pomegranate

The Untitled Leap -- Chapter 5A

NOTE: This could very easily be confusing, but I think Chapter 5 is the last segment in this draft. This piece comes before it. I figured if readers haven't read Chapter 5 yet, this may give them the opportunity to read it more in order (there will be more pieces between 5A and 5. I'm thinking I'll name them 5-B, etc. for this draft.) Anyway this is the next segment. Thanks for reading -- Wendy


There came a time, a terrible time, that Mary and Laura later referred to as The Rift. The Brit reappeared. Laura fell under his spell once again. And I, Mary thought, objected. I threw my friendship under the bus, because I didn't trust that my friend would ever come back to me. I was foolish and young and arrogant and I had this notion that friends were disposable, that they had a shelf life. I left my friend for dead, she thought. It was a horrible thing to do.

It took three years for Mary to regain her senses. Then she wrote Laura a note, and they met in a cafe.

“Have you seen any good shows lately?” Mary asked in the silence.

“I gave up television,” Laura said.

“You know, I wondered about that,” Mary said. “I saw one of your flyers. I was just walking down a street in the city, and I saw it on a telephone pole. I saw you were doing a performance piece on that.” She looked at her friend. “You're performing now?” Laura nodded.

“You were in it,” Laura said.

“I figured I would be.” They picked at their salads. “I'm sorry I wasn't there,” Mary said. “I'm sorry I missed it. I'm just so sorry.”

Mary asked about the Brit.

“I was jealous,” she said, “presumptuous.”

“It didn't last,” Laura said. “You could have waited it out.”

“I know, “ Mary said and then said, “Well, I actually didn't know then.”

“It's like the Bible,” Mary said. Laura gave her a look. “No,” she quickly, “I haven't become a fundamentalist or anything like that. But there's this idea in the Bible that's stuck in my head about not letting the sun set on your anger. It's just that notion of forgiveness. It's that idea of not going to bed pissed off. it's that sense that there's something so much more beyond our egos, beyond the petty differences, beyond our limitations, beyond our quirks, that we need to admit defeat and surrender and throw up our hands and love.”

“It's the  California Bible,” Mary said as they ate, “It's in the Book of Friendship.”

“Huh,” Laura said, “It might give Gideon a run for its money.” She leaned forward. “Now,” she said, “What have you been doing?”

“Two words,” Mary said, “Piano and baseball.”

Y Is for Yoga

It started at a party during the holiday season where I saw one of my favorite people in the whole world. She's an accountant and a yoga teacher. She's written checks for me since 1989, and whenever I send her an invoice, we exchange a couple of sentences about movies. But on this occasion, I asked her about teaching.

"Do you teach beginners?" I asked. That would be me. I've followed Richard Hittleman's 28 day program at home, but then strained my Achilles, and abandoned the practice all together.

She told me she did have a beginning class, once a week, 7:30 to 9:00 AM.

"I would love to do it," I told her, "But there's no way I'm getting up that early."

We continued to talk. She told me why she started yoga. She told me how she became a teacher. She told me more about the class.

"Suppose I did do it," I said. "Would it be the kind of thing where I could just show up?"

She told me about class fees and class schedules. She said the next class would be in two weeks, because she was going on retreat. She told me about the retreat.

"All right," I said, "Then I think you'll see my smiling, tired face two weeks from now."

She told me it would be the last class of the year.

"Oh," I said, "Maybe I should wait until 2008."

She laughed. "Just come," she said.

So I did. I showed up at the ungodly hour and I claimed two mats, two wood blocks, one purple block, a bolster, and a strap. I stretched and balanced and rested and twisted and lifted and then the class was over.

"But that seemed like five minutes," I told my friend.

I have now gone to three classes. I still love it. I worry the day beforehand, "Did I set the alarm? I don't want to miss my yoga."

I notice now sometimes when my shoulders are up. I sometimes now remember to breathe. Is it yoga yet?

