Trans/plant/portation

I hoped my memory of how to find his house wasn’t fuzzy, but if I was right, we had quite a ways to go before we’d show up at the white row home. As the sun prepared to set, I sniffed around an abandoned strip of train cargo cars. Judging from the height of the weeds and the rusty state of the tracks here, no trains had passed through here for a long while.

I slept in fits, as Pie was tied to a crumbling handle on the open cargo door. The wood was rotted in places and my nose stuffed up from the smell of mold and old urine, but I’d become so exhausted I couldn’t keep myself awake, and I hoped the horse would alert me if I were in any danger. Read More…

Okay, this is really a list of the top writing posts I’ve written, by popularity of post and my personal preferences. It’s my blog, I get to pick! There are also a few other “best of” here that involve other people, so worries that this is all about me are premature. Enjoy. Read More…

For those of you following along, here’s the latest piece I’m sharing of my work in progress.

Closing my eyes made the experience feel more familiar, even if I knew I was sitting back on Jeannine’s friend’s couch and not in a lab. I appreciated Dr. Stanger’s voice, strangely comforting even after everything I’d put him through. Without seizures anymore, we weren’t sure if this would work. I should have been more nervous about the hand-built EEG machine than my own capacity for out of control neuron activity, but I didn’t think the doctor would have subjected me to anything that could hurt me. Even if he’d gone through a terrible ordeal on my account.

“Just relax, Jack,” he said, and it occurred to me that I didn’t know why he cared to do all of this for us. Was he interested in inventing a time machine? Wanted to prove himself correct? Was he actually insane?

I considered ripping the wires off of my head, held to my scalp with some kind of hair product instead of the medical putty I was used to. This was reckless, dangerous. What was I thinking? I should jump up and get out of here, explain to my parents that I’ve been stupid and desperate. They’ll have to get over it at some point. Read More…

It’s been a good year, even if I did have a lot of hopes for 2010. If 2008 was chock full of life events—getting married, moving to the other side of a large continent—and 2009 was about adjustment to those new environments, I figured the next year, this year, would show up with big rewards for my good behavior. And it did, kind of. It’s been hard work on top of more hard work, and a lot of it has been frustrating (I’m looking at you, rejection letter). All told though, I can look back and see several important lessons. Which leads me to: Read More…

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…

My latest bit of Parallax, from the first draft. To read the earlier excerpts, click on Parallax in the tag cluster on the left side of the screen.

Sanjay looked much older in scrubs.

“Green’s a good color on you,” I said, sitting in my car.

“Oh shut up.” He clipped his brother’s hospital badge on his shirt and said, “Wish me luck.”

The plan was for Sanjay to say Dr. Stanger needed to go to respiratory therapy, and he was the orderly to remove him. With all the smoking the doctor did, we hoped it wouldn’t look suspicious. According to Jay’s brother Prabal, lots of patients on the mental wellness ward smoked a lot and it was common for them to get checkups from the respiratory therapy staff when they inevitably had problems breathing. Read More…

Holy crud, NaNoWriMo is over. Finito. Those of us who finished with 50,000 words or more, let’s give ourselves a pat on the back. Those of us who didn’t, I have something to say.

It doesn’t matter.

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. Read More…

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 couldn’t let my isolation get the best of me. I determined to push through whatever this was, find out if there was a way to save both mothers and my friends who were in danger.

Looking up again, I saw Jeannine start her engine. I was going to miss her and then not have a way home, 20 miles away.

I leaped up and raced into the parking lot, waving my arms, and saw the flash of Jeannine’s brake lights. She backed up and reached over to unlock the passenger door.

“What the hell, Jack?”

“Can I get a ride?” Each word came out with a pant in between. Read More…

So much about writing is having confidence without losing a cap on one’s ego.  If I can’t even call myself a “writer,” then spending time at the keys is even more ludicrous, because it’s too easy to believe these hours are all a waste. At least, that’s how the equation works in my head. Somehow, I’ve muddled through since I moved out West, and all of my education that looked wonky or out of place in the government contract/technology world now fits snugly against these latest endeavors. English literature, critical theory, and psychology are the ham to these eggs, or the Not Dogs, for those who are vegan inclined, to this tofu scramble. Read More…

Nearly there, with a scant 48 hours left until the end of the NaNoWriMo. If you’re lagging behind or thinking that there is no way on this good green earth that you can finish and make the 50,000 word count, don’t despair. I’ve said all along that this exercise isn’t about a number, it’s about a practice. Writers write. Dolphins dolphin or erm, swim. Forward, or even lateral progress, is what November has been about, so if we’ve stuck to our keyboards, pens, indelible markers, or chisels, then more power to us. Let’s look at some other benefits of continuing to plug away at our intrepid novels:

Read More…