Old-fashioned Newfangled Girls

OLD-FASHIONED NEWFANGLED GIRLS is a contemporary Middle Grade story about the two oldest of six sisters and the crazy summer they spend mourning their best friend's move, saving up for a horse, and battling against each other in the war to prove which is best: cutting edge technology or good, old-fashioned living. I hope you enjoy the first page!

Chapter One

The one advantage to having five little sisters, Georgie Coleman thought, was that you never ran out of funny stories to tell your best friend even when you wrote her a letter every other day. If Connie and Cherry hadn’t accidentally died the cat’s hair magenta that morning, for example, her current epistle would be a meager seven pages. As it was, she had just hit lucky page thirteen.

A tap, tap, tap against her bedroom window jolted Georgie from her work. Ink splattered from the nib of her quill pen and speckled her paper with cerulean blue.

“Blast!” said Georgie, sopping up ink with an already stained handkerchief. This was the third bottle Mama had ordered for her in a month. If she didn’t stop spilling, she’d be forced to go back to ballpoints for her correspondence. Or worse: e-mail.

Georgie threw open the diamond-paned window to find a chicken standing on the sloped roof beneath the gable. Its sleek golden head tilted inquiringly to the side, wattle swaying.

“Daffodil dearest, I’m rather busy,” Georgie said. “I’m trying to write a letter to Clara before the mailman comes.”

Daffodil scratched at the roof tile.

“You’d better be quiet,” Georgie warned. “If Mama finds out I’ve been going on the roof, she might forbid me. There’d be no more midday cereal snacks for you.”

The chicken pecked at the windowsill insistently.

“I suppose I can’t refuse the world’s only tree-climbing Buff Orpington,” Georgie sighed. “Or lilac-bush-climbing, to be precise. I’ll finish my letter out there.”

First things first: Georgie swiveled the lock on her door and double-checked to make sure it wouldn’t open.  Secrecy, of course, was of the utmost importance. To set the mood and cover any suspicious noises, she selected a Louis Armstrong record from her collection of vintage vinyls and set it spinning on her new turntable (also known as The Best Thirteenth Birthday Present Ever).