Tag: excerpt

Another Excerpt of Gaia’s Hands

Trigger warning — this excerpt deals with PTSD/rape. The description is not from a salacious point of view, but from traumatic memory.

This is an excerpt from Gaia’s Dance, which I don’t know if it should be in the book even though it survived three edits. But it mixes trauma, magical realism, and relationships, and may be a quintessential part of the plot, even though it’s a sideplot:



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On his way to Jeanne’s house, he rode past throngs of students drinking in costume or just drinking. He swerved around a pony keg that had rolled out into the street. Past downtown, he rode his bike under a tree full of birds flocking for migration south. Jeanne had called them starlings, but their frenzied voices mocked him. Josh imagined them as the tengu, bird kami, of Japanese folklore and hoped they would protect him. 

Josh arrived in front of Jeanne’s bungalow, a cream-colored cottage with brown trim, the landscaping brown and desiccated by the frost. He remembered her saying that the trees in the back hosted islands of lush edible growth – vines, bushes, creeping greens, all dormant now. Her koi pond slept, dreaming of spring. 

He rang the doorbell. Jeanne, pale and weary, let him in and shut the door behind them. He stood in an apricot living room with burgundy and gold accents. “Pick a seat”, she said tersely. He chose one on the wood-framed couch, leaving enough room for her if she wanted to sit. She stood.
“What’s wrong?” Josh breathed, his stomach clenching. “I’ve missed you.” 

“Oh, Josh,” she fretted. “I’ve been really busy lately.”

“You have never been too busy for your friends. I worry about you.” And about me, he thought. And us, even if you don’t think there’s an ‘us’.

“There’s a lot going on –”

 “Did I do something wrong? You act like you don’t trust me.” He remembered seeing her flinch that day in September when she shied away from talking about her past. He searched his memory to see if he had ever been aggressive, had ever overstepped his bounds.
“You don’t understand. It’s not you I don’t trust, it’s me.” 

Around her, he saw snow fiercely blown by the wind. He stood up, faced her, close enough to touch but not touching her. “What do you mean, you don’t trust yourself? I trust you.” As she shook her head, he realized he had said the wrong thing. He took a deep breath and started over. “Could you tell me what you don’t trust yourself with?”

“I don’t trust my judgment. Not when it comes to getting close to people.” She shivered as the snow billowed around her in the warm room.

“Why not?” He would not allow her to walk alone in the blizzard. 

“I’ve let the wrong people into my life. Over and over, because I wanted attention,” Jeanne murmured.

“Don’t we all want attention? Love?” 

“Not when people hurt you with it …” Her voice broke. Her eyes swam with tears. “Not you, Josh. Just …”

“Who was it, then?” Josh winced; he spoke too loud.

“Something really bad happened when I was young.” Jeanne’s voice was small, barely audible.

“Tell me. Please.” Josh took a deep breath against the churning of his stomach.

Jeanne responded in a soft monotone, “It was a sunny day in March.  The phone rang at four in the afternoon. My sister Clarice was at Eastern, and my parents worked Saturdays. I thought the call was for one of them. Instead, it was for me.

“My neighbor Malvin ca
lled. He had two little girls, 4 and 6, with platinum blond hair and pretty blue eyes. I used to go over with my sister and help her babysit them, so the girls got to know me pretty well. He asked me to come over and do the girls’ hair so he could get them portraits at the mall in Champaign. 

“I knocked on the door.  I remember I felt this chill across my shoulders despite the nice weather. I didn’t understand why. There were people Mom didn’t let me visit, and she never let me have male babysitters growing up because she said she didn’t trust them not to hurt kids. But Mal and the kids — they weren’t strangers, they were neighbors.

“Mal let me in. He seemed nervous. His hair looked sweaty and greasy, and he smelled of beer, and something didn’t sound right about the way he talked — he sounded like he read off a script. He wouldn’t really look at me. He told me the kids were in the back room. By the time I realized that I didn’t hear the girls, he pushed the door open and shoved me in.

 “I trusted Mal. I trusted him; heck, I helped him with the kids all the time. The kids weren’t there, they were with their mother, and he and his friend told me they had a different game in mind.
“I won’t tell you, not even you, all of it.

“When they had finished, they threw me out of the house and I ran home. I saw blood and slimy streaks in my underwear, bruises where fingers had dug into my arms. I felt pain, shrieking pain, where those two men had no business going. So much for being a virgin till marriage.

