I've spent the day surfing writers' blogs. There are so many ambitious literature sites out there. Quite the humbling experience. I decided that I, too, had to have extensive and hyperlinked lists of my favorite writers and books running down my sidebar. I, too, wanted to be the go-to reference for readers and writers. Then, I poured myself another vodka rocks and got over it. If you need a reference library, go back to that guy's site. He's doing a wonderful job.

This is the place for those days that your keyboard is more forehead stop than anything else. Come not looking for reviews and contemporary trends, but for complete and total bonding when your writing looks suspiciously like an 8 1/2" x 11" piece of holy crapola. I'll post daily, but sometimes, it'll be more Homer Simpson, less Homer.

But let's not forget to celebrate those days when the work starts to come together. Mike's Hard Lemonade for everybody!

Hey, for the two beautiful friends who check here regularly for updated frags, keep clicking through to my site over and over so I'll stop thinking my stat checker is broken. You guys are great.

I've discovered, quite by accident, that I am a weekday writer. Which is okay. Nothing good ever happens in my story on the weekends, anyway. Gabriel Garcia Marquez, my writing god, said once that he writes eight hours every day, even if he has nothing to say. I choose to interpret his "every day" as Monday through Friday.

That Wopner at 3 o'clock line in the disposable frag reminds me of this guy I used to hate date. He was always so self-satisfied when he knew the easiest of the easy shit and that drove me crazy. He needed a pat on the back for displaying his extremely limited wealth of knowledge every. single. time. I hate that guy. Note to self: No more writing before eating for the day. You were obviously hallucinating and you let that weak fucker infiltrate your character. Another note to self: Maybe don't use online journal as substitute for sketch book journal that hasn't been touched since you entered the blogosphere. There is still such a thing as a private thought.

Both of us should delete the previous post from our memories. Please replace it with this one. Thanks, dude. Your fabulousness continues.

Her first question to me was a legitimate one. If she doesn’t know what she’s missing, how will she know where to look for it? Whatever the fuck it is, Parker added in frustration. Two days she’s known me and already uses fuck 300 times a day. Some people are absorbent that way.

I tell her that she found Ellery’s shop without knowing the shop even existed. So continuing to follow her intuition should work in the beginning. I remind her that if she reveals herself to me honestly, I should be a pretty good help. Sometimes I know right away, sometimes it takes longer.

Why do you even want to help me? was her next question.

Self-pity and insecurity won’t get us anywhere was my answer.

“My father,” says Parker, pretending she hadn’t asked that question so she could ignore me. “This has something to do with him.”

“Are you being cliché? If I had a finger for every time somebody pulled his father out of his fucked up life's butt…”

“Shut up, Stillwater,” she laughed. “Just because your daddy never looked back and you’re now so—unaffected—”

“Oh, now you’re being ironic. And with jokes.”

“I think whatever I need is in his possession. Is that a better way to put it?”

“Well, let’s go get it, then.”

“Let’s do it.” She hops up and runs outside the cool cat place to her behemoth parked on the street. I grab Ferocious B from the fenced-in yard and get him excited about climbing into the back. We’d been packed for several hours while trying to figure out our next step. And now we had it. Maybe. “Just gotta find him first,” admitted Parker as she turns the ignition key.

A light exchange that probably will not make the final draft. I'm posting right after writing to create a sense of permanence.That way, I don't get stuck by being overly dissatisfied with what I have so far. If I keep my habit of excising huge chunks without giving them a chance, I'll be back where I started. So I post the frags and I take a second look at them later. I'll maybe keep parts, not all, in the final draft.

Writers reading this know that there is really no such draft as a final draft. It may be printed, distributed and praised, but in another read-through, we'll still find something we would have done differently if we'd held onto the work for one more day. Sometimes, you just have to release it as is. But not today (ha). This one is still in progress. The last sentence definitely won't make it, but it's time for lunch, so I'll leave it for now.

Never edit on an empty stomach. Never drink on an empty stomach. Never keep anything you wrote while you were drinking on an empty stomach. Just saying.

I have yet to learn to drive and, judging by the way Parker is maneuvering her grossly oversized vehicle onto the parkway, neither has she. I would find it a tragic twist that after surviving years of emotional neglect and physical abuse by my mother, I’d be killed during a premature and ill-timed lane change on the Takemeback Expressway. I tell Parker this and she tells me to shut up. Which, of course, I do since she needs every ounce of concentration for the task of not killing me and her dog while merging onto the Wayback. That part, I keep to myself.