The Untitled Leap -- Chapter 5

In retrospect, Mary wished that she had told Laura about “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” sooner.

When the show originally aired, Mary considered her love of the show to be an adolescent regression that  she best keep to herself. She would mention it to Laura sometimes in passing, but never in detail.

“I like Buffy,” Mary said, “because we were both skinny blondes in Southern California, faced with  evil, and fighting it in our own way.”

The show was actually set in the fictional town of Sunnydale, but it had been filmed in Torrance, California, where Mary had spent her teenage years.  But then apparently the crew had been overly zealous in their demolition of the high school in the third season finale. The neighbors complained, and they had to shut down their production there.

She told Laura, “It was nice to see a skinny blonde kicking ass. I just wished I had had that superhuman strength. That would have come in handy.”

Once she was really sick, Laura started watching the show.  She discovered it one day through the glory of syndication. So many channels, and the choice was clearly Buffy. Sometimes Mary and Laura would watch it together, lying back on their pillows to witness the opening with the melancholic, yet determined theme song accompanied by the montage of Buffy with her friends continuously battling to end up victorious for at least one more season. Once Laura started watching Buffy, in their phone conversations, Mary always asked, “Where are you? Where are you now?” and Laura would tell her where she was in the series, a seven-season epic, an ambitious project for a dying person.

Laura was able to watch through Season 3.  She saw Buffy through high school. She never saw Buffy's death at the end of Season 5, and how her friends, through witchcraft, through hasty love and the conviction that they could not live without her, brought her back to life. It was immediately seen as a mistake. She was first feral and confused. There was a question of whether her mental facilities had been compromised. And then she recovered, at first not telling her friends of her disappointment of leaving the place where she had gone, a place she called heaven. She ended up different, a distant, cranky, more disciplined person who no longer spoke in wisecracks. Most fans, Mary thought, hated the new Buffy. She found her true.

***

After Laura died, Mary would talk to her about Buffy.

“This is the part of the story you didn't get to yet,” Mary said, “Although in heaven, I would imagine that you get to whatever you want.”

When Laura died, Mary wished she could rent billboards that announced her friend's death. She wanted T-shirts in all different colors that said, “My friend died” on them in different fonts. She imagined she would wear the one in cursive the most. But since the first idea was out of her means and both were socially absurd, she walked a lot and looked at birds, and thought about her friend.

She knew she could never bring Laura back. She didn't have many photos of her at all. Both of them hated to have their picture taken. They preferred stories. They chose words.

If Mary could tell anyone anything about Laura, she would say:

That she made the best cottage cheese and noodles that you could ever imagine. Was it something in the seasonings, in the ingredients she bought, something in her tools, her technique? There was something there that Mary could never replicate, although she continued to try.

That she was always the person to go to if you had a problem. Mary could call her up and tell her anything, and Laura would listen and say, “Uh huh, uh huh” several times as if she were a doctor about to make a diagnosis, and then she would say, “That reminds me,” and then she would launch into the story of a television episode. Often it was “Seinfeld.” Sometimes it was plot related. Sometimes a character reminded her of one of the people involved in the problem. Sometimes, Mary had no idea how the story truly related to the problem. She would hang up the phone, enormously relieved and think, “But we just talked about TV. How could I possibly feel better?”

That she was the type of person who would go down to a bus stop carrying a potted plant, strike up a conversation with someone also waiting for the bus, and they would be on the phone list. They would be her lifelong friend forever.

That her favorite bird was the egret.

That she made leggings her personal trademark.

That she could talk faster than Mary typed.

That she knew the best places to get tacos in San Francisco.

That she loved to dance.

That she gravitated naturally to poker.

That she liked all things English.

