Writing – Roads on Her Face

Book finished!

Now, the hard part- finding an agent. I decided to try the traditional route for Roads On Her Face first, just because that was always the way I imagined it. The book is currently with one last beta reader, and through my first round of editing. It wasn’t meant to be done in 2020, with the whole world mess going on affecting book launches, movies, and SO many artistic debuts. It makes me really sad for those who have put years and heartache into their works to launch them in this year and have them railroaded by a pandemic.

This blog was so helpful in giving me motivation and a place to jot down ideas and stories. I’ll transition as needed to promote once I have a final marketing plan. Thank you so much for following along here, and stay tuned for news. Send me some good vibes!

Imaginary Road Trip- The South

So we start in Monticello, then, you and I on this imaginary journey through the way your life traveled. Georgia, where the mud is as red as blood and the sun sinks in a great glowing ball of fire behind the tightly-ranked dark-coated trees that huddle close to the meandering roads and shoulder out the sky. It’s early summertime, perfect for a road trip. I am only a speck of your future, riding along in your cells. Maybe I’ve been there all along.

The thick layers of humidity permeate the walls, awakening the musty smell of swamp and damp wood, and even seem to extend to the slow voices of Southern people and the veiled layers of politeness, straight-faced sarcasm, and backstabbing. “Well, bless your little heart,” they say, and their eyes speak other words. Who let them in here? They say with their mouths closed tight in prim little lines. Here the black and white lines are as deep and permanent as the lines in the farmer’s faces. Here, the music does stop if you walk into the wrong bar and eyes roll at you. Didn’t you know? This place is not for you, white girl. This restaurant is not your kind of place, black boy. There are modern times with a black President, and then there is the South. Mom had a black nanny from the time she was a child, Lucy, who took care of her when her mother was at work, and who finally took care of her mother when she grew old and lived alone with no one near to help. She had a family of her own, somewhere and somehow, but my mother only knew the Lucy who was a staple of her white family.

My only memory of Lucy was being too young to walk into what must have been her church, and she carrying me in, and many black singing faces coming down close to my own, smiling; them passing me around and pinching my cheeks. Lucy told me not to tell Granny, just to keep it to ourselves. I don’t think she believed I knew where I was, being just a toddler. I never forgot, though.

The heat is so oppressive here in the Peach State that even the buzz of cicadas seems sluggish, difficult. Sweat drips down your back and soaks a round spot onto the driver’s seat at the base of your spine. The mosquitoes attack the windows, big as moths and thirsty for blood.

Working with an editor- Outside Perspectives

It’s funny how a little outside perspective is all you need sometimes. It confirms thoughts you had, allays doubts, or just gives a little adjustment to a view you’ve held on to that might be all you need to get over a hurdle you’ve put in your own way.

I’m at the point with “Roads” that I felt I needed that outside perspective, and luckily I know a really great editor and writer– and the choice was easy about WHO to work with. I’ve been following Leigh for years after I stumbled across her blog The Future Is Red I believe it’s offline now). It really spoke to me, as it was about the life change she made and how she and her husband just decided the rat race wasn’t for them. They had sold everything and hit the road traveling with an infant. She understood the wandering spirit, and I knew instinctively she’d like the book and have the insights I needed.

I’m super excited. I feel I’ll have a good first draft by the end of this year, and then it’s time to find a publisher. Finally. After a lot more years than I care to think about. I’m finally ready.

Government Cheese Moon

The road unfurls at 80 miles per hour (don’t lie, 90) across west Texas. The stars begin to fall, one after another, and the half-eaten moon hangs low and sullen, yellow as government cheese.

After Marfa and the 100 potholes on U.S. 90 beating my tires to death I can see the vivid flashes of lightning in the belly of a massive beast of a storm ahead over Van Horn, billowing unfettered into the upper reaches of the atmosphere. In the inky velveteen blackness I fly past the Prada store and its ironic greenish light stretching toward the empty highway. Consumerism, duly mocked.

We Don’t Rent Pigs

I’ve been at a writer’s retreat in the Big Bend area this week…here’s a little something I worked on as an assignment.

The assignment was to write a non-fiction scene, in the style of a journalism long-form story. This was chosen as a stand out piece of writing to be presented to all attendees and instructors at a reading at the close of the retreat.

Freddy drops a quarter into the parking meter in front of the TV, turns the knob and you can hear it drop and clink with its fellows. The meter is an old-style one with a little gold plate that says “Police Officers Will Not Turn the Knob,” meaning maybe that it was from the day when actual cops had anything to do with parking tickets and people expected that cops should be there to help instead of hinder. The flag inside the glass bulb drops, and Freddy has two hours.