“Oh God, I didn’t do anything,” she cried.  “Mal and his buddy said things to me: ‘Hey, fat girl, let me see your tits. Do fat girls put out? Are fat girls easy?’ I didn’t even know what they were talking about, never heard the words before. But they showed me, and it hurt. I tried to stop them, I tried, but I couldn’t.

“They laughed when I screamed. That hurt me the worst — my neighbor laughed when I screamed.
“I buried the clothes; I scrubbed away the evidence so my parents would never know.”

Josh felt weak, vaguely ill. He remembered the drunk woman at the house party, and how scared and ashamed he felt. Multiply that by a hundred, and maybe that was how Jeanne felt. Age thirteen, two men, no way to fight them off. Only powerlessness and pain. Too much darkness, too much, and he could do nothing to redress her past. He knew that he could only give comfort. He took a deep breath to center himself, then caught and held her gaze. “You didn’t cause it.” His hands rubbed up and down her upper arms to try to remove the chill that had nothing to do with ambient temperature.

“No I didn’t,” Jeanne breathed through tears, “I’ve come to believe that. It took a long time.”

“Not just the assault.” He couldn’t bring himself to say rape. He had to keep his composure for her. 

“Don’t blame your judgment either.”

“I trusted Mal – “

“Your parents trusted Mal. You believed your parents. We believe our parents at that age. Your judgment told you to run when your mother’s guidance told you everything was ok.”

“Oh, God,” Jeanne paused, then broke out in sobs, “Oh, God, you’re right. I never trusted Mal. He looked like a rockstar, but I could feel something mean about him.“

Jeanne crept into his embrace and cried, and they walked through the blizzard together.

***************
Now, that you’re at the bottom, a question: would you like to read this book? It’s likely going to be something I self-publish on Kindle, but my readers deserve to get a free copy, which I can send to you.

P.S.: An excerpt from today’s work:

Of course I dreamed again after Ichirou left. Of course, I dreamed about being shot. And, of course, I dreamed about Greg:

I experienced the dream as if I was outside myself and inside my body at the same time.  I saw the sniper level his gun. I heard the shot, and I felt the tearing pain from the bullet. This time, I looked down at myself as the bullet tumbled out of me, and there was a tear in my shirt and a blossoming of blood. 

I collapsed, and everything happened in slow motion: I felt my heart stop; then I felt every cell of my body yanked backward by a second, maybe two seconds. I wanted to scream from the pain, but it was over almost before it had begun. I peered down to see the hole in my chest mended. Greg dropped to his knees, exhausted, and muttered, “O mój Jezu, przebacz nam nasze grzechy …” 
When I awoke again, the barest tinge of sun could be seen through the trees from my window. Greg stood over me, his long hair falling into his face. He pushed it back with one hand in a gesture that had long become habit, revealing his long, homely visage. I noticed his eyes looked hollow in the sparse light.

“Are you an angel?” I asked in a parody of awe. Joking was the only way I could encompass what he had done.

“Definitely not,” he muttered. “I’ve done a couple things in my life that might actually keep me out of heaven.” He bent down by my side and inquired, “How are you feeling today?” Unlike Ayana, Greg spoke English in a definite accent, with rolled r’s and subtle accent differences.

I sat up. “I can sit up without help. I’m hungry — are you sure I can’t eat anything but chicken broth and rice? Don’t I have red blood cells to build up or something?”

“We could make you some befstyk tararski. That should set you up good.” He raised his eyebrows.

“Which is — ?”

“Raw beef with a raw egg in it.”

I uttered a long sound that resembled wretching, then managed to choke out, “Gross!”

“You’re missing a treat, let me tell you.” Greg shook his head. “It looks like you’ll be eating some of Ayana’s rice porridge again. Yours will get a little spinach.” 

The porridge, it turned out, wasn’t bad at all. Certainly better than that raw beef Greg was talking about.
I whiled the time after breakfast trying to guess the implications of being resurrected. Nobody had come in to visit; I fretted about what they discussed in my absence. My viola was, as far as I knew, still packed in the truck, and I was pretty sure Greg was guarding the front door. I was ready, if not to run, to at least venture as far as the living room and eat lunch there. When I suggested the venue change to Greg, he scowled at me from the doorway.

“Why not?” I snapped at him. “I’ve got enough energy to —”

“Yell at me, it sounds like,” he smirked in his oddly accented English. “Maybe you are ready to come out and visit with us.”

“You mean — have tea, and talk about the weather?” I inquired.

“Not exactly. We’re having a debate about what we should do from here — running appears to be no longer an option.”

