Friday's Whims of the Time Traveler 15.1: May 9th, 2010
"Caramel Kisses" is an unfinished novel I began to write back in 2009 and stopped working on in 2010. The two main characters - Adriana Maguire Reynard and Emma Burking - would ultimately be revised for my later completed novella, "The Liffey Is Half-Asleep," in 2011. Several elements of "Liffey" can be found in their original forms in "Caramel Kisses," such as the characters' names, the haiku scene, and Adriana's penchant for writing.
Because of its influence on my later writing, I figured that this story, though incomplete, was worth sharing.
Caramel Kisses: Chapter One
by Belinda Roddie
I was twenty-two years old when I first fell in love. When I was still in college, many a naysayer in my family enjoyed prattling to me that I would never find love at my young age, that love wasn’t kind to those who lacked the maturity or alleged wisdom that the next thirty-year-old or forty-year-old had. Although I was tempted to bring up the romances of olden days that involved characters as young as fourteen years being able to claim their ultimate love despite still battering swords with pubescent urges, I figured that it was not my place to argue with the ones responsible for the occasional extra check in my mailbox. Instead, I continued with my infatuations and curiosities as routinely as any other university student, focusing on my studies while dealing with the remaining threads of the tapestry that was my hormonal struggle. But despite anything my family may have said in order to fill me to the brim with their so-called realism, it didn’t change the fact that I was twenty-two years old when I first fell in love.
To be honest, I couldn’t even understand why they even tried to inject logic into my veins. By the time I moved into my cramped apartment in Sausalito overlooking the bay, I had a bachelor of fine arts degree in creative writing clutched in my fist and only fifteen hundred dollars to my name. My resume consisted of a few odd jobs at the local school district as well as some tenuous months at a nondescript Target store, since my strength lay in my repertory of fiction and drama, not business. I was a playwright, not an entrepreneur, and I had stumbled straight into the real world with the full knowledge that what I was doing did not constitute a large income or profitable outlook. But in truth, I was happy, or at least happy enough, with my state of being.
There was nothing remotely worthy for storytelling in my apartment complex. I stayed in Archstone Sausalito, and all I had really gotten from the experience was a leaky bathroom faucet, a TV swollen with static, and a few words of broken English from my landlady. I stayed in my room most of the time with my laptop open, my fingers leaving sandwich crumbs on the already browning keys in their crackling plastic shell. Occasionally I’d stop typing to scratch a stubby fingernail against the desk, scraping away the residue of a ring my milk glass normally left on the cheap wood. My situation was not special in any way, or even relatively intriguing. I was not Arturo Bandini in Los Angeles, hammering away at an old-fashioned typewriter while smelling steak from the adjacent apartment and dreaming of a Mexican princess. I was never that fascinating, and hardly as unreliable to listen to.
Fortunately, I was also not like Fante’s mouthpiece in that I had a job and could pay the rent without many sporadic expectations. While I continued to feverishly e-mail short story and one-act submissions to the nearest literary magazine or online website, I worked under the watchful eye of Nelson Staffing Solutions tucked away on the outskirts of San Rafael. It was like having a field trip every month or so, in that I’d be assigned one job in some remote city in the county and then shuffled to the next place to be assigned to work that was more than just slightly similar to the last monotonous process. I received reasonable pay for my reasonable amount of dedication – that way, I could live casually, if not comfortably, even if I continually had to grit my teeth at the sugarcoated apologies editors gave me for not putting my work in the closest west coast writing journal. Not surprising, of course, but rejections were like a large medicine tablet, always a bit difficult to swallow.
I was far from the audacious gung-ho kid skipping out of college with a briefcase and a couple of graduation checks from relatives. In all honesty, I was living a very honest and very matter-of-fact sort of lifestyle. It was just difficult for me to speculate anything too exciting in said lifestyle. Then again, someone with a name with more muddled foreign pizzazz than Arturo Bandini had to be bound for some sort of emotional joyride.
Because of its influence on my later writing, I figured that this story, though incomplete, was worth sharing.
Caramel Kisses: Chapter One
by Belinda Roddie
I was twenty-two years old when I first fell in love. When I was still in college, many a naysayer in my family enjoyed prattling to me that I would never find love at my young age, that love wasn’t kind to those who lacked the maturity or alleged wisdom that the next thirty-year-old or forty-year-old had. Although I was tempted to bring up the romances of olden days that involved characters as young as fourteen years being able to claim their ultimate love despite still battering swords with pubescent urges, I figured that it was not my place to argue with the ones responsible for the occasional extra check in my mailbox. Instead, I continued with my infatuations and curiosities as routinely as any other university student, focusing on my studies while dealing with the remaining threads of the tapestry that was my hormonal struggle. But despite anything my family may have said in order to fill me to the brim with their so-called realism, it didn’t change the fact that I was twenty-two years old when I first fell in love.
To be honest, I couldn’t even understand why they even tried to inject logic into my veins. By the time I moved into my cramped apartment in Sausalito overlooking the bay, I had a bachelor of fine arts degree in creative writing clutched in my fist and only fifteen hundred dollars to my name. My resume consisted of a few odd jobs at the local school district as well as some tenuous months at a nondescript Target store, since my strength lay in my repertory of fiction and drama, not business. I was a playwright, not an entrepreneur, and I had stumbled straight into the real world with the full knowledge that what I was doing did not constitute a large income or profitable outlook. But in truth, I was happy, or at least happy enough, with my state of being.
There was nothing remotely worthy for storytelling in my apartment complex. I stayed in Archstone Sausalito, and all I had really gotten from the experience was a leaky bathroom faucet, a TV swollen with static, and a few words of broken English from my landlady. I stayed in my room most of the time with my laptop open, my fingers leaving sandwich crumbs on the already browning keys in their crackling plastic shell. Occasionally I’d stop typing to scratch a stubby fingernail against the desk, scraping away the residue of a ring my milk glass normally left on the cheap wood. My situation was not special in any way, or even relatively intriguing. I was not Arturo Bandini in Los Angeles, hammering away at an old-fashioned typewriter while smelling steak from the adjacent apartment and dreaming of a Mexican princess. I was never that fascinating, and hardly as unreliable to listen to.
Fortunately, I was also not like Fante’s mouthpiece in that I had a job and could pay the rent without many sporadic expectations. While I continued to feverishly e-mail short story and one-act submissions to the nearest literary magazine or online website, I worked under the watchful eye of Nelson Staffing Solutions tucked away on the outskirts of San Rafael. It was like having a field trip every month or so, in that I’d be assigned one job in some remote city in the county and then shuffled to the next place to be assigned to work that was more than just slightly similar to the last monotonous process. I received reasonable pay for my reasonable amount of dedication – that way, I could live casually, if not comfortably, even if I continually had to grit my teeth at the sugarcoated apologies editors gave me for not putting my work in the closest west coast writing journal. Not surprising, of course, but rejections were like a large medicine tablet, always a bit difficult to swallow.
I was far from the audacious gung-ho kid skipping out of college with a briefcase and a couple of graduation checks from relatives. In all honesty, I was living a very honest and very matter-of-fact sort of lifestyle. It was just difficult for me to speculate anything too exciting in said lifestyle. Then again, someone with a name with more muddled foreign pizzazz than Arturo Bandini had to be bound for some sort of emotional joyride.
The work you see here has not been edited nor altered since May 9th, 2010.
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