My Cardboard Balcony

Here's the deal with first novels: They can cause a lot of trouble for a writer, especially mentally. It can safely be said that most authors see their first novels as things that need to be perfected and successful, and that makes sense. After all, if you want to be published and sell stuff, the first book that gets printed has gotta be good. Hell, Joseph Heller's first published work ever , not just his first novel, was Catch-22. And look how well that did! That being said, many first novels are written, stew in a journal or on a Word document, and never get published. They don't have to be published. That's the truth. And that was quickly becoming the reality in terms of my first novel, The Sequined Door. The Sequined Door is not, by any means, a bad book (and I use bad in the technical sense here). It's a fluffy, silly, colorful, LGBTQ+-teeming, fabulous piece of work. But it is, in many ways, inherently flawed. Many examples of queer-identifying individual

"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 Fourteen by Belinda Roddie The trouble with you, Adriana Maguire Reynard, is that you think too much like a playwright. I mean, don’t get me wrong, it’s one thing to be a playwright, to draw up the scripts and pull the strings of conceived characters with some sort of conflict swarming about them like a hungry family of gnats. But to think like one, to be overwhelmed by

The roses are adequately pruned, and the garden sublimely pristine. It's green enough, gold, blue enough, and white enough to hold its own against the sun, and if you get really close, you can see the honeysuckle drip silver onto the bricks below. People walk through this place every day, and somehow, when they walk out, there's a bit more color in their cheeks, and their hair looks a tad bit more like groomed foliage.