“It’s for Cowboys games, when he tries to come in here and camp out all day,” Harry said in his thick German accent, rolling his eyes. “Nobody wants to hear him going off like that; at least he can pay for it if we have to.” He grins toward Freddy, and you can tell it’s a subject that’s come up through the years over and over. Like the same long Texas evening, like when you step inside this place with the cow bones all over the porch roof, the same day just keeps replaying. Where the fun never stops.

It’s hot and sticky inside even with the swamp cooler and all of the fans blowing at once, kind of like sitting inside someone’s beer-scented mouth while they’re panting and sighing. Outside, a few locals are strumming guitars and a mandolin, taking turns singing and passing the same couple of women around. One has tattoos above her lady business, and cut off shorts and tube top to make sure you can see them – the other wears sweats and no makeup, with tough eyebrows like the cholas I knew in high school. She doesn’t smile.

“It’s 3 to one men to women out here,” the cute brown-skinned female bartender smiles. “I just stopped dating when I moved to Alpine for school.” She flips her short dark bob as she turns to serve another icy Lone Star – (Estrella Sola! The man she’s serving asks her, and she looks at him like he’s asking for Courvoisier. He explains it means the same thing as what she’d been handing him all night, just only in Spanish this time) – Harry leans in and says she does hav e a boyfriend who she doesn’t call her boyfriend. She disappears a little later with the non-boyfriend. 3 to one odds you’ll end up with one of those out here, I figure.

The guy with the gas pipeline company has been kicked out at least once today, but he comes back in and buys the whole bar a round, so they let him stay this time. He’s good and drunk, having a hard time focusing on anything and sweating all the way through his Stetson. He has small eyes, fat pink lips and I don’t like him, partly because he stands with his sweaty arm against me when there’s a whole bar to his left, partly because I’ve heard him talk about the female bartender who threw him out, repeatedly calling her a bitch and whining to anyone he buys a beer for that “she hates me.” I figure she knows him well enough to judge, since Freddy and Harry both say he’s a good guy. You can’t trust what they say, since they’re drinking the beers he just bought. Miller High Life and Natural Light, respectively.

“I raise pheasants, and let ‘em go out here,” says Freddy conversationally. “I just let 20 go in Ft. Davis. I put an ad in the paper in up there to let people know not to shoot them ‘til December. I want to reintroduce them to this part of Texas. Gotta keep the rednecks and Mexicans from shooting them all, though! At least for a while, give ‘em time to breed,” he laughs, rubbing his big belly. “I put the ad in Spanish and English.” He’s Hispanic – about 45, greying, with the body of a long-haul truck driver. He says he’s not bitter about his wife leaving him with their two daughters. But that was 12 years ago and he hasn’t dated much.

“Freddy’s probably the smartest guy in town, even though it doesn’t seem like it,” Harry says to me, keeping up his revelatory side conversation. “He’s just acting dumb.” I’m not sure why Harry’s giving me the inside scoop, maybe to set himself up as the guy who knows everything about everyone. If I lived here, I don’t think I’d tell Harry anything unless I had a reason for piping information into the gossip mill. Just like when someone tells you “Don’t trust so-and-so,” I make it a rule never to trust the speaker of those words.
Scott the pipeline guy oozes back inside to lean against a bar stool next to mine – too much cologne, undertone of sweat, liquor and ready-to-hump. “It’s so dang hot! I can’t stand it,” he complains, trying to get someone to talk to him. He pulls out his phone and sloppily tries to text. I glimpse the screen and two words in his conversation before he makes a “How Dare You” face and slaps it against his chest so I can’t see it. He pouts his lips, playing coy, like, I can’t believe you peeked!

“She fucks,” the text says. Over the bar, a sign says “We Don’t Rent Pigs.”

Blocked Artist

It’s always our own fault, isn’t it? We have good intentions but the “not creating” takes over faster than any other kind of lethargy. I let myself get too busy, my days too full, my nights too short.

My sister got “The Artist’s Way” for Christmas, and flipping through I appreciated the advice to nurture the inner artist child. She’s sensitive, and needs encouragement. Dedication is just something you create by being persistent. I’ve fallen victim too often to the thought that you have to “be in the mood” to write, when it’s actually that you make a date with yourself daily and make it happen.

Hello, 2015. I just transcribed the next hour of Mom Speaks. I’m making new dates with myself right now. And the gym, also the gym.

