Sunday, April 26, 2009

Excerpt from WIP

Lately, I have been thinking about, but not writing much on my novel in progress. However, tonight, after a happy, tiring day of digging in the garden, I actually worked on the novel for a while. Here's a short excerpt from the evening's writing:

It is amazing what happens to time when you are having a major life experience like your first relationship. It gets completely filled up. Every single moment becomes intensely saturated with significance. Later, when you look back, there are all these events, emotions, and significant moments packed in one after another and you remember them all perfectly. So it seems incredible when you realize that only, say, three weeks have gone by, yet more has happened than in three normal months. And those three months that you would have typically had in the past seem so pale, empty, and pathetic compared to every colourful, jam-packed hour in your current eventful life.

That’s how it felt for me when Percy and I began going out together. It’s like all my senses got switched from sleep mode to full on. I smelled coffee with an intensity that almost made me faint, and suddenly I could see things around me with the clarity of an artist – the colours, the composition, the pattern of twigs against a winter sky. Yet at the same time, every little nerve ending was like an antenna tuned to the frequency of Percy; every part of my body was alike an octopus tentacle reaching towards Percy. The pop music singers always sing about the “electricity” of love, or the “magnetism” of their lover, and I totally discovered what they meant. I felt astonishingly alive, the blood pulsing under my skin, and I could hardly even recall how dull and vacant my life had been only weeks before.

2 comments:

  1. I love your description and how I completely know the feelings you're describing. I would definitely like to read more.

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  2. Hi Jen!

    I forgot to mention when I posted this that it is written from the point of view of an adolescent girl who has just started having her first relationship.

    gideon

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