Guest Post: Terra Elan Mcvoy

Today, I'll be featuring Terra Elan Mcvoy, author of After The Kiss. Thank you Terra for writing this amazing guest post. Everyone please go out and support this awesome author by purchasing After The Kiss!

For more info on Terra, visit her site(s):
-Website
-Facebook
-Good Reads

Did you miss my author interview with Terra? Go here

Summary for After The Kiss: This moment changes everything. Becca has been head-over-heels for Alec from the instant they met. He's a brainy jock with a poet's heart—in other words, perfect for her. Camille is careful with her words and protective of her heart, especially since Chicago. Then a new boy in her new town catches her off guard with a surprise kiss. Too bad that new boy is Becca's boyfriend, Alec.

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So, my new book, After the Kiss is finally out, and I’m incredibly proud and excited. Camille and Becca were fun characters to work with, and this was a neat book to write. I think the finished
product turned out well. (And I hope you all do, too!)

There were some bits, however, that stayed on the cutting room floor—poems and passages from Becca and Camille that didn’t quite fit for whatever reason: didn’t end up moving things along at the right pace, or saying things in the exact best way. So while you are (hopefully) busy reading what did go into the book, I thought I’d give you all a peek at a couple of things that didn’t make it.

Thanks, and enjoy!

--Terra Elan McVoy

[The Public School Children Who live In Furnished Souls]
(with apologies to e.e. cummings)
--Becca

the Public School children who live in furnished souls
are too beautiful and have lazy minds
(also, with the tired teachers’ blind-eye blessings
elevated grades—unwarranted intellect)
they believe in themselves, and You Tube, both idiotic,
and are invariably interested in so many inane things—
at the present one still finds
nimble fingers twittering. . . or tweeting?
perhaps. While permanent faces boredly banter
the scandal of Olivia and Tyler
. . . the Public School children do not really care, among
Decatur, if sometimes in their box of
cinder-block-bricks and shadowy corners, their
poetic peer rattles like a fragment of broken-hearted candy.


A Song In the Coffeehouse
(To Nadia, with apologies to Gwendolyn Brooks)
--Becca

I’ve stayed in my notebook all my life.
I want to peek behind the counter
where it’s dirty and crowded and friendship grows.
A girl gets sick of feeling alone.

I want to go behind the counter now
and maybe down into the kitchen
to where the college kids play.
I want a good time today.

They do some wonderful things.
They have some wonderful fun.
My self-consciousness sneers, but I tell myself it’s fine.
How they don’t start shaking their hangovers until quarter to nine.
My self-doubt, she tells me that Nadia
has grown up into a wild woman.
That Denver’ll be taken to Jail soon or late
(on account of what he sells out at the back gate).

But I say it’s fine. Honest, I do.
And I’d like to be a wild woman too.
And wear mismatched knee-socks and t-shirts of lace
and strut around the coffeehouse with a huge grin on my face.


waiting
you want to grab them by the shoulders—ellen, luli, willow, autumn, the coffee
counter girl, your literature teacher, whomever— and shake them and say, as loud as you can manage (so loud it makes them flinch), what are we doing here??? everything is so at a standstill. everything is waiting for something else to happen: waiting for a boy to call, waiting for a test result, waiting for approval, waiting for someone else to say something before we have to. waiting for the rice to boil. waiting for the other shoe to drop. and after years and years of waiting it finally dawns on you —right when the thing you’ve been most waiting for might actually arrive— that there is nothing ever in the arrival, only always what you do in the preparation for it. the prince will never kiss your sleeping lips (and if he does, he will have bad breath, and a mommy complex, and eight boxes of comic books he’s embarrassed to show you), and you will never earn enough money (not for the plane ticket, and the apartment, and the designer clothes, and the reservation at the restaurant everyone’s dying to get into). you will never eventually come up with the best comeback, and the life-changing concert will never be quite what you expected once you go. you can wait and wait and wait and still the timing won’t be right, your hair won’t be long enough, your thighs will be too wide and your argument will still have a few holes in it when you finally think of something to say. whatever it is you’re waiting for —your prom date, your graduation, your acceptance letter, your new job— will always only ever be insufficient, be halfway what you wanted, because once it comes you will already be dreaming of the next thing coming around the corner, so there is only here—the time in between the thing you are waiting for. there is only ever this and so you had better pay attention, or else one day you will wake up and you will
be lost.
--Camille