“What do you mean?”

“Ok, stand up so I can help you out to the living room.”

“I don’t need help!” I snapped. I stood up and promptly felt my knees give out from under me. Greg glared down his nose at me.

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“Ok, so maybe I do need help,” I sighed. I was an emancipated minor, with all the responsibility that entailed — which was very little up to this point. Even now, I relied on Ayana and Greg to keep me safe. I stood again, this time supported by Greg, and we ambled into the living room.

An excerpt from my work in progress

As we stepped outside into the night, I saw a group of young men standing in the yard, lit only by the odd lantern. I noted that Hakeem’s colleagues from the alliance wore gang colors — in fact, they wore the colors of opposing gangs, one group largely Latino and one Asian. They regarded each other with a wary cordiality, and I wondered if this alliance could blow up into violence at a moment’s notice.

The heads of each group — one wearing a grey bandana tied around his upper arm, one a red bandana tied around the opposite arm, like their followers — came up to shake my hand. “I hear you’re a Schmidt,” the Asian man with short-buzzed hair and acne scars squinted shrewdly at me. “I have uses for a Schmidt.”

“I’m sorry,” I said very politely — and very uneasily. “I have a quest I’d like to go on.”

“We could make it worth your while,” said the babyfaced Latino leader with a tattoo of a teardrop under his eye — a sign he had done time in prison or even killed someone.

“I’m really sorry. Part of me would love to, but I’m haunted by a story.” I felt nervy telling this to a gang leader, but I boosted my bravado with the reminder I had cheated death once already.

“Let’s tell stories later. I might have one you’d like,” the Asian leader shrugged.
I inwardly sighed in relief, because I was likely surrounded by more firepower than I’d been in the hostage situation. 

We moved, with myself the only one not in black, toward the looming refinery. I probably should have been to reduce my visibility in the night. “Break up,” each gang leader whispered to his crew, “two by two.” I stuck with Hakeem, the broker, who looked almost undistinguishable in his faded black hoodie. We drifted, two by two, by differing paths, toward a door in the back. 

When I arrived at the door, I expected to see the glow that distinguished a Schmidt 4000 on battery power. I saw none. Rushing to the lock, I realized that the battery had been stolen. I tugged at the handle dumbly, feeling the others’ eyes boring into my back. Of course, the handle didn’t give, because a Schmidt lock with a stolen battery stayed in the locked position. 

Frantically, I put together all I knew about Schmidt locks from my father. When a battery died in the lock position — ahh, that was it. The wafer drive could be used as an override key, a secret perhaps only I knew. I reached up my sleeve for the — 

No, I couldn’t do that. Any one of the people in the huddle around me could kill me for what I had tucked up my sleeve. They were gang members who were heavily armed, and I was a woman whose only weapon was a shotgun with birdshot back in my truck. 

I took a deep breath. “Are you people of honor?”

An anonymous voice near the back snarled, “Those are fighting words — “

Hakeem jumped in. “The lady has to keep her trade secrets. She’s a Schmidt — “

“I already gave you that secret,” I told the leaders. “You’re the only ones in the world who know I’m a Schmidt. That gives both of us a responsibility. On my side, I will have to answer any call of yours I can if it’s a life-or-death matter with that lock. Deal?”

“We already made that deal with you,” the Latino leader, stocky with curly hair half buzzed, half-curly, intoned.

“This other secret, though, this trade secret, is deadly. It could get me killed if you know, and it could get you killed if you know. It’s Pandora’s box — you can’t put the secret back in. The secret’s like a deadly virus — if you can’t keep it contained, it will kill you.” I hoped to God — mine, Hakeem’s, or anyone’s — that they would listen, because all that I said was in some sense true.

“Can you get that door open with it?” The Asian leader spoke.

“Yes, but everyone has to turn their backs, so they don’t see what I have.” Everyone turned their backs. “Ok — “ I said before turning to the lock, and saw Hakeem turn slightly —

“Hakeem, no,” I yelled. One of the red bandanaed men turned and clocked him. Hakeem spun to the ground.

“Fair shot,” Hakeem groaned, straggling upward. Everyone again turned their back to me.

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I had one frightening moment when the first pass of the wafer didn’t click the lock open. Then I took a deep breath, flipped the wafer — and the locks snicked open.

An excerpt (again)

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NaNo writing makes for a very rough draft. I look at this and see that it’s a bit more than a plot outline, but not much more. You can’t tell from this that Archetypes are beautiful but not imaginative, that their decor is very austere a a result — think Shaker or Scandinavian design — or that the only wall hanging is a representation of the community logo — which was designed and created somewhere else.

