Tag Archives: urban
reading #64
a book reading
excerpt. book 3
Kell @ Book #3
“People on the street were starting to notice what a basket case I was, the women and children mostly stared, the men wanted to fix me. A couple of well-meaning bastards tried to play hero and grabbed me by the arm they were so eager to help. Let go of me, don’t fucking touch me! The lucky ones backed away, shocked cuz I ruined their pseudo-heroics, while others dared face me behind their foul breath of omelet and avocado peppered with lox and wall street journal. I hit them with a wind farm of disaffection with the patriarchy. Ya, that’s right, Green Lantern, slow your roll and cool your jets, this ain’t Petrosinella and no, you can’t climb my hair! My performance was incandescent. I zigzagged back ways by alleys to keep from being followed.” – Kell
permanently pressed
today i am light
i am even
grown up
from the nitro
blackish wet
soil
i am liking to work
with the life
i have
left
with what i have left of life
not like before
when
permanently pressed
into residual urban
cold cascade of landscapes
i was doomed
blunted
and dark and
that
was then
writing a book
As some of you may know from previous posts, I was enticed by the natural editing process (several drafts in, mind you) to switch perspectives between two main characters and sisters, Ame and Kell. I stepped in the arena and began doing exactly that, and found Kell’s voice (previously unexplored) an easy thrill; writing from her perspective comes quite natural to me. I began threading the narrative this way, back and forth between Ame and Kell, for several pages in what has come to be a rather drawn out ‘prologue’ of the (unreleased) Book #3 of my fiction series.
Switching perspectives seem to inject the narrative with a juicy shot and a vaccination against monotony. Both voices are first person, and Book #2 left off with the sisters apart and now trying to communicate through the telepath. Ame is searching for Kell who has gone missing. These characters both have telepathic capacity, though the younger of them, Kell, has had hers stifled by her opiate addiction. In fact, she has been a junky for so long she doesn’t even know her own power. She has not yet been convinced she is one of their tribe: Delux. A people very much like humans in all ways except for certain practices and preternatural gifts.
So I had yet to have anyone else read the latest draft with the perspective switching. I really only got it all together in form a couple weeks past. I shared my work with my beta readers through g. docs. I shot the first 15,000 words out to my betas last week and got a great reaction. One of my readers actually read my mind completely (no joke!) and suggested to me to have this threading go on – past prologue – and into the main narrative, he so enjoyed the switch. Now this will likely postpone (and already has) my release, but it cannot be helped really if I am to follow these leads. Getting the comments from my reader was like the universe speaking to me, I swear to god.
The series has had some initial success in the market. I released Book One in late 2013, and Book Two late last 2015. Here is the link to the series on Amazon, where 17 combined reviews have garnered 4.9 out of 5 stars. Here is the link to the series on Goodreads, where as of this writing 43 readers’ reviews have garnered 3.9 out of 5 stars. Totaling both platforms, that makes 60 reviews for 4 out of 5 stars. Just a drop in the ocean, but encouraging enough for me to wanna keep the series alive for you and me!
Ame and the Tangy Energetic
“and together they brought the vines smashing across the windows and tearing apart the floorboards, and breaking apart the furniture, the shark fins cutting into Black’s skin and the vines wrapping around him like a snake, yes, she saw a snake in her mind, a silver snake, and the snake was like a secret gift from a friend an ally, like a ring on a finger, she thought, and god am I losing my fukkin marbles but it’s beautiful! and there was the light in Ame’s eyes, the savage blue like the deep waters through which the great white hunted the Atlantic, but the brutality that had so torn her up back then, the very night she met Ame’s boyfriend finally, Maze, and they had taken the subway under the earth and across the San Francisco Bay, for she remembered asking Maze for the window seat and steaming the window like she always did, and wiping it with her arm, and the funny look Maze gave her when she leaned her face up against the glass so she could watch the tracks with one eye and watch the passengers with the other, the look he gave her like why the hell are you doing that? and she didn’t care cause she was able to lean into a nod and look less foolish this way than that, and then Ame turned around from the seat in front, to face them, and was just the nice girl who befriended her back when she was living in that decrepit former nunnery on Lake Merritt and nowhere to go, but afterward, after that really cool show in the Mission, the coming back with a rumbling and rush of air and sound as the train picked up speed in the tunnel heading home to Oakland, this time she sat up and next to Ame who was going on about having been a rockstar for a minute when she got to draw a soup spoon like a bow across some DIY instrument was supposed to pass for a violin, and they were laughing and then when they stopped and the train came up for air, there was a strange tension reminiscent of some intangible tucked far away in her past, a bad energy; and her high was wearing thin but whatever it was was picking up the slack and she saw both Maze and Ame fixed upon someone in the train, and then she was hustled off the train by them at the Broadway station, wondering why the hell they didn’t go on to MacArthur seeing as she was hoping to hit the Imperial where she was staying with Bless and Freddy, and where her secret stash of Somas and Percs were gonna help her to sleep, but she followed them out and up into the street and the Paramount Marquee was all lit up towering over the orange of a Broadway night, and sure enough they were following somebody, and she got a real uncomfortable feeling like she was about to be an accessory to a crime, and sure enough she was”
– drafted from ‘Ame and the Tangy Energetic’ (Daughter of Darkness #3) .voice of Kell. coming this summer to an ebook store near you
journal
life i love you. good friday
“Quiet life on softened streets, all the bad news backed away. You lucky kid. I washed my hair with 100,000 molecules. Each one like the full moon tonight, lighting up life in all the right ways. I made it to the site. I could peacefully fold my legs up under me on the couch facing the east, the house where nobody’s home, facing, pinching my slip as I picked it up and let it go hang around freely, pinching myself. You lucky kid you. All the pages were viewed, in a free sweep of eyes (not mine). To be sure they really existed, outside of myself. Not so easily destroyed by water, heat, air, time. Thumbs rubbing the ink to a fade I can no longer describe. Each curve of every letter like the full moon tonight, lighting up life in all the spectacular finishes. Flourishes. You lucky kid. Thinking of a friend, one I haven’t even heard of in years, a keystroke away, a daydream, attacking a search engine with a heart on a saturday in America, one truffle at a time, pulling lightly on the ends of twisted plastic until the whole thing rolls over and out, examining the condition of my condition, remembering the ionic bond even if it hurts. Life I love you.” – KatYa, 2016. excerpt fromAme and the Tangy Energetic
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| k by k on a sunny day 2016 |
story
Maze 2:15:1
In the last episode 2:14:7 Ame is waxing poetic on love and the orphans have come back from the seven eleven and are literally forcing her to play with them. If she refuses they might push her into traffic. Damn kids!
Book Two
Daughter of Darkness Series
Chapter 15:1
story
Maze 2:13:4 Storytelling
Book Two
Daughter of Darkness Series
Chapter 13:4
In the last episode 2:13:3 Bless and Ame finally throw down! Ame uses her Girl Army skills to evade and attack. Girl on girl crime!
K IS SILENT 