Farm Stand

 e-book and audiobook, coming soon!

A month in the country, it sounded restful to Adelaide. A month out of the city, just she and the kids. Farmers, the salt of the earth, good food, anonymity. It was hot that August, when racial tempers flared and lust flamed  across the corn fields. It was a summer that altered many lives connected by the Farm Stand. 

REWIRE, The Gold Stone Girl, book 3, Prologue - Holometabolous

I am soup. Not consomme´, or broth, or even bisque. I’m the texture of things that have been boiled down into each other, thickened by evaporation into a potage. A brew that carries the flavor of the old me into something new. My body died. It was attacked by the same sort of juices my stomach uses to digest food. It would not be far wrong to say that I ate myself from the inside out in a process called histolysis. Not all of my original tissue was destroyed. Some of the old me will pass on to my new self. Though not much.                                                                                                                        

In insects there are collections of special formative cells which lie dormant, cells which have played no part in the insects larval life. I have them too. These groups are called imaginal buds or histoblasts. Maybe they’re the source of my dreams. The histoblasts supervise the building of the new body I must make out of this soup, or die in the attempt. It’s the same biochemical process that turns insect food into body parts. This rebuilding process is called histogenesis. I have no idea how I know these things, but I do. 

When the change starts I know that something is seriously wrong and I also know that I have no way to stop it from happening. A hook covered appendage, a cremaster, pushes itself out of the skin on the back of my spine like Bourko’s arm, but dark spindly and spiny. I’m screaming. It’s as if an alien were trying to get out of me and it’s succeeding. The insect arm embeds itself into a glue-pad of fine silk, which it secretes onto the rock ceiling without asking my permission or needing it. Then I’m dangling by the alien arm attached to my back, my feet kicking.                                                               

Maybe I’m an alien like Bourko.   

I have a second to process the situation, the women staring at me hanging from an arm I didn’t know I had, before Reggie inflates like a balloon around me. The same way she protected me from the ball of flames that time we killed. This time all of my epidermis goes with her, like a snake shedding its skin. Only I don’t have another set of scales underneath. It’s gross. I’m like something found under a rock, something slimy with pulsing veins. I’m teeth chattering cold and scalding hot all at once and I’m moaning.  
Reggie seals the larval me up inside her and then I disintegrate. My gastric juices are turning me into soup. Why was I worried about being eaten alive by the Night Mare when in the end I do it to myself? Suffice it to say that I am liquid. Except for these tiny discs made up of embryonic matter floating on top of the me-soup.
The discs suddenly go into overdrive consuming nutrients from the soup. The tiny discs have divided many times growing and proliferating at breakneck speed. I can feel it happening. It’s not totally uncomfortable. I’m getting used to it. I’m becoming something new. How long it will take and what I will be are unanswered questions.                                                                                                                    
 It’s me making all of this happen. I know that. The me that’s thinking these thoughts. That me has to figure out how to accomplish the rest of this process. I’m not sure what that means but I feel hopeful. I wonder if soup can hope? If so, I hope that this is a safe place for what’s happening to me because soup can’t stand and fight. Soup can’t even run away to fight another day.

Now I understand why no one wanted to explain this change to me. What could they have said but, you’re going to be soup? Who would have believed it? Certainly not me.   

Podcast: Critique It's a Nightmare

July 29, 2015

Episode 21: It's a Nightmare: Dystopian (Feminist) Fantasy Critique

Podcast

listen                 here  or

Download

EPISODE DESCRIPTION

Leslie & Alyssa critique the opening pages from Nicole Quinn’s It’s a Nightmare.
They discuss the genre, the function of the comma, the importance of a name, and
suspension of disbelief.

Santa Ana winds

Photo by Eric Massey (@masseyfoto)

When my Papa moved into our house to die I imagined a sweet old man puttering around till one day he wouldn’t wake up, and we’d all cry. That’s not what happened, nor who arrived. He was a gale of hurricane force, that knocked me off course, tempered me, and left me refinished. 

