Monday, May 23, 2011


He told me that I'd know when the ending happened. That I'd feel it.

I'm not so sure that's true. I've got a problem with endings and I'm not convinced that they are preordained or organic. He told me they happen quite out of the writer's control.

No way, Jose.

Wednesday, May 18, 2011


The summer Andrew and I got together, we sat on a couch in my mother’s living room. She was out of town and the sun was setting. Or maybe it had become dark and I hadn't noticed. We had spent days intertwined, one person, lost in time. Back then, I didn’t notice anything except him. Back then, he was the most important thing in the world.

He took me in his arms and held me like a child.

“I need you,” I told him.

Back then, I did.

“I’m going to marry you,” he told me.

Back then, our two hearts beat like a metronome.

Black Sheep - A Novel Excerpt


Then, as Andrew turned out the lights and fell asleep next to me in the earliest hours of that morning in March, a Tuesday morning like any other, I was overcome with a queer feeling. A foreign silence impinged on the normal nightly Hollywood noises - on the keening chorus of coyotes, the dry scrape of cars moving up hills, the racing, receding wail of helicopters in the air. I didn’t know then, but no one heard that silence. Not a single soul in miles.

Just me.

Afterwards, I found myself looking back on that night, on that giant, peaceful silence. I found fantasy trying to recreate it over and over again.

If only I’d known my life was about to change.

Tuesday, May 17, 2011

Black Sheep - A Novel Excerpt



Men fall in love with me at first sight. Trust me, there were lots that I wanted to that didn’t, but the ones that did, fell hard, fast, bloodied. There was nothing to be done, even I couldn't warn them. I was a bomb waiting, ticking, sweating, that they could never reach in time.

I explode all over people.

There is a belief in certain circles that some are put on earth only to shake things up. Spiritual shit-kickers by birth, by definition. Having been a victim of watching my life like an outsider, I want to tell you I am one of those people.

You never get what you want, only what you un-want. Isn't that sad? Like, truly, the saddest thing about life? Men want a woman like me, but since I’ll never want the same, I'm gone before things begin. So, in getting what they wanted for awhile, they actually only got exactly what they un-wanted.

Does a part of them whisper that? Like a premonition they ignore?

I watch this play out, like scenes in a movie I can’t escape. Everything is acted with a sickening intensity. The pacing's too slow. The seconds I spend with these men thud by like boots in slush.

Every time, I convince myself for awhile that I am different. That love, in it’s pregnant hope, it’s early bliss, is actually greater than everything else. That I can beat who I am. That it will change me, that I will become something else. That everything can stay new.

But the truth is, you can never escape yourself, even when you try. Maybe it’s my knowing this that killed the romance in my heart, that ensures I’ll never have the wherewithal to really be someone’s girl.

I want to love these men, I do, but I blink and then everything's over as quickly as it began. I am yanked out of men's life with such force that I can't catch my breath.

I am some strange cosmic sacrifice. Standing five-foot-two, weighing one hundred and ten pounds, I was sent here only to fuck shit up.

It’s best just to accept that you can simply never overcome most points of your personality. I am going to end up completely and devastatingly alone.

Black Sheep - A Novel Excerpt


“Why do you think we couldn’t see it coming?”

“That’s the way life is. You don’t see things coming.”

The brain is this three-pound organ that’s the seat of everything we are—our hopes and desires and our loves. All it takes is this tiny tweak in these three pounds, this tiny change in perception, and what you see as real isn’t real to anyone else.

“What are you doing tonight?” I ask him.

“Going to see Marianne.”

I nod. “Did you tell her?”

“No.”

“Don’t. It’s not worth it. Does she know I’m here?”

No, he says again.

When we finish our drinks, I look at him and I say, so this is goodbye. And he says, unless you want to come show up on my doorstep again. Then he laughs and his face shifts, slightly, a small change behind his eyes and I realize he’s crying. And then, so am I.

“Where are you going?” he asks me, and I answer. He says nothing back and I realized he wasn’t talking to me. He was talking to God now.

He holds me tight as we say goodbye.

“Someone should have told us what was coming.”

Later, in a dream, Jesus called to plead his case. He was surprisingly whiney. Eventually, I had to hang up.

"Quit bitching," I told him. "I'm busy."

I'm sorry, but what did he expect? This isn't a fucking hotline.

Black Sheep - A Novel Excerpt


How much time do we get?

Only with death, do you see time for what it is. You are re-introduced to what you had and how you spent it. You re-evaluate, recalculate, reorder. When it’s all taken away, there is lingering clarity.

Years double back and skip forward.

So, did you get weeks or centuries? Only seconds? How quickly did it go? When did it leave you?

Trust me, the world, in relationship to the time a dead man spent in it, reassembles. Sometimes, a memory gets confused. Stuck, like an ice-cube in your windpipe in its hurry to find place. Lost, now too big to fit where it should, the moment takes a different shape. Maybe it assumes a giant importance. Maybe it get thrown out all-together. My point is, when time's running out, it always re-calibrates.

Really, how long do you feel you got?

Have you seen my father’s ghost?

Black Sheep - A Novel Excerpt



"You have to believe you’re good enough. You’re really talented. Truly talented. Everyone you go in for becomes a big fan. But you need to believe that you deserve it. You need to go into those rooms and believe that you deserve that part.”


I nod. I feel like crying and I don’t know why.

“I do believe. I do think I deserve it.”

“Probably not. Not enough. Otherwise you’d be booking.”

“Right. You’re right.”

I want to tell him that I feel like an impostor, sitting here, acting like I have a say. What I have is given and it can be taken away. I don’t own it. It owns me. Even in the good times, I knew it was fleeting.

The possibility is what hurts. I sit under it’s shadow, weighted in darkness. I will it closer, invite it back inside, ask it to take pity on me.

“Your auditions aren’t what they used to be. You’ll get it back. You just have to believe you will.”

People talk a lot about belief here, positive thinking, manifesting your destiny. I wonder if things are that simple, that my problems are of my creation. That one thought can swim into the ether and by chance or by luck, crack the universe and change things.

It just seems a little straight-forward to me.

“Maybe you should get a tan,” he tells my back as I’m walking out of his office.