Tag: writer

Short Excerpts from a Book I’m Writing

I’ve been trying to write a book since I was sixteen. My biggest inspiration was the very beginning of the Last of the Mohicans. I loved the way James Fenimore Cooper described the land:

“A wide and apparently, an impervious boundary of forests”, “struggling against the rapids of the streams, or in effecting the rugged passes of the mountains”.

It inspired me to write this:

“In a vast, docile wilderness, a wind chill whipped through an abundance of pine trees, generating a rippling effect of green from an eagle’s view and from the windows of the autumn mist. Cutting through the mountains a few hundred feet to the west, was a river of cold blue, turning itself over the rocks and rapids and housing a school of salmon which jumped from their sanctuary in smooth repetition. Bear would gather at the mouth and wait for a flash of silver to jump unknowingly into their jaws. Scattered gold light lit the passage of fox to run among the roots of the forest floor, which was littered in cones and decaying flora. Nearby a doe and her fawns would trek through, pausing for a minute to warm in the god rays.”

My favorite series, hands down is the Harry Potter series, of course. I’ve always been mesmerized by the way J. K. Rowling can tie any loose end together and make underlying connections that still have yet to be discovered by readers. I love how reading and re-reading her books always offer something new. In fact it was one of the books in the Harry Potter series that inspired my next excerpt. She mentioned Hagrid’s Patchwork quilt, and thinking about the quilt, led me to write this:

“The front door’s frosted patchwork of stained glass colored the snow where the light fell, and the merry sounds of music and laughter muffled behind it. This was it. I pulled the heavy door open with a loud rusty creak and stepped over the threshold. Every nail in the mud room was packed with traveler’s cloaks, coats, woolen sweaters, hats and scarves, hiding both of the log benches. Wet and muddy shoes and boots lined the red wool rug, soaking the floor in dirty puddles. I hung my cloak on one of the lesser burdened nails and went through to the front room, where a woman in a commoner’s clothing stood behind a wooden desk.”

Whether or not these excerpts will form to become a book is unknown. Whether I will ever write an entire novel and publish it is unknown. But for now, I know this:

I can write, my writing is good. I am talented. I can write a novel.

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About Kristin

I was born and raised in a tiny town in the great blue mountains of northern California, where cattle outnumber people. My daddy was a ranch hand, as well as a mechanic for tractors and farm equipment, and most summer nights were spent staying up until two a.m. in a baler, watching him weigh the bales and scare coyote and rabbit out of the fields.

In the mornings, just before the break of dawn, my mom, my brother and I would take a quad out to the field by our house and mom would push the wheel lines back while my brother and I wrapped our arms and legs around the steel pipes and rolled with them. After school I’d sit on the hard floorboards of a swather while dad cut the alfalfa round the edge of the field.

Back then I wanted to be an artist, an old-fashioned one. One that would get commissioned to paint a portrait of some higher class subject, or spent hours sitting at a pottery wheel to create some sort of masterpiece.

I wanted to be a writer too. I wrote my first book on hexagonal-shaped pink and purple paper that my mom had bought for me, that I’d stapled together and illustrated myself.

Throughout my childhood I never stopped writing. I scribbled ideas in notebooks and finally progressed to using the old dinosaur computer we had to type out pages of fairytales.

When I was ten, my grandparents bought me a laptop to fuel more of my imagination. Then I started writing pages upon pages of failed novels.  

By the time I was twelve, my parents separated to later divorce, and I stayed with my mom, who was struggling to both raise me and live under a single income.

Shortly after, my older brother graduated high school and left to Oregon to attend Culinary school, which left me to start and finish high school and do the majority of the cooking and cleaning round the house.

(In those days we ate a lot of pizza.)

In a sink or swim way, I learned how to cook eggs, mashed potatoes, rice, etc. I even made my own barbecue sauce once, although I never wrote down the recipe.

When I was 19, a college dropout and back to living with my mom, I started my first job at a Taco Bell, where I first truly dabbled in a cooking experience, of some sort. I stayed at that job for five months, until I had enough money to comfortably buy a used car and move back to the college town I abandoned months prior.

