Tabitha Vohn's Blog, page 11

Guest Post on PureJonel

http://purejonel.blogspot.ca/2014/11/...

Hey Readers and Friends,

If you'd like to hear my thoughts on celebs, rock stars, and why we love them, check out my guest post at PureJonel AND enter to win a free ebook copy Tomorrow :0)

P.S. Thanks Jonel for the opportunity to be featured on your blog!!

Last Free Excerpt from Tomorrow Is A Long Time, Coming Nov. 24th

I closed my eyes. I saw his younger face mingled with his voice, and my longing for him rose up in me angry and hungry like the beast I had kept locked away, in a dungeon of forgetting, in the cold, concrete cellar of my heart.
The words kept coming from his mouth. His hand reached up to brush my face and I backed away. “Can’t sleep for missing you, for wanting you,” I heard him say.
“Don’t,” I remember saying, putting my hands up in front of me. He held them gently, brought one to his mouth. “Stop,” I shouted, “what are you trying to do to me?”
He crossed the space between us so quickly it was almost unworldly. He took my face in his hands and then brought me to him. He wrapped his arms around me and held me. “would die if I didn’t hold you again,” I heard him say.
Part of me fell back into that spell, intoxicated by his scent and the feel of his warmth around me and the image in my head of his younger self. But now, an equal power in me forced me to see with truth that this was a man four times my age, wrinkled, sagging, married, perverse in his wanting me this way. I let that voice pervade my head and only then did I have the power to push myself away from him. Still, the other voice screamed inside of me “It’s him, you idiot! It’s him!”, and I hated how much I loved him, even as I looked with haunted eyes at the grotesqueness of his reality.
“I’m not doing this,” I said, and then I started to cry. My voice rose in exhausted frustration, at the realization that all progress was lost, and I was just as hopelessly lost in him as ever, but worse now, because I was lost in my heart. “You’re married! You’re old! I’m not blind. I see you for what you are. I’m not ruining myself for a few fortuitous years of God knows what just so I can watch you die.”
“It’s hopeless, hopeless,” I cried, wrapping my arms around my abdomen. “Please Cal, just leave. Just forget me and leave.”
Cal stood, covering his face with his hand. When he tried to come over and put his arms around me I pushed him away angrily.
“Don’t touch me again,” I said, louder than I’d intended, through my sobs. “Just leave me. Leave me.”
“Eileen,” he said calmly, “I want to tell you why I came, and then I’ll go. And I’ll leave you alone; I won’t try and contact you again, if that’s not what you want.”
I calmed myself and wiped my face with the backs of my hands.
“Why are you here?”
He motioned for us to sit down again, and so I did. He took a deep breath, paused. He looked at a loss for words, like he was searching for the right ones.
“If I were younger. If I weren’t married, and you knew everything about me that you know now, would you still want to be with me?”
I shook my head. “What does that matter? It’s not possible.”
“But if it were? Would you?”
A tear rolled down my cheek. “You know I would.”
“What if I told you that there was a way, for us to find out whether things would have been different for us? If I would have been different?”
“It’s not possible. It’s…” I stopped. My eyes widened as I studied his face, as I recalled the conversation in a smoky booth with string music and vodka tonic. “You’re talking about that new experiment aren’t you? The German scientist and the memories.”
Cal looked surprised. “You know about that?”
“A friend read about it in a science journal.”
