(NOTE: This site doesn't have a selection for "Novel", but that's what this is -- the intro to my work-in-progress novel, "Before and After". Enjoy!)

"I don't know what to write. How ironic is this; I consider myself a writer, good with words, yet I don't know what to say. 'But this is different,' I tell myself. 'Cut yourself some slack, Rami. The words will come.' I want to be clever, I want to say something that will stand out from what everyone else says to him. But what do you say to someone whose father just passed away?

'I'll keep you in my prayers'? No, that would be a lie, becuase I don't pray.

'I know how difficult this must be for you'? Nope, that doesn't work, either. Sick though my mother is, she is still living, breathing, being, which is more than can be said of Staiven's father."

And so this volume of Rami Maahrtini's journal begins. The card that she ended up mailing to her friend Staiven was short and sweet. I remember this card because I overheard as she read it to her mother, and I remember thinking how incredibly insensitive that was. To read a "sorry about your loss" card to a woman sick with cancer? Of course Mintie handled it with unflinching grace, as she did everything in her life -- the angry purple knot of cancer included.

I should know. I was there. With my own eyes and ears I experienced a lot of what you are about to read. What I did not experience firsthand I am relying on the journals of Rami, and the other materials found among her old belongings, to provide. This is the tale of an incredible family that I used to know, years before The Wall was brought clattering down, (and that should tell you just how long ago this all happened, as The Wall has been down for quite some time).

I will try to write this as a narrative, so as not to bias the reader's opinion. I will also do my best to recount the events as they actually happened but, as you may have guessed, this is all but a faded memory to me now, and time has the wicked tendency to distort the truths of history.

With that said, dear reader, I hope that I still have your interest, and that you turn each page with wonder and perhaps some excitement, all the while keeping in mind that these were real people, and I loved them...

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