I entertain her with the explanations of the Wayback and the Takemeback. “How did I end up way back here?” asked many a lost and drunken soul when the town was mainly dirt, grass and trees with one paved road. Stumbling upon the one paved road: “Oh, this road will take me back.” It did and both names stuck even as the path and the road were built into thoroughfares.

“If there were a Vegas of Trivial Pursuit,” she says, not really impressed, but nothing ever really impresses her, “we’d be speeding toward it, Rain Man.”

“Wopner at three o’clock,” I say, very pleased at myself for catching her easy reference. Doesn’t happen often and probably won’t happen again for another 500 miles.

Anybody else notice how I weenied out on beginning Parker's story?

I can't let a backstory impasse become an impasse for the entire thing. I have to keep going, almost no matter what.

I've used the word "thing" twice in the past few days. My 12th grade English teacher hated that word, and I'm always conscious of its use, especially my own use of it. But sometimes, Mrs. Pecsenye, thing is what fits. Don't mark off for it after all these years.

This need for dialogue is killing me, but I understand the purpose. Exposition should be done through at least one other method besides the narration. I think dialogue breaks up what could be a monotonous process and it allows us to get to know even the minor characters in their own voices.

Here's something fun: originally, Stillwater and Parker were scheduled to begin a journey, a trip, sometime during the telling of the story. But, I thought Stillwater was being inextricably tied to Ellery's shop and, by extension, the cool cat place. I'd decided (and I was probably taking the easy way out) the journey would have to be metaphorical and that the two of them would meet up with Freddie Mercury and Tim Woodman within the confines of the shop or the living space. But, voìla, or, as someone I used to know would say, viola--Ellery pushes Stillwater out of his comfort zone and now I, the writer, have no choice but to send Stillwater and Parker into another world and onto their journey. I love how the brain works sometimes.

This frag was posted before rewrites, so please expect rewrites. I'm even rewriting this section about the rewrites. Deleting certain rants because, as I have discovered while blog surfing, witnessing someone losing his mind on the Internet is neither fun nor entertaining. The delete key is our friend, people. The caps lock key is not.

Tomorrow was her subdued request. We were both tired and that word was the most reasonable she’d said all day. We managed to sneak Ferocious B into the cool cat place, and I made a bed for him out of blankets on the floor of my room. We were free of all awkward and unsure moments as I slipped into my own bed and slept next to her, holding on, for the first time.

“So where is she?” playfully demands Ellery as he meets me at the shop the next morning. “Out shopping for curtains?”

“Where’s who, old man?” I laughed.

“Boy, you think you’re the only one around here who knows all the gossip? You left last night with her. A customer. Big no-no that I guess I forgot to cover, but under the circumstances with her having nowhere else to go, I understand. Before you ask how I know that about her, I even know how much you tipped at the bar for your margaritas, so...”

Embarrassed, I interrupted Ellery that I got it, he knew everything. Ferocious B was in Mom’s kitchen earlier this morning eating what appeared to be a chopped steak breakfast. Asleep, Parker and I never heard his scratching at the door to be let out, but Mom sure did. When I left for work, the dog was drooling behind the front desk, keeping cool cat gramps company. Parker, to answer Ellery’s question, was in the kitchen, cleaning and talking Mom toward the brink.

“What are you doing here, anyway?” It’s been a long time since we were in the store together, and I’m suspicious. Indentured slaves can’t be fired, can they?

“I was just about to ask you the same thing,” was Ellery’s answer. “You’re here when I’m paying you and you’re here when I’m not. Not quite sure why you hang out with old men like me, but, for a while, you can get along without me. Take a week or two off. It’s called a vacation. Use it to figure out what you’re gonna do with that girl.”

Why do I need a week for that? Why two weeks? I left, though, before Ellery could ban me from the shop for three. But not before I told him I loved him like he was my own father. “Don’t replace me while I’m gone,” I prayed to him and to whomever else could be listening.

He promised that I was irreplaceable and I had no choice but to believe him.

It will take a while to tell Parker's story. I am cheating a little bit by allowing Stillwater's character to create kind of a first-person omniscient vibration. It's very difficult for me to switch from one character narrating in first person to another. I've seen that method work in one book that I loved in junior high--I can't remember the name of the book (was a pig one of the characters?) and I can't duplicate the feat. Stillwater is going to have to tell Parker's story, but first, I gotta know Parker's story. I thought I knew it, but, well, you know, things change.