You don’t know that Daniel is having to process that the woman he brought to the collective has probably introduced the biggest danger to the collective, and that his son tried to kill her.

This is why revision exists.

************

Mari called the meeting to order. I noticed, for the first time, that someone had set up a short platform made in the same blond wood as the floor. Mari and Luke and William sat crosslegged on rugs on the platform, looking more austere and more unsettling than they had seemed before. 

Mari stood up briefly, projecting her usual benevolence, which did not calm me down at all. “We have an emergent situation, one which involves the events that exiled Jude from Hearts are Mountains, Jude’s questions about Annie’s identity, and the whereabouts of Jude after he left us. Other revelations will likely be revealed that cannot be discussed outside of this space. I would like Annie to come up here and tell the story of how she came here.”

I stood up, feeling my legs wobble. Mari motioned me up to the front where I stood, as she sat down. “Do you mind if I ask you questions? You don’t have to answer anything you don’t want to.”
I realized that if I left any questions unanswered, I would look suspicious to the Archetypes gathered here, and I realized that I didn’t want them to mistrust me. I wanted their regard.

“Annie, can you tell us your name and background?” Mari inquired.

Oh, we’re playing hardball here, I thought.

“The name I was given when I was — engendered …” I began, and I watched eyebrows go up with the words I carefully chose, “I was named Anna Mîr Johnson, and after my mother married Arthur Schmidt, my identity papers were changed to name me Anna Mîr Schmidt. I remember that well now, and I realize this man — “ I waved toward Luke — “created papers for me at my — engendering —  and at the time Arthur Schmidt claimed me as his daughter. My birth father was William Morris — “ I waved a hand toward William — “but he left me the day I was engendered. I’m still trying to figure out what engendering entails.”

“This makes you Nephilim,” Kirsten called out, petting one of her clowder of cats. 

“Yes, I’ve been told I’m a Nephilim. I’m trying to get up to speed on that, because until today I assumed I was human with a really poor memory of my childhood.”

“Some of us have lived like that,” William breathed. “My parents, Lilith and the Kiowa Archetype, engendered me and left me with the Kiowa to be a brother to them. They didn’t, however, tell me I would outlive those brothers by hundreds of years. It caused me some trouble. If Mari hadn’t found me, I would still think I was human.”

“We’ve been taking Lilly to task since we found you,” Luke reminded William. “All of us have made mistakes, even though we are not human.”

“Anna,” Mari interrupted, “can you explain to us who Arthur Schmidt was personally and professionally?”

I took a deep breath. The stocky, balding man I had called father, Arthur Schmidt, had been my favorite human being on earth — and I realized how accurate the phrase was in this case. “Arthur Schmidt was, for all intents and purposes, my father. I met him two months after I was engendered, and he did not challenge my mother’s cover story that I was my mother’s distant cousin who had suffered from a severe amnesia that had taken my childhood from me. My dad took it upon himself to pull me out of my shell by teaching me about puzzles, cryptograms, and riddles. He was a cryptographer. You would not have known of his work for the government, where he placed his most sophisticated systems. You might have, if you were a burglar, cursed Arthur Schmidt, because his locks were, for all intents and purposes, invincible.”

“How much do you know about his locks, Anna?” Luke asked, rubbing his chin.

“I know everything,” I breathed. I saw everyone in the group I faced — Ivan, Summer, Daniel — study me with interest. “I have his codebooks and his lockbox here in my backpack,” I indicated the pack I had carried up with me. “I have his override, which works as a key and as a code simultaneously. I’m the only person in the world who can currently arm and disarm a Schmidt lock.”

The room was perfectly quiet; I wondered what the others thought. I spoke again: “Would that be enough for someone to try to kill me? Would it be enough for someone to rescue me from certain death? To have me followed? To put a bounty on me?”

Luke uttered one word: “Yes.”

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I then understood why my situation concerned the collective. They lived in danger by merely sheltering me. 

An excerpt — and the home stretch.

I am in the home stretch with 4000 words left. I might hit the goal today; I might not. I will keep writing till at least the end of the month; it’s possible if I keep this rate up I’ll be close to the end of the book. I doubt I will, however — I’m traveling for a writers’ retreat over (American) Thanksgiving.

