Friday, July 6, 2012

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 fiancĂ©’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."

17 comments:

  1. You are such a great big tease and I cannot wait to read more!

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    1. Lazy is what I primarily am. Having invested all this energy in the book writing, I feel like ripping off it for my blog, which truthfully deserves its own material. But it was kind of fun. ;)

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  2. I would have copied my favorite line to comment on, but I LOVED them all. I'm with TL--more please!!

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    1. Thanks, hopefully it will result in something someone can actually buy. If it doesn't though, I suppose it will make for blog material for a long time coming.

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  3. snippets are great; I enjoy them. I'm having a hell of a bad week after my mother fell, but my best friend has come to rescue me from insanity so I will be back. Thank you for your warm comment on my bear post. That was painful to write even after all these years, and honestly, II shoould have let it go. Enough pain gping around right now with my mother's issues to cover it all.

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    1. Glad you are keeping your head up. I appreciated the emotional honesty of what you wrote. I was really interested in your writer's workshop, too, but so rarely write fiction, I thought it was not for me. I am glad I get to steal some vicarious pleasure from you and the participants.

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  4. I love them all, of course, but I have a clear favorite. Of course. ;) There are so many stories inside you, I love getting little peeks.

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    1. I, of course, want to know which one that was. I am happy because I just started writing into the part of my life which allows for humor. It's been a journey.

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  5. Hi Tara. My two favorites are Amazing Grace and The Alien. You do think BIG! And the strands of your self that you sew into time are glittering and oh so organic. Bravo! And you may think you don't write fiction, but half of the snippets had the "feel" of fiction to me. For what it's worth, every fiction author uses large snippets from true life to add substance and reality to whatever they write. Best, Tom.

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    1. Thanks, Tom. That's an interesting observation. I've enjoyed writing a few short fiction pieces lately and I enjoy the way you can use but depart from real life as you choose. And there is definitely a fictionalizing even of autobiographical work. I don't remember it all accurately, of course, so I am trying just to capture the feel of events from my perspective and I have changed names and played with dates etc. There's a sense of re-inventing my life as I write it, while still remaining true to it.

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  6. Tara, these are so beautifully written that they do, in fact, read like fiction. Very intriguing. Have you finished the book? Or how far along are you?

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    1. Thanks, Elaine. That's an interesting thought. I suppose I've always thought good non-fiction should read just as well as fiction, but I'm not very good with plot, so I just write from my life.

      I'd say am about halfway through with the roughs. Then there will be lots of proofing, editing etc.

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  7. Love the snippets. I'd love to read much more. When do you think the book will be published, so I can buy it?

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    1. Thanks, Cara. I appreciate the compliment. I have no idea when I'll publish it. I am working hard on finishing it and then I'll probably self-publish, at least initially, but I'd like to have enough following to feel like it will sell a semi-reasonable amount first. Hard to project. Hopefully, not too long. :)

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  8. Self publishing is a lot of hard work, as I understand it. I am not a snob, so I buy self published just as quick =) Best of luck!

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    1. Thanks, I went to several workshops at a writer's conference on self-publishing and traditional publishing both and I ended up leaving with the impression that they are BOTH a lot of hard work, and that traditional publishers do very little for you and are not very interested in even reading your book proposal to begin with. (That impression was based on the seminar lead by a guy who worked in traditional publishing.) Some people self-publish and then, if successful, can get picked up by a traditional publisher. Anyway, the whole thing either way is on you to market yourself and do most of the work. There's some pros and cons on either side after that.

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  9. I also can't wait to read more. Count me among those who will purchase said book, regardless of publishing method.

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Faith in Ambiguity by Tara Adams is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License