I am, once again, pumped up on caffeine, so I may have a good thing going tonight as I try to tell her story. I've discovered, strangely, that I am at my most creative when writing Stillwater while listening to Maroon 5 on my jukebox. Don't ask, I don't know. I'll try the same playlist for Parker, but I may have to switch to something else if Adam Levine fails me. Taking all alternate suggestions...

Posting this without edits. I'll rewrite it later. Just wanted to get it up before getting back to work on the next development.

I am completely unused to actually having to listen to someone’s life story. I am nearly always faking it in one way or another and, here with Parker over super nachos and pitchers of margaritas, I don’t know when to laugh or when to hang myself by stringing together strips of my napkin and jumping off the wooden bench we’re sitting on so intimately. Are people always this detailed? And, I hate to say: boring? How many times can you tell the story of visiting your grandparents for the summer and in how many ways? I’m highly interested, though, in this girl and her habit of sitting no more than three millimeters away from me as she’s talking and animating herself into spastics. She’s sexy as hell and, honest to God, I’m trying to remember if pancakes Mom has ever displayed a written objection to her tenants fucking their new best friends in their single-bed, one-window rooms.

Then, I get it: Parker is making up half her shit she’s been telling me tonight. I know this because usually halfway through people’s stories, I can plunge in and surf the rest of the waves with them. As I say, I know where they’ve been, I know where they’re at, I know where they’re trying to go. With Parker, I was getting nowhere until I began to understand what she’s doing, which is lying to me.

I put aside, only temporarily, I assure you, any thoughts of taking her home with me and I take her hand until she stops talking (five long and crazy minutes). Leaning over, into her ear I whisper to her how much I really like her. She’s quiet, perfectly quiet, resisting the urge to dismiss me frivolously. I don’t say much else as our fingers interlock and I know it’s killing her to keep silent. I’m thrilled that she knows how to follow her instincts. Kisses almost imperceptible, I come to rest against her forehead with mine and ask her if she wants to start over from the beginning. Tell everything, but tell, this time, only truth.

Visiting the rewrite process for a second. With the first drafts no longer taking place in my journal, I'll have no real record of changes. I recovered the first draft of this paragraph through the undo feature in Word.

In duress, my memory always bails and I have no idea if I have any money. I know I’ve been at Ellery’s for a decent time, but for all I knew, he could have been paying me in chicken feed. Since I know Ellery to be nothing but an honest man, I’m assuming in my pocket is enough money for drinks and dinner and I accept Parker’s invitation.

I played with the paragraph for about three hours, clearly demonstrating why it took me three years to get those opening five paragraphs of this story.

In duress, my memory always bails and, standing in front of this girl, I have no idea if I have any money. I know I’ve been at Ellery’s for almost a year, but my work could be a payoff for a bet between him and cool cat gramps or some shit like that. I'm an indentured slave, I'm suddenly convinced. But, then, since I know Ellery and cool cat gramps to be nothing but honest men, I quash the slave slavery scare. I’m assuming in my pocket is enough money for our drinks and dinner, and I accept Parker’s invitation.

I'm enjoying Stillwater's character and I like having a little fun with him. Besides being the original book's doppelganger, his personality is based on my cousin Tony who died about 4 1/2 years ago at the age of 29. Tony was always ultra cool and ultra-accepting of people exactly as they came to him. He never suffered from Stillwater's memory loss, but the magnanimous way he treated people showed that he was quick to forget all our fuck-ups.

But enough about that beautiful boy. I'm never meaning to be this sentimental. It's that kind of day, I guess.

I forgot: I'm supposed to be writing.

One day soon, when I post this type of fragment fusion, the link will be over on the sidebar somewhere and a separate page will open for those who are following only the story and not the writing process. Until then, as in right now, the whole what-I've-got-so-far will be posted right down the middle of my rambling notes and commentary. Much cyberlove to my sexy HTML tutor when he and I get together this weekend. While we are waiting...

[Update: I still haven't figured out how to get a sidebar link to the ongoing story, but I did figure out the post-excerpts feature, so that's what I'm going with for now.]