Here’s an excerpt from yesterday (really rough). Our protagonist, Annie Smith,  has accepted an invitation to the intentional community Hearts are Mountains, built in northern Nevada in the Owyhee Desert, for fuel and water. There are a few mysteries that Annie doesn’t quite register:

I realized, as we went down another circular stairwell, that the underground building was a cylinder longer than it was wide. This being the central cylinder, the rooms appeared to be for collective use. Doors led to, I presumed, the other cylinders below the greenhouses. The layer below the great room served as a craft production room, and below that a root cellar and food storage area, with a full quarter of the area used for — 

“Water reclamation?” I asked, spying the tall cylindrical powered unit.

“Got it in one,” Daniel nodded. “We run the unit on skinky — generated outside, of course — supplemented with jatropha, which we grow in one of the domes, and castor, which we grow on the opposite side of the animals so they don’t eat the beans and die.” He indicated the large unit again. “One of the biggest hazards of living in underground units is the humidity level — too much humidity, believe it or not, makes underground living very unpleasant.”

“This is a pretty sophisticated setup,” I remarked, looking at concrete and metal. “Pardon me for asking, but doesn’t this setup require a lot of money?”

Daniel paused for a long moment. I wondered if I had broken a taboo among these people by mentioning money. “I’m sorry — “ I blurted out.

“No, really, it’s fine. It’s hard to explain our funding for this, however. We built this with seed money and sweat equity. Although the cement habitats are prefab, we installed them ourselves. This one goes about seventy feet into the ground, while the others — living spaces — go down about sixty. As you can tell, almost all our living spaces are underground; we had to do some deep digging, and I don’t know if the site has fully recovered after twenty years.”

We walked up three flights of circular stairs past the root cellar and the peaceful crafts room, where a man sat, spinning fiber — 

“Derek,” Daniel called out, “say hi to Annie. She’s having dinner with us.”

Derek, a pale man with incredibly long, pale hair, gave us a puzzled look and then smiled. “Hi, Annie,” he said and turned back to his work.

“Is he Kirsten’s brother?”

“Twins. They’re extremely rare among …” he let his voice trail off, and I wondered how the sentence would have ended.

“You don’t get visitors here often, do you?” I queried in what I suspected was a grave understatement.

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“Not too many people are into rock climbing these days,” Daniel shrugged.

I wrote a fun section of my Work in Progress yesterday I wanted to share. To give a little background, A shadowy group called Second World Renewal have chased Grace and Ichirou, prodigies in viola and art prospectively, and Ichirou’s chaperone Ayana, across Poland. The three have boarded a ferry from Gdynia, Poland to Nynahshamn, Sweden as an attempt to get to their home countries. As they boarded the ferry, Grace noticed the porter resembled one of Second World Renewal’s hired muscle. Because Ayana brushes off Grace’s fear, Grace suspects Ayana is in league with the group.

Ayana sends Grace and Ichirou off to the disco while she claims to set a trap for the group’s thug. Having no choice, they dress up and go to the disco, where Grace gives in to her fatalism in a .

Let me know what struck you, what questions you would ask.

*****

Music blared in the disco, enough that I thought I saw the walls move. A few people sat at the bar tables and even fewer danced. The blue lights — can lighting, neon accents — rendered the clientele almost anonymous and the wooden tables and chairs and walls a greasy black. The performer, dwarfed against his equipment, hit knobs and slides and created loops of sound that slid against each other. The couple that slow-danced when everyone else on the floor couldn’t figure out whether to dance fast or slow took the anonymity offered to start locking lips. I wondered what that would be like …
Ichirou and I finally sat at the edge of the disco. We sat silently, not watching the performer, not looking at each other. I thought about Stockholm Syndrome and whether I could truly escape Second World Renewal’s plot and why they wanted me in the first place, given I wasn’t a real prodigy like Ichirou, and if I would survive to get my first kiss —
Tears overcame me. 
Ichirou reached for my hand.
I yelped — “Don’t do that, you little pervo —“
A tall man wearing a crew uniform stopped by our table. “Is there a problem?” he asked in a low pleasant voice. That was all I could discern of him given the lurid blue lighting. 

“No,” I gulped. “Everything’s okay. I’m just babysitting and — “
“You decided to bring your charge to the disco?” the white-uniformed man chuckled.
“Well, I …” Ichirou had turned away with his arms crossed as I spoke.
“It’s okay. Just so you don’t let him drink any alcohol.” His face bent close to mine, and I saw freckles, dark eyebrows, and a thin nose. 

“We’re not drinking,” I shrugged. As far as I was concerned, Ichirou wasn’t drinking. I myself considered trying Sex on the Beach if I was about to lose my freedom to Ivanov’s goons. 

