Tag: WIP

A excerpt of my WIP

An excerpt from my work in progress:

Across the floor of the café, Jeanne wrestled with the program with which she laid out her permaculture gardens. In particular, the app balked at selecting a single clump of plants in a permaculture guild, and instead she lifted the entire 2-acre garden diagram off ground level and into the impossibly blue sky. She needed a better computer, one which could handle the graphics better. She sighed and turned back to her computer. When she glanced up after a few more painstaking minutes of moving the clumps of greenery, she spied a young man sitting across from her. She knew his face: the unruly straight black hair, brown almond-shaped eyes, a sensuous mouth. The slam poet. The man who had looked over at her earlier.


 “I’m Josh Young,” he announced in a light, dry tenor. “I’ve seen you around here. I hope I’m not interrupting you.” He grimaced; she chuckled when she saw his rueful expression. “Was that as awkward as it sounded?”

She silently applauded his straightforwardness. “I’m Jeanne Beaumont,” she replied, extending her hand. He gripped her hand firmly, which she appreciated. His grip fitted with his graceful movement. “But I think you know that, for some reason.” She caught his eyes; he grinned.

“Green Things and Felicitations,” Josh chuckled. “The episode with the Jeannie Beans.”

“I remember you. You went to my Thursday Night Lecture — ” Jeanne scrutinized the young man, trying to discern his motives for meeting her. 

“Three years ago,” Josh responded. “My senior year. I went to grad school from here to get a double Master’s — MFA and MS in English. Then I came back here. I’m in the Writing and Languages Department. I teach Composition and wrangle the Slam Poets Society.” 

Jeanne calculated in her head — Josh had to be 25 or 26. Twenty years younger. So, are you waiting for someone? Or are you here to talk to me? she wondered to herself, thinking how unlikely the latter would be. Reflexively, she swiveled around to check whether a cluster of young, ragged poets stood in the background laughing behind their hands at the scene. To her relief, she saw none.

“No, actually, I came here alone — I felt restless, so I came out here to check out the scene.”  Josh looked up at her, his mouth quirked. “Am I disturbing you?”

 Only as much as darling young men usually do, Jeanne reflected. “Not at all. Would you like to join me for the music tonight? We can drink coffee together.” 

She thought she heard the answer in his grin. Illogical, she thought. Just like the whiff of apple blossom that wafted by.

What I’m working on

Rewrites are harder than I thought:

Lilly Doe thought she’d have a nice quiet evening at home.

 She sat in her sanctum, the soothing living room of her Chicago bungalow. After looking through a research paper on modern Archetypes and the female psyche, Lilly strolled over to her bookcase to find a mystery novel to read — and dissolved into a sparkling mist.

When the molecules that made up her body realigned themselves, Lilly found herself in an eerily perfect coffeehouse.  Black walls, dark interior. Scattered shelves with bric-a-brac — a stuffed armadillo, a badly tarnished coffee urn. A small stage, enough for three musicians, but perhaps not enough for four. A dusty upright piano, which she suspected was in perfect tune. Lilly felt as if her insides were still sparkly mist and her legs about to dematerialize once more. But stubbornness would not allow her to shrink from the emergent situation.

The coffeehouse, however, stood silent, and nobody sat at the tables. If Heaven had a coffeehouse, Lilly reasoned, this would be it. Who knew Heaven would be so empty?

Lilly felt goosebumps form on her arms. Her knees buckled, and she collapsed into a chair. She pinched herself and felt pain.

Just then, a man glided up to the chair across from her and sat down. The man had fine, straight, black hair pulled into a loose ponytail, wide Asian eyes, and a graceful nose. He wore unrelieved black, which almost blended into the darkness of the walls.

The man looked at her expectantly.

“Am I dead?” she queried.

“No,” he replied, in a silky tenor. “I suppose you could be dreaming, Lilly.” He  rested his chin on his elbows, watching the emotions play on the woman’s face.

“I don’t dream,” she snapped. “Do we know each other?”

The man raised his eyebrows. “I know of you.  You have touched me.” He studied her again: a short, curvy woman with sunny curls, a button nose, and at the moment a scowl on her face.

“How could I have touched you? I don’t know you!” Lilly shivered.

“I heard a story about you once. It touched my heart,” he murmured. A long-fingered hand gestured toward his heart.

“I don’t know you,” Lilly snapped, standing up.

The man gestured her back down gracefully. “Think of me as an Archetype,” he said. “An Archetype who holds a cultural pattern for humans – thousands, even millions of people at once. Without their cultural DNA, their anchoring in the world, humans will die.”

“Millions of humans? ” Fear replaced skepticism, as though the words resonated with a buried part of Lilly’s memory.

“Pretty much. Archetypes generally live in spaces between worlds, a bleak place called InterSpace, so they can be called to be the template for a human in this world. Archetypes seldom visit Earthside, except in our case.”

“If this is a dream, why are you in it?” She held her breath to keep from screaming. “People can’t dream of what they haven’t seen before.”

“Did I say it was a dream? I called you here, to the ideal coffeehouse, a space that would reassure you, so I could talk to you.” His hand touched hers, and she jolted.

“This isn’t reassuring me,” Lilly sighed.

At that moment, two large lattes appeared on the table.  Lilly took a sip; a perfect latte. “Are these real?” she asked.

“Is this not the best latte you have ever tasted?” He smiled as if he’d made the lattes himself.

Lilly remembered the setting finally, a Chicago fixture whose eclectic shabbiness had earned it renown. It had been years since she had been — Lilly shivered. This compelling man – Archetype – spoke in riddles. “So why are we here?”