More to the point, are you interested in helping a writer finish her debut novel before she is old and decrepid?
As you may know, I’m self-employed, and while that’s great for my creative mind and general flexibility, it also means that when I don’t work, I don’t get paid. I’m very fortunate to have an international literary agent and they’ve assured me that my novel has the potential to be very successful. While I have applied for many, many writing grants, this seems like the best way to go about this. So, basically, what I’m saying is that if you have Randelas (or Dollars, or Euros or Pounds) to spare, and you’re a fan of the literary arts, and would like to support a potentially-best selling novelist, you’d go a long way in helping me take time off from my day job (from time to time) to get this baby written, by contributing to my ‘novel fund’ via PayPal me. No amount is too big or too small.
I'D LIKE TO HELP!
Not convinced? Read an extract below
On Monday we wake to ash. It floats through the sky, lazily. Until the grass is coated in it. The sliding door locks behind me so I stand on the patio in my nightie, the usually cool tiles growing warmer beneath my feet. Before long every shrub in the garden is dulled to soot. My throat is hoarse and I catch a nose bleed before the blood can reach my mouth.
Beyond the valley, five houses burn. The ridge is on fire, and the television sets are melting to cobalt and blue. Polyester spits, satin hisses. Five cocker spaniels howl as their water bowls dissolve in the heat. Behind us, another fire rages, turning the high school to a splintering sound of hearts breaking and blackboards splitting. When it reaches the science lab there is the sound of several bombs going off, then a renewed zest to the fire.
My tongue is burning. My lips are raw.
Still not convinced? Here’s more
The midwives fought to perform the episiotomy. It was gruesome, the way they cast lots for it, as if my mother’s skin was seamless cloth to fight over. I’ve been told this story many times but each time another crucial detail has been left out, so that I have always had to pay much more attention to the story with each telling, making sure to memorize what was included and what was omitted, and comparing it with previous versions after. The last time they told me the story of my birth, my mother left out The Cut. At first I doubted ever hearing about it, but when I went snooping around our family papers and found my mother’s medical records, there was an official document that described my birth in acute, cold, medical detail. I knew that my father had stood back, had held my mother’s hand in the beginning but quickly shifted to the back of the theatre after, the surgeon joking that should he faint, he would be left to recover on the floor, alone. Which was obviously a joke because everything was always dropped to make sure my father was fine, and this time was no different, a nurse going so far as to let go of my mother’s hand and to leave the theatre to get my father a glass of water. It is against this information that I read the record of my birth, where the cut was rendered as mere detail, although my mother, who received it without anesthetic, couldn’t have felt it as slight as that. Like all children, I constructed my alternative narrative with the evidence at my disposal, working slowly towards the truth of the matter by way of careful listening and the feeling in my gut. The birthing papers were themselves a story all of their own, but parallel to this ran my alternative narrative, the one that I dreamed might have been written, in ancient Greek and Kiswahili and Tamil, if birth was deemed as important as war and death and other heroic feats.
The nurses fought over the scalpel. When the head of Obs and Gyn won the battle, she passed that blade through my mother as if she were butter, the metal swimming through skin until my head popped out. Grabbing at it, the nurse pulled, and the rest of me shot out like that of a vicious worm feasting on overripe plum, my shoulders and elbows and knees slick and new. The nurses gasped, and my mother pushed the rest of me out in a single jettison of fluid, which spilled over and tainted the place where others would grow. And while the doctor tied sailors’ knots in my mother, and steeled themselves against her steaming insides, it was of no use. The knots loosened and the curse set in like a vicious mould.
Infliction, inflammation.