He nodded. “They’re looking for volunteers. Strictly to study the effects of rehabilitation. There’s a lot of speculation about this, but the scientist is a good woman. I’ve spoken with her. She believes that one person, if they’re the right person, strategically placed in another’s life can change them for the better.”
“Funny, I thought only God could do that."
Cal was silent for a moment. “And just how does God do that? Through people?”
I had to concede that this was often the case.
“If you agreed to do this, I promise you, we would go through all the strictest procedures. We would ask all the questions, address any concerns that you would have.”
“Have any of the volunteers died, or gone into a coma?”
“No, nothing like that. There have been some side effects, Dr. Schultz says. It depends on the effectiveness of the experiment and how long the subjects stay under.”
“You’re really serious about this?”
Cal paused. He looked at the floor and then back at me.
“When the patients wake up,” he said quietly, “the ones that have gone through the experiment and have spoken to journalists about it, they said that it was more vivid than any dream they’ve ever had. It was like living a second life. I want that chance with you.” He took my hand in his. “I want it more than I’ve ever wanted anything, to be with any person.”
“But your family, your children. Won’t this experiment make you forget them all, if you replace your real memories with new ones?”
“No, see that’s where the journalists have gotten it wrong. I’ve spoken with one of the men that’s been through it, as well as the doctor. They’re not destroying memories, they’re making a second set of them. The person whose memories are entered comes out of it with that same feeling, of having lived two lives.”
I was speechless. And scared. I knew the sensible thing would be to say that it was a crazy idea, that he was crazy for suggesting it. But it scared me more how un-crazy it truthfully sounded to me. How, on the contrary, it made perfect sense. Made the past and my irrational love for Cal make perfect sense. What if I was meant to come into his life now, for this?
“How long would we be under?”
“I don’t know. A few days maybe. Dr. Schultz says that would be your decision. You would control how long to stay. You can wake us up. She said time moves similar to a dream. What seems like hours in a dream may only be a few seconds or a few minutes in reality. She would be able to explain it to you more thoroughly, if you would be willing to speak with her.”
I nodded. “When?”
“I heard that you’re going to be performing in Austria. I thought that afterwards, you could take some time to ‘tour Bavaria’. Book a flight home later. No one would have to know; there would be no chance of a scandal this time.”
“And your wife?”
Cal took a deep breath. “She knows.”
“Knows what? About us? About this?!”
“She pushed me to come and talk to you. She said I need to know, one way or the other.”
“Wow,” I said trying to digest that. Sadly, it made me feel worse and not better that this Margaret loved him that much.
Cal glanced at his watch. “You need to go. Your friend’s luncheon.”
I checked the time. “Shoot. Yeah, I need to get going, or I’ll be late. Cal,” I said, all of the anger leeched out of me now, softening towards him. “I just don’t know.”
“It’s alright. I didn’t expect you to say yes right away. Although, I hoped that you would.”
We stood from the couch. I thought about that morning we had sat in the sunrise, before any darkness or harsh reality had settled in. I thought about how I had seen him as just him, how I had wanted to be with him.
I put my arms around him, and he held me tightly. I brushed his hair back from his face as I pulled away. “Just let me think about it?” I said.
He kissed my cheek. “Take as much time as you need. Thank you for letting me see you again.”
I didn’t hear the door brush against its frame as he closed it behind me. All I could hear was the roar of his absence in the space where he had been.