“Why not? You have a chaperone.” He shared a significant look with Ichirou, of all things, and Ichirou nodded. “May I get you something to drink?”
“Sure, if you’re not going to drop a roofie in it.” 

The man nodded thoughtfully. “It’s hard not to worry about that, isn’t it? I assure you, nobody’s going to tamper with this drink. What would you like?”
“Sex on the Beach,” I mumbled.
“I couldn’t hear that,” the crew member grinned.
“She wants Sex on the Beach,” Ichirou chirped. I laid my head on the table, hoping the blue lighting hid my flaming cheeks.
“Ok, one Sex on the Beach for the lady, and for you?” I heard the crew member ask Ichirou.
“I’m fine with mineral water. Sparkling if you have it,” Ichirou replied. And do they have any vegetarian food?”
“Lacto-vegetarian?”
“Lacto-ovo-vegetarian,” Ichirou corrected. “I don’t want her drinking on an empty stomach.” 

“You’ll make a fine salaryman someday.” I saw the crew member wander off as I lifted my head. If I survived this trip, not even I would believe the story.
“Please, no, not a salaryman,” Ichirou breathed when the crewman had walked out of earshot.
“What’s a salaryman?” I queried.
“The stereotypical Japanese man. Works in a company, lives for the company, spends more time drinking with his co-workers than with his family. Dies of overwork.”
“Oh.” I wondered if being a salaryman would be better or worse than being a kidnapped prodigy.
The anonymous crew member interrupted my thoughts wielding a tray. “Here you go,” as he handed me an icy drink off his tray.

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“You take care of her, all right?” The crew member pulled out a phone, scrutinized the screen, and trotted quickly out of the disco.

An excerpt!

This is an excerpt from “Toppled”, my current project. I skipped ahead to something I thought would be more motivating for me. Ichirou and Grace and Greg have “talents” — strange abilities hidden under the mundane talents they have as prodigies. This gets into talents ethics, and — well, bumbling attempts at relationships. This is from Ichirou’s point of view — he spent several years in a school that tries to cure hikikomoris, or teenage recluses. Grace’s parents put her in residential music schools for most of her life, and she has little parenting as a result. Greg’s family was killed in a bombing about 13 years ago. 

Because this is an excerpt from the middle of the book, you may have some questions. Go ahead and ask!
**************
I sat in the copse of trees that the cabin nestled in. I focused on the birds singing to keep the pressure of the air from crushing me. Ayana-sensei taught me how to do that, to keep me from retreating into what she called my own mind. I didn’t correct her – I retreated to a place, not my own mind.
And now I would tell Grace-chan – Gracie in her language — about this place, and she would doubtless think I was crazy. But I would not be an impostor to her.
I glanced up, and I saw Gracie stroll toward me, tall and lean and poised. She had the perfect demeanor, the perfect body – I stopped the thought there by thinking of the birds, some of which sounded familiar, some not. One bird called “cheer, cheer, cheer!” and I knew I had once heard it in the world I retreated to.
Gracie wore shorts and a t-shirt and a black baseball cap with a white symbol that, after much scrutiny, I realized were initials intertwined. The Yankees, of course. She sat down next to me, unnervingly close, and I smelled a distinctly chemical, un-Gracie smell. She handed me a bottle. “Good. You have a hat. Rub some of this on so the ticks don’t get you.” I did as directed, and I too smelled like cleaning fluid disguised by artificial flower scent.
“So why are we here?” she asked, cocking her head as she peered at me.
“It’s time to tell you something.”
Of course, Gracie’s brow wrinkled at my dramatic choice of words. “Time to tell me what?”
“Where my talent comes from.”
“Comes from?” Gracie would say that, because her talent, or the talent beneath her talent, developed from her childhood need to be listened to and appeared to come from her own subconscious.
I closed my eyes and took a deep breath as I felt the slight breeze pushing against my skin. “Your talent comes from something inside you. My talent comes from a place outside of me.”
“What do you mean?” Grace-chan stammered.
“Do you remember the video I showed you the day we met?”
“I can’t forget that –” she snapped. “I spent half an hour with you in a pitch-black lounge watching bunnies turn into flowers and finding all the pain of my childhood – which had no bunnies or flowers – lying dissected in front of me.”
“I miscalculated,” I shrugged. “Too much happy and not enough comforting.” I paused. “But that’s not the point.”
“Not the point,” Gracie echoed.
“The reason I wanted to meet here is because I wanted you to know where my ideas come from.”
“They come from your mind?” Gracie asked, and I couldn’t identify her tone of voice.
“No, Gracie,” I corrected. “There’s this place, and I go there – “
“And the place is in your mind,” she insisted.
“No. I go someplace. Someplace else. When I was a hikikomori, the world would become too much for me to deal with, and I would go to this other place with no sound but pictures flowing like waterfalls, and it would tell me stories in pictures, and I started to retell them. Sometimes it showed me horrible stories that I swore I would never share. But most of the pictures show me things the world needs to see. And I retell them.”
“And you’ve assigned yourself as the arbiter of what people need to see. How conceited of you!” Without another word, she stood up and stalked off.
I sat with my back against my tree and my eyes closed, trying to pay attention to the sounds rather than going back to my world.

