Teasers from my Untitled Book

Photo Credit: Morgue File by Johnny Pixel Productions

I don't have it in me to write a real post today, but I want to update my blog, so this is what I am going to do: I am going to post snippets from the book I am writing to entertain you–not enough that it could be said that this material has already "been published." Just enough to make sure you know I am crazy. Hopefully, you will keep in mind that crazy people are often fabulous authors, especially when writing autobiographically. Let me know what you think.

From The Alien:

"Of all the people I have ever met, I am the only one I know to have had a childhood messiah fantasy. While others indulged in the minor grandiosities of pretending to be a princess, a superhero or a mortal policeman, I essentially believed that I was God."

From Forsaken:

"In middle school, we moved from a little rural hippie town in the San Geronimo Valley, from a landscape with hills like the green breasts of a Goddess dotted with oaks, to affluent, pretentious Tiburon, with its yachts, tennis ladies and pickle grass watersides. I moved with my roller skates from a wooden deck where I could practice to hard and uneven asphalt where I fell, scraped my knees and gave up learning to skate. Every rose in Tiburon was all thorns. Magic was illegal."

From Stranger in the Dark:

"Addiction is a cauldron into which I have poured my anger, my bitterness, my loss. In the arms of this boy I have found both an answering pain and an answering love. My friends are arranged around me like barbed wire. I hold a cigarette that can go off like a gun."

From Amazing Grace:

"On one occasion, I can recall watching Montel Williams with a panel discussing eating disorders. I nodded my head vehemently, recognizing the insanity and the societal pressure that drove it. At the commercial break, I vomited up my lunch."

From Bondage a GoGo:

"'Bondage a GoGo.'

Even the words were a tease. Bass boomed in a darkened room, alive with dancers slick with sweat. I wove among grinding bodies decked in liquid black laced up corsets, knee high stiletto boots and lingerie; the world was delicious and innocuously dangerous, like the tiger behind an invisible fence."

From Warp and Weft:

"Five days and two hospital transfers later, I have a baby boy. Thirty-five weeks gestated, he is five pounds, three ounces and still curled up like a bud. He can fit in the large palm of my fiancé’s hand. His jaw is angular, not yet softened by baby fat, and he is almost never awake, but he can breathe on his own. He lies in an incubator, wearing the diaper of a doll and a tiny hat. Rowan."

From Boadicea:

"Which matters more–quilts sewn by dear friends, moments of joined laughter ‘round a circle as your child is blessed, tears shared in moments in still rooms, safe from ridicule? Or the power of a voice raised among many, the authority of initiation into influence? Again and again, in the intervening years, I have wondered. And again and again, I have chosen my own voice."

From Genesis:

"I was lying on the bed and it was 11 AM. The skies had leaked rain for days. They had oozed rain, like a full sponge slowly left to drain in the sky. Now it was July and the weather was sunny, but I hardly noticed. Moss grew on the interior of my soul. I had a baby whose single goal in life was to climb everything and a house with a large stairwell and a baby gate he regarded as a personal jungle gym."

From Driven:

"And that image–my bent and twisted body in the passenger seat of someone’s car, leaned back to let a hysterical infant suck on my pinkie until it grew numb because of my misgivings about pacifiers–that is all you ever needed to know about me. The rest of this book is wasted paper."