New Excerpt from Upcoming Novel, Tomorrow Is A Long Time

"So Eileen, who has been the great love of your life thus far?”
I shot him a curious glance. “That’s quite the question.”
“Well, our time is limited. I find the best way to get to know people is to ask the questions that you are afraid to ask, the ones the other may be afraid to answer. We can skip over weeks and months of trust building and slow budding intimacy with a short succession of inquiry. Are you game?”
“Ok,” I laughed. I was quite shocked though, both to discover this about him and by the fact that he should want to form such a connection with me. What was I to him, except a musician he enjoyed?
“Good. Then, back to my question. Who has been your great love?”
“Honestly?”
“Of course.”
“You.”
He scoffed. “Seriously, Eileen.”
“I’m not kidding. In all of my life, thus far, no one else has moved me as much as you.” His face became unreadable, and in my boldness I suddenly became terrified again that I had overstepped myself and revealed too much. He would think I was a nut!
“Before you get too worried, I realize that I’m completely certifiable,” I said, trying to add an ironic lilt to my voice. “It’s a fictional you that captivated me. Pieces of characters that you played that touched me and left other, mere mortal men incomparable.”
His voice was soft. “Actors are not the characters they portray.”
“I know,” I assured him. “I’m not suggesting that you are. It’s a funny game that movies play with our heads though. So different than reading a book. We can fall in love with words on a page, with a poem or a beautiful passage. But to a living, breathing embodiment of those words on a screen, attached to an actual human being…I suppose the attachment grows stronger.”
Cal gave me a sad smile. “I don’t think you’re crazy, lovely one.” He ran his fingers lightly under my chin as he spoke. “I’m just sorry to think that you will be disappointed that I am not the vision that you have of me.”
“Maybe that would be true, if you were still thirty.”
We both laughed, and he nodded.
“Ok.”
“My turn?”
His eyebrows raised quizzically.
“Who has been the great love of your life thus far?”
He turned to gaze at the moon.
“No one.”
“No one? Truthfully?”
“The truth.”
“But, you’ve been married several times.”
“Yes.”
“You weren’t in love with any of your wives?”
“In love is such an arrogant, American phrase. I hate that expression. We’re raised to think that being infatuated with someone is equivalent to love. So we make promises that we can’t keep, and when the passion wanes, we move on with what’s left of us.”
I sat speechless for a few moments, not knowing how I should reply.
“What do you think about that?” he asked.
“That makes me sad.”
“Why?”
“Well, because what else is there?”
Cal didn’t answer.
“Did your wives love you?”
“That’s an interesting question. Truthfully, I wouldn’t know. I treated them all so terribly. I was never faithful to any of them. Eventually, it made all of them despise me. If any of them did love me I broke their hearts with it.”
“Do you regret that?”
“Yes and no,” he replied, searching in his pocket for another cigarette. He found one and lit it. “As I said, I never loved any of them, not truly. Whether I cheated on them or not, I would never have been able to return their love.”
“And your children?”
He took a long drag on his cigarette. “My turn.”
“Alright.”
“These characters of mine, the ones that you say have been your only great love, which ones were they?”
“Why do you ask?”
“Just curious. Come on, humor my vanity,” he said, grinning.
I tried to pretend like I was taking the time to consider it, even though I already knew my answer. “A war vet and a male prostitute.”
He chuckled to himself and shook his head.
“What?”
“Out of all the some sixty different roles I played, you would pick the most abstract and unpopular, wouldn’t you?”
“The critics loved both of those films.”
“Yes, but the fans didn’t. Both shattered that James Dean image they had of me; the small town, all-American boy. The latter almost cost me my career.”
“And now it is a heralded classic.”
“Hmmm. And tell me, what was it about those characters that moved you so?”
“Well, both of them moved me for the same reason. They were so desperately lost, and they thought they were nobodies. They felt like nothing inside. But yet there was such beauty in their souls, and neither of them ever recognized it because no one ever gave them the chance to prove to themselves that they were more than what they feared. And when they tried, they were persecuted for it. Eventually they both succumb to the lie that they are nothing, in spite of their greatness.”
“And you felt that those were admirable qualities? Being lost and tortured?” He flicked his cigarette onto the ground under his furious boot.
“No, that wasn’t the point. The point was that they had the potential to be these remarkable men. They were poetic and courageous. They recognized the unloved and the uncared for, and they fought against injustice. All they needed was someone to offer them hope, to validate what they kept hidden away inside. Neither of them ever knew what they were worth.”
I must have been beaming in that wistful, dreamy-eyed way I get when I talk passionately, and I almost didn’t notice him swipe at his eyes in the gruff, offhanded way that old men do.
I dared to speak his name. “Cal? What is it?”
He sat, shaking his head over and over. “Where have you been?” he whispered. “Where have you been all my life?”
I didn’t know whether he was being sarcastic, or whether I had said something that hit a tender nerve in him. I answered the only way I could. “Waiting for you. Admiring you from afar.”

Feeling Nostalgic

The other night, I was feeling sick to my stomach. The Japanese Nobel Prize-winning novel I've been slogging through was not getting it done. Sometimes, a reader needs the comfort of a bedtime story. So I routed through the three stacks-deep shelves of books in the upper half of my closet until I came across what I was looking for: a little known but beloved to me novel that I bought at my elementary school book fair. It got me to thinking about when I first developed as a reader, past the picture books of bears and fairy tales. I thought it would be nice to pay homage to those first books that truly awakened me as a reader and saw me through those pre-teen years...

Read more @http://tabithavohn.com/blog/

Read an Excerpt from Tomorrow Is A Long Time

Hey Readers,

In anticipation of its release in November, I thought it would be nice to offer a few sneak peaks at my new novel in the coming months. Here is the first one. It is the prologue. I’m very pleased with it; I hope you will be, too. If you like it, please add it to your to-reads list on Goodreads ( if you read and review there). Also, be sure to enter the Goodreads giveaway (why pay when you can read it for free, right?) and stay tuned to any of my social media sites for more teasers and excerpts!

Prologue:

You have to be brave to get old. He told me that once. As I watched the delicate lines etched into the fabric of my skin, thinning and fraying with age, like soft paper, I knew he was right.

