Friday's Whims of the Time Traveler 16.1: 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 Two
by Belinda Roddie
With most of my attempts to get into some sort of anthology, I was advised to add a little blurb about myself, whether in the form of a list or a paragraph with a maximum amount of words, which was in itself rather ironic considering writers were normally not expected to keep things mathematical or their thoughts to a sharp and finite point. However, I believed it was the best way to introduce myself these days because people normally couldn’t take new personalities in more than small doses because their attention spans were so shot that you could see their brain functions slowing down behind the whites of their eyes. Adriana Maguire Reynard, I’d tell them, after they would nonchalantly shake my hand, unaware of what they had gotten themselves into. Twenty-two years old, graduate from University of Redlands. Six plays to my name, half of them actually performed. Not published. If they were interested after that, I’d give them the step-by-step analysis of each fragment of my identity. I figured it was the appropriate way to talk to people these days, the analytical way – everybody was becoming their own variety of amateur psychologist, so I had to cater to the occasional demand for extraneous information like they were my new best friends.
First, the name. Adriana: Italian, in every sense of the culture; Maguire, a throwaway Irish surname which only needed an O and an apostrophe starting it off; and Reynard, Scottish oozing from each pronounced letter as if they were pores on a sick man’s skin. I was a mongrel of cultures, a genetic splicing of ethnicities. One step to being an identifiable writer was a specific yet relatable upbringing, one pertaining more to nationality than anything else. And already I considered myself a Californian by birth, a New Yorker by trade, a Bostonian by opinion, and a Brit by attitude. I was already in trouble.
Six plays to my name, half of them actually performed. This was something I was actually pretty proud of. I had been able to coax several student directors eager for earning their last-minute credits in school to take up my original writing for their workshops. They always thrived on the more angst-inducing pieces; after all, we were in college and we hadn’t grown out of the stagnant dependence of forming our identity based on our generation’s alleged woes yet. The “no one understands us and let’s show them why” approach still wasn’t stale back at my university, and I was able to get a decent amount of recognition for it. Or at least I got a few double-sided programs with my name next to “Written by” for it, in a more technical perspective.
Then, the big one: Not published. Granted, I wasn’t looking toward publishing these days. Already the prospects of grad school were becoming appealing to me. I remembered one night, back in Southern California, where I spoke to a friend of mine with Jack Daniel’s on his breath and a glazed look in his eyes, telling him I wanted to be a professor. He chastised me for going for the easy route, for settling, for gaining the fixed income. He was all for profitability, for success, attempting to pull away from the roots of his family that held him to the dirt and a poorer outlook on life. But if there’s one thing an artist appreciates in order to continue his or her work without hassle, it’s a fixed income, even if I didn’t quite have the teeth or the mindset of a professor. I was more likely to get drinks with my students than lecture them on Kafka.
Of course, in most blurbs about myself, whether to the indifferent gaze of a publisher or the thinly drawn line of a listener’s mouth, I left out some important facts that just didn’t contribute to the basics: That I was born in a suburb up north with a depressed father and a bipolar brother – that I had dealt with relatives filling their lungs with carbon monoxide or their mouths with alcohol before going to the divorce judge – that for over ten years, I consistently traded blows with the notion that maybe, just maybe, it wasn’t a phase that I wore my hair tousled and my jacket and T-shirt creased like I was one of the guys.
I remember the day I went to San Francisco, in 2010, on a November morning. The manager of my latest clerical escapade had allowed me a day away from rattling cabinets and files that looked as if they could rival the size of Tolstoy’s literary archive. It got tiring to pull out folders and reorganize them when they would be torn apart by the nearest surety bonds underwriter and I would be forced to rearrange the pieces all over again. Still, it was nice enough to take the ferry to the city, my favorite city, the place I really wanted to live in but couldn’t afford to do so, as was expected of someone with my narrow range of financial possibilities. I was twenty-two years old, and all the things I left out in my fifty-word biography were about to write themselves on the page.
Because of its influence on my later writing, I figured that this story, though incomplete, was worth sharing.