That she was a person of ingenuity and imagination. That when she decided to do something, she did it. That she had many different careers in her life, and when she said what the next one would be, she wouldn't say it as an announcement. She would slip it into the conversation like an interesting aside, and then the next thing you knew, she was taking a class to learn what she needed to know, or she had met a person who had  a friend who was in the field, or she had read a book about it, and done the exercises, and had now she was doing it or being it or whatever she had said that she had wanted. Sometimes Mary wondered if that's why she died so young, that she had this list, and she just got through it so fast. She wondered if she could have told her to slow down. Wasn't there someone on TV that they liked who did that? She couldn't think of a one.

That if you went to a movie with her, you had to be prepared to change your seat, because she was quite small, and often couldn't see over other people's heads, and she wasn't the type of person who would put a coat over the seat in front of her to save the view. You would just get this opportunity to change your perspective. You would get to throw the dice with her, and see the big screen from all different angles. And at each new seat, you would talk to the people around you. Often the conversation started by “Excuse me,” while you tried not to step on their feet, but then you would add another sentence or two, because that's what Laura inspired in you, to look at people and say a few words, because she had made you understand the value of connection.

That before Laura died, she wrote in a book to Mary, “What will I do without you?” “But wait,” Mary thought, “Who's leaving who?”

The Untitled Leap -- Chapter 4

And then there was “Love Connection.”

It was on at 4:30 weekday afternoons, early on in their friendship. One day, Laura called Mary, and said, “I have to tell you what I'm watching,” and that began the tradition of “Love Connection,” where Mary and Laura would watch it together from their different apartments and call during the commercial breaks.

They were both fond of the host, Chuck Woollery.  They would analyze what they had seen. Which of of these strangers reporting on their arranged dates would ever go out again? Who just wanted to be on television? What was the real love connection?  It was a time before Tivo. If they wanted to see the show, they had to be home, which they often were. Mary worked from her apartment. Laura was a grad student with mostly morning classes. There was no technology to forward through the commercials. This gave them time to  say what they thought very quickly and laugh before the show started again, and they would hang up and witness the action captured on the screen before reporting back to each other. It was also a time before caller ID. Sometimes just as the commercial would start, Mary would answer the phone and it would be her current boyfriend, delighted that she was home, and she would have to come up with a quick excuse. She could never say, “Excuse me. I'm watching “Love Connection” right now and talking about it with my friend. Could I call you back?” It was something, Mary thought, strangely sacred. It was something, she decided, that they would never understand.

When Mary and Laura walked around the lake, they often talked about the men they dated.  There was the brilliant James Dean of  a writer who spoke very softly in monosyllables who everyone seemed to want. There was the older folk dancer with the questionable hygiene who had a much longer social shelf life than originally imagined, because, they decided, in the end, he had been  kind. There was the Financial District man who always showed up in a suit. There was the remote Brit who Mary despised and Laura adored. And there had been the psychology grad student who said he was addicted to television, and kept his set behind a closed closet door. Mary had only once watched television with him, and that was right after the earthquake of '89, when the power came back on. He wheeled the TV set out and they had eaten ice cream in big bowls with soup spoons, while watching coverage of the event, viewing the damages as if this was something that had happened on a distant movie set, not in their neighborhood.  They watched the news,  wanting to hear that this had indeed been the Big One, that they need not worry any more. But they didn't say that at all, and in the end of the evening, he had wheeled the TV back into the closet and closed the door behind it, and they went to bed and tried to sleep.

Laura thought Mary would end up with the psychology grad student. But one night, Mary was with him, and they ran into Laura at a cafe.

“What are you doing here?” Mary said, and they hugged, and Laura joined them at the table, but the conversation lacked cadence. The grad student spoke in bullet phrases. Later, when they were alone and she asked him what was wrong, he said Laura had squirrel energy. It made him uncomfortable, he said.

“She's a dynamo,” Mary said, “A force of nature. She can move mountains. She's no squirrel.”

A month later, she broke up with him.

“For a graduate psychology student,” she told Laura, “he was surprisingly lacking in insight.”

