Instead of sitting down to absorb the album, I let it trickle in, play it over and over while I read my astronomy textbook, when I doodle in my journal hoping to come up with story ideas for my creative writing class, when I’m on the phone, when I’m reading books and when Jillian comes over to chill.

One night I sit on my inflatable chair writing away in my journal with half my mind on the page and half with the music. As I try to think up story ideas, a song called “Moonchild” starts, launching me into the ether in its intro. Something about the words, the singing, though I don’t know it by heart yet, makes me feel at all like my old vibrant self, or at least its shadow. By the time I get to the bridge, the song stops me in my tracks, using my foot absentmindedly against my bed to rock my chair. I have the seed of a story idea.

I scribble furiously. So there’s this girl and she meets this guy, and they fall in love but he has to leave on a spaceship and since it takes place in the future, his ship can go almost the speed of light. Then, according to Einstein’s relativity, he’ll experience time dilation, so it’ll only be two years for him as he experiences time but it’ll be two hundred years on Earth and the girl will have to deal with this loss and she’ll be so distraught that she’ll only go outside at night because that’s when they met and when she can pretend to look for his ship, and she’s really a creature of the night anyway, a moonchild. I’ll use that for the title. And then something will happen, I’ll figure it out, and at the end she’ll have some sort of choice, like to either keep on mourning or move on and face morning.

~~~

This is an excerpt from Moonchild. Since I’m going to be working diligently on rewriting and revising that project (read about that mess of a task here), I’ll probably be posting excerpts from Moonchild for awhile. And yes, it’s (somewhat) named after the song mentioned in this section.

And to read the fictional short story that came out of that bud of a story idea described in this excerpt, click here.

This excerpt takes place during the fall of my freshman year. I was struggling big-time with writer’s block, and was at the school on a writing scholarship, so that was a bit of a dilemma.

Don’t forget to check out Samples, Published and Early Work for more excerpts and chapters and full pieces of writing.

~EJ