I think of him, of the unmistakable cadence of his voice, chuckling at my realization that my face had changed, as we lay together in the old brass bed and I, rolling over, had caught a glimpse of myself in the mirror that hung on the far left wall, tarnished with age, as I was. He ran a finger over each deep line that Time’s scythe had torn through the plane of my forehead, against the crescent edges of my eyelids. He told me I could not be more beautiful.

I cried, wondering how it could be that I had woken up to find that I had spent more of my life than not staring into his face, tasting his mouth, bathing my ears in his voice.

How had I not yet been taken?

I told him this, and he kissed me the way that he always did, with his fingers in my hair and his body pressed against me, like every kiss might be our last.

“I’ll never wake,” he whispered. “I’ll keep you here ‘til I die. ‘Til my last living thought is a dream of you.”

The sun draped like honey through the corner window, its wooden pane creaking in the early morning breeze. The leaves of the sugar maple rustled restless and full like a maiden’s skirts, and the murmuring of the cows echoed through the green pastures that lay beyond our white picket fence.

Our bones ached, and we moved slowly now when we rose from the bed. I watched as he fumbled with the buttons on his flannel shirt, his skin too softening with age, the indentations like a fine mesh of web over his back and shoulders. I marveled at the mirage of his years that faded in and out of focus and interposed with the young, firm body that had first pressed me down onto this bed- his eyes searching, so careful not to hurt me, so oblivious to his own beauty, which was piercing and my heart broke with it- devastated at his perfection, as I was still.

I understood that he saw me in the same shifting facets of light, and I loved him for it.

He caught me staring at him and smiled. “The kids will be coming soon.”

“I know,” I replied. I remember staring out the window at the quiet hopefulness of the morning, thinking of my children, or their existence-our children. It was as if our souls had been split off into these separate beings, and we walked outside of ourselves as new creations; beautiful, harsh, and wild.

I smiled at him, stretching and arching my body like a nymph. The rays of light banded against the bare skin that peeked out beneath the fold of unbuttoned satin stretched across my abdomen. I rolled over onto the bed and peeked at him through the crook in my elbow, where my eyes rested. I let my mind clear and my gaze fell over him until all that was left of my being could be read in the supine flicker of my lashes.

He hesitated, only for a moment, before ripping off his clothes and tumbling back into bed. He rolled me over in his arms and growled into my neck-both of us laughing-and then covered my face with kisses, and the laughter was misplaced, and our desperate consumption of the other blocked out all light or time. I was only his and he only mine…

Now, as I write this (or right this, as it were), the sunset passes over the mirror that hangs on the far left wall of my small, corner apartment in the old, Victorian house on Louis Street. But I dare not look into the glass. I can sense the vague outline of the twenty-six year-old figure who hovers there, as transient and horrifying as spectral mist made flesh. Even after thirteen months of being home (home, so strange to think of it that way), I still cannot look her in the face. Though I see her in my mind’s eye, in a black and white photograph, lost to time. And I see her now-firm skin, streak of amber hair across the shoulder. I feel her in the aching loneliness of this body, howling at his absence, where the brain makes the body remember. Remember something that never actually was.

I spent weeks shifting about like I was still in a seventy year-old body, until the youthfulness trapped in my veins like overripe fruit burst open and demanded that I reclaim what was rightfully mine. Meanwhile, the heads of strange passersby would turn in the street. I avoided their concerned glances, unable to assimilate into a world that left me feeling alien, displaced. But I’ve learned again how to order take-out from the organic market and smile at the young girl behind the counter. I’ve learned to condition my ears to the constant hum of the streets outside my window at night. My violin’s strings cry out in the dusk, lamenting all the things my soul cannot say.

And I’ve been to The Slam again, my old haunt. I’ve ordered my dark chocolate hot and listened to Isabelle’s poetry and feigned disapproval at Johnny’s latest conquest. I’ve danced against him, and lost my screaming head in the hypnosis of the music, his warm lips experienced against my own. His mouth on

mine was too much to bear at first, and he apologized for the tears on my face, and I apologized that I could not explain.

Neither of them knows (no one else knows) where I was during those months that I disappeared, or the reason for my reticence-my fragile ambience- when I reappeared. Only him, and a group of five doctor-scientists with titles I can’t pronounce. His family, and the therapist that I refuse to see any longer. What’s the use of trying to get over something that was only a dream?

So the days pass, as monotonous as waves’ thrush along the sands. It seems pointless that I should have to live through all of them again; endless days that have lost their music.

