Shock Wave: Part 19- I Listened
Catch up before you continue on with the story.
Cindy and I woke up the next morning and left the small motel in the town of Tracy behind after fueling up the gas tank and our bodies at what seemed like the town’s only gas station. We had roughly six hours left, of driving through the Northern part of California that everyone forgets about, before we could even cross the state boarder into Oregon and I wasn’t really sure where we were going after we got up there. The hitchhiking passenger in my car’s front seat was still being incredibly mysterious, and I still didn’t know anything about how she was related to this strange story. As we made our way back to the five-freeway I decided to make it my mission to find out more about the stranger sitting beside me. (more…)
Writing Through Writer’s Block
Via David McQueen
“Bad writers are bad because they stop too soon. In fact, let’s take a step back. The only quality, I think, that marks the writer as different from everyone else is simply an unwillingness to quit. Others give up when they learn writing is hard; the writer struggles on. When I sit down in front of the blank page, it’s no easier for me to fill it than anyone else. The non-writer looks at the blank page and — quite sensibly — says, ‘forget it, I’m outta here.’ But if they had to, they could put a few words down there — just like I do. Only the words wouldn’t be any good. So the non-writer gets frustrated, gives up and leaves. Me, too, I get frustrated… but I sit there, and work to make it better. Anybody who’s willing to struggle, I think, can write. The real work is to stick at it until you find the gold. To get to that funny line. To do the hard work no one else wants to do, but everyone wants to have done. To discover the great character bit, the clever story turn. Until you have it, you don’t have it. Until it’s there, it’s not there — and you need to stick at it until it is there.”
— Terry Rossario
It seems as though the only way to pull a writer out from the depths of absolute nothingness is to force a gun up to their head and tell them to write. It’s as if the stern actions from their jacked-up ridiculously terrifying action hero of a muse has the power to lift the verbal blockage that releases the most wonderful stories known to man. Why is it though that I have to force myself to write in order to overcome the mind boggling pause in my creative stream of consciousness? (more…)
Shock Wave: Part 18- The Nightmare
Catch up before you continue on with the story.
There it was again, an attractive woman with short blonde hair wearing jeans and a white button up t-shirt that was two sizes too big sat before Sarah in a car.
“Ready?” The woman said to Sarah as she threw the old blue Chevy pickup truck into gear.
“Yes,” Sarah said.
The woman scrunched her tiny nose and let her bright sparkly blue eyes peek through behind her long lashes as she smiled at Sarah. “Okay, this is it then. There’s no turning back.” (more…)
Shock Wave: Part 17- The Escape
Catch up before you continue on with the story.
Sarah Liera had been trapped underneath her psychiatrist’s desk in the middle of the night for over an hour before that same psychiatrist got up and left to use the restroom again. If it wasn’t for the hot tea rushing though his body at the moment Sarah could have been trapped there all night.
She made her move quietly and quickly when she heard the door shut and threw the file back in to the cabinet and shut it all in one swipe. She then shuffled off into the front room and eventually out of the window nearly hurling herself outside of the building. She never stopped running once her feet hit the dirt and she traveled into the dark with no newly acquired knowledge that she so desperately sought. (more…)
Times Are Changing
In a matter of five months my life has went from incredibly depressing to surfing the skies on cloud nine, and the rapid shift in my life’s progression has left me with the strangest time-elapsing whip lash. So much has happened that at times I feel I can’t comprehend the amount I’ve accomplished in this period and, oddly enough, I feel I haven’t finished this trend of quickly occurring positive changes yet.
Recently, while sitting in my comfy office chair, located inside the Bakersfield Californian building, I was offered to cover a quick feature story on one of my old high school teachers. After getting in touch with him via email, he responded to my inquiry and agreed to be interviewed by his former student. (more…)
Shock Wave: Part 16- Big Sky Country
Catch up before you continue on with the story.
“Tell me a little about yourself,” I asked the hitchhiker lying in the motel bed next to mine. I had met Cindy that morning and traveled with her for that entire day but I didn’t really know anything about her.
“I suppose I could give you that much since you haven’t kicked me out yet and that you’re actually driving me all the way to Oregon,” Cindy said. “I really didn’t know if you were going to go through with it.”
“I’m being coerced though.”
“You’re just really nosy and want to hear the rest of my story.” (more…)
Shock Wave: Part 14- The Break In
Catch up before you continue on with the story.
Subtle sounds of snoring slipped out from the body lying next to Sarah. It was now her chance to sneak out from the large wooden house in the woods and off to break into her psychiatrist’s office in town. It was a risky operation, but she was running out of time before someone caught on that she wasn’t taking the mysterious medication that was making her forget her past. She couldn’t mess up either tonight, because her husband and her psychiatrist were forcibly drugging her to forget something she couldn’t imagine what they would do to her if they found out she had started to remember. (more…)
Shock Wave: Part 13- Remember Who To Trust
Catch up before you continue on with the story.
The plan was incredibly simple. Slip outside the house while her husband was sleeping and sneak into Dr. Aislinn’s office in town to look for some answers to her past and possible help restore her memory completely. The problem, however, was her ability to actually pull this off without getting caught by the individuals who wanted her to forget something important. (more…)
Shock Wave: Part 12- The Old Chevy Pickup
Catch up before you continue on with the story.
An attractive woman with short blonde hair wearing jeans and a white button up t-shirt that was two sizes too big sat before Sarah in a car.
“Ready?” The woman said to Sarah as she threw the old blue Chevy pickup truck into gear.
“Yes,” Sarah said.
The woman scrunched her tiny nose and let her bright sparkly blue eyes peek through behind her long lashes as she smiled at Sarah. “Okay, this is it then. There’s no turning back.” (more…)
Shock Wave: Part 11- The Trick
Catch up before you continue on with the story.
