piece #1
Even from a distance I could see the pain on his face, and it struck me like a molten sword. I nearly lost my balance. After a few moments, he caught me peering at him and began walking over.

“Hey Sophie,” he yelled up the hill, offering an odd smile. It suddenly reminded me of a time when we were kids and we had to take our dying cat, snowball, to the vet. Snowball sat on the examination table purring, but his face was tense and we could tell he was incredibly uncomfortable; he kept looking around the room at us while desperately pleading with his eyes to be taken home. I asked the vet why he was purring when he was obviously so scared and miserable, and she said a cat’s purr is a lot like a human’s smile– we don’t always do it just when we’re happy.

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There are a couple of things, random here and there things, about this book I’m plucking away at.

The first thing is that I have no idea whatsoever how to write a novel. I’ve never taken a single creative writing class in my life. As a result, I’m mainly versed in how to write persuasive essays and research papers which are boring as hell to read. Papers where you must be concise and say exactly what you mean in as few words as possible. Creative writing isn’t like that at all. I imagine the job of the creative writer is creating an experience rather than an idea. How one goes about doing this I’m not sure.

The only thing I am sure of is that I want to do it. Just for me. One of those “before I die” type things. I don’t care if it gets published or if anyone reads it all or even if it’s any good, but I just want to do it.

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piece #1
I remember having walked through this cemetery everyday on my way to school. Classmates would raise their eyebrows at me, but I always found it a nice, peaceful walk. I liked the little patches of clover here and there, and the way the flat leaves all pointed at the sun with the same angle giving them a terraced look. I even found a four leafed clover once or twice among the gravestones. In the early morning a heavy fog moseyed through the trees surrounding the cemetery which lent them an enticing mysticism. It was peaceful and lovely because this cemetery had always just been a place like any other; it was like the beach, coffee shop or park, a place where people went sometimes. Not until right then, as I stood over my mother’s brand new final resting place, did it occur to me it was a place completely unlike any other. Exceptional in its oddness, this place was as beautiful as it was full of sadness, loneliness and decay. It was also then when I noticed how the poison oak, just turning crimson for the long autumn ahead, surrounded the grassy hill and looked suspiciously like a ring of fire.

She had died in a car accident. My step father, James, told me they were arguing over the phone as she was driving home from work. It was one of the three times a year when it really pours rain in southern California, and she just hydroplaned right over a cliff. More than likely she was driving way too fast as she often did when she was irritated. It was the deepest kind of tragedy; one of those stupid thoughtless mistakes that changes absolutely everything in a single moment.

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When I was little, maybe 8 or 9 or something, my mom gave me a genuine old fashioned western saddle on my birthday. It was old, dusty and smelled like horses; the perfume of a million daydreams. A friend of hers re-discovered it while cleaning out her garage, and it quickly became the best birthday present I ever received. Poor kids rarely get really cool things; with my saddle, I imagined myself galloping along on a black stallion, maybe even becoming some kind of cowgirl.

About a year later, when my mom was having trouble paying the rent, I watched my saddle ride away in the back of some man’s truck. Somehow my mom had lugged the huge saddle and its wooden rack out of the house without me noticing, but I got to watch him drive away with all my little girl dreams of owning a horse. I wondered for a long time if that strange man had any idea the part he played in the destruction of a little girl, but I suppose it doesn’t really matter. Later on she told me that she sold my saddle for $300 and she needed that money for rent, but I didn’t understand these things. The bitterness of that single moment would follow me through the next few decades. Years later the anger and hurt would still well up in me, and I’d think that she should have sold something of her own, like her useless first wedding ring, or some of her other jewelry if she needed the money that badly.

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