“Ichirou, let me give you a piece of advice.” I opened my eyes, and Greg, lanky and unkempt in his second-hand fatigues, squatted next to me. “When dealing with women, it’s best not to dismiss their emotions lest they get angry and stomp away in a huff.”  

I haven’t given you an excerpt for a while

I hadn’t given you an excerpt for a while; this is from what I’m currently writing.

Background: Grace Silverstein, an eighteen-year-old viola prodigy, and Ichirou Shimizu, a seventeen-year-old graphic design prodigy, have just escaped gunfire from the place they had been invited to participate in an international assembly for prodigies in Krakow.  Through a combination of luck and craftiness, they have holed up in an all-night pierogi place in the Stare Misto. They eat dinner, given that they barely picked at their food at the earlier banquet, and discuss their predicament:

Ichirou interrogated me after the waiter had left. “How come you have money?” He studied me through his steel-framed glasses.

“I’m 18. I’ve been handling my own finances since I was 15. I have a credit card.”

“As a high school student?” Ichirou peered over his nerd glasses at me.

“As a trust fund baby.” I peered back at the youngster.

Ichirou pulled out his phone and tapped on the screen. “Trust fund baby?”

“My parents died in a plane crash when I was fifteen.”

“I’m sorry,” Ichirou murmured.

“It’s complicated. I spent most of my life at boarding schools — music schools — I never really knew my parents as Mom and Dad.”

“That’s strange,” Ichirou replied. He paused, as if he would say more.

At that moment, the waiter came back with our drinks. Ichirou scrutinized his cup of hot water with a teabag beside it. My water came in a bottle and appeared to be bubbly.

“I would recommend looking at the Krakow Misalliance,” the waiter smiled, reaching toward an invisible lock of hair and then stopping. “It takes a while to cook, though. Your pierogis will be out in a minute.” He wandered off, and I noted that he glanced over his shoulder at the door.

I glanced at the door again, and thankfully I didn’t see any beefy men striding through. “Do you think they’re going to find us here?” I fretted.

“Hard to tell.” Ichirou took a sip of the tea he had brewed in his cup. “This is tea?”

“This is the way the rest of the world drinks tea, Ichirou,” I smirked, then sobered.

Ichirou took a deep breath. “What happened back there? At the Palace?”

“I think they want people with talents. Not talents like ours, but talents like yours. Like what you knew would happen when I watched your screen saver.”

“I didn’t know for sure,” Ichirou responded. “I thought it might.”

“You tested that on me without knowing what it would do?” I hissed just as the waiter came by with our plates. Ichirou gave me a warning look.

“Venison pierogis for you,” the waiter handed me my plate with a dancer’s grace, “and cabbage pierogis for the vegetarian. Let me know if you need anything.” The waiter walked off, glancing over his shoulder again.

“So you think they’re after me because of my animation,” Ichirou conjectured between bites. “What about the others, then? What about you?”

Good question, and not one I’d been able to answer. “Nastka — Anastasja — I overheard her talking to Matusiak about practicing something — and did you notice that her talent was not mentioned in the introductions? And the twins — they’d had contact with this bunch before, and they were terrified.” I remembered the white faces of the children and their mother, and I remembered the gunshots as we fled the building, and wondered what their resistance had cost them. “As for me, my only talent is music — honestly.”

“We’ll see,” Ichirou responded, rubbing his chin. “You’re here.”

“Whatever,” I responded.

I have a month and a half to wait on my manuscript that’s with HarperLegend — if I hear nothing by August 1, I have to regroup again.

