For those of you following along, here’s another excerpt of the first draft. Enjoy!
While Dr. Stanger worked on building a crude EEG machine, I drove out to Conestoga for more information on the town and its residents. Whatever town square I’d seen was gone now, subsumed into a street grid. Only on the outlying areas were there still farm lands, but the vast majority of the area had been developed. I pulled over, seeing a yellowed sign in the window of a storefront: Historical Society. I fumbled for dimes in my pocket and bought an hour’s worth of parking time, and headed inside. An older lady with curly white hair greeted me.
“Suggested donation is one dollar,” she told me, “but you can see if that’s worth paying after you walk through.” I smiled and put a bill in her metal box. It didn’t appear they had visitors often. Read More…
I saw 
Just call the iPad the gift that keeps on giving…for a price. My latest little obsession is Angry Birds, a deceptively simple game that features a slingshot and birds on one side, and evil green pigs on the other. I played this game for the entire first leg of my flights to Arkansas, where I am now, baking cookies for the holidays with my mother. (Keep your jokes to yourselves.) It all becomes about aspect and pitch and when to time that explosion, as my brain decided, delirious with giddiness at the comical nature of the app. But the game was fortunate because I’m sure I avoided a painful conversation with the man in the middle seat, who had a terrible case of halitosis. Life Note #29: Always travel with mints, not always for oneself. 
Sanjay looked much older in scrubs.
Many of us who had the fortune to attend college, or who lived in a tight-knit community can relate to the concept of venturing out around campus and its nearby neighborhoods and running into lots of people they knew. In Syracuse, an acknowledgment or short conversation seemed to happen every 6.3 yards. With my move to Washington, DC, after nine years in snowy Central New York, I was suddenly anonymous. And in that urban landscape, hardly anybody cared if they saw a masculine woman in a tweed jacket, so I was initially pleased that I’d gotten some degree of quiet in my subway/walking commute to work. But quickly, I realized that I missed the little, often pithy small talk from New York. What I missed was that degree of community. 
It never did, really, except that NaNoWriMo is a great front for a writing program for young people, so I enjoy making a donation to them, and no, I’m not their pitch boy. But as far as writing goes, it’s a lot of fun to struggle through a first draft when hundreds of thousands of people are doing the same and talking about it online and in meet ups across the country. That’s wonderful. And it’s a fallacy, because in any given month, hundreds of thousands of people are slogging through a first draft. And most of them don’t finish. And most of the ones who do wrote something awful, or close to awful. And the vast majority of finished projects won’t see the light of anyone’s ebook reading device. 
Those of you keeping up with the first draft of my WIP, a YA novel about time traveling with trans themes, I’m posting another excerpt today. All excerpts have been posted in order, so to go back and read any earlier episodes, just click on the Parallax tag on the left side of the screen. Enjoy!
I was 21 years old and everyone had forgotten my birthday. I’d come out one month earlier and promptly broken my ankle in three places—which makes a hell of a terrible sound, for those unfortunate enough to hear it—and was at the tail end of a friendship that soon wouldn’t survive my coming out process. Full of angst and sadness, and not especially mobile, I slowly crutched a half a block from my upstairs apartment onto Westcott Street in Syracuse, New York, where I was about to start graduate school in English literature. Woe was me. I figured if I focused on a simple goal of sitting down and having a two-egg lunch at the corner greasy spoon, I could just get through another moment in what I was sure would be my worst birthday ever. 
Trans/plant/portation 