Episode #1: SKINLESS: INSIDE THE STORY : Spotlight : Chapter 1 (non spoiler)
EPISODE #1: GOOD MORNING. Dive into the World: Chapter One (after Prologue) •Album: Skinless: Songs from the Book. If you love The Bell Jar, The Basketball Diaries, Just Kids, and voice crime noir.
Editor’s Note (January 2025):
BookLife recently reviewed SKINLESS, describing it as a “powerful portrait of a traumatized woman splintering at the seams,” and noting that its fragmented, nonlinear structure is “the only honest way to render a mind trying to hold itself together.” If you’d like to see how they engaged with the book, you can read the full review + find SKINLESS here:
http://booklife.com/project/skinless-the-story-of-a-female-survivor-103872
Welcome to Skinless: Inside the Story
Skinless opens with a quote that relates directly to a main theme:
“In each of us there is another whom we do not know.” - Carl Gustav Jung
If you love The Bell Jar, The Basketball Diaries, Just Kids, and dark, psychological noir set in New York, Skinless is for you.
Before we dive into Chapter 1, read what others are saying about Skinless:
“This book is a hidden gem, apparently a debut work from author Maggie Moor. A story of a young woman Charmay who is raised in a dysfunctional family and sexual abuse from her drunken stepfather which left her jaded with very cynical view of men. This is a narrative in the first person of how she survived raising herself up from the streets of San Franciso and New York City, maneuvering a relationship triangle between her husband who is the local weed kingpin.The author takes you deep into the thought process of the main protagonist, who is sharp witted, resourceful, and dangerous.
She can feign sweetness to obtain what she wants from a man but has the ability to spit venom that can emasculate one in the bat of an eyelash.
She goes deep into the character’s family background, her opinion of her world, her surrounding extensive knowledge on various subjects from street survival, film and music production, to the art of studying gems. Goes into such deep description of characters and events that you can almost taste it. I would recommend this book to those that enjoy psychological suspense then add this to your TBR List.
Thanks NetGalley, Pearl of Peace Publishing and Author Maggie Moor for the complimentary copy of “Skinless” — Tammy, Netgalley Reviewer, 4 star (2025)
PART I | CHAPTER ONE
Lower East Side, New York
Good Morning.
A wind tapped lightly at heavily drawn aluminum shades, wishing to breathe newness amidst the howling chaos. Me and Sam had one thing to cling to on this banal rock, and that was each other. Well, each other and whatever else we could get our hands on.
Bare springs, mattress. Me. Cool air, tawny skin. Long dancer’s limbs, lanky legs. Naked on my back. Gold chestnut waves; my hollow eyes blindly, wide open staring into hue, blue.
Cold chills from the cheap AC cranked up in the middle of September rattled my bones, a fixture insisted on by my hot-blooded Cuban choice of man, forever running everything in his life as a quick means to get by and a quick means to die. Sam set for sleep like he will the morgue, when he’s done doing his time.
“That ass is mine,” he said. My thighs pressed his tattoo-inked delts. Sam’s silver sacred heart Jesus chain slid supple against my slender neck bone.
“Sam.” Matted goosebumps crept slowly up my spine. I pulled him deeper, “Sam.”
Shift, wrap, fetal style. Cranky radiator steam spit behind our slumbering heads. Early evening waking, actually. I pulled myself from Sam, tried stretching my overworked limbs. Though I appeared lithe and strong from several years of childhood dance class, and my teenage road-roughing homeless, natural living I couched it as, I still to that day (and maybe even today sometimes) found it impossible to gather strength to stand. That morning, not unlike many of the rest, the chill in the air got me up from bed. Perhaps, it was more the cold of my inner unrest, my screaming wish to enliven a life force within that I had quieted by my own mind, my daily endurance of cruel and jarring commands on my own innocence and self. Those internal mental lashings had been going on since I was a young child, before the junior high dance classes, before the Miss Teen New York pageant, and probably started right around the first time my mother’s drunk boyfriend grabbed my clean-then pussy.
A salmon-colored rotary phone rang from its perch on our hardwood floor, just across the beige flimflam hanging. A sheet to separate the mattress from the living was all we had in this Lower East Side dive studio. The fifth of our sublet apartments since we’d begun dating a few years back.
“God, it’s fucking cold,” I sighed. I slipped my ankle from Sam’s clutch, pulled the pink sham from our bed tight ‘round my shaking ribcage.
“Don’t answer the phone, babe.” Sam grabbed at the air as I—Groan, I did, and crawled under that flimsy beige, across cool bare wood, in that New York, studio sublet.
“I’m serious, babe,” Sam yelled. “If it’s Jess, tell him I been under flu, few days past layin’ low, watchin’ like, Mean Streets, watchin’ something…ah, You never remember.” Sam loved his Scorsese flicks. I swear I think he thought or we thought we lived in one. Or any movie, really. This was our life. I didn’t realize then that most people watch TV and flicks to vicariously live through, while keeping themselves safe at home. I, we, lived like there was no tomorrow. I swore by it.
“Live like you’re gonna die tomorrow, ’cause you never know.” There’s some spiritual truth to that, ten years later and to this day even, twenty years later, I might hear myself say the same thing—but meaning, don’t cow-tow to fears and social moorings. Back then I meant, I didn’t care if I died, and secretly hoped I would, every single day.
“Remember what?” I mumbled absently, lost in my usual foggy and anxious. Why get bogged in memories. I pride myself in not remembering, I probably thought, and often said.
