Here’s another one of those WIPs I started and didn’t finish. It just kind of petered out. I may pick it up again someday when I feel like it. Who knows. But check it out.

“I’m sorry, sir, but this card has been declined.”

Even with the pounding bass of the techno music in the background, Kyle* Branson was sure everyone in the club had heard the bartender, especially the woman next to him who snickered and turned to tell her friend about it. Kyle ignored the smirk on the bartender’s face and accepted the card. “It’s all right, I have cash,” he said, pulling out a thick roll of hundreds from the pocket of his pants. He handed the bartender a hundred dollar bill, who looked at it suspiciously.

“Jesus, man, it’s real,” said Kyle’s friend Seth. “Trust me.” When the bartender shrugged and took it away, Seth turned back to Kyle, who was slipping the rest of the money back to his pocket. “Dude, what the hell was that about? This is what you get for spending thirty grand at the Tokyo Toy Expo. The bank probably put a hold on your account. Also, it’s called a billfold. Have you ever heard of it?”

“I’ve just always carried everything in my pockets.”

“Yeah, what are you, ten?” Seth shook his head. “And you can avoid shit like this happening again if you just accept one of those little black cards they’ve been offering you. You live in LA, dude. All you need is one of those cards and a driver’s license. Hell, if you had one of those, I don’t think you’d even need a license. You just flash one at the cop who pulls you over and he’d be like, ‘Oh, I’m sorry, Mr. Branson, sir. I didn’t realize you were filthy stinkin’ rich from the Honda Civic you drive. Here’s a hooker for your trouble.’”

“I like my Civic,” Kyle said. “Why should I get a new car when it runs just fine?” It was the first car he’d ever owned. He purchased it with sixty thousand miles on it for four grand as a college freshman and six years later, it still ran like a dream.

“And yet you don’t hesitate to spend thirty grand on a little dinky robot that fetches your slippers,” Seth said dryly. “You should be driving a car befitting of a man in your position. Maybe an Aston Martin or something.”

“Yeah, because I foil evil villains and bang hot chicks for a living.”

“And if you had an Aston Martin, you’d be banging hot chicks left and right,” Seth replied. “When was the last time you plowed a woman you didn’t love? When was the last time you had sex with a strange woman just for the hell of it?”

(more…)

Here is something I wrote for my Personal Narrative class. It’s a “dream narrative” written in stanzas.

He sits, just as he’s always done,
At the foot of my bed, in his white suit—
White jacket, white pants, white shirt, white shoes—
I’m almost sure his underwear is also white,
But I never see it.
In his arms, he holds a guitar and he is strumming
I strain to hear what it is
I’m almost sure it’s Leila.

Black hair… lots of it… on his head,
Though he is clean-shaven
Long, flowing raven locks.
Past his shoulders and one half of his face is veiled
By it like the El Mariachi in Desperado right before
He busted out his Tommy gun and started killing people.
Green eyes burning in their sockets like emeralds
Gone nuclear… blazing, dare I call them orbs?
And I’m thinking I write like a romance novelist
Even in my sleep.

(more…)

Here’s something I wrote in 30 minutes for a freewriting exercise in my novella class. I am directly transcribing this from my writing journal, no editing. Please excuse if it sucks.

When I was fourteen years old, I lost my virginity to Hank Ericson. At the time, it didn’t really mean anything. Not to me, anyway. It was just something else to do on a slow, lazy Saturday afternoon. We had just watched Body Heat with Kathleen Turner and William Hurt— a VHS tape Hank had snuck out of his parents’ bedroom—and we sitting uncomfortably in my bedroom. My breasts—what little I have of them—felt tender and heavy and there was a cramp that felt like I was getting my period that tugged on my stomach. I turned to look at Hank. He had a Rubik’s cube in his hand and was trying very hard not to look at me.

“We should just do it,” I said suddenly.

“Do what?” He raised his head briefly to look at me. After a few seconds, he returned his attention to the Rubik’s cube, turning it over and over in his hands. His longish dark brown hair touched the collar of his shirt and curled at the ends. He needed a haircut.

He was sitting at the edge of my bed. I flopped on my stomach and planted my elbows next to him, propping my chin on my hands. My arm touched his corduroy pants. “I mean sex, you dummy.”

(more…)

In honor of one of my heroes, Kurt Vonnegut, I decided to post this for all you writers and would-be writers out there. It’s from his collection of short fiction called Bagombo Snuff Box. Check it out.

1. Use the time of a total stranger in such a way that he or she will not feel the time was wasted.
2. Give the reader at least one character he or she can root for.
3. Every character should want something, even if it is only a glass of water.
4. Every sentence must do one of two things — reveal character or advance the action.
5. Start as close to the end as possible.
6. Be a sadist. No matter how sweet and innocent your leading characters, make awful things happen to them — in order that the reader may see what they are made of.
7. Write to please just one person. If you open a window and make love to the world, so to speak, your story will get pneumonia.
8. Give your readers as much information as possible as soon as possible. To heck with suspense. Readers should have such complete understanding of what is going on, where and why, that they could finish the story themselves, should cockroaches eat the last few pages.

Pretty cool, huh? I don’t know about #8 ’cause I’m not a fan of too-much-info-at-once. I’d like to think he meant you should be able to weave the info into the narrative and not dump it all on page 2. As my prof always says, “A good writer can feed info to the reader without the reader being too aware of it. A good writer doesn’t spoon-feed info. You must always assume that the reader is as smart as you are and can figure things out for herself.”