attoun.

furry french fries - I've found petrified french fries in my car before. Usually they're rock hard. I think my dog ate one once before I could take it from him. LOL

fling the fossilized pizza - LOLOLOL I love the alliteration. I am delighting in the awkward moment of the heroine being caught with a very dirty car interior.

slapdash ponytail - I love her word choices.

There's a paragraph of telling-not-showing which I think is a useful tool with Woman's World stories. You want to show the couple connecting and at times, the easiest way is to summarize all the things they talked about.

She shivered at the sound of her name on his lips. - Love it. I love seeing fresh ways of showing the physical attraction between the characters. 

She'd forgotten this surprising, joyful feeling when you're standing on the brink of something wonderful about to happen. - Haven't we all felt this? This is a great moment when the reader can identify with the character in the story and live vicariously through them, which is kind of the whole point of these romantic tales.

And when they had their first date on that same restored bench weeks later... - Okay, the whole story was fantastic until I got to this part. I am assuming they reenacted her grandparents' cheese sandwich and gingersnap picnic on the bench, but that wasn't made clear. Did something get edited out? 

Photo by David via the Flickr Creative Commons License