Freeway Lit

The new year is underway. It has happened.

Not a lot to report. I'm working on my novel. Staying focused. Making progress.

Here's a passage I was working on today. It's from the point of view of one of the novel's minor characters, a physical therapist who lives in L.A. and does home visits and thus spends a lot of time stuck in traffic...

"By the time she’s back on the 605, she’s sitting and stewing in traffic, sucking it again (just part of the job when you’re an in-home physical therapist who lives in Los Angeles), and within minutes she knows she’ll be late for her next appointment, way over in Long Beach. It’s that time of day when she’s driving directly into the sun. Sucking it. Sunglasses help, but only a little; she still has to squint as she drives, the cars and trucks crawling along, eventually passing an accident, two cars, minor damage, the far left lane blocked, and so she has to merge, and because people are generally assholes no one lets her in until she practically hits another car. How much of her life spent like this, braking, stopping, starting, on Southern California concrete? All that time spent dream-thinking, life-reliving. Because what else can you do? If she had done X. Said Y. Ignored Z. Mostly she ticked through the list of men that had appeared in her life—ah, men and their inevitable disappointments!—starting with her father, and including both those with major roles and those with minor, walk-on parts, and somehow they all equally haunted her. Brake. Stop. Start. Traffic is traffic. Men are men. Because what else can you do?"