I had a lot of friends – Mom speaks

He was a good guy.

Yeah. He was a good man, my dad.

Did he treat you any differently, as a southern only daughter?

Oh yeah. I was probably spoiled rotten. Daddy’s little girl, I mean he took me everywhere with him. Going to town, to Monticello, because he was a very sociable person. So he’d go and visit his friends, Mr. Glover at the furniture store, and at the barber shop Billy Ray Tyler, he’d go see him and I’d go with him. Just, all around town and he’d take me with i\him.

How big was Monticello?

Probably no more than 30,000.

It is a very southern little Georgian town. What did you think about the community, how did you feel about the people?

Uh, I had a lot of friends. It seemed like I knew most everyone in town. I liked growing up in that little town. I liked leaving there.

Just a pretty blonde little southern Monticello girl. Prom queen, homecoming queen?

No. I wasn’t any of that, but I was in the clique. The popular clique.

A lot of boyfriends?

Mmm…no/

How about friends?

Yeah, I had a LOT of friends.

Journal Entry- August 28th, 2011 Fallon, NV

Describing the drive across the Nevada emptiness – something you feel more than think. The comparative busyness of Arizona with its big highways and changeable scenery starts to fade east of Vegas. The bones of the land rise stealthily, underground stone serpents slithering just out of reach of your notice. The shadows become more blue, the sage and scrub brush more pervasive. There are no more trees, as if their entire race was obliterated here. Wait, no, a lonely pair of young cottonwoods have been planted as the wilting guards on either side of the burnt gash of a road leading to the blood-reds and pus-yellows of yet another strip mine. The earth bleeds and cries freely here and there is nothing and no one to comfort her. When there is an end-time, it will mirror this and we can say we saw the portents. Clouds stay high above the flatland, streaming down from a mile overhead, sometimes the rain reaches the ground to be blown violently across the road and fill the washes. The old-timer at the Hard Luck Store in Mina called these “gullywashers.” “We don’t want it to rain too much, not now,” he responded to my “But isn’t this nice?” His bleary blue eyes rolled over me to glare out at the thin freshly-washed strip of blacktop.

The smell of the rain is the smell of the dusty breath of the sagebrush, held for months in anticipation of this brief half-assed blessing. The colors and the light are like nowhere else. It’s as if, in death, the land deserves this heavenly illumination. As if the sky feels sorry for the stones it exposed, and drenches them in forgiving saturated color. If there is a place for the hills to have eyes, it is here. You can feel them on you all the time. You just hope the engine keeps running, and the air conditioner doesn’t give up.

4 p.m.

We just got invited to a shotgun wedding in the park. She’s about 9 months along, 16 or 17 at the most. I say hell yeah!

Roads on Her Face #21: How School Happened

It’s more fun to tell stories than to talk about logistics, but the logistics of “how stuff happened” are always the parts people want to know more about. How did you eat? (Mostly with our mouths). Where did money come from? (It grew on trees). How did you get so smart? (I didn’t go to public school, much).

School the way most kids did school wasn’t really a viable option, given Dad’s penchant for pissing people off, landing in jail, or general anti-social tendencies. It’s hard to catch the bus when you’re 40 miles on a dirt road from the nearest bus stop. School officials tend to ask questions that no one is prepared to answer, such as “Where are your school records? Do you have an address or a phone number?” Somehow, we were accepted at many schools all across the country, mostly I imagine because we brought in extra cash to the district as low income little desk-occupiers. No one ever followed us when we left after a few weeks or a month, and I wonder if anyone ever noticed. I didn’t get too close to most of my school acquaintances, who were usually of the lonely outsider type anyway. They were just glad to have someone to sit with at lunch, and I was glad not to have to try to talk to a group of kids at once. I was much better one on one. I didn’t particularly want them to come over to play in our trailer or car, and I wouldn’t have known what to tell them when they started asking questions. I was savvy enough to know that I was vaguely ashamed of us, but also proud that we could make it living this way when I knew most of the people we met hadn’t the vaguest idea how we survived. I liked the idea of being self-sufficient, and still do, though now I realize how heavily we relied on government aid most of the time.

Now, I want a homestead off the grid somewhere in the hill country in Texas. I want chickens, and maybe mini-goats, an art studio, and a big spread that I can fence off and hide in. I’ll fit right in in Texas.