My mother always blamed ill temper on the Santa Anas, downslope winds that originate inland and drive everyone crazy while racing southwest to the water of the California coastline.  Devil wind.  Santa Anas whoosh all of the smog away.  In their wake, everything is crisp, blue skies, a desert landscape climbing to snow capped mountains.  During Santa Anas there’s a notable rise in crime, freeway gun battles, Hollywood actors in rehab,100 mile winds, forest fires, sinus infections, and generally bad tempers all around. Some surgeons say that blood won’t clot predictably during the Santa Anas and they adjust their operating schedules accordingly.

When the wind blows off the desert hot and dry, or fresh off the mountains skin blistering cold, beware. This is what I know of my family and their moods. This is the East wind my father brought with him from the West.  He was a Santa Ana.

My Papa was kidnapped by Lewy Body dementia. Held hostage by its hallucinations, he held us all captive there too.  

Papa had caregivers around the clock.  A revolving cast of personalities that came and went, depending upon their capacity for aggressive insanity.  Papa sent one nurse to the E.R.  

While awake, he was visited by the ghosts of long gone friends and family, with whom he brokered forgiveness, and assigned blame, all while offering them breakfast.

At night this ninety-four year old retired rocket scientist, who could barely leave his wheelchair when awake, was a spy on a mission in his dreams. In those dreams turned nightmare we were all the enemy, unseen voices, ever on the attack. He bit, he punched, he protected himself. He crawled from under his bed as the wreckage of bombed buildings.  He balanced on the bedside table to wave in incoming aircraft.  We lived at the eye of his storm.

But Santa Ana winds are seasonal, inflaming everything as they whirl towards the Pacific Ocean to be absorbed and neutralized.  The devil wind always ends.  The crime rate returns to normal and more blood clots according to routine.  Papa’s gone now, and, as in the wake of the Santa Anas, the atmosphere is recharged, it’s clean. When the wind blows, sometimes the cradle rocks and the bough does break, and crocuses still poke their heads up out of the snow.

The Harlem Book Fair

Mina and I will be exhibitors at The Harlem Book Fair, July 18
You can find us  on 135th st, between Lenox Ave and Adam Clayton Powell

In Writer's Row: Blue Barn Productions - R6

Everyday Thoughts

In 1990 Indian economist, Amartya Sen, put the number of human females missing from the planet, (selectively aborted, outright killed, or neglected to death), at 100 million; the death toll is higher now. 

Why does half the human population have to ask for human rights? It seems absurd, and yet, we are asking for the right to be equal to human men. 

Our planet, and her health, have been feminized for the same reasons, so she can be easily commoditized, rather than preserved. If we continue to measure success by an artificial construct, where everything on the planet has a price tag, what meaning is there in the actual value of anything? 

Feminism, (or equality, for those who equate ball busting with the first term), has a direct impact on the health of our planet, and its humans. Change is upon us. 

Grow something. Turn off the lights. Drive less. Understand where your water comes from, and make sure it's being protected. The planet will adapt, other species will survive, why not us?

2015 Wheatley Awards Nominees

Congratulations to all of the writers!  Mina and I are so grateful to be included.

http://www.harlembookfair.com/#!where-to-stay/cjg9

The books listed have been selected for final consideration.

First Fiction

Adinkrahene: Fear of a Black Planet by Jeffery A. Faulkerson

Born at Dawn by Nigeria Lockley

It's A Nightmare, The Gold Stone Girl, Book 1 by Nicole Quinn

Once In A Lifetime In Love by Sonya Felice Jenkins

Princesa by Maria L. Perez

Reason by Tiombe Jones

Shifting Allegiances: A Nigerian's Story of Nigeria, America & Culture by Amaka Lily

Tea Leaf: What Hides Underneath by Mia Mitns

The Devil Made Me Do It by Colette R. Harrell

The Ugly Secrets of Private Roy by Edward Roy

The Unnamed by Elva Nelson Hayes

Weaver by Miriam Kelly Ferguson

Who Made the Potato Salad? by Inez Robinson-Turpin