They still went to meetings, although not as often and rarely together. At some point, Mary thought, you just carried the rooms around in your head, those tables of people, all those voices with their confessions and their rants, where another's nod or sigh was seen as an editorial, where people showed up with skin too thin to hear any sort of opinion about anything. And then later on, your skin gets a little thicker. You realize that your sponsor was a bit too rigid in her food suggestions for your innate anorexic self. You throw out the food scale where you were measuring your meals. You never buy a scale again to weigh yourself. You tell at the nurse at the hospital to keep the number to herself, and she looks at you puzzled, but agrees. You don't buy bags of sugary things. You try to live with the anxiety that lies  underneath the hypothetical bags of sugary things. And if you're lucky, Mary thought, you keep your friends as close as you can.

Dickens and DVDs

I wanted to post a link for the Dickens Challenge site, where if you wanted to see all of the work together at one place, you could do so.

http://johndishon.com/test/

I've really enjoyed working on this project, and it's been very inspiring to me to read everyone elses's work as we progress along. I'ts one of those things that makes you want to shout from the rooftops, "Step away from that videogame. Exit that chatroom. Turn off that TV. Go start a writing project!" If everyone was working on a writing project, the world would be a happier place. This, I believe.

And I am going to start writing more in my blogs here again. I was thinking that I would like to write at least one post a week in http://weledger.typepad.com/dvdsandme/, a blog mostly about DVDs that I have watched, but I also veer into movies, sometimes films, and TV, or in present day, the land of syndication I sure hope the writers get their just compensation soon.  Someday, i hope to write again in my music blog, http://weledger.typepad.com/driving_in_my_car/, but that one you really have to listen and think. Who has time for that?

The Untitled Leap -- Chapter 3

One day, right before Mary made a mistake, Laura said, “Do you know what I hate the most?”

They were at her apartment, a place Mary felt she didn't visit nearly enough. You see, there was this bridge. Laura lived in San Francisco. Mary lived in the East Bay. You wouldn't think it would be that big of a deal for either one of them to drive to the other's home, but somehow it had always felt huge. This hadn't started with Laura's illness. It started from the moment Laura had moved here several years into their friendship. Mary came to visit her more. It was more glamorous being in the city. Laura knew her turf. There were no surprises. But she could drive to Laura's apartment, and they could spend some time together, and she could exclaim over the people. How could people from one side of a bridge dress so differently from the other? How did the food taste so much better? Why are your cafes nicer? These are questions Mary would ask, and then she would go home.

Laura said, “What I hate the most is when people say that I'm looking great.”

They were lying on her bed, their heads propped up with pillows. The TV had been moved from the livingroom to the bedroom a while ago. There was a pile of DVDs on the table. They were taking a break from their marathon.

Mary nodded and thought that she had been about to say that all day. Laura had lost the weight she had gained from previous medications. She was back to her petite self.  Her body looked like her own  again. She had found some cute turbans. Her skin glowed.

“I want to say to them that things aren't what they seem,” she said. “I want to say you don't know what's going on inside.” She smiled and looked at Mary. “I actually want to bare my teeth after I say that, maybe growl a little. Let them think I can puncture their flesh.” She sipped her black tea. “They only think they know why they're scared to be around people with cancer.”  She drank some more liquid. “I've been watching way too many horror films,” she said.

Laura had started watching these movies on a lark. They were easy to find on cable. She had never seen them before. Late at night, when she couldn't sleep, the Candyman, the Rings, all the Nightmares on Elm Streets were there for the taking.  It was something Mary could no longer do. As a child, she had been obsessed with scary movies. Even though they gave her nightmares, she felt compelled to ask for the ticket, to go sit in the dark, and then stay up all night, spooked by sounds and imaginings. And it wouldn't just be for one night.  At random moments throughout her life, alone in the dark, the film projector in  her head would begin to play every scary scene she had ever seen starting from childhood. There seemed no way to erase  that film, no way to stop it running, but there no longer seemed to be a reason to add  to it.