So, school- my mom’s daddy, Papa, had put some money aside in a savings account for me when I was born. Instead of having it for college, it got tapped into much earlier to enroll me into an expensive Christian satellite school program- well, expensive for homeless folks. I think it may have been between $200 – $500 for the whole school year, very cheap especially considering the quality of the education (even with all the Bible parables sprinkled in). I’m guessing some of the rest of that money went to food, and probably beer. We were able to get the student and teacher books, the tests, study guides, and lesson plans. I would do school in the morning and have the rest of the day off. When a dedicated kid sits down and completes all the schoolwork typical in a normal public school day, she should be done before noon. So much time is wasted in timekillers, recess, and babysitting that it’s no wonder kids are so under-educated. By the time I surpassed my mom’s math education, I was easily schooling myself and honestly grading my own work. The other kids were young enough that reading and some math and coloring were good enough, and by the time we settled in one spot and enrolled them in public school for the rest of their school years, they only had a few missing years of education and still easily tested into their respective grades. They went to a small New Mexico school that also needed more desk-warmers, and the accompanying grant money.

I went to two full years of public school my last two years of high school, where I got the requisite sexual and partying education every teenager needs. I didn’t even go to some of my classes and still got straight As. I helped the overloaded teachers by explaining geometry to a few of the other students, and they overlooked my occasional truancy and low-cut blouses. I got a full ride to college, too.

Roads on Her Face #20: Push Came to Shove

There are things I’m still pissed off about years and years after they happened. I wish I could let them go, but even if I laugh them off now they still hang on to the edges of my psyche. The school zone ticket I got after school hours, and the small-town asshole judge that talked with the offending officer about their upcoming fishing trip, after the “trial.” The fat woman who loudly asked what was wrong with my brother’s face, when he got out of the hospital after being wounded in Iraq. The old bag who threatened to call the police in a park somewhere in Idaho, who was sure the ragged little kids on the swing set had to be good-for-nothings.

You have to take a break now and then after hours on the road with kids, and public parks across the states are a quiet place to rest and let them out to run off some energy. Parking lots and rest areas do in a pinch, but green grass, shade, and jungle gyms do a lot to tame the wild beasts.

It was a cloudy day, almost chilly. We must have been headed south, skittering like leaves before a winter storm. We were trying to park overnight, so we had to keep a low profile and not look like we were planning to do what we were planning to do. The kitty was beside the car with her cotton rope leash tied to the side mirror. She lay quietly in the grass, being a smart kitty.

Mom was reading in the car, and Dad was listening to the radio. Sophie was sleeping quietly, and Reno was driving a Matchbox car through the Sahara-like dunes of the sandbox on one side of the playground. Rowdy and I were over by the swings. “Push me!” he called, swinging his legs and looking back at me. From out of nowhere a fat kid with cheeks like biscuits arrived on the scene. He made a beeline for my brother and announced “I wanna swing!” I looked around, and didn’t see any parents.

Shit! I hated confrontation, mostly, though I didn’t avoid or mind the shot of adrenaline that came when you knew you’d have to do something soon. The fatty was way bigger than Rowdy, who was staring up at him in blue-eyed shock. We weren’t used to people arriving on the scene. We didn’t have to talk to other people, and most of the time we weren’t supposed to. Fatty unceremoniously shoved Rowdy off the swing. OK, time to do something.

I was a lot taller than fatty. You could tell he didn’t often talk to girls, mostly by the cheeks and the small piggy eyes. They glared at me out of his reddening face as I walked right up to him.

“Get away from my brother!” I said, picking Rowdy up and grabbing the swing. “We were here first, go play somewhere else.”

From behind me I heard the war-shriek of Grandma. “You get away from my grandson, I’m going to call the police!”

“Shut up, lady,” I said, the adrenaline showing up. I was talking back to a grownup I didn’t know, and that was a new feeling. I swallowed the lump in my throat and turned to face her. “You can’t do anything about it.” I wanted to tell her how her grandson was fat, and she should make him exercise. Also he was a bully, and that he needed to get his ass kicked. I wanted to tell her that neither she nor he nor anyone else had the right to push us around, but “Shut up” was going to have to do.

Her mouth hung open, and I could see the family resemblance clearly, though she probably hadn’t had as much food as this kid, being raised in the Depression. She hadn’t been spoiled, so she made sure her grandpiggy was. Also I decided it was time to get back, because she had said “police” and Dad would not have taken kindly to anything involving police. Us three little ragamuffins scurried quietly back to the car, flying under the parental radar. My heartbeat slowed, but I never forgot. It was easier to tell people to fuck off after that.