Those of you following me on Bluesky or Mastodon may have already seen this, but I’m sufficiently chuffed that I have to come dance about it here, too.

In The Tropic of Serpents, after Isabella cuts up her skirts to resew as trousers and mentions that this was the start of her always wearing such clothing in the field, she drops this little pair of parenthetical comments:

(Whatever the scandal-sheets may claim, I do not wear them at home, though I have considered it once or twice.) (The incident at Booker’s Club should not be counted; I was extremely drunk at the time.)

In the more than eleven years since I wrote those lines, I have not figured out what she was referring to. Not for lack of trying, either; it sounded highly entertaining! But I’m the kind of writer — especially in this kind of viewpoint — who will toss out things like that without having the faintest flipping clue what they refer to. I wrote “From the Editorial Page of the Falchester Weekly Review,” and I wrote “On the Impurity of Dragon-kind,” and in all that time, “The Incident at Booker’s Club” remained my white whale, the story I was sure existed but couldn’t write.

UNTIL YESTERDAY.

Yesterday, while making tea, I caught the fluttering edge of a wisp of an idea. I was walking down the same mental path as before — “really, drunken hijinks don’t feel like Isabella’s style, even when she was younger,” followed by “and I can’t really see Tom dragging her into something like that” . . . and then a previously unseen fork in that path caught my eye, whose entrance bore a sign saying “BUT ANDREW TOTALLY WOULD.”

I will say no more of what lies down that path. But I will say that two hours later, I had a complete draft of the story. It needs significant revision and then, y’know, I need to find an editor that will buy it, so t may be some time before anybody can read it — but! “The Incident at Booker’s Club” officially joins the ranks of the Lady Trent short fiction!

I am so pleased by this, y’all have no idea. 😀