August

The air is a little heavy with humidity but the temperature has fallen to reasonable levels. I can feel the tipping point coming. The point when you’ve clicked your way up to the very top of the first hill of the rollercoaster and everything pauses, frozen in time, until gravity takes over and you rush toward the ground again. We’ve risen to the peak of this summer season and we will soon begin the pell-mell rush into autumn and winter. But for now, we sit at the apex of the year, still and peaceful.

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Protest IS Patriotic

A stranger on the internet, disagreeing with my #protestISpatriotic hashtag, asked me what freedoms the current administration is curtailing. I have created this reading list for that stranger and any others who might be curious why I feel it necessary to be so political these days.

These are SOME of the things the Trump administration has done that I disagree with, that I believe are damaging to the well-being of our country, and that I protest out of patriotism:

Last Resort

Leslie had tried all the other numbers she knew. Nobody could tell her any more about tomorrow’s big project deadline than she already knew herself.

“What a bunch of morons,” she muttered to herself as she paced back and forth across her tidy bedroom. How was it even possible that they, having been in class all week, knew less than she did after being home sick the last three days?

There was no help for it. She only had one option left.

Promise Me

“Promise me,” she begged.

“I promise,” he whispered. He pulled her into the warm circle of his arms, where the air smelled of cloves and fresh hay and, best of all, him. This was where she belonged, where she wanted to stay forever.

“How can I trust you?” she asked. “How can I believe your sweet words? Words cost nothing.”

The Key

If it had been any other storefront, she wouldn’t have hesitated. The key, dangling from the knob on the roof access door, sang a siren’s call. She could already half imagine the shenanigans they would get up to, two stories above the rest of their sleepy little town.

But it wasn’t any other storefront. It was THAT storefront. And because it was THAT storefront, she paused to lick at her chocolate ice cream cone and consider her options.

Sometimes

Sometimes it was difficult to force her body to move through the sequence of chores. Her feet would grow leaden and her fingers would refuse to grasp. The buckets and barrows that normally danced as she commanded would stand sullen and still as the afternoon light deepened.

Level Up!

I reached a pretty spectacular milestone in my writing adventure yesterday.

I’ve blogged about this before, but I struggle to understand where my stories come from. Other writers will talk about creating whole worlds but that’s not how it feels to me. I don’t feel like I’m creating or inventing the stories I write. It feels more like I’m tapping into a source and downloading them through my fingers.