Inertia Installment #2

Here is the second weekly installment of Inertia the novel. You've met Jake. Introducing...Angela. (Click the image below for easier viewing)

Inertia Sneak Peek!

I will be publishing the prologue and first chapter in weekly installments now until the release date (April 18th, 2011), so stay tuned for more. Thanks to Debbi Wraga at The Shires Press, we get to use the actual text. Here is the first one; it's from the Prologue. Inertia has two narrators. Meet Jake. (Click on the text below for easier viewing).

Inertia promo...

“Only the good die young,” croons Billy Joel, and we all know exactly what he’s talking about. It is always those who are too light, too bright for this planet that seem to make their exits early. We concede that it could be in part because they are immortalized in the bloom of their youth, too soon to make the mistakes the rest of us make sooner or later and live to regret, but we wonder, somehow, if it isn’t something more than that.

What if…they are special? Spirits, angels even, who have agreed somewhere out in the ether, before they took bodies in this life, to come to earth for only short periods at a time, bless those they come in contact with intensely, and then leave again, lift off into the next cycle of life and love? And what if…you had the unlikely experience of knowing such a spirit twice in one lifetime? Once as their peer and once as their elder?

How we long for such a reprieve from the losses we experience, how we hope to be brushed, even for an instant, with the ethereal traces of the one who is gone from us. What if it happened for real, and you knew it?

Inertia the novel...

I receive the galley proof of Inertia. It is in fact a book. A novel that I am preparing to send into the world as on a little boat with candles and flower-petal-confetti. I send it out on the waters of its gentle birth. It carries with it my most perfect intention.

On the night it is in transit to me, the night of my waiting, I am visited by M in my dream. He is sunny and sandy and fully alive. He is grinning and nodding his awe and approval, a look I remember well from when I would introduce him to a new poem, a new concept, a new meditation. It was so vivid, and I remember appreciating the accuracy and likeness of this dream M with the real boy I knew and loved in my time at HPA.

It was a simple message, one of many--it said, wordlessly, Yes. And Oh. Mmm. M's smile said You are onto it, Kim. This thing came into being of its own accord. It has its own life now. He expressed universal gratitude for my willingness to sit for three months straight at a child desk with a cafe chair and the hope of a trade wind to kiss my forehead from the high window I faced all that time. He said Thank you for being so small so these ideas could pour themselves into your long shadow, let you collect them like seashells or Job's tears, as from a river, set them against sky like morning stars. 

I knew when I woke that I was moving with the universe, not against it. That there was something divine in the whole celestial arrangement of those shells, those gorgeous little tears. I saw them as my love, grown from the grains of my early distress into the gift which I now lift over my head and offer back to the sky, to every single soul who desires it. Indeed, to God.