When Mary and Laura first became friends, they both lived near the lake that they had first walked around, looking for geese, a bird that was never too hard to find, especially since they had decided that they no longer wanted to migrate. This was a damn good home.  Even the geese knew it. After that first walk, Mary and Laura  met there regularly.  Sometimes, when Mary thought of those walks, she imagined them as an old time movie, one of those Fred Astaire productions. In her mind, their steps were as wondrous as his dance on the ceiling, two skinny girls, one small, one taller, a female Mutt and Jeff, hurling words out as fast as their legs could move, swinging their arms, and laughing.

“Why couldn't the air hold the words?” Mary thought. “If I could only hear them now, I would transcribe them.”

She did this for a living from her home, a studio apartment with a corner of the room reserved for her work. People gave her tapes, and she typed out what they said. It was an odd way to make money, but it seemed to suit her. She was exact. She cared about commas. She learned all kinds of things from listening to their voices that she then had to keep to herself.

The other day, while cleaning her room, she came upon a tape that Laura had made for her years ago. “Mary and Laura's Radio Debuts,” she had written as a title. On Side A, Mary heard the familiar voices of Click and Clack from Car Talk, and there she was, earnestly talking about her Toyota Tercel and the clicking sound she heard, and how then it would lose all of its momentum and stop dead right on the spot.

“It's the clutch,” they told her. As she listened, she marveled at how gentle they were with her, telling how how much it would cost, bringing up the idea that it might not be a worthwhile investment for an older car with significant mileage.

“But Mary loves this car” -- was it Click or Clack who said this? After years of listening to their program, Mary still could not tell the two apart. “She needs to try to save it.” On this, they all agreed.

On the other side of the tape, Mary heard the dulcet tones of the host of a local radio show broadcast live on Saturday mornings. It was a good walk away from Laura's San Francisco apartment. She would meet Laura there, and then they would  climb up and down several hills to the studios, where she would swoon at the host, and on their walk home, Laura would repeat in the kindest way that friends do when they really try to to burst a bubble, “But could you really imagine him at your apartment? What do you honestly think he would think of that green carpet?”

An improvisational acting group was there on that day. They asked if anyone would volunteer their datebook. Laura gave hers up in a flash. They asked her name. “Laura,” she heard her friend say in such a faraway voice, as if she was already in a distant country, rather than several rows up, sitting right next to her. And they acted out a week of events that Laura had written in her book. Listening to it now, Mary thought, “Did we truly spend money and time on “Dick Tracy” Did we actually plan such an outing?” They walked around the lake. They went to a party hosted by one of Mary's former bosses. At one moment, the actress playing Laura got confused and started calling herself Mary. Then in the skit, she called Mary up, “This is Laura,” she announced. “I've decided to use my own name again.”

When the skit was over, Mary played the rest of the tape. She kept thinking that surely, Laura was on Car Talk, too, and that at the next radio show, she had certainly brought her datebook in, and they had done her life, at least what  that week of her life would like from the perspective of an improvisational acting group. Didn't they both do that?

The Untitled Leap -- Chapter 2

In the afternoon, while people were at work, Laura watched “Matlock.”

She tried to explain it to Mary one day while they talked on the phone.

“It's comforting to me,” she said. “I can doze to it. And then when I wake up, there's Andy Griffith. And for a minute, I think it's Mayberry, but then I remember that he's a lawyer now, and that justice will be served, because how can it not be?  Because, even if this is another show, it doesn't matter. He will always be Andy from Mayberry.”

Mary felt the weight of the receiver in her hand. The whistle showed up in her head, that theme song from their childhood, a jaunty, innocent tune that welcomed you into a town where Don Knotts could be a deputy, and Floyd was their silly town drunk, and Aunt Bea could be counted on for lemonade.

“You know, I've never seen Matlock," she said.

She tried to keep her voice even. She didn't tell Laura that she couldn't imagine ever watching it, that it was entertainment designed for people who wore polyester and looked forward to the Early Bird dinner. It was for people who found the acting on “Murder She Wrote” nuanced. In her private version of hell, they ran “Matlock” in a continuous loop.