[Updating the update: scrapping the post-excerpts feature. Filing under: bad idea]

Walking away, behind me my mother standing in the doorway in her unwashed housedress, hair sticking out in all kinds of crazy directionless ways, screaming something, screams being nothing to her but usual, but I admit something was different about this scream, maybe she was screaming for me to come back. Not, this time, maybe, screaming motherfucker. Not, this time, maybe, screaming lazy motherfucker. Didn’t sound exactly like stupid lazy motherfucker, could have been a plea. For me. Her son. To come back because today was, you know, one of those brand new days you sometimes read about. Different I’m sorry I promise I love you won’t you please come back. For a second, I adjusted my backpack and, carefully, my considerations. Stopped to capture the rhythm in her hysteria…ah, there it was…I was still a motherfucker. But I was a motherfucker who was now walking fast away from this shit and that alone makes me better than most motherfuckers you know.

Found a bit of a pad somewhere, not not close, not not far. Not sure how I pay for it, if I pay for it. Cool cat with lightning white hair we call gramps works the front desk and takes money from a few people. Mostly, he gives ‘em friendly shit of the workin’ hard/hardly workin’ variety. I like my room, nothing in it but me and a bed. Shower and head up the hall and I’ve counted five dudes walking in and out. No phone around the place. And this won-der-ful woman I feel obligated to call Mom and she has yet to call me motherfucker cooks us breakfast every morning, no fail. Eggs, toast, bacon, oatmeal, Frosted Flakes, and pancakes if we ask. We are on our own for lunch and dinner, but that breakfast can and does hold me all day sometimes.

Cool cat we call gramps tells me about a place maybe I can get a quick gig doing a few odd things, pick up a few bucks here and there. Am I out of work? I ask him this, hoping he knows ‘cuz I don’t. He laughs and slides me a small white card with an address written on it in tiny neat print. I bet it’s Mom’s writing. Guess I’ve eaten one too many pancake without some sort of monetary compensation. Not wanting to get on the bad side of anyone associated with this good place, I accept the card and head on out to find whatever it is I’m looking for.

Two blocks up, three blocks over, I get it, I’m there. New cool cat waiting for me and I like him already. I feel where he’s been, I’m at where he’s at, and I know where he’s trying to go. I tell him nothing of this as I introduce myself. I love how he says my name: STILL water. The Still intoned as nothing but, you know, very un-still as the word rises as an uphill stream. STILLwater Crowe, he says, and I am home.

I do my odds for him: sweeping floors, greeting customers, twirling a mop on such needed occasions. After about a minute, I figure out I’m not the most necessary employee hired in world history. Most of what I do, Ellery probably did himself before I got here or it just as well didn’t get done. Grateful, I work hard and fast, taking a break only when Ellery claims I’m about to give him a heart attack, I’m working so much.

I ask Ellery how he knows cool cat gramps. I ask, but I know. I know this the same way I know everything about certain people I meet. Their lives fold out in front of me a page at a time. I knew next to nothing about my mother even though, after sixteen years, we’d been together for over half her life. I knew nothing of my father since, I guess, his life choices weren’t about meeting me twice. As I sweep, I close my eyes and listen to Ellery and his smoker’s rasp tell the story that began fifty years before I was born when Ellery and cool cat gramps were young boys.

By accident, my laughter at one part of the story sounds too much like I’m very familiar with it, and I catch myself. Ellery barely notices, though, and keeps talking, dismissing my yeah, I know exactly what happens next with his own but you’re too young to know anything about that, boy. No point explaining, I’ve learned, that our experiences are universal and I may not have been with him on that particular street corner on that particular day, but, shit, we’ve all had best friends fuck us over. My universe speech gets lost, anyway, in the overall possibility that I just might have been there with him that day almost seventy years ago. Because how I know all this shit about these people, I haven’t quite figured out, yet. I was out of school more than I was in school at some point and maybe metaphysics was covered on one of the days I was out getting my ass kicked by my 103-pound mama.

Ellery asks about my mother and for one hot flashing second, I think he’s asking about my pancakes Mom over at the cool cat place, but then I get it he’s asking about that mother. I give some shitty answer that makes him temporarily defensive and I apologize, but she is no longer the focus, so it’s good.

I get myself to Ellery’s shop seven days a week. It’s a five block trek from the cool cat place, and the short distance makes it digestible and, therefore, understandable. Mine is not a memory issue or deficiency, it’s probably just that with so many other’s memories, I have limited room for my own. I don’t really think about it. I don’t analyze it. It is, as we say, what it is. I keep my people and activities constant and once I’m in a groove, I stay there.

