Below are the opening lines of Window Display, the story I am writing for the Bound by Ink Writing Event.

Anyone of my friends who is not a writer won’t understand why we writers must observe everything and everyone around us. They’ll never look at people passing by while they’re having their coffees at a street café. They never notice the waitress who serves them every day has changed her hairstyle. Everything that interests us, they fail to see. They’ll never obsess over why the woman with the poodle walking her dog wore two different pumps last Monday – both a similar but not quite the same dark blue color but with a distinctly unequal heel height – and never noticed it herself. A writer notices. He should notice. I notice. The smallest details of everyone and everything around me may catch my eye, and give rise to extrapolation, conjectures and hypotheses to satisfy my ever present urge to fill in the gaps. A young woman’s stifled posture when a man casually touches her knee, another’s flirtatious looks that go unanswered, the intense heat of gazes exchanged between what could be mother and son… I could go on but won’t, other than to say they spark the imagination, set my mind reeling with the possibilities. There is no escaping it. There is no intention behind it. It is not indiscretion. It is life’s blood. It is called shameless by my friends but I have long ago stopped chastising myself over what is quite simply sucking dry the innocent passerby of all he – or she – is worth in the way of secrets, peculiarities, habits, tics, and whatever else that interests me. It is not obsessive to want to know what I want to know by observing them and their behavior. It is what I have always done and do for a living now. I am a writer. I watch. …