Venetian blind tapped, half-slid. My cover dropped; shoulders drooped. Breeze spilled pink sundown on that dusty wood flooring. I stretched, a cat in sun slip.
“Fuckin’ symp softees…Life is fleeting.” Softee was a word I used then, for people I thought were weak: hadn’t survived the streets, had parent’s money, no grit, no backbone; add: worried what everyone else thinks. Maybe add: went to college, worries about the future, doesn’t follow their gut, their heart. That was my basic definition for a softee. I hated weakness in a person. I wouldn’t stand for it in myself. When you been touched funny as a kid, and especially you don’t tell, you got a fortress built up.
Morning stream of conscious, “Girl, don’t hide your face from nothin’…” my lips-flow, “Pull your hair back…Don’t worry you’re alone…” I found myself humming barely audible, a song I had been composing.
Music was one thing that always helped me return to innocence. Before it all happened at home, I had played clarinet and piano since second grade, every day after school. Practice, practice, practice. I quit in fourth grade when my band teacher grabbed my ass under my little blue skirt. My Mom had been in bed that morning with her drunk, and told me I looked like a prostitute as I left the house. After he grabbed me, I was flushed face solo in the bathroom stall shaking and told myself, Guessed she was right, I look like a ho.
I shouldn’t be wearing that skirt. Really, that band teacher was a dickhead pervert, but I didn’t bother telling anyone. That was minor compared to the other stuff, home. I just never went back to band, then. Too bad, because I was first seat clarinet in the fifth-grade band, but, ‘You gotta suck it up and make a plan,’ I told myself at age ten—nowhere to turn. Since I’d met Sam, actually, I’d found a piano. Been starting to write my stuff down again, starting to let myself believe in my dream. Something you may not know, that people been touched funny lose sight of. Dreams become something for the spoiled brats of the world, or softees. Survival becomes key, fulfillment isn’t something you even really consider. Until you start to heal.
“Told you last night about Jess,” Sam called across the flim-flam at me. “I’m makin’ moves for us, tryin’ to get cash for capital case I hafta fly solo. Some suburban white kid, for a few pounds of pot. Just don’t answer the phone or door, babe.”
“Dance, the music, the…”
Lately, then I’d been trying to write things down, make songs. I wanted to record an album.
Oh, smack, I heard the answering machine click triple time.
Mother’s saccharine, bellowed, “Hello, my darling daughter, I just called to tell you I was sitting here in my sunroom watching these two gorgeous loons float on the crisp inlet pond…”
I am sure I stared at the two-headed tape in the machine, dead-eyed, and mouthing mother’s words, verbatim. She said the same thing every time:
“…And, ooh, how the evening sun is slanting just perfectly making shadows across the limbs of these northeastern trees.”
I winced; my massive occipital pulse. Mom’s voice always made me shaky and filled with questions. Slid my bony, slender fingers behind the green, silk curtain hanging window, grasping my half-drunk Jameson, soldier on demand.
“Cool, liquid sunshine,” I crooned, cracking screw top.
(C) Maggie Moor
Listen to “Girl”…the morning song Charmay is writing. . . (apple music)
Girl © Maggie Moor
'Girl
Don’t hide your face from nothing
Pull your hair back
Don’t worry you’re alone
Dance
The music, the spotlight
Dancing body
Naked and alone' 
MUSIC FROM SKINLESS
This novel has a companion album, Skinless: Songs from the Book (Charmay & Maggie Moor), featuring songs written and performed by Charmay in the story—lush downtempo, jazz, and chill‑out electronica that extends the world of Charmay: New York Noir. Available on all streaming platforms.
SUBSTACK- “Skinless: Inside the Story.”
This 8-episode Substack series dives into the world of Skinless (Book One in the larger Charmay novel series) and the album Skinless: Songs from the Book. Each Episode spotlights themes, relationships, characters with images and vivid chapter excerpts, bringing you into the Skinless World, Charmay’s life: on stage, in fights, on street benches at dawn, in boundary-breaking nights, and in the quiet aftershocks of trauma and desire.
Across the series, you will be given free content:
a guided walk through Skinless via 8 weekly spotlights and a Bonus Music episode (the backstory on how each track was first written, recorded (as Maggie Moor), and reborn under Charmay )
a deeper look at Charmay’s evolution from girl-voice and survival mode toward awakening and self-possession
a glimpse into Book 2 through future-leaning pieces like “Awake” and “Spiderwebb”
“Skinless took me on an emotional rollercoaster. One minute I was angry, then heartbroken, then inspired. The writing is gorgeous but not overdone. It’s emotional in a way that sneaks up on you. I’ll be recommending this to everyone I know.” ⭐️ - Goodreads
Meet Charmay…
Episode #3 Now Available: Meet Charmay
Meet Sam . . .
Meet the Players Episode #6 Dec. 02.2025
SKINLESS eBook available now on Kindle. Worldwide print Nov. 12, 2025
New SPOTLIGHT on Characters, Relationships, Themes every Tuesday at 6PM. Right now its open to Everyone.
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Join the list! Maggie Moor offers Free Substack content.
SKINLESS: a fast-paced crime novel and a psychological narrative of a young female artist fighting to heal.
I wrote SKINLESS to reach people who are struggling, and who want to feel understood; and people who love a fast paced crime thriller with a rhythmic hard-boiled voice.
Read what other people say about SKINLESS: Feel welcome to leave your review and don’t forget Amazon: help SKINLESS GET OUT THERE! #skinlessthebook