Days are now months and I am spending more time alone in the shop, a place for odd pairings. It is organized only for those who know what they need in the moment they need it, but for those who wander in to look around curiously, the place is a nightmare. On the shelves, in a bin, under useless crap is the exact thing that a person has been missing, causing his life to stall or falter or fall, and it’s my job to help him find it. It’s a common object, clandestine in its real purpose: a screwdriver, a pen, ceramic mug or wire whisk. It’s the object that moves with a person from house to house, childhood to adulthood, that rattles in the kitchen cabinet, toolbox, or junk drawer, always present before or after a purge. We all have one, this linchpin that holds it all together, and once it’s lost, our lives trip end over end until it’s found.

In Ellery’s shop, the girl who was caught in a whopper of a lie by her mother and, seemingly unrelated to the lie, is known soon after as the redhead who hands out on demand orgasmic jobs to the high school football team when it was really just that one stupid boy that one stupid time comes in looking for her peso that is no longer rolling around in her desk drawer at home. She and I find it under a stack of early Hustler relatively quickly.

The father who has yet to learn the difference between being a bad parent and accusations by his three fucked up children of being a bad parent wanders into the shop having no idea why he’s there. His linchpin, which I know to be a silver button off a long ago jacket that belonged to his mother, is safely at home in a box on his top closet shelf. He is kind of shuffling down each aisle, confused about why the motor oil is next to the pain relievers, rebuffing my offers of help with a very sad just looking, thanks. He pauses briefly at the stack of Hustler magazines, I hold in a giggle, he walks out empty-handed. He didn’t need to be in here anyway.

Nose first, a massive dog peeks into the shop, either unaware or uncaring that he’s leashed and bound to the hand of his owner, a small dark-haired woman who weighs thirty pounds less, it seems, than her mastiff. She calls him, very sweetly, and he obeys, immediately withdrawing from the doorway. No longer pulling her along the sidewalk, he allows her to tie him to a street lamp four feet from the shop entrance. All at once, he prepares to drink his water, rest on the pavement, and guard the half-block radius surrounding Parker Gale.

I can’t help her, but she walks in, light and breezy and pretty and determined to misunderstand nearly every word that comes out of my mouth. She thinks flirting with me will help as she moves with a purposeful fluidity among bins that are overflowing with cheap shit never designed to advance her cause. I follow her because she attracts people that way. They—we—can’t stop ourselves. With a half smile, I sort with her a bin filled with screws, pencils and cassette tapes. My fingers come across a dog’s leash, prompting me to say: Awesome dog outside.

Her cursory thanks slam right up against her more pressing issue. “I used to have this woven vinyl key chain that I made at summer camp right before fifth grade. I had that key chain forever. I’m thinking that I accidentally threw it away and you, Stillwater, can’t tell me it’s not around here somewhere.”

“It’s not here and it’s irrelevant,” I said for the 400th time since she’d walked in. Evidently, girly had a lot of missing minutiae and what she needed most, apparently, was to stand next to me and catalogue its entirety. “What’s the dog’s name?”

“Neo, but I spell it N-e-e-y-o. He’s a Neapolitan mastiff.”

“That’s terrible,” I say out loud. Hell, she’d been in the store for almost two hours telling me the most intimate details of her life. By then, we were surely friends. Friends don’t let friends give their dogs intentionally misspelled fucked up names.

I untie the dog from his post and bring him inside the shop while Parker pulls his dinner from her backpack. I decided to call him, only between him and me, Ferocious Beast That Lazes in the Sun When Sated.

The shop closes after sunset only in the moment its customers find what they're looking for or when they give up the search for the day. That moment finally arrives for Parker at six minutes past midnight and I grab my keys before she finds another tangent to explore. Her energy is infectious, so although I’m ready to walk away from the shop, I’m not yet ready to let her walk away from me.

Ferocious B waits near the door and looks at me like I’m stupid, which, I guess, I am. I have no idea what to say or do next and it’s obvious to every being in the room. An inherently impatient Parker finally quasi-apologizes for making me work so late and wants to make it up to me by buying me a drink or a cup of coffee. The stupid boy in me refuses to decamp, and I ask after the welfare of Ferocious B. Something along the lines of shouldn’t she be getting him home, he’s been out all night kind of bullshit.

Parker raises an eyebrow in half-amusement, half-are you kidding me, and asks if I want to have a beer with her or not.

