BIG GUNS!
If you ever wanted to throw your money around like Oprah, now is a good time! Don’t you want to be my hero?? At this point chances are you can LOOK like a hero…….Pretend you are buying a table at a charity gala. I will give you and 7 of your friends all the rewards listed—even the expired ones, if you go ahead and make a pledge today of $150! I just need to get funded by May 9th at 9am!
http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1912437156/big-in-britain-a-novel
Pub Crawl seemed an appropriate term for the night’s event. The long flight and the preceding week had taken it’s toll. I felt like I had just finished a marathon, I had not slept well in a month and my feet, crammed into ridiculously sexy shoes, ached. I just wanted lie down.
Not too far from the line to get into pub number four, I spotted a bench. I sat with a groan of relief, fantisizing about crawling underneath and stretching out for a little power-nap. I needed to rally and no one would notice a body under a bench.
I settled for taking off my shoes and the night went downhill from there.
I don’t know what I was thinking. Every woman knows you can’t remove four inch heels a half size too small and expect to get them back on your feet, let alone regain control of your evening. Things get out of hand when you take off your shoes.
Jennifer Heath on: Sexy Shoes and Chaos.
http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1912437156/big-in-britain-a-novel
See update #6!
New Enticing Reward! I kind of feel a little dirty about it but, oh well.
For a pledge of $125 or more, you will receive all the usual rewards AND exclusive access to some naughty bits. Yep, I can write a steamy, down and dirty love scene, my friends. I wrote the rough-draft sex scenes more, um, explicitly than the finished product will be so I have something to edit. You will get a copy of the rough draft of these pages. And, you don’t have to wait for the book to come out—I will send you this exclusive content as soon as the project is funded! The only redacted parts will be spoilers.
Pub Crawl seemed an appropriate term for the night’s event. The long flight and the preceding week had taken it’s toll. I felt like I had just finished a marathon, I had not slept well in a month and my feet, crammed into ridiculously sexy shoes, ached. I just wanted lie down.
Not too far from the line to get into pub number four, I spotted a bench. I sat with a groan of relief, fantisizing about crawling underneath and stretching out for a little power-nap. I needed to rally and no one would notice a body under a bench.
I settled for taking off my shoes and the night went downhill from there.
I don’t know what I was thinking. Every woman knows you can’t remove four inch heels a half size too small and expect to get them back on your feet, let alone regain control of your evening. Things get out of hand when you take off your shoes. “
Jennifer Heath on: Sexy Shoes and Chaos.
http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1912437156/big-in-britain-a-novel
See update #6!
“So,” she said. Crap. I knew what was coming. We’d covered love-lives, sex-lives, school, jobs, parents, mutual friends, fashion, television and HBO, current events, film, religion and politics. Only one topic remained.
“So,” she said. “How’s Simon?”
“Simon? Simon who?” I said. She rolled her eyes. She was witness to the beginning, having served as my assistant counselor that summer.
“Shit, I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have brought it up.”
“No, it’s fine.” I shook my head, chuckling. “I’m fine. No worries, you’re fine,” I said. “He’s fine, I’m sure. I really don’t know.”
Truly, I hadn’t thought of Simon in months, actually.
At least, not wistfully.
Simon Harris, the British boy I met at summer camp who broke my heart, still calls or emails me about every six months. I don’t answer his calls. (Anymore) And, I delete his emails. (Almost immediately)
We met when I was 18. He was 19. We broke up over ten years ago, just before I turned 21. I should have put an end to it a long time ago. I realize that, I get it.
But, with each careless contact I get a tiny thrill of hope that lingers just long enough to go sour in my gut. Last August, after three years of emails only, he called me beacause he heard Both Sides Now by Joni Mitchell. He went on and on in his message about camp fires and sing-alongs. Then, he asked me to send him the recipe for S’Mores.
Once, he drunk-dialed after getting together with some old “mates” from University he’d introduced me to the first time I flew over to visit him. They all got on the line at the end of the call and sang a garbled, drunken version of Fly Me to the Moon by Frank Sinatra. That wasn’t even our song. But, sill, Beverly had to force me to erase it after I played it every night for a week.
And, a few times in ten years he has called just to say “he wanted to hear my voice”. Those calls hurt the most.
Part of me (the part that remains convinced I’ve ruined him for other women with my pure and perfect love) clings to the fact he’s never married. He has fathered five children however, with five different women. So, clearly he has not been lonely while wringing his hands over the loss of me.
I am lucky he dumped me. I dodged a bullet. Intellectually, I know that to be true.
But.
But, I’ve always wondered if there was anything else I could have said or done or been to make him keep loving me.
There we stood, on the English coast, the sun painting an exquisite scene as it set into the Irish Sea. I made my case, holding back nothing. I laid out my plan to move to England. Leaving school, all my friends and my family didn’t even seem like a sacrifice. I told him in a hundred ways that I loved him and then I begged and cried. My tolerance for humiliation knew no limit, back then.
Here’s the thing. He didn’t see it—his back was to the water. So, he couldn’t see what I could see. I think that contributed to the discrepancy between what he thought his feelings were and what I knew they should be.
He gently shook his head and kissed my cheek.
I just couldn’t believe it.
But, I didn’t despair. For weeks, I was positive he would come around. I waited for the phone to ring and every time it did I knew it was Simon calling to say, “I love you, take me back.”
In the following five weeks he called twice. The first time he phoned to share the good news of his sister’s engagement. She was the sister I’d always wanted and I cried knowing I was missing it. The second call he asked me to send him the soccer scarf he’d given me. Funny that I am, to this day, so stubborn I refuse to call it football as some kind of passive-aggressive protest yet, I can’t seem to gather the ovaries to tell him to stop messing with my head. I gave him my heart and he wanted his fucking scarf back.
And now, ten years after the break-up, every six months when I get the semi-annual shout-out, I ache. I curl up in a ball and I want to hibernate.
Lucy had found Simon un-worthy of my love almost immediately. I was afraid she might sprain an eye-ball over the Atlantic if she knew I still occasionally pined for a boy I first loved when I was 18. So, I just tapped my empty wrist and smiled.
“Actually, it’s almost time for a phone call from Simon.”
http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1912437156/big-in-britain-a-novel
Why am I stressing? I liked improv way better than all that “acting” I studied in college….outline shmoutline. Writing should be the same? It’ll come to me, right?
Don’t answer that. Or do.