I grow terrified that someday I will forget that other life. That it will fade, like dreams do, like water colors in the afternoon sun. Soon, all I’ll have to remember it by is my mark, my one keepsake: the hand and wrist of aged flesh on my left arm, which I keep concealed in long, black gloves and expose only when I am away from the prying of foreign eyes. The doctors say they can’t explain it, that it must be some sort of psycho-centric phenomena that caused part of my body to assimilate with the age of my mind, specifically in my “dream core”. They say they can fix it, but I fought them off with the vehemence of a mother protecting her young. I’d see them all dead, I screamed, if they tried to take away the one thing, the only thing, that stood as proof of all that was real; real to me and Cal.

I hear that he kept his remembrance too. His photos pop up from time to time on the celebrity news, commenting on how wonderful he looks, how healthy. Young actresses are begging to know who his cosmetic surgeon is, what innovative technique he allowed them to experiment with. It’s as if years of decadent living had been erased from his face. Only I recognize the stark glare behind his eyes when the journalists stand too close, the paparazzi too emboldened. It’s the frozen unconsciousness of someone caught in the headlights. Haunted. Lost.

As for myself, I live those feelings. I would drive back to the place that we called our home if it existed. Or our cabin in the woods. But he had it built especially for me. I’ve thought about going to him. I think about it and it scares me, how dangerously I want to see him, touch him again. But it’s forbidden, and I have to agree with the doctors that it’s best if I leave him and his family in peace. The experiment was a success; I accomplished what I had set out to do, not knowing what it would cost me, this dispossessed life.

Soon, time will erode the smooth planes of my flesh, and then even my arm will blend with my present self, and I will be left with nothing but the ravings of a madwoman, and the littered fragments of a half-forgotten dream.

So I write. I put on my Joan Baez on the portable turntable. I watch a fire-kissed leaf float on the autumn winds across the window pane, and lightly glaze the shoulder of a woman passing by on the street corner below. I turn the ornate, mother of pearl ring encased in diamonds and silver around on my ring finger and conjure the past. And I hear his voice close to my ear. As dreams become as tactual as reality, so will these pages surrogate my memory.

New Author Interview!

Thanks to Justin at Book Blogs for doing this great interview. They were great questions. It was like a wonderful venting session; I get why people do talk shows, ha ha.

Check it out @http://bookblogs.ning.com/group/iat-i...

Teaser for Tomorrow Is A Long Time

Coming November '14
Read more@www.tabithavohn.com

New Teasers for Old Books...

Why I Write...

While I was completing my master’s degree, one of the exercises that I had to do was to write an educational philosophy- a “why I want to teach”, as it were. I’ll be honest, it was obnoxious. I suppose because one would think that verbalizing why a particular passion, career path, etc. has been chosen would be easy; really, it’s not. In fact, it’s quite daunting trying to put a conviction into words and not have it come out sounding like complete bs or superficial nonsense.

However, like the Oracle in Greek mythology alludes, there is an importance in “knowing thyself”. It’s good to dig around in your own head every now and then, especially when it concerns those areas of your life that consume the most of your time and energy. If you don’t have a clear vision of your passion, how do you expect anyone else to?

--view more at http://tabithavohn.com/blog/

Cover Reveal & Blurb: Tomorrow Is A Long Time

Cal Morrison is a Midwestern farmboy who was thrust into fame during the Old Hollywood era. Now, at eighty-five, he sees his life as wreckage. At the mere age of twenty-four, Eileen has seemingly little in common with Cal, except that she fell in love with him on screen.

When Cal and Eileen meet by chance, she discovers that her feelings for him are not without merit, and he sees in her a chance for true love and, more importantly, for redemption.

A controversial experiment offers the key to them both. With the help of a German scientist, Eileen will enter Cal’s memory and, together, the two will create an alternate reality within the realm of dreams. Replacing the memory of his first wife (his leading lady in his most controversial film, The Last Tomorrow), Eileen will step into the 1960’s and discover whether love can exist between her and Cal, and whether loving him unconditionally will be powerful enough to alter the course of his destructive future.

But there is one thing that neither has fully considered: what happens once they wake?

Tomorrow is a Long Time asks the question of how powerful one person’s influence can be in our lives, the lengths we go to for love, and whether it is worth it.

-Coming Fall 2014