I drank two cups of coffee and read the entire Los Angeles Times sports page and two poems from a literary magazine and a short story from another journal, while sitting at the window of a coffee house in Inland Southern California.

It was afternoon on a Wednesday.

A gray-haired man, his face dry and dark and wrinkled, sat in a parked 1975 Datsun pickup truck across the street.

He hadn't moved for hours. He might have been asleep. He didn't have to tell me, he had nowhere to go and no one to see.

The truck was Dodger-blue. Its windows were down. The street's palm trees were ashy. The street was dirty and dusty. The street was full of sunshine, sin, dog din, and neglect -- pot holes and teenage criminals. The mountains were so close, but covered in smog, hiding, apparently.

Two yoga shops
in town closed down.

If I hadn't left the apartment
I would have gone crazy.

6/30/2010
Redlands, CA

The First Draft

The world moves fast, especially for writers and Southern Californians.

So I created this blog.

It's the 21st Century, unfortunately, and it's time for us all to adapt. Finding a place for a creative outlet is not a new problem or desire for writers, but blogging now creates two distinct changes. First it allows anyone to publish -- for better or worse --, creating that outlet. And second, it demands that writers be quick with their work -- which is most often for the worse (ex: modern newspapers).

The creation of this blog is not to diminish the writing process by reducing my work to only its first draft. Instead, this little space is to encourage me to write more and then to continue working on draft, after draft, after draft, so that hopefully some of these hasty works make it in print for some journal somewhere, which will undoubtedly exist much longer than anything posted on-line.

Some pieces will be fictional, some non-fictional and some poetry, or something like poetry, but don't assume anything about where they may have come from in experienced life. I'm not shy about taking liberties with the truth in these works, becaue most often the truth is found outside the factual parameters that shape it.

So thanks for reading. I hope you continue to follow this blog and enjoy it as much as the taste of citrus on the tounge of wealthy New Englanders in February (that, friends, is a line that would definitely undergo major edits).

And please let me know if you'd like to contribute a creative piece to this blog (I'll accept almost anything, so gimmie your left overs).

Brett