GIVE FEEDBACK FOR START OF NOVEL

Hi fellow writers

This is a proposed start of novel.
Protagonist is Flor "the urchin"

her grandfather, whom she hated when he was alive (and vice versa) is seeing her life from the void, he has died.

Please offer any feedback or thoughts you may have, all are appreciated.

Here it is:

UNTITLED NOVEL PROJECT:






Each of us is all the sums he has not counted: subtract us into nakedness and night again, and you shall see begin in Crete four thousand years ago the love that ended yesterday in Texas.

- Thomas Wolfe






Here, in the void, there is darkness, but we are not alone.
People who I had known on the physical plane do not appear to me here, but there are others in the empty field. The distance is indefinable, endless, but others are everywhere, omnipresent. A circular presence envelops, we are not alone, there are no words, thoughts have no words, there are stars, there is blackness. You feel the thoughts, there is no articulation. I have been in the dark chamber with the mind on occasion, though you see nothing, feel nothing, it is revealing awareness, transmitting something that I receive in a tangible way, and I comprehend but it has no words or thoughts in it. There is also no I, though I have a boundary where I start and end, it is not drawn. My family, the people I knew, loved, disliked, I remember them clearly but I have no attachment to them, no love, fondness or animosity clouds my picture of them, they simply are there, out-pictured with no words. My mountains, a clear, ice cold river tumbling down the Sawtooth, the horse, the fire, smoke pine cobalt hot yellow dry sun, hawks.

After I appeared in the void the view became unadulterated by personal prejudices.

The urchin, Flor, well, here I see her life like a moving diorama. It is presented to me, I have no choice in the matter, but I have no objection to it. An overseer appointed in silence by a mind who has no name.



This girl was the bastard product of two people who were unfit to marry: my only daughter Geneva and the liaison of desperation, Jerry. He was irredeemably below my vision of who Geneva should have been with. The hours, weeks, months and years of piano study and toil, the strings of pearls, the masters degree. This offspring of theirs and I did not get along when I was in the physical plane, and when we had her in the house I was reminded of the father and it rankled me. She once piped an insult at her dead mother when we had people over for the wake, and I rapped her on her little eight-year-old head with my knuckles viciously. Usually I reserved my contempt for her under the cloak of leaden silence, but when the opportunity arose to level her, humiliate her to her core, I savored that. Her presence was just such a penultimate reminder of failure. She would insult me in the car when we took road trips, Carmen my wife, and I, and she would toss insolence at me by criticizing my driving. An urchin is what she was like. Arriving like a tattered package that was sent to the wrong address each June, it was Carmen who took care of her and let her in. I preferred not to have anything to do with that dilapidated tryst. Geneva was off somewhere drunk through and through, unable to tie her shoes and the Lothario, well, he was on his seventh wife somewhere in California. The unattractive, penniless, self-adoring Lothario. Neither were fit, all an unquenchable oil fire burning out of control and here was this contemptible urchin sitting at my kitchen table eating my blackberries and cream.

When I first entered the void, the urchin got hold of a few of my pieces, but the elder sister, a product of the one legitimate marriage Geneva managed to secure until the husband blew his brains out with a pistol, stole most of my art. There was a ring carved and made smooth as ash and velvet from walnut wood, and several small pieces, cups from red cedar, the statuette of an African warlord. These trinkets I spent days and weeks lathing, sanding, sculpting, perfecting, may be the rope that binds us in the void. She carries them all over the world with her and as they go, so goes my vision into the thread of her story. My prior ire towards her can't exist here, we feel a remnant of emotion that is so infinitesimal you could say we don't feel now as we knew the tidal charge of emotion on the physical plane. In the vacuum there is no fear.

The present journey for Flor began with my words to her through a psychic medium in a storefront metaphysical bookstore in Venice, California, 2017. I had not prior sought a way to inject my omnipotent vantage point into the urchin's life, but the mind turned my awareness and there I was, my view pooled in the mouth of a woman with tarot cards and bleached blonde hair with bangs. There was Flor's daughter with autism, that was the anchor of my word, something the woman with bleached hair could not know. Flor was afraid she would be arrested at the airport and the daughter gobbled up by a cold government machine. Her daughter was a bastard creation as well, as we know it in the physical, the fruit of pure gritty lust, this time the bearer of the seed an introverted Scientologist with no interest in anything more than wealth and copulation, whisky and a butt, Mercedes and Asian go-go girls. The kind that demands a paternity test or it didn't happen.

You will make it, you can do it, compelled by the force of my connection to the ring and the girl, my granddaughter, the lady with the cards delivered the outcome. The urchin said to the lady with the bleached bangs, “It can't be him, we hated each other when he was alive, I mean hated each other.”

She had known the word was from me, she had the worn wood ring on her right index finger and she twisted it around and decided to jump. They were pushed up against the edge of a cliff by forces that could not be surmounted head on, and they jumped.