The opening of my memoir (The Writers Guild of Free Republic)

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Posted on 12/28/2024 2:19:27 PM PST by Ciaphas Cain

Lazamataz started a Writer's Guild awhile back and last week he shared some of his thoughts about the novel he's writing. In the spirit of the endeavor, and because I'm really eager to hear what others think about it, I'm posting the opening of the memoir (actually more of a full autobiography) that I finished the first draft of last month.

Please feel free to post your honest thoughts and opinions about it, no matter how brutal. It's the only way I'm going to improve.

Bit of context: this is how the entire book starts. It's in first person just this one small section. After that it jumps to 33 years earlier, and from there the book is in first person. I just wanted to have better "camera control" over this scene...

September, 2016…

Not another human soul is in sight along the remote highway cutting a tight line through the New Mexico desert. The sun beats down upon the landscape, bathing the scrub and mesas with late-summer glare. A white-winged dove flits across the sky.

The camera zooms in to track the lone vehicle upon this road. A silver Toyota Camry bearing North Carolina registry. The car is packed for a long journey.

The driver is a man in his early forties but has often been told he looks much younger. Laying in his lap is a miniature dachshund, who occasionally raises her head to survey the scenery they are passing through.

It is somewhere along this desolate route that the man does something he has always wanted to do if he found himself in this kind of place. He rolls down the windows, turns up the car’s stereo, and starts playing “Mrs. Robinson” as he crosses the desert floor.

It is an epic moment. The man has long envisioned that it would be the kind of scene from a motion picture. And now at last he gets to be the star.

As the song winds down, the man discovers that he is all out of jalapeño-flavored peanut brittle. He curses himself. “I’ve got to stop eating that stuff like there’s no tomorrow.”

The car continues down the lonely road, as the man’s thoughts drift upon the adventure so far. They didn’t want to believe he could do it. They tried to stop him. But the vision was too affixed. The calling too strong. This might have been the only chance in his life since his mind became his own again, that he would have to break away. To at last become the person he was meant to be. It was either take a leap of faith and live, come what may. Or die alone and unfulfilled in certain bitter regret. And the man did not want that.

The dog is now sitting up in his lap, looking out the window. She seems to appreciate the beauty also.

Until the man came here he had no idea that the desert possessed such a rich palette of color to draw from. Humbled to play his part in the portrait of this parched wilderness, he now muses upon the span of his life, and marvels at the events and people who came along the way that brought him to this moment.

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As I said, thoughts and opinions are most welcome.

1 posted on 12/28/2024 2:19:27 PM PST by Ciaphas Cain

To: Lazamataz

2 posted on 12/28/2024 2:19:47 PM PST by Ciaphas Cain (A perfect storm. There will be no escape from what is coming.)

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