Red Lemonade

The Hallucination chapter was the first thing I wrote about two years after all of this stuff happened. I was very raw and it was extremely difficult for me to write. That said, I don't know if I will keep it but it did lay out the use of Diego, a street name I used, as the major force against which I struggle. This is a full length memoir yet Hallucination was created as a short story. So I have been deciding whether to compile short stories and make that a memoir or to write something more linear. As you may be able to tell I've written the linear version so I will have to scrap Hallucinations or rework it at some point. There is much more from the married woman but as I said I was in a great deal of pain writing that so perhaps my fresh eyes will have a better time with it all. thanks for reading. Yes more to come if I can pull myself away from Black Diamonds.

The first chapter, about the Big Wheel, is a terrific introduction. The next chapter I have to say I find very uneven. Some events or mental states are fully narrated, and really well done. But the ones that aren't feel like they're glossed over. I kept thinking "Expand this" and "expand that" -- for example, the "married woman" comes and comforts the narrator, but there's no detail. Other times I read it as if it were a novel, and I saw opportunities to expand it in a fictional direction. All this is to say there's a lot of terrific material, and you have the opportunity to write a very interesting memoir (or novel) if you have the patience to dig into it.

I love the pace of this. It's such a fast read. I've never actually done meth, but I imagine this is what it feels like - hyped-up, speedy, fast, exciting, dangerous. And then ending in a crash. Are you going to post more? This is a full-length memoir, right - not a short story?