Excerpt #5

When they come home, you are sleeping. Someone comes into the bedroom, and it wakes you partially, but you just lie there, rectangular in your mind, almost square, like a life raft or an inflatable mattress, You do not alter your face, you are careful about this, remaining impassive, letting the eyelids rest lightly without flickering. You imagine your face Chinese. In your head, you start writing this –  doing a better job describing the scene than you are doing now as you try to remember when it was effortless, unencumbered by your graceless typing. Your typing is gimpy

Excerpt #4

It’s actually about 75,000 homes now without power in the state, according to the radio, and many folks may not be back up until Monday. This is small talk - not that it isn’t important – if it’s you without heat, lights, water and the ability to cook or keep food, or it’s your job to answer for why people are still living like that, it’s pretty damn important. You just mean to say that it’s not a part of this novel. It’s not a fictional story. What we’re doing here is blurred non-fiction. It’s a car ride while you’re drowsy – part dream and part car-wreck-unfolding

I Love You No One

Excerpt #3

A girl walks by the window with an intense, searching expression on her face. She’s hard-bitten and frayed at the edges, obviously an addict. A black girl, early twenties, under a beat up, straight-haired wig – for a minute you think you know her from when she was a kid in your program, but you don’t. Your car is parked right outside with you lap top on the floor, and you can’t help but glance that way as she goes by. Not far behind her is a man looking very alert, taking everything in, barely contained desperation. He’s a hungry fisherman, and she’s his lure, cast into the stream of this street. To say she is a hooker and he is a pimp is not the whole story. They’re addicts first. It’s a little like being Irish- American

I'm Gonna Tell My Kids A Bedtime Story

Excerpt #2

Your world is small. Your experience is narrow. This ocean you pretend to swim in is as shallow as a kiddie pool. You have no expertise. What do you have to write about? The number of steps you take to complete your unconscious circle, the weather conditions, the pain of others, the joy your children stir in you and the fear, the guilt your children stir in you and the fear, the deafness you’ve developed in your marriage, the way you’ve closed your self down, working and maybe more about working, about sitting at a desk and watching time go by and not even wringing your hands over it when that’s the very least you should do, about planning a life that you will not live to see, that you will not take steps to implement? You want only to escape this moment.

Excerpt from Yesterday's NaNoWriMo First Entry

It’s not a life without humor – not entirely. Just a few moments ago you were interviewing a suicidal woman in the emergency room worn down by family problems, depression and chronic pain, hanging by a thread with her 11 year old daughter, crashing between the homes of friends and family and trying with heavy footsteps not to wear out her welcome. We determined a hospitalization might be the safest thing, the quickest way to get an anti-depressant started, being that an outpatient appointment is unattainable in less than 12 weeks in this state. You go to consult with the attending physician who is presently being consulted by a physician’s assistant who is bragging about how she just successfully installed a nasal trumpet.

This makes you snigger a little. You tell them you played the nasal trumpet in 4^th grade band. The doc laughs a little, the P.A. ignores you entirely. You do the consult. The doc agrees with your disposition. You leave the ED blowing one clear half-note out of your right nostril while pinching closed your left.