I'm Lazy, So Here's A Novel Excerpt

Okay, I’m tired today.
But in my defense, I rode a horse last night who was so freaking wild, “it was like riding,” as I said to Brian (who was enjoying the show from the sidelines) “a stick of dynamite that had just done a line of coke off a hooker’s ass.”

And you might think that’s a wild exaggeration (albeit a funny one), but have you ever tried to stop an 1,800-pound animal who is really in the mood to *not* stop?

Well, I’ll tell ya…
It’s hard.
Very hard.
So hard, in fact, that I’m still tired today.

So in lieu of an original blog post, I’m just gonna throw up another excerpt of my novel.*
It’s probably overkill to remind you guys of how delicate my ego is when it comes to this sort of thing, so let’s just leave it at
“be nice, or face the consequences.”
Deal?
Deal.

Allrighty, here we go…

Once they had moved in, she found that she was entirely in her element. Ensconced in silence, she padded about in a worn pair of scuffs, sippingg tea and gazing out of the windows, any one of which displaying a combination of tangled wood or open, untended field that flanked the rear of the house, starting at the base of the concrete steps that descended from the back door and expanding out to a neat wall of trees standing several hundred yards in the distance. A lopsided, weathered barn set squarely in the middle of this open expanse. A connect-the-dots pasture was outlined in rough, grey posts that had once stood vertically but were now succumbing to gravity and leaning at odd angles. Several of these posts were interconnected with wide, flat boards that had been half eaten away by time and the elements, but most stood displaced, like ancient stones positioned to help keep time; a bucolic Stonehenge smack in the center of New England.

She had been out to explore the barn on a few occasions. When they first bought the house, she was eager to determine whether the barn could be transformed into a sort of free-standing workshop; a place where she could write, uninterrupted, surrounded by the smell of seasoned wood and old straw. How romantic, she thought, to write a book in a barn. And she imagined the passage of time—pillows of snow and hot August sun—how they might be viewed from a barn-turned-studio; cozy in the winter and cool in the summer. But upon further inspection, the barn was clearly beyond hope of inhabitance. The wood that comprised the walls was half-rotten and marred by great chinks through which keyholes of landscape were visible. The floor was unfinished; earth that was tamped hard and dusty and tended to slope towards the south, separating from the far wall in a gap that was large enough to roll a baseball under. Although the poles that supported the roof seemed strong enough, gaps between the boards of the ceiling shot slivers of light in which particles of dust floated lazy and thick. A loft—for hay, seemingly—perched above the skeleton remains of several large animal stalls. A ceiling beam had collapsed onto this second story at some point, breaking through the slatted flooring to jam against the wall 5 feet above the ground. If at once there had been a ladder mounted to one of the crossbeams for access to this area, it was long gone. A pile of hay, baled at one time but long since freed of its twine, slumped into the walls in the far corner of the building. It smelled of mold, and she shuddered to think of the hundreds of rodents who had likely made their homes in this pile; a rat condominium, hiding hundreds of whiskers and claws and twitching, snake-like tales. Aside from the hay pile, the barn was largely empty. A pitchfork here, a rusted can there, were all that was left to indicate that the structure once held a purpose.

Sighing in disappointment, she had trudged back to the house. The barn was pretty from a distance, perhaps, but useless, none the less. Still, stepping onto the soft shag bathmat after a hot evening shower, she routinely dragged the palm of her hand across the fogged window glass to find the abandoned structure; a deeper shade of black against a midnight canvass. During the day, the barn stood docilely, supervising the tilting posts and crows who occasionally came to rest on them, cawing and hopping, unfolding and folding their wings in the cold morning sunlight. Over time, the structure took on the personality of an grandfatherly old man in her mind: gruff, perhaps, but always with a watchful eye and good intent. So she took to glancing at the barn whenever she happened to pass a window that faced the backyard. It was a companion, of sorts. A second construction that lent its company to the first. One house in the middle of the woods, after all, was a lonely thing. But a house and a barn? Coupled together, they could be no more lonely than a man and his wife.

TA-DAAAAA
Okay, that’s it for today. Imma get me some mo’ coffee now and start counting down the days ‘till I’m a free agent.
(15, but who’s keeping track?)
Woo-Hoo!


*Copyrighted, bizeatches, so back the hell off. Word.