It’s a crisp Autumn morning. Halloween morning. Our giant maple tree rains dying leaves onto piles of their comrades. I’m sipping the last of my caramel coffee. And my orange cat just jumped onto my lap.

I have a million and a half items written on my to-do list. The dishes pile high. My clothes in the basket are wrinkling. Yet, all I want to do is write. I’ve so missed writing. Can you tell?

The past few months, my days have been filled with baking and decorating cakes and cookies, chaperoning field trips, painting new art, PTA duties, home chores, family dramas, etc. etc. One thing I haven’t been able to do is write.

Perhaps I need the motivation to write. I have enough ideas swirling in my head, but I just don’t have the assurance that my words will be heard. My last books have yet to be published, so it truly is difficult to write new ones without the certainty of acceptance. So, maybe I need to create my own motivation. Maybe I need to force my words to be heard?

There’s so so so SO much I don’t know. SO much I question. Am I doing the right thing…choosing the right career…picking the right things on my to-do list… One thing I do know is: I LOVE to write. I miss it. And I can’t let the fear of failure stop me any more.

So, my amazing reader, I’m giving you a treat instead of a trick. I want to show you something I’m working on. A piece of me. Words from my inner soul. Words that have yet to be seen by ANYONE. Yup, these are brand new. So brand new that they aren’t completely edited yet. So, please don’t judge me too hard!! I just can’t keep my words to myself anymore. I’m asking you, my amazing reader, to help motivate me to continue writing this book. I know in my heart it COULD be wonderful. It COULD be a hit. I just need to finish it and release it to the world.

So, without further hype, here are the beginning words of my latest young adult novel, GRAVE. It’s a supernatural fantasy, and the story of nonliving girl named Grave. I’ll let my words tell you the rest…

Chapter 1

I lived in purgatory. A slug-infested world of endless days stacking on days.
Time just ran so stupidly slow without the key around my neck. Earth rotated like a snail. Dust and rock dissipated like the wake of slime on moss and mildew. It didn’t stop nor spin counterclockwise. Each path, life, and body of dust fell in linear time.
Life was filled without real- well, without real life. None I could touch, anyway.
In this year, more people existed in the backward centuries. Death took 119.07 Billion… No, it was 119.071 billion…119.072…119.08. Death was busy. He was always busy.
How’d that ol’ saying go? There’s nothing certain except death and taxes? I knew nothing about tax, but my brother, Death, was as certain as time itself. Certain to stop life at every rotation of spinning rock and dust.
Today shone as gloomy as any other November afternoon. I slithered up from the worms, soil, and roots and rested against the limestone. The broken, cold statue of a girl guarding Corinne Elliott Lawton greeted me with hollow eyes. The stone angel above the Morgan family raised his hand in a forever frozen wave. The weeping, clothed angel on Smith Livingston hid her face from me. My fellow lifeless guards. Their gazes washed over me like my brother’s never would.
The sun moved to hide behind my favorite clouds. Nimbostratus—if anyone cared to know. A gentle wind flicked the palm and olive trees, pulling back their curtains to reveal the Savannah River. A delicate view for the unseeing corpses.
I felt none of it. Not the wind. Not the sunbeams. Nor the sand crackling under my Converse. Not because I was a ghost. Nah. That’d be too simple a term.
“Look! It’s the guy from our storybook.” The voice of a young boy-child broke through the rows of deteriorating limestone.
“Not possible. He didn’t have a first name.” A girlish voice answered him.
I crept closer to witness two young humans laying flowers over their grandmother. The boy hugged his chest in folds of thick, wool fabric. He tossed blond hair from long eye lashes and wiped his nose dry. He whimpered and moped like so many others who visited my burial ground homes.
Pity. They wouldn’t have to mourn their kin if they simply took up residence with them. They all did soon enough anyhow.
The girl laughed. A rare sound in my world. “This guy died in 1959.” She pointed to the stained tombstone then to the fresh one where their flowers lay. “That says grammy was born in 1955. That’d mean she was alive in Bible times and that can’t be right. She was old, but come on. Don’t be stupid.”
“It could’ve been. You don’t know everything.” The boy’s words mumbled and tumbled over each other as he argued and called to a father who never left the idling car.
The girl chuckled again, shoved the boy’s shoulder, and twirled her black, lace dress. Both left through the cemetery’s rusty gates and climbed into their hearse. Arguing the entire time.
As the car drove from sand to asphalt, I traced the tips of my hands along the engraved “C.” Years of soot and mildew passed through me as if I was mere wind. I single breath held in time.
Perhaps that’s the best way to describe my existence: I’m the moment between heartbeats; a held breath; the space separating blood cells. I’m the fraction between life and death.
Death. Death isn’t a stranger to me. Life, on the other hand, I’ve yet to meet her.
My fingers hovered as I finished tracing the “n.” A wolf spider glided over what should be my nail. Fuzzy, brown fur protected his legs.
“Hey, friend.”
The spider turned to me. Glowing eyes searched for my voice. But I wasn’t talking to him.
The engraved name of RAVENEL CAIN stared at me. The girl was right; he wasn’t the same man from the Bible. He was his great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great grandson.
But it wasn’t my task to keep track of every Cain. I had enough to worry about without being my brother’s keeper.
I nodded my respects to Ravenel as I allowed my form to pass into the loose Earth beside his monument. Layer of worms, shale, underwater streams, and molten rock whizzed past before I emerged once again.
Row upon row of crescent-shaped tombstones greeted me. Incredible peace held onto the quiet and solitude.
Then again, was I ever truly alone?
“Hello, Ahmed. Still in there?” I lowered my head to the wet dirt and waited for movement. Silence answered back. “Ahmed, check.” I strolled to the next stone. “Caporal Amar…check. Brinis Amar…” I paused. A squirrel ran across the cement path. He chirped at me, but the ground remained still. “Check.” I waved a finger through my imaginary clipboard.
The clouds darkened as I finished scoping the modest cemetery of 1700 French Expeditionary Corps soldiers. The heavens broke. Rain beaded on my palm before seeping through. Past the camouflage of ashen skin. Past the absence of veins and bone. Droplets dribbled through me like newly watered flower pots.
A tall figure in a rainbow raincoat knelt before a monument with a bouquet of pure white lilies. His face hid behind a hood. The jacket’s pattern faded as if exposed to years of sunlight. Streaks of red and blue morphed into dull pink and violet. He knelt with rounded shoulders, ignoring my presence like the rest of humanity.
I walked away from the figure. My fingers glided along rough stones. Decades of sun and hail jagged the slate to appear like ancient marble. Time and elements mold each rock in their own unique way. Unlike me, they change with the coarse of time.
“What does the sun feel like?” I climbed to sit on a monument marked with a single word: Inconnu. The French word for unknown. But it was a lie. I knew him. I knew them all. “Do you remember the feel of its rays, Benjamin?”
I paused. A woodpecker beat the snot out of a neighboring sycamore. A gardener gathered a forgotten tin can half full of old beer. Dust fell from my stained Converse.
They came from dust, and to dust they returned. It’s poetic really.
“You’re not dust yet, are you Ben?”
I suppose I could’ve taken a peak at Ben’s skeleton. A few centuries into decomposing, he’d be nothing but teeth and brittle framework. But I liked to give the dead their privacy. I wouldn’t want to be caught naked either.

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And that’s it for your taste of my work! I hope you enjoyed this little look into “Grave” on this crisp Halloween day. I welcome all feedback and thoughts. Until we meet again, I think I’ll go back to writing…