Life is a Story - Tell it Big

If Walls Could Talk – Summer Home

Sally — Fri, 18 May 2012 06:51:21 +0000

I am an all time house but a part time home. I have owners and I am sure they pay a full time mortgage on me. During the winter I am shut down, someone does drop by now and again. A property manager, I suppose. A quick walk through, a check of the pipes, not even a light dusting though.

Did you know dust is almost entirely human skin that is shed daily? Kind of gross. Really gross. Without humans wondering around, cooking, showering, playing, napping, I don’t really need all that much attention.

As the trees begin to leaf out the property manager gets more involved. He jangles his keys and tromps in wearing work shoes. It is still cold outside but he has some prep work to do.

He freshenes up the place, throwing windows open, fluffing the drapes. Checking light bulbs. He goes out and comes back with some supplies for my pantry. Then he rearranges the shelves with the newest freshest supplies toward the back.

When he is done fussing around he shuts me back up and I don’t see anyone until at least two very hot weeks go by.

Being a summer home is not a bad job, I am filled with activity all in a big ball of energy. The family hasn’t changed for almost a decade. No new babies come in and the children are less apt to mess up my walls or break the lamps. They do continue to drag sand and grit in on their shoes. The sand etches my floors in defined pathways. There was a shoe rule in the beginning but about four summers in, the rule was abandoned.

I didn’t have don’t have air conditioning and until recently I didn’t have a television.

The owners claimed I was a place to unplug, to relax a way to leave the city behind. But a tv came with a vcr, then a dvd player, then on a hot summers day, a cable guy came out and hard wired the tv.

The family still spent a fair amount of time running on the beach, burning their shoulders and noses but they also spent an alarming amount of time inside.

Two years ago the family showed up with computers and more wiring went in.

The energy that used to start out expectant and chaotic then settle into a calm hot quietness has changed. Now, the thread of worry and the feeling of anxiety follows them and they are not the relaxing people who came before.

I am still a summer home but the days of unplugging are long gone.

Writerly Wednesday Welcomes James L. Hatch

Sally — Wed, 16 May 2012 06:31:24 +0000

James L. Hatch is our Writerly Guest this week! Welcome James.

The Substitute by James L. Hatch

Bio

Although my bachelors, masters, and Ph.D. are in chemistry and meteorology, I worked as a scientist and system/software engineer before retiring a third time, and then turned to writing. Extensive travel, from Thule, Greenland to Australia’s Great Barrier Reef – and to dozens of countries in between – provide the real-life experiences I incorporate into everything I write.

I enjoy boating, kayaking, skiing, traveling, hiking, tending nine grandchildren (no more than two at a time), and ballroom dancing, but my first love is writing. I have completed eight novels and one short story, and intend to continue writing in the Sci-Fi and paranormal comedy genres. I have contracts with xoxopublishing.com, Solstice Publishing and Eternal Press.

All my buy links and books/excerpts/blurbs/reviews are provided on my website .

Blurb

The Substitute Blurb: Miss Havana’s public persona was far from the truth because, in her capacity as substitute teacher, the small community where she lived knew her as the breathtakingly beautiful young woman who demanded every student learn, but in her private life, ostensibly caring for aging parents in Chicago, she raced through the lives of powerful men, leaving a wake of destruction…and a deep desire for revenge. Little did she realize her conflicted life would end in a chaotic death at an early age, and to eternal conflict with the devil. The surprise ending will leave the reader stunned and gasping for more.
Excerpt:

This excerpt is told from Lucifer’s POV in hell (extracted from Chapter 27 of The Substitute)
The lair is silent when I wake the next morning and, for a moment, I consider the possibility I’ve had a really bad dream, but the smell of stale urine wafting from by sleeping mat and the sound of Miss Havana thrashing around in the kitchen quickly brings me back to reality. The bitch is looking for something sharper than her tongue, but I doubt Lilith would have left anything like that laying around, especially if this is my fate and my agony is to be extended. Calling Waldo to help me during my scuffle with Miss Havana and Croco might have been the wrong thing to do.

I wander aimlessly to the kitchen, find some spoiled food, sit at the opposite end of the kitchen table from the bitch and poke at the disgusting pile on my plate with a rounded wooden spoon, the only utensil left in the kitchen, probably because it’s quite dull and very difficult to duel with. Frankly, I’m a little surprised Lilith didn’t affix them to our arms with long handles so we’d have to feed each other if we wanted to eat. It’s trite, but ironic and effective. Miss Havana ignores me completely as she seethes silently in her own little world. Being the upbeat fellow that I am, I feel compelled to offer some enlightened conversation.

“Bitch!”

True to form, she is up to my challenge, and retorts in a microsecond. “Asshole.”

I smile sweetly. “Shrew!”

I’m positively amazed how she can distort her face with a curled lip when she defames me, but just when I believe I have the extent of her vocabulary completely figured out, she changes her mode of operation by enthusiastically giving me the one finger salute and follows with, “Eat shit and die.”

I can only offer a deep and forlorn sigh, remembering the meticulous way she used to keep herself. Now her frizzy hair hangs into her coffee and the bags under her eyes sag as much as her breasts. She has aged, although others here don’t. I guess that’s because she never really became part of the establishment. I never actually judged her. Had I banished her, I might have allowed her to keep her youth, for my own pleasure of course, although there would have been other downsides to be sure. Now she’s just a shell of her former self, full of hatred and rage, but without the power to do anything about it.

