Ralph Pullins

What follows is the prologue for a novel I have started but never finished, before my current project took over my writing efforts entirely.  I wanted to post this because I think that the perception is that these things come easily and whole, that writing is somehow easy for those of us that do it, that a certain measure of success with the craft means that it is all fun and games for us.  It isn't.  There are a lot of missteps and failures and garbage that has to come out before anything good happens.  Writing, if you take it seriously, is something that is shaped.  Made, rather than born, if that makes sense.  I will probably finish this someday, maybe next year after I get this current thing off of my plate.  This part came very naturally, but I found that the main text, the body of the story, wanted to fight me every step of the way, that nothing wanted to come easy.  Maybe I just haven't found the right voice, or maybe it just wasn't the right time for this one or wha...

I'm old now, and out of touch, but when we were kids we called it moshing, or slam, or maybe just the pit.  We didn't really ever call it dancing, though that was what it really was, just a movement to the music, a release, an expression of ourselves, a bunch of lost kids, angry and disappointed with the world.  To an observer, it looks violent, and sometimes it is, if you get a drunk in there flailing his elbows around, or some tourist jock type dude that saw it on movies or something and just wants to push people around, and sometimes something happens in there, people can crack their heads together, or you can get a fat lip or something, but mostly it is just bouncing around, just dancing, but like I said nobody really called it that.  It was just the pit, a thing that happens at shows, between the crush or people at the front, all sweaty sardines, dudes trying to keep their girls from getting crushed, all smashed in there, hot and stifling, between there and the stoic older...