The Realm of Katherine Vick

This is a short story written for a challenge prompt of "Messy Room" some time ago. It is, to some extent, inspired by my childhood, when my bedroom floor required stepping stone clear patches to allow me to get to my bed. But the thing was, I knew where everything was and couldn't understand why everyone else felt I needed to tidy it up! ;p I am much tidier now but I will admit, there is still an element of system in play in certain aspects...;) The System That was the thing that no one seemed to be able to understand. She knew where everything was.   Oh it looked a mess to the outside eye. It looked like carnage. But to her it was a code. The clothes were not strewn at random but carefully arranged – over the chair if they had been worn once but could be worn again in public, on the stool if they had been worn several times but were still good for lounging around the house and in the heap at the end of the bed if they were due for the washing machine, preferably with

On the Matter of Content Explosion Now, anyone out there who has followed any of my fanfiction projects over the years may be aware that in respect of my writing, I tend to have something of a problem when it comes to estimates of length . My fanfiction projects were famous for turning into monumentally vast monsters well beyond the bounds of my original intent as chapter after chapter proved insufficient to hold the content I wrote for it and split out and split again. Indeed, anyone who read my author interview for The Merry Band will also be aware that this phenomenon of my writing is not confined just to fanfiction, given the confessions I made there – that my novels were all originally intended as a single book, would you believe, and that I split it, first in half and then into a trilogy to accommodate fresh material that blossomed into life in the process of writing. Once I started writing, there was simply too much story for one book or even two books to hold. Some might