Kidnapping Alert
My parents are taking me to Philly next week for unspecified reasons. Just FYI.
Also, I doubt anyone is reading this, but just for my own benefit, here is the start of Ch. 1 of Blue:
(I write so slowly that I'll prolly not finish this chapter until September starts =D)
Chapter One
Houses are dark when you are alone, and the walls seem to pull around you like a shroud. Somehow the lights appear to dim and it seems useless even to stir from your bed, to taunt the shadow-monsters hiding beneath it. Suddenly it seems much safer to hug the blankets to your chest and sleep the days away. And suddenly the food has mysteriously moved into your bedroom and the television has tuned itself to daytime soaps and you have gained fifteen pounds and you wonder how it all happened. For Veronica Stills, it was her cat.
Blue was a large neutered tabby with an easy-going nature and an affinity for smoked salmon. Ronnie had gotten him as a birthdfay present from her older brother back before her older brother was laid up in a hospital in northern Vermont busy dying of lung cancer. Ronnie herself had never smoked, since she knew that the cancer ran in her blood, and a good many other things, at that. Instead she had Blue and her laptop, and when the pain grew too much she would drape Blue around her shoulders like a heated stole and and let the pain flow out through her fingers. On particularly bad days, she could manage a couple chapters at a go. Ronnie had a lot of pain to dispose of.
She opened her eyes and hit the top of the coffee percolator. She seemed to think this would help. In lieu of outside circumstances, Ronnie had promisend herself that after this cup of coffee had brewed, she would go back to work.
Ronnie fancied herself a writer, which is a difficult fancy to fall into. Luckily, she had a fallback plan. Someone had blessed her with a voice and the grace to sing, and so she paid her rent with church gigs and was a free woman. Most of her acquaintances (not friends, for there were none) from school said that it was a shame, really, to let all that talent go to waste on a dead end career and no husband or house or car and Ronnie would smile politely but in her head she was screaming. She had gotten straight A's in school, worked long into the night for years (developing a long-standing relationship with insomnia that even now she was loath to break off), played that silly game of reading the teacher's mind, until one day, she had had an epiphany. Once she had graduated, no one would ever ask her the date of Charlemagne's ascension to the throne. Never again would it import the difference between an alligator and a crocodile. She was wasting her time.
...Ronnie is me, in case this isn't blindingly obvious. Haha, I'm so predictable...
Also, I doubt anyone is reading this, but just for my own benefit, here is the start of Ch. 1 of Blue:
(I write so slowly that I'll prolly not finish this chapter until September starts =D)
Chapter One
Houses are dark when you are alone, and the walls seem to pull around you like a shroud. Somehow the lights appear to dim and it seems useless even to stir from your bed, to taunt the shadow-monsters hiding beneath it. Suddenly it seems much safer to hug the blankets to your chest and sleep the days away. And suddenly the food has mysteriously moved into your bedroom and the television has tuned itself to daytime soaps and you have gained fifteen pounds and you wonder how it all happened. For Veronica Stills, it was her cat.
Blue was a large neutered tabby with an easy-going nature and an affinity for smoked salmon. Ronnie had gotten him as a birthdfay present from her older brother back before her older brother was laid up in a hospital in northern Vermont busy dying of lung cancer. Ronnie herself had never smoked, since she knew that the cancer ran in her blood, and a good many other things, at that. Instead she had Blue and her laptop, and when the pain grew too much she would drape Blue around her shoulders like a heated stole and and let the pain flow out through her fingers. On particularly bad days, she could manage a couple chapters at a go. Ronnie had a lot of pain to dispose of.
She opened her eyes and hit the top of the coffee percolator. She seemed to think this would help. In lieu of outside circumstances, Ronnie had promisend herself that after this cup of coffee had brewed, she would go back to work.
Ronnie fancied herself a writer, which is a difficult fancy to fall into. Luckily, she had a fallback plan. Someone had blessed her with a voice and the grace to sing, and so she paid her rent with church gigs and was a free woman. Most of her acquaintances (not friends, for there were none) from school said that it was a shame, really, to let all that talent go to waste on a dead end career and no husband or house or car and Ronnie would smile politely but in her head she was screaming. She had gotten straight A's in school, worked long into the night for years (developing a long-standing relationship with insomnia that even now she was loath to break off), played that silly game of reading the teacher's mind, until one day, she had had an epiphany. Once she had graduated, no one would ever ask her the date of Charlemagne's ascension to the throne. Never again would it import the difference between an alligator and a crocodile. She was wasting her time.
...Ronnie is me, in case this isn't blindingly obvious. Haha, I'm so predictable...