“Dick Van Dyke was on it today,” Laura said. “He was a judge who murdered his mistress and framed her lover.”

Mary imagined Rob Petrie jumping over furniture in a long black robe. This time, he lands on his feet.

Sometimes Mary thought that she and Laura became friends, because they both weren't ordinary citizens. They belonged to one of the tribes who had to go to church basements and make their identity known.

“I'm Mary,” she would say.  “Anorexic/bulimic.”

Anorexic/bulimics didn't have their own meetings. You had to hang out with garden variety overeaters who had no inkling of the power to be found in wasting away.  At 12 years old, Mary imagined that a devil seduced her. He woke her up out of slumber, whispered in her ear, told her she was so, so pretty, asked her if she would like to be ideal. And she smiled and pushed her plate away and said yes, oh, yes, please, teach me. And she grew smaller and smaller and watched the horror in the faces around her, and the devil tickled her ribs, and told her it wouldn't be long now. But then one day something broke. She found a magazine under her mother's bed with a page folded to an article. It was all about a new disease. Anorexia nervosa, they called it. As she read, the demon screamed. She heard him race away. She imagined it was to regroup. The next day she began to eat and didn't want to stop. She would eat and throw up and picture herself deep in the ground. She would lie there and think that she could almost hear that demon again, and then things would be so much more orderly. This insanity went on for 10 years, and then she found herself in church basements, listening  to other people's stories, and sometimes saying her own.

She had come to the conclusion that the reason why anorexic/bulimics didn't have their own meetings was because if they all met in one room, the space would most likely explode. We're all just too intense, she thought, we need our more regular folk around us. She was glad Laura was her friend. Over time, she could say, I danced with the devil. We waltzed. We did a mean minuet. We sure the fuck did the tango. But in the end, I picked up my dance card and went home.

The Untitled Leap -- Chapter 1

Mary told her it was like baseball.

“I can't sit down and watch it any more. I've got to be moving. I have to listen to it.”

She told her it was about a rhythm that got in her head, that even though no game was the same, even though there was no clock and always surprises, there was a pace, a motion, and when that game was on in the background, nothing, it seemed, could ever go wrong.

She told her this while she cradled the phone in her hand, the TV set on with the game in full flower, but no code was broken, as she was talking on the phone. She was imparting important information.

“Why is that man crouching?” her friend asked, her eyes on her TV at home.

Mary paused a minute, digesting the simplicity of the question.

“He's the catcher.”

The batter hit the ball back into the net. Silence.

“Do you know about foul balls?” Mary asked. “Do you know about three strikes?” “Okay,” she said,  “We'll have to start from the very beginning.”

Mary had met her friend, Laura,  twenty years ago in Berkeley, in a church basement on a Sunday morning, at one of those meetings that you go to, because if you didn't, you'd be face down in a box of doughnuts at best. Yes, she was there, because she had been humbled by doughnuts, and the only difference between that day and a year ago was that now she had no illusions about it. So she sat on a cold, metal chair holding a styrofoam cup of weak ass coffee that did nothing to hold back the headache that haunted her. She sat in that chair as a tiny woman with long, curly hair stood up and introduced herself, and proceeded to speak.

If you asked Mary today, she couldn't tell you any of the words that Laura said.

“My head hurt too much,” she'd say.  “'I could hardly stand sitting there.”

She said, “I thought about walking out, but instead at the end of the meeting, I walked up and talked to her.”

She said, “it felt like I didn't even know that I was doing it.”

She said, “I just meant to say that I liked what she said.”

She said, “I never talk to anyone at those meetings.”

She said, “I never talk to anyone.”

But Laura thanked her. Then she looked her in the eyes and  said, “I was going to walk around the lake and look at the geese. Do you want to come?”

Mary closed her eyes, felt the pain in her head, and said yes.

Now, on the telephone, she told her friend, “Maybe this isn't such a good idea."