In duress, my memory always bails and, standing in front of this girl, I have no idea if I have any money. I know I’ve been at Ellery’s for almost a year, but my work could be a payoff for a bet between him and cool cat gramps or some shit like that. I'm an indentured slave, I'm suddenly convinced. But, then, since I know Ellery and cool cat gramps to be nothing but honest men, I quash the slave scare. I’m assuming in my pocket is enough money for drinks and dinner, and I accept Parker’s invitation.

I will say that I am unused to writing dialogue or any type of transitory text that gets my characters from one place to another. They usually just end up in the next place I need them to be with no real expository methods. But that lack of explanation was a main criticism of my earlier work and I'm trying to work through that now. My main fear is that the characters begin to ring false as they are talking, so I should just eliminate the talking altogether. And for a character to explain his feelings (except to dismiss them) as Stillwater is doing once he meets Parker is previously unheard of for me. I'm not a very sentimental person except in certain circumstances.

This is the first time since before high school, by the way, that quotation marks have appeared in something I've written and I absolutely positively cannot guarantee they'll survive the next edit. Quotation marks are too mainstream for me, I guess, and I tossed them right around ninth grade as being too cumbersome. But most times, our goal should be to communicate as clearly as possible with the reader even as we attempt to be unbound by rules and proper punctuation. It's a fine line and I hope I'm not compromising my personal writing style by floating toward normalcy.

A Raymond Carver short story that short story writers love to beat themselves up with:

For Sale: Baby shoes, Never used

He let the readers create their own backstories for this one. Brief, the most brief, really, but the imagination flies away with it. But since my story already has more than six words, I'd better be getting on with assisting the reader with the necessary explanations.

The shop closes after sunset in the moment its customers find what they're looking for or when they give up the search for the day. That moment finally arrives for Parker at six minutes past midnight and I grab my keys before she finds another tangent to explore. Her energy is infectious, so although I’m ready to walk away from the shop, I’m not yet ready to let her walk away from me.

I can't go any further into the narrative until I work out the age and backstory challenges. Obviously, Stillwater is no longer a teenager, but I'm thinking he is still living at the cool cat place, a boarding house. Where is Parker living? In this moment as they are leaving the shop together, does she have a place to go? I think I'll have to separate them tonight and they can meet up again later once those two questions are answered about their living arrangements.

I can’t help her, but she walks in, light and breezy and pretty and determined to misunderstand nearly every word that comes out of my mouth. She thinks flirting with me will help as she moves with a purposeful fluidity from bin to bin overflowing with cheap shit that will never at all advance her cause. I follow her because she attracts people that way. They—we—can’t stop ourselves. With a half smile, I sort with her a bin filled with screws, pencils and cassette tapes. My fingers come across a dog’s leash, prompting me to say: Awesome dog outside.

Frag continues here

Her absent-minded cursory thanks slam right up against her more pressing issue. “I used to have this woven vinyl key chain that I made at summer camp right before fifth grade. I had that key chain forever. I’m thinking that I accidentally threw it away and you, Stillwater, can’t tell me it’s not around here somewhere.”

“It’s not here and it’s irrelevant,” I said for the 400th time since she’d walked in. Evidently, girly had a lot of missing minutiae and what she needed most, apparently, was to stand next to me and catalogue its entirety. “What’s the dog’s name?”

“He’s a Neapolitan mastiff and there are lots of them named Neo and that’s what I named mine, but I spell it N-e-e-y-o.”

“That’s terrible,” I say out loud. Hell, she’d been in the store for almost two hours telling me the most intimate details of her life. By then, we were surely friends. Friends don’t let friends give their dogs intentionally misspelled fucked up names.

I untied the dog from his post and brought him inside the shop while Parker pulled his dinner from her backpack. I decide to call him, only between him and me, Ferocious Beast That Lazes in the Sun When Sated.

My writing day is being chopped into small pieces. Once I get started, it's time to run and do something else. I'm posting the frag as it is in this moment. Then, I'll pick up dinner ingredients and the Starbucks vanilla frappucino which should keep me awake the rest of the night. I can write in silence and get some work done after my day is over.

Nose first, a massive dog peeks into the shop, either unaware or uncaring that he’s leashed and bound to the hand of his owner guardian, a small dark-haired woman who weighs thirty pounds less, it seems, than her mastiff. She calls him, very sweetly, and he obeys, immediately withdrawing from the doorway. No longer pulling her along the sidewalk, he allows her to tie him to a street lamp four feet from the shop entrance. All at once, he prepares to drink his water, rest on the pavement, and guard the half-block radius surrounding Parker Gale.