Caramel Kisses: Chapter Two
by Belinda Roddie
With most of my attempts to get into some sort of anthology, I was advised to add a little blurb about myself, whether in the form of a list or a paragraph with a maximum amount of words, which was in itself rather ironic considering writers were normally not expected to keep things mathematical or their thoughts to a sharp and finite point. However, I believed it was the best way to introduce myself these days because people normally couldn’t take new personalities in more than small doses because their attention spans were so shot that you could see their brain functions slowing down behind the whites of their eyes. Adriana Maguire Reynard, I’d tell them, after they would nonchalantly shake my hand, unaware of what they had gotten themselves into. Twenty-two years old, graduate from University of Redlands. Six plays to my name, half of them actually performed. Not published. If they were interested after that, I’d give them the step-by-step analysis of each fragment of my identity. I figured it was the appropriate way to talk to people these days, the analytical way – everybody was becoming their own variety of amateur psychologist, so I had to cater to the occasional demand for extraneous information like they were my new best friends.
First, the name. Adriana: Italian, in every sense of the culture; Maguire, a throwaway Irish surname which only needed an O and an apostrophe starting it off; and Reynard, Scottish oozing from each pronounced letter as if they were pores on a sick man’s skin. I was a mongrel of cultures, a genetic splicing of ethnicities. One step to being an identifiable writer was a specific yet relatable upbringing, one pertaining more to nationality than anything else. And already I considered myself a Californian by birth, a New Yorker by trade, a Bostonian by opinion, and a Brit by attitude. I was already in trouble.
Six plays to my name, half of them actually performed. This was something I was actually pretty proud of. I had been able to coax several student directors eager for earning their last-minute credits in school to take up my original writing for their workshops. They always thrived on the more angst-inducing pieces; after all, we were in college and we hadn’t grown out of the stagnant dependence of forming our identity based on our generation’s alleged woes yet. The “no one understands us and let’s show them why” approach still wasn’t stale back at my university, and I was able to get a decent amount of recognition for it. Or at least I got a few double-sided programs with my name next to “Written by” for it, in a more technical perspective.
Then, the big one: Not published. Granted, I wasn’t looking toward publishing these days. Already the prospects of grad school were becoming appealing to me. I remembered one night, back in Southern California, where I spoke to a friend of mine with Jack Daniel’s on his breath and a glazed look in his eyes, telling him I wanted to be a professor. He chastised me for going for the easy route, for settling, for gaining the fixed income. He was all for profitability, for success, attempting to pull away from the roots of his family that held him to the dirt and a poorer outlook on life. But if there’s one thing an artist appreciates in order to continue his or her work without hassle, it’s a fixed income, even if I didn’t quite have the teeth or the mindset of a professor. I was more likely to get drinks with my students than lecture them on Kafka.
Of course, in most blurbs about myself, whether to the indifferent gaze of a publisher or the thinly drawn line of a listener’s mouth, I left out some important facts that just didn’t contribute to the basics: That I was born in a suburb up north with a depressed father and a bipolar brother – that I had dealt with relatives filling their lungs with carbon monoxide or their mouths with alcohol before going to the divorce judge – that for over ten years, I consistently traded blows with the notion that maybe, just maybe, it wasn’t a phase that I wore my hair tousled and my jacket and T-shirt creased like I was one of the guys.
I remember the day I went to San Francisco, in 2010, on a November morning. The manager of my latest clerical escapade had allowed me a day away from rattling cabinets and files that looked as if they could rival the size of Tolstoy’s literary archive. It got tiring to pull out folders and reorganize them when they would be torn apart by the nearest surety bonds underwriter and I would be forced to rearrange the pieces all over again. Still, it was nice enough to take the ferry to the city, my favorite city, the place I really wanted to live in but couldn’t afford to do so, as was expected of someone with my narrow range of financial possibilities. I was twenty-two years old, and all the things I left out in my fifty-word biography were about to write themselves on the page.
The work you see here has not been edited nor altered since May 9th, 2010.
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