Blank Slate
an excerpt

Olivia murmured something soothing. Honestly, she had never met Mamma, seeing as how she had been dead for years, and she didn’t much care what Mamma thought about her or writers or the Jones River Writers Colony. She was only at the insistence of her shrink and her agent.

She stood in the door and watched Joanne scurry down the path, back to the central compound. Olivia was staying in the most remote of the cabins. She had specifically asked to be as far away from the other writers as possible. Honestly, she hated writers. They were so damn pompous and self involved. How many hours of her life had she lost to workshops, seminars and intensives? All to sit around and listen to a bunch of gas bags blather on, blowing wind up each other’s skirts about how they were the next generation of the great American novelist.

Olivia had no such illusions. She was a writer of what the industry called “mainstream literature.” She knew she would never see her books on any “top novels” lists. Which is not to say she hadn’t started out wanting that, every writer did, especially the ones who protested the loudest that they didn’t want it. But she had learned early on that she was good at writing the kind of novel that the average American read while riding the bus or sitting on the beach during summer vacation. Which, all things considered, was still better than sitting at a damn desk somewhere, pushing papers from the inbox to the outbox, worrying about who was fucking whom and why, exactly, she should care.