That time I couldn’t find a job or pay my rent, so I moved back home again, and got the first job I could get my hands on – the California Conservation Corps. Working there made an adult out of me; it made me gain muscle and sweat and ache, and it hurt me in more ways than just that. It slightly crippled my knee, and that’s what woke me up and scared me into quitting. I thought my knee would never be the same because that’s what I’d been told about those kind of injuries, and for months afterwards, it wasn’t.

In February, I started talking to a guy I’d talked to off and on since I was a Junior in high school, and it took me three years to realize he was perfect for me, and he was everything I wanted all along. On his birthday, the twenty-seventh, he told me his friends were all working and he was drinking by himself, so I got in my car at 7:30 at night and drove the two hour distance between us to say ‘happy birthday’ in person, and less than an hour after I got to his house, I became his girlfriend. I’d spend the next year and a few months driving the distance on my days off to see him.

After the Conservation Corps., it was my brother that got me my next job in a new restaurant and distillery (where he worked as a pizza chef), as a hostess and later a prep cook. There, I wore the chef coat and worked in a busy kitchen with constant yells of “sharp, coming through, sharp!” or “hot, hot, right behind you!”

In that kitchen, I learned what seasonings go best with calamari (Old Bay and lemon), how to properly hold a knife, that diced potatoes will turn black if they aren’t kept in water and bacon will hold beef patties together if they are too lean. I learned how to make buttermilk pie and lemon cake, how to prepare a traditional Caesar salad, and I watched the Head Chef (at the time) fillet an Alaskan Halibut.

Shortly after I started cooking (for real), the hostess that replaced me had to quit due to unforeseen circumstances, and I resumed my position at the front counter.

Then it was April, and the burger joint in town that had been remodeling all winter re-opened and needed people to work in the kitchen, and a former coworker contacted me to see if I wanted the job. Knowing it was my only opportunity to get back into it, I accepted, put in two weeks notice and started to memorize the menu, but then the time came for me to start, and I was never told what time I needed to come in, it was continuously stalled and put off until I told them I’d find something else.

My boyfriend’s dad came to the rescue with that one, landing me a job in a department store, because he had worked with the manager there before. Little did I know, that would be the worst job I’d ever have. The amount of stress I endured made my chest hurt and left me with a tension headache everyday, up until I decided I didn’t care. It wasn’t worth sixteen hours a week at minimum wage, so for months I looked for something else, anything else, but I’d reel in my line and find moss.

For ten months, June to March, I endured it and kept going in every morning with a cheerful attitude, insisting to myself that today would be better; I wouldn’t get stressed out, I’d get everything done before we opened, there would be no problems that would set me back, I wouldn’t get any rude comments from coworkers about not doing enough or not doing it good enough and somebody would actually help me get the job done. Every day my insistence of ‘today will be better’ was always crushed.

In March a few days after my twenty-first birthday, I snapped. I missed a prep day due to snow, and I knew I’d have to do twice the work in a 1/4 of the time it would take, plus train somebody to help me do my job and deal with rejection from upper management if I tried to ask for help. That put me into a restless sleep and made me get out of bed at one a.m., three and a half hours before I would have had to leave for work, and it was then that I decided to quit, so I texted my boss and went back to bed. When I woke up it felt like a weight had been lifted, and I never felt more at peace in my entire life.

By May, I moved in to my boyfriend’s house with his parents, his younger brother, his brother’s girlfriend, the five dogs, the four cats, the five (or so) snakes, the three (or so) lizards, two tarantulas, two fish, a snail, a gecko and a coop full of hens; and I’d started a new full-time job at a senior center as – you guessed it – a solo cook for a group of sixty.

It really surprised me, how much I didn’t know.

I didn’t know safe meat temperature, how to make tiramisu, meatloaf, mousse, what ‘braised’ or ‘Julienne’ meant, I still can’t find a happy medium when it comes to cooking rice, but here I am. 

So thanks for reading my first post, I hope that you like it and will follow this amateur blog for updates on life and good food.