It had been about three and a half hours since I first got into the car back in Los Angeles County. Three of those hours had been spent driving up into the Central Valley with a strange hitchhiker, on a secret agenda, that was in the middle of telling me this disturbing story. I had no clue why this story was being told, how this random hitchhiker was involved, and why I was nearly being held hostage and driving north toward the state of Oregon. But like the girl in the story, I felt my future lied in the answers I would uncover about my captor’s past.
(more…)
Shock Wave: Part 10- What Was Forgotten?
Catch up before you continue on with the story.
She felt that feeling in the pit of your stomach that heated up your body with anguish. She felt nauseated as the rhythm of her heart beat faster. Flashes of past events briefly flooded her mind while sweat dripped out of her pores. There, a woman wearing jeans and a white button up t-shirt that was two sizes too big looking at Sarah from the deep crevices of her unconscious mind, and although she had no name, Sarah new this woman was the key to remembering everything. (more…)
Shock Wave: Part 9- Question Everything
Catch up before you continue on with the story.
She spoke about it to the psychiatrist. A flood of images swiftly flashed across her mind bringing distorted memories she couldn’t quite remember. It’s as if she had woken up from a long night of rest and spontaneously recalled a very intense dream from that night before. She tried holding on to every little bit of what was being remembered in that moment, but as quickly as the images came, they all began to fade away. An important piece of her soul had been locked away somewhere in the vast open space within her mind. There was no way of grasping the intangible—especially without her knowing where to search for it in the first place. (more…)
Shock Wave: Part 8- Death on the Couch
Catch up before you continue on with the story.
A few weeks had passed since she wandered out of the woods and entered in to the wooden house. A local doctor called by her husband had come by to stitch up her small head wound and she had spent all of her free time trying to remember her life before the day she woke up in the middle of the forest.
She hadn’t connected with her husband James since she first walked through the front door. There were no feelings of intimacy or affection for this strange man and, frankly, she wasn’t even sure if she liked him as a person. She did, however, try her best to fix the situation by just going with everything, but the line was drawn when conversation about their love life turned into attempted action in the bedroom. (more…)
Shock Wave: Part 7- What Would She Have Done?
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We continued on the ninety-nine north past the fork in the road where the five north split off. Normally, if I were planning on heading up north out of the Valley and up to northern California I would have turned off and taken the five, but I was still hoping to get rid of my story telling hitchhiker sitting in the passenger seat. (more…)
Shock Wave: Part 6- The Day I Nearly Dropped Her Off In a Ditch
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I had made up my mind somewhere in the snow covered mountains of the Grapevine path. My mysterious and strange hitchhiker would be ditched right after the five split off from the ninety-nine somewhere near Arvin, and I would continue traveling north to Bakersfield. I was worried about how this would actually happen. She could easily have a weapon on her person and keep me hostage until I dropped her off in Oregon, or could find some way to track me down since she went through my purse, and I realized that this ditching maneuver could be my last. (more…)
The Story of Graduation
It was sort of funny, at first, everyone I’ve ever needed to email or talk to decided to up and leave before I could have a quick chat with them. I wanted the fall 2012 quarter to be my last quarter at Cal Poly Pomona, but instead the school was secretly working their administration magic to keep me paying for a way to get out.
Undergraduates at the school have to pay $6,624 for tuition, an estimated $1,500 for books, $106 for parking per quarter, and some classes, like my dance course, requires you to go see plays that often require purchasing $50 tickets. That’s not including gas/transportation cost, room and board, groceries, and other necessary living costs, so you could understand my reasoning for just wanting to be done with school.
The problem is that the school is seemingly putting so many obstacles in front of you that you can’t graduate on time. (more…)
Shock Wave: Part 5- The House on the Edge of the Woods
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Hitchhiker Cindy and I continued traveling along my usual path toward the center of California. I still wasn’t sure if I should drop her off in the first town outside the mountains of the Grapevine and continue further north heading home, or just take her all the way to Oregon. I was still concerned for my safety at this point because I really had no clue as to who she was or what she was capable of, and any attempts of finding out these facts seemed to be dragged out and hidden behind this strange story she was telling me.
“Is this story describing what happened to you in the woods or something?” I asked the hitchhiking storyteller.
“No. No, but it relates to me and why I’m here right now,” my passenger said. “Just keep listening and I promise by the time I’m done everything will make sense.” (more…)
Shock Wave: Part 4- In The Woods
Catch up before you continue on with the story.
Cindy and I collected ourselves after the small freak-out at the gas station and made our way down the road again. I was a little ruffled by the growing sense of insanity that I’ve noticed in my hitchhiker’s behavior, and I was worried that my journey north wouldn’t end as well as I would hope. I moved my car to the second most right lane on the highway—close enough to quickly merge over and onto a nearby exit just in case my passenger’s mood shifted again, but out of the way of the slow moving 18-wheeler trucks blindly cutting off their fellow motorists. It was then in that moment when Cindy began to tell me the one story I wish I had never heard. (more…)
Living with a Vampire: Part 3- The Bed
As published in Uloop news.
The next day, one of my roommates who I had met in architecture school approached me about the vampire. She told me that she heard the vampire’s bed slowly, but steadily, squeaking all night long. They tried turning up some music to drown out the sound, but the noise was so loud that nothing would help. A day later, my other roommate from architecture mentioned the same thing. The noise just wouldn’t stop.
Eventually the vampire tried to drown out the noise that she was making all night by blasting Death Cab for Cutie. It didn’t help a thing and, if anything, she only sort of ruined a few of their songs for me. The noise continued for a few weeks, and then finally the noises at night ceased. The vampire decided to make these noises during the daytime. (more…)