Editing the Next Book Again

I’m done editing Apocalypse, which means three of five (actually six, but I don’t count that one) edited. I have learned a lot about the editing process, with the most important things being:

1) Read what I’m editing aloud, or at least aloud in my head — it slows me down.
2) Action verbs.
3) Don’t describe how people are feeling — get into their thoughts and physical sensations.
4) Don’t write tentatively — “Perhaps he wanted to torch the building a little bit, maybe” does not engage the reader.

I learned none of this from rejection slips. I’ve learned NOTHING from rejection slips other than “This doesn’t really fit with my interests.”  I’m not kidding. Maybe I’m spoiled, because when I get rejections from academic journals, I get PAGES of critiques. And usually, if I address those, I get published.

Oh well, I’m editing “Reclaiming the Balance”, which is actually in pretty good shape already. Here’s an excerpt from the first chapter:

Ahead of her, off in the grass, she saw a long black boxlike construct, large enough to walk in, tapered slightly on one end. From what she could tell when she peered into it, it looked like a portable photography gallery with well-lit, artfully framed pictures on the wall.

Curious, Janice strolled over and stepped into it. She recognized herself in the pictures along the walls, and the hair stood up on the back of her neck. She recognized the first picture — she was only five and she wore her almost black, wavy hair back in a ponytail, but her mother had worked to make her bangs big. She preferred to play with her brother rather than sit like a lady, so her next picture featured that same Sunday outfit muddied, along with her hands and face. She stopped at a picture where she wore a mascot outfit – a cardinal – in her high school gym. Her father had foregone all of her extracurricular activities because his career kept him busy. Her mother had not attended either, claiming other responsibilities.

Janice didn’t see the door behind her close, so curious and unsettled she felt by the pictures of herself. How did someone get them? Why were they there?  When she saw the photo of her kneeling in front of her grandmother’s coffin, Janice turned and fled toward the door she had entered, which had disappeared like in a nightmare. She turned and ran the other way down the corridor, toward the open door, toward the light.

Before Janice reached the light at the end of the corridor, someone grabbed her wrist firmly. When she turned around to look at who had captured her, she saw a young man with frantic eyes. Or a young woman with frantic eyes — she couldn’t be sure.

“I can’t let you past. If you go through that door, you’ll die,” he — she? gasped.
“But there’s no door out!” Janice yelled. “How do we get out?”

“I’m Amarel, and this is my grandmother, Lilly.” Amarel indicated a short blonde woman who looked little older than himself. “She’ll transport us.”

“Transport? Okay, just get me out of here.” Janice had this. She’d learned the word ‘transport’ from her now ex-boyfriend. To transport meant to feel her molecules tear apart and coalesce back together in another place. Her last coherent thought before she felt herself dissolve was, “Not the rabbit hole again …”

An excerpt from what I’m editing today …

“The Triumvirate,” Luke stated, “expect us to be scared. Conversely, they expect us to be arrogant to cover our fear. We should communicate neither.”

“But wouldn’t fear cause them to under-prepare for the battle because they think we’re pushovers?” Stephanie Rogers, a member of the telepathic women’s rugby team, inquired.

“I suspect they will be underprepared no matter what,” Luke grinned savagely. “They believe themselves to have superior weapons — strength, transportation and teleportation abilities, near immortality and quick healing. The Nephilim have similar characteristics, but are less difficult to kill – or injure in this case. The Triumvirate expect us to conduct typical human warfare — with guns, which would fail us; with edged weapons, which they consider themselves better at, with martial arts, which some of them have mastered. They have not fought a battle against subterfuge.

“I fear, though, that if we send a cringing, cowering message, we ourselves will take it to heart and create our own fear, and they will win.”

“So, we send them the type of message we’re good at sending?” Ilsa asked. “Calm, strong, sure of our convictions?”

“I think that’s a good way to start,” Luke nodded. “How should we address them?”

“‘Dear assholes,’” Allan Chang intoned.

“Ah, no,” Alan Sutton replied.

“How about ’To our adversaries,’” Raina Prince suggested.

“Although I like that, we are not an adversarial people. In an ideal situation, we would seek to find unity with them.” Ilsa stood up. “How do we address them in that sense?”

“Dear Triumvirate,” Addie Majors stood up and answered. “We regret that you have chosen this action. We will be ready to face you on the appointed day.”

“We should be ready at any moment, though,” Luke said. “But we don’t tell them that, of course.”

“Frankly,” Dan Lance stated, “this sounds like a perfect message. Short, sweet, to the point. Not overly aggressive nor overly passive.”

Sarah Kinder jumped in. “I agree. That’s the message I would like to send.”

In the end, the collective entrusted Luke to send the simple message.