the first paragraph

She was paying bills in 1984. Big brother was not watching. Or was he? There were fleeting moments in the quiet times when she was alone in the apartment that a wisp of a presence entered the room. Or was it her imagination? 

Kenny had been laid to rest a year ago, yet her brother's life and essence hung around, lingering in her thoughts much more so than she would have ever predicted. She had not seen him since the birth of her daughter in 1977. He visited her in the hospital, held that tiny angel, who was an ounce shy of six pounds, on his lap with both arms protecting her sides, as if she could roll off. He gazed at her forever, tears welled up in his eyes, and Carma realized he was thinking about his own baby, the one they wouldn't let him see. Not even a photograph. Neither of them said a word. 

She did not know how much she loved her brother until he was gone without a hug. 

She did not know how often she would think of him or how deeply his pain would reach into her for understanding and clutch her heart. 

She did not know she would write a book about the pain of stigma, neurological disorders, and the mysterious veil between hallucination and imagination. 

She sat cross-legged on the floor, barefoot, writing paper checks to pay bills by mail, as was common habit in that decade. One of her three cats lazily approached, stretched, and without warning began massaging the her bare skin with claws out.

"Ouch! Knock it off, Angie!" 

Instantly, without effort or resistance, words tumbled into her head. It was as if they fell out of the sky, just like the cat's mother, Skyla did, four years earlier. Just as spontaneously, her hand moved the pen, scribbling furiously, a couple of sentences about a girl and a telepathic cat in a strange world. The girl's name was Cherry. The cat in the story was Anjl. The girl was a runaway. The cat was a friend, a guide, native to the planet. 

The paragraph was written on the back of a torn envelope. That was all that came to her. She pondered the scrap of an idea for a few minutes and set it aside. She had no further inspiration at that time. 

A storm was brewing deep in her subconcious where sadness and anger about how her brother was treated by society seeped in curiosity about neuroses, what happens when a person loses their sanity, and wondering if daydreaming wasn't almost the same thing as hallucination. Plus, what the heck was deja vu? Eerie, that's what. She had experienced it hundreds of times. The first time she was ten years old and didn't even know the name for that weird feeling. And don't even get her started about out-of-body travel! 

So many curiosities. What makes people so afraid of losing their minds? 

The following Monday she took the scrap of a story idea to work, because the receptionist, Patty, always had a book to read when it was slow. She would show it to Patty and ask her what she thought of it. She and Patty became the best of friends that year, as Patty encouraged her to write more, peppered her with questions, gave her suggestions, and read every page Carma typed. They took lunches together and spent evenings and weekends hashing out a short story to send to a science magazine. That was the plan, until Patty kept begging her to write more--make it a novel!  

That is how the creative process begins for Carma. Spontaneously. She never had any aspiration to write science fiction. She had never read science fiction. She barely liked science fiction movies at that point (now she loves them!) 

The truth is, Carma invented a planet, a plot and an array of characters, but had it not been for this one enthusiastic reader wanting to know more about this and that, giving her feedback, pushing her along, the story would have been abandoned and never finished. 

Thanks to Patty Sovic, there is such a thing as The Saardu Trilogy. Not everybody loves a crazy writer's mind as much as Patty does, nonetheless, Saardu is now a big fat book. 

Patty & Carma, 2014

Next: first draft