#SweetSaturdaySamples Blueberry out take.

Hi Sweet Samplers! My women's literary novel, Blueberry Truth, is coming to print soon so I thought it might be fun to do an out take today. Earlier drafts of the book included some of Blueberry's voice. These were later edited out to smooth out the narrative and make it an easier read. Blue's voice, though, helped me to capture her as a character and helped her to come through in later versions.

This is from a very early draft, one of the first things Blue "said" to me. 

   My granny the one who call me Truth. Ma call me Blueberry because that what she like to eat when she have me. I live with my Ma and Julio and Frostie before she gone off to Florida and I have to go to Granny house and she change my name. No baby be called Blueberry is what she say. I say there no baby here. I am seven years old, old enough that I go to the store by my own self. Granny say I seven years old with a mouth. That be Ma fault, she say. Ma ought to have said me some manners, but Ma run off with  trouble, is what Granny say. 

            Teacher at the new school show us to write cursive, but my letters come in crooked. Child write crooked, teacher tells Granny. Uncle Dee say it cause I stupid. I ain’t stupid, I say. You a little bitch like your Ma, he say. She can’t write good neither. I throw a cup at him, hit him in the nose and make it bleed. Uncle Dee got a good job that pay twenty dollars an hour, Granny say. Don’t you be messing with him. She make me sit in the closet. One hour for being disrespect. One hour, but when I see the clock she let me out it been one hour and one half. I can tell the time. I ain’t stupid.

 Beanie and Mac MacKenzie have led charmed lives. They both have jobs they love: he’s a pediatric cardiologist; she’s a teacher at a school for troubled children. They’ve recently bought a big house on a quiet Albany, New York street only blocks from where they grew up together. The only thing missing are the children with which they’d envisioned filling that house.
  Enter seven-year-old Blueberry Truth Crowley, a fiercely independent child whose life has been anything but charmed. When Blue ends up in Beanie’s classroom, their two worlds collide.
     Blueberry Truth is the story of that collision and of the commitment and love it takes to make not a baby, but a family.

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