I’m fortunate. I have an office to which I can retreat and type my little masterpieces. Let me give you a peek into what I look at every day. Enjoy! A plant that I picked up for two bucks at the grocer’s. Sale!! A teapot that I fell in love with at a thrift shop. Had to have it for 5 bucks. Coffee (or tea) cup – one of many. Makeup bag. It’s pretty psychedelic! And packed full. Harley Teddy! He doesn’t really have a name. Any suggestions?
Music is important to me. I listen to every type, every kind from hither to thither all the way over to yon. You get the picture. This is going to be a simple post. Maybe you’ll sing along with me, maybe you’ll snicker at how old I am. I’m not going to wax poetic about how the songs of my childhood and teen years were so much better than the songs of today because I believe that there’s good music in all eras. You just have to look for it. And there were some pretty crappy songs when I was growing up, believe me. No. This post is about listening to AM radio in the 70s and the songs that came out of that mono speaker that still inspire me today. So fluff out your Afros, get your love beads and granny skirts and take a walk with me down
Nearly every person reading this has received a bad review at one time or another, whether it be a poor grade in a class, a poor performance review at work, or (gulp) a bad review on a book. Given my successful experience as an educator (backed by a file full of good reviews) my take on reviews were a lot different. Let me explain. As a teacher in a room full of students, it is your job to convey the material to them. That is to say, if you administer a test and more than ten percent of the class fails, you’ve failed as a teacher and the material must be re-taught. The purpose of a teacher is to ensure that students are learning and retaining the material because every lesson taught builds upon the one before it. If they miss out today, then the next portion of material will
As a romance author, I’ve written quite a few short stories and read even more. I’ve read short stories by industry authors as well as the “classics” by Edgar Allen Poe, O. Henry, Richard Matheson and Stephen King. In addition, I’ve read anthologies of short stories. As an author, I feel that I am in a constant state of learning and try my best to expose myself to a variety of writing and writers. There was one thing I noticed about the good short stories: they didn’t explain me to death. Nothing bothers me more than a short story that tries to tell me every detail of each character’s back story in the first three paragraphs. It bores me. It bogs me down. Ditto to the over-explanations after each character does something. “She brushed her hair, something that she had done for years and her mother had done before she
When one thinks of tradition at this time of year, Thanksgiving, Christmas etc. spring to mind. But what of those ongoing traditions, the ones that we practice every day and pass on to others? In those times the lights were out, in the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy, I realized that as a parent, I’ve passed on the tradition of creativity. During the day, the little ones would gather around the coffee table with their crayons, colored pencils and more sheets of white paper than I care to count. They would draw, argue, discuss, draw some more and produce a book, which then was ‘published’ through the use of numerous staples. How did they learn/want to do this? Children imitate what they see. I remember when I was writing some story or another and my oldest son came into my office and saw my feverish scribbling on a lined note pad.
Friends to lovers stories always touch my heart, and my holiday offering, Second Chance Christmas, is an example of this trope. I’ll let you in on a little secret, these characters, Zach and Naomi, were the first romance couple that I ever created. Their story was a mess, (and I knew it in retrospect) and was my first rejection. When I read that first rejection email, my face got hot. It was two days before I could tell my husband that the story I had worked on for the last month had been rejected. He, of course, was supportive, compassionate, and insistent that I get right back on that writing horse and keep going. I set their story aside, but eventually discovered that they had come so alive in my head that they had to have a story, even just a short story, of their own. And thus, the story