First, Strawberries

 Gina knew a marathon housework session was in order before Joe got back from his business trip, but she just wasn’t ready to start that. She had too much other work to do.

For one, the manuscript she promised to proofread was just sitting on her desk, unread. Gina and Henry, her agent, agreed that she would finish proofreading and get it to her editor before the end of the week.

It was Thursday. How would she ever finish reading in two days? She contemplated telling a little fib and saying she had done the proofreading when she really hadn’t. She never understood an author proofreading her own work anyway. She knew what it was supposed to say and, in most instances, read it as what she meant to say and not the mistake. Besides that, every time she proofreads her own work she finds something she might want to edit and overthinks her decision on whether to leave it or change it.

She stood at her desk staring at the manuscript thinking about how archaic actually printing out pages of a novel on paper seemed these days. While it was old-fashioned, and wasted paper in her opinion, she had to admit reading a physical copy would be easier – and seem less like work and more like reading a book – than reading it from a screen.

As she weighed the housework versus proofreading options she looked past her desk and into the kitchen, where she saw a bowl of fruit sitting on the counter. That fruit reminded her that she had strawberries in the refrigerator. She decided eating a bowl of strawberries would be the perfect way to relax while figuring out what task to choose first.