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Genre: Other Genres
About s.e.barringtonLocation: Maryland Home Region: Website: http://littlejoys.wordpress.com Favorite novels: The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, Catch 22, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, Snow Flower and the Secret Fan Non-noveling interests: Printmaking, paper-cutting, crochet, dessert, not running marathons |
Joined: October 29, 2008 This Year: Official Participant NaNoWriMo History: NaNoWriMo posts: 0 NaNoWriMo buddies: 2
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Brief Author Bio: My name is Sarah. I'm a graphic designer for the money, a printmaker/paper-cutter/tearer/gluer for the fun, and a writer for the therapy (I write a lot). I'm descended from (what I like to imagine is) a centuries-long line of creative people: musicians, dancers, photographers, painters, woodworkers, writers, storytellers, and passionate consumers of ice cream. I'm also a neurotic perfectionist, but let's not get into that. I have a husband who’s allergic to everything, a house that needs to be cleaned, and a healthy obsession with pineapples. I’m also a Libra, which means I like everything to be in balance, which really means I harbor a deep fear of making decisions because if I accidentally make the wrong one it may create turmoil in my life and quite possibly cause the world to explode. And we can’t have that. And I'm sure it all stems from the fact that my mother nearly ruined my life by making me left handed at the tender age of thirteen months, while waiting in line at the bank. |
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Synopsis: An Abrupt and Meaningless End
Ivah Wheller is a writer and industry expert on punctuational aesthetics, who lives a pretty good life in the bustling twin cities of Manhattan and Amber. And when she's not evaluating the emotional impact of commas, communicating with her best friend and colleague through their Invisible Cosmic Connection, flirting with the debonair Scottish bus driver, traveling to distant cities, or engaging in friendly passive-aggressive competition with her former friend and professional rival, she's probably pondering the universe's wicked sense of irony over a cold cup of coffee.
So when a charismatic politician, nicknamed "the Punctuation Pirate" (he plunders and pillages punctuation from villages), lobbies hard against punctuation education, Ivah's got a pretty bad feeling about society's future.
By a stroke of fate, she befriends a quiet young scholar, who secretly helps her learn the frowned-upon practice of scientific method in order to learn what really happened to the ancient number-worshipping civilization that existed -- and suddenly collapsed -- before them. Only when everything begins to make no sense at all does Ivah realize that her vivid daydreams of another time and place might just hold the key to rescuing her own civilization from an abrupt and meaningless end.
Excerpt: An Abrupt and Meaningless End
The light, in the form of a million different reds, yellows, oranges, peaches, and lavenders, kissed away the last traces of night to reveal a dewy autumn morning – optimistic and green.
The trees stretched their branches and shook from their fruit the last sparkling droplets of night; the flowers awoke and turned to the sun, misting the air with their essence. The sun rose higher, lifted by the sweet cacophany of overlapping bird songs.
And a thousand miles away to the west, the flat, open plains were blanketed by thick clouds of gray and drenched to the muddy bone with rain.
Most of the world was still asleep yet, an hour before dawn. Halfway through her second cup of coffee, Ivah Wheller was awake enough to be having a lively but crippling debate with herself about the aesthetic merits of an em dash versus a colon. The coffee, being half gone, was getting cold twice as fast, and Ivah now pondered this fact – having definitively decided for the third time this morning that the em dash had more of a certain melodrama about it and she preferred melodrama in this case, as opposed to the logical matter-of-factness of the colon. She thought. Maybe.
It was both ironic and sad, she thought as she hurried to finish the last of her lukewarm coffee, that the closer one got to the bottom of a cup of coffee, the less fulfilling it was. At first it's so hot one has to wait to safely taste it; then one enjoys a few luxurious sips – but about halfway through, it starts to cool off so quickly that one would need to drink it twice as fast in order to extract maximum enjoyment from it, which in and of itself obliterates the casual pleasure of sipping a cup of fresh, hot coffee.
And so this would be the morning that Ivah confirmed for herself the singular truth that was understood by the ancient people of every civilization, every race, every tribe, every neighborhood since the beginning of mankind, and perhaps even before that: the most important causes are always lost, good people die for lost causes, it always rains after a haircut, and coffee gets too cold to drink the faster you try to drink it.
The universe has a wicked sense of irony.
