My Cardboard Balcony

Well, looks like the holiday season is almost here (for me, at least - for retail, it's been here since September). I'm looking forward to seeing family for Thanksgiving, eating a boatload of food, and preparing for the holidays. Due to my huge employee discount at my job, I actually got all of my Christmas shopping done for a lot cheaper than I usually spend. So that's cool. My girlfriend and I will be spending Christmas together, so that'll be lovely. We already have plans to get a tree and decorate the apartment. For now, of course, it's work as usual, helping sell books and then heading books to play music and write. I was thinking about this earlier today, but if I were ever asked if I had one thing I'd like to see produced onstage or onscreen, it would be my recently completed miniseries, "Happy Distribution." While my novels are okay, the miniseries is honestly my most personal. It's a big chunk of doubts, reconciliations, attractions, a...

"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...

Chester was the star pupil - the stray constellation caught in the astronomical web of Professor Anderson's eye. When Chester was staring down at lined paper, his wedge of graphite scribbling away at cosmos, Anderson could not help but look at his student as if through a telescope. The weight of a thousand galaxies weighed on the older man's brow, as he stopped occasionally in his lecture to grab his handkerchief and wipe his brow free from space dust while Chester watched every slight twitch of his forearm.