The one thing J.K. Rowling might say to you if she knew you

Courtesy of crumpled up paper I found in the trash bin.

Have a great Thursday.

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The yummy of life is often concealed by things we don't want.

A group of alumni highly established in their careers got together to visit their old college professor. Conversation soon turned to complaints about stress in work and life. Offering his guests coffee, the professor went to the kitchen and returned with a large pot and an assortment of cups: porcelain, plastic  glass, crystal, some plain-looking, some expensive, some exquisite. He told his guests to help themselves.

After everyone had a cup in hand, the professor said, "If you notice, all the nice-looking expensive cups have been taken up, leaving behind only the plain and cheap ones. While it is normal for you to want only the best for yourselves, that is the source of your problems and stress. Be assured that the cup adds no quality to the coffee. In most cases, it's just more expensive and oftentimes even hides what we drink.

"What all of you really wanted was coffee and not the cup, but you consciously went for the best cups. And then you began eyeing each other's cup. Now consider this: life is the coffee. The jobs, money, and position in society are the cups. They're just tools to hold and contain LIFE. And the type of cup we have does not define, nor change the quality of life we live. Sometimes...by concentrating only on the cup, we fail to enjoy the coffee.

"The happiest people don't have the best of everything. They just make the best of everything."

                   --author unknown

The yummy of life is often concealed by things we don't want.

Have a great Tuesday.

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Awesome Andy Davis

Growing up is hard to do...

You remember the real questions

And your play friends you left behind

It is the girls and boys inside us all that allow us to love

Thank you Andy. Thank you Pixar.

All things end.

Even childhood.

But at least it stays with us to inspire our stories for the next generation.

I liked Andy so much that I named a major character after him in my second book, Oculus, and essentially, based his appearance off of what he might look like in college. I'm sure there's lots of amazing young men out there just like him. And now I have one in my book. :)

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What is your writing origin story?

Today I'm participating in the Origin's blogfest. The question for this one is pretty easy. When did your writing dream begin?

It probably began a long time ago in high school. I took a creative writing class and Mrs. Fife had us write a short story, and I enjoyed it. I penned my first novella that school year using a typewriter. It ended up being 80-pages and it sure was fun. But oh boy...was it awful lol. If it were animated...it would be some horrible Japanese anime with melodramatic acting, huge swords, and silly sexual tropes that would come across to an adult as being childish.

Then I tried again in college. I worked on a fantasy that involved a Dungeons and Dragons character that I must have kept plugging away at for about four years. I never ever finished it but it was probably 500 pages of typed garbage. Seriously...I had so many pages of taverns and just random monsters and meaningless sword fights, and some dragon showed up once but not for any reason really. Then I made up some twin guy who was evil and somehow the brother of the protagonist. Why? I have no clue. It just seemed like he should have an evil twin. I never plotted anything...I just wrote for the sake of writing which I realize now is called pantsing. Anyway...pantsing is a terrible way for me to write. There's just no structure and a story can balloon to 500,000 words with no end in sight.

All in all, I have five novels/novellas that should never ever see the light of day. And that's my "Origins" story.

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Are you afraid of the dark?

This is the last day of the I'm Hearing Voices blogfest. My flash fiction below is supposed to invoke an emotion. I want you to feel fear.

Once on the main floor, he checked the front door, and found it still locked and bolted.  He moved through the living room, past the grand piano, toward a light in the kitchen.  He saw Mrs. H. standing with her back to him, making a sandwich.  She had on a flimsy white night gown.

He tapped lightly on the door with his left knuckle to get her attention so as not to startle her.  She still jumped and then put the knife down and looked over at him.  Jordan folded his arms across his smooth bare chest and leaned against the door frame.  “Thank God it’s just you,” she said, going back to her sandwich.  “You hungry?”

“No,” he stated.  “I thought I heard a noise so I came up to look.”

“Well that’s why I came down the stairs.  I heard someone walking across the floor.  What were you looking for anyway?”

“It wasn’t me,” Jordan said.  “I just came up the stairs a second before I knocked on the door here, and Rob’s asleep on the bed.”

She set her knife down on the counter.  “If it wasn’t you and it wasn’t Rob and it wasn’t me…there’s no one else in the house Jordan,” she said.

           Jordan glanced around in the dark, looking a bit uneasy.  She did too, moving her eyes from off of him and into the shadows that lay beyond the halo of light emanating from the under cabinet fixtures.


Excerpt from SLIPSTREAM

Have a great weekend.

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When music and words collide...

Have you ever listened to a song and thought that the words captured the impact and emotion of a scene that plays out in your head? Or that the song somehow captures within its tune the very essence of a character?

I thought about this when I watched the season 2 premiere of one of my FAVORITE shows this past Monday. It's called Being Human. And it's on #SyFy :)))

To explain the cast a little bit starting in the upper right corner...

The "Lady Killer" is Aidan. He's a really nice vampire who has some difficult choices to make because his desire to be a "nobody" collides with the vampire political elite who want him to be involved in just about everything that is going on in Boston.

The "Wild Man" is Josh who through no fault of his own has been infected with lycanthropy.  He's impregnated his girlfriend and spread his disease unwittingly to her (it would seem). So he's got a lot of tough choices too. Tough in the sense that the "paranormal" won't stop for an instant and allow him to be "normal" which is all that he ever wanted.

And then there's "Sally". She is my favorite character in Being Human because her story is so incredibly sad. Like tear-jerker sad. It really moved me when I discovered that the reason she's a ghost is because her good-looking and charming boyfriend/fiancee murdered her. She didn't know it either. We find out about it about the same time that she does. And boy does he show his true colors. She had so much love and was such a kind person. But just like in real life...those types of things in no way insulate a person from experiencing the worst that life has to offer. I'm not one that believes in karma. Bad things happen to good people all the time.

At the end of season one, there's a scene where Sally looks on from the door and the song by Oasis called "Don't Look Back In Anger" plays. It even  has the line "And so Sally can wait, she knows it's too late as we're walking on by...Her soul slides away, but don't look back in anger I heard you say..."

And it really is just perfect because it has her name, she's a disembodied spirit, and she's been very angry and because of that, it's trapped her on earth. It more or less seared her story into my brain so that I'd come back for season two. And I think that's just amazing and clever writing.

Have a great Wednesday :)

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