Toko-pa Turner

I recently crossed the 3/4 mark in my draft and now I'm up to the steamy scenes. I haven’t written anything this sexy before. It’s actually kind of fun! The only problem is the niggling feeling in the back of my mind—"What if my mum reads this?" Now I know why most romance writers use a pen name... In other news: I'm house sitting, looking after a cat. This is Effie. A very active little cat who likes playing, chasing her tail, and jumping up on the table to steal food and drink. Very naughty.

One day in my junior year of high school, just as I was getting started on my earliest years of serious drinking, an older family friend asked me what I was intending to do in life. We were in the back office of the upper flat where I lived with my mom on Church Street, a classic two-up San Francisco Edwardian right along the streetcar line and around the corner from the local fire house.

Nature teaches nothing is lost. It’s transmuted. Spread between rows of beans, last year’s rusty leaves tamp down weeds. Coffee grounds and banana peels foster rose blooms. Bread crumbs scattered for birds become song. Leftovers offered to chickens come back as eggs, yolks sunrise orange. Broccoli stems and bruised apples fed to cows return as milk steaming in the pail, as patties steaming in the pasture. Surely our shame and sorrow also return, composted by years into something generative as wisdom.