She said, “It might not be a project that you want to undertake.”

She thought of what she would like to do if she had a terminal disease. Learn how to speak Italian.  Play the mandolin. Walk every day. See every possible bird she could. Watch them fly. Learning the A, B, Cs of baseball would not be high on her list. If she thought about it truly, the rhythm in her head that comforted her came from years of fandom. It seemed instantaneous to her now, but it was no quick fix.

She could hear her friend tiring.

“What if we talked tomorrow?” she said.

The Dickens Challenge

I'm going to be participating in an writing activity, instigated by writer Tim Hallinan, http://www.timothyhallinan.com, called the Dickens Challenge. A number of writers will be posting one chapter a week of a project a la Dickens and his serial novels. My work will be called "The Untitled Leap." Please pardon the rust.

Here is a list of the other writers involved in this Challenge, and where you can find their work:

John Dishon, newly married and newly out of college, is a beginning novelist with special interests in Asian culture and literature, who sees the Challenge as a way of getting one of his ideas for a novel out of his head and into written form. His book will begin Monday, December 17.  It’s called Country Snow and it can be found at www.johndishon.com

Nadja (NL Gassert) is working on the second book in her gay romantic suspense series set on lush, tropical Guam: When a vengeful STALKER seeks to punish Mason Ward for the sins of his past—and present—the security specialist needs to fight to save himself and those closest to him. Nadja will begin to post on Monday, December 17 and you can read her at http://write-experience.blogspot.com/

Timothy Hallinan is a novelist who lives in Los Angeles and Bangkok, Thailand.  The Fourth Watcher, which is the next novel in his Bangkok series, will be published in June 2008 by William Morrow.  (The first, A Nail Through the Heart, is out now.)  His Challenge book, Counterclockwise, will start Monday, December 17 at http://www.timothyhallinan.com/blog/

Steve Wylder is an Amtrak ticket agent and freelance writer living in Elkhart, Indiana and Bloomington, Illinois. His most recent published work is “Time Passages: Reflections on the Last Train Home,” in Remember the Rock Magazine. His contribution to the Dickens Challenge is tentatively titled “Things Done and Left Undone” and will begin Monday, December 17 at : http://ontheslowtrain.blogspot.com/

Lisa Kenney is a telecommunications industry account executive and beginning novelist who lives in Denver. She’s tackling the Challenge with a Dickensian themed story with the working title Foundling Wheel and will begin posting excerpts Monday at Eudaemonia.  Lisa, bless her brave soul, will begin to post on Monday, December 17.\

Usman is a businessman and writer who lives in Pakistan and has recently completed a book, which is now in revision. His work for the Challenge will be a mystery/thriller for which he’s still gathering ideas. (Welcome to the club.) It’s not titled yet but when he publishes, beginning around January 1, 2008, it’ll be at http://reality967.livejournal.com   

Insomnia

Some books you have to think about when and where to read them.  I took Stephen King's Insomnia with me on vacation and learned after one night of sleeplessness that I couldn't read this right before I planned to slumber.

It's a huge book of big ideas that begins with sleep. On the back side, there's a photo of King wearing a T shirt that says "We Never Sleep."   He looks bemused and very tired.  In the book, he writes about different sleep disorders and many different ideas for cures ranging from acupunture and hypnosis to eating honeycomb right before bed.  I imagine he has tried them all.

After that, I read the the book in the daylight, often with the TV on -- all those football bowl games and no Tivo in the hotel provided an invitation to read during all the commercials. The insomnia turned out to be a springboard to the big issues.  The book is really about the natural cycles of life and death, and what happens if those are tampered with, and the energy that we all have and how it's expressed and used.  I hadn't read Stephen King for a long time, just as I haven't seen a scary movie in forever, because, as I discovered again with reading this book, scary movies and books keep me up at night.  But I really wanted to read Insomnia, because it was such an ambitious book that made you think and wonder, not the things you would expect from a popular author such as King, but there it was, and I was glad to have found it.