However, being the good sport that I am, I have only pointed out her gradual decline on a few occasions even though there are those who would gloat, but that wouldn’t be me. No, rather than point out her imperfection, I simply focus on me and how much younger I appear than she. Of course, when she still spoke to me, she would simply retort, “Younger men are okay. Men don’t mature anyway.”

A lesser man might be insulted, but instead, for a fleeting moment, I feel sympathy for her, something not allowed here under any circumstances. She must note my modicum of compassion because, in the next instant, she dumps her bowl of gruel on me and stomps off toward the living room. Unfortunately, she can’t go far, because two of Lilith’s fierce dog-like creatures block the door and neither of us wants to risk testing them. Perhaps someday, if the opportunity presents itself, I will bump her into one when she’s not prepared and see what happens.

I’m not at all sure why Lilith is keeping the two of us around. Relatives don’t mean anything here, so I’m absolutely certain she has a reason, a plan for us. I’d like to talk that over with my former mate, but I suspect that would be like trying to share food with a caged wild cat. Nevertheless, I approach her with my normal pleasing demeanor, determined to give it a try.

Interview

1. In three days, all power will go off, everywhere for a very long time. What will you include in your author survival kit?

Ans: A fishing pole and lures.

2. Where did the idea for the work you are promoting arise?

Ans: In a dream, a weird dream. I woke laughing and began writing immediately. I finished the novel in less than two months, the fastest I have ever completed any book.

3. What do you like to read?

Ans: Paranormal parody/comedy and Sci-Fi.

4. Tell us about the most exciting place you have ever visited?

Ans: Hayman Island, Australia, on the Great Barrier Reef

5. What is the most mundane, day to day, thing you can share about yourself?

Ans: I love to eat.

6. What scares you the most?

Ans: Missing meals.

7. Tell us anything but keep it G rated.

Ans: I just finished the sequel to Oh, Heavens, Miss Havana! The novel is called The Training Bra, and has the same wacky characters as the first book in the series, The Substitute. I am now torn whether to write a fourth comedy, or a Sci-Fi-YA-contemporary fiction. I have great ideas for both.

Buy Links

James L. Hatch, Miss Havana, The Substitute, The Training Bra, Comedy

Fiction Friday – If Walls Could Talk – Schoolhouse

Sally — Fri, 11 May 2012 06:48:26 +0000

Welcome to Fiction Friday. To see all of the Fiction Friday Posts, go to http://fiction-friday.com . To see how the idea for If Walls Could Talk, go here..

Schoolhouse to Dentist Chair..

I was a two room schoolhouse.
My desks were rarely full. Maybe for one or two years. Then the flu came through and closed me up tight. After what seemed a season, I reopened both teachers looked drawn, exhausted. The students, fewer, looked fairly beat down as well. Some of the girls had their hair shorn back to their scalps.

It was a slow start after the illness. Before that I know some of the children would get sick and never come back, but that was two here, one there and never caused my doors to be shut tight.

With two classrooms there is still a lot of repetition. Year after year the teachers taught the same lessons, gave the same hand writing, arithmetic drills, reading circles. One group would work quietly while another group gave recitals on facts and more facts.

Being a school house was dull, almost mechanical, I saw children dread to enter with two or three behind them, cheerful and hardly able to wait to get through the doors. Some of those who couldn’t wait to get in were the first who wanted out in the afternoon.

When a family fell on hard times, kids would go missing. Sickness of a major family member kept that family’s children home. Someone had to do the chores. During planting and harvest time, the bigger boys were excused early or allowed to come in late, or not at all. Having an education is a privilege, not a right. Sitting behind a desk memorizing arithmetic did not get the crops planted or taken off to market. Some facts of life were always facts, bigger than any multiplication problem.

I was a clean place. The teachers would stay after the children were gone. They’d make notes, go to the other teacher’s room and they would chat, sometimes serious chat, problem solving and other times they’d laugh and tell stories that should have been told out of school. You know, you’ve heard it before, telling stories out of school.

The narthex is a small room, called the cloak room. Children shed coats and hats and mittens. They stomped the snow off, set their lunches on the shelf. This was a transitioning place where many children shrugged off the troubles that followed them from home. I suppose that is why some of the kids were always so anxious to get here. If the day turns nice I keep the coats until the next day. A child forgetting his coat was free to come in and retrieve it. It was the innermost doors that were off limits without a teacher.

The narthex sheltered many people over time. Sometimes, and most often they were adult men. They’d come in, usually drunk and huddle up for the night. Always careful to let themselves out before the full on break of dawn and the arrival of the teachers.

The teachers being the first ones there knew. They could smell the drink the grown men sweat. They’d remove any bottle that might have been left behind and go on as though it was an ordinary thing.

The men who slept there knew the rules unwritten and unspoken. Only the worst off left anything but a scent behind. There were regulars but never two at a time and I wondered if there was some invisible code a signal that I was occupied. If there was, I never figured it out.

The last classes happened here and ended as they should. The teachers and children were going to come back to another place next year. No one was sad.

The children cleaned me that year beside the teachers. They washed the walls, the chalkboard, even shined the pegs that kept the coats. There wasn’t even a hint of a lost fried egg sandwich.

This time they locked me up as tight as when the influenza hit the town. My electricity was turned off. My water, too. I sat like that. I didn’t take long to begin to show my abandonment. I think places need people in order to be alive, in order to be.

I just sat here. Some junk gathered up out front and a new house went up next door. Always, a few kids would come around to use my playground, but it had turned rusted and dry rotted and one day it was cleared away.

I was painted up one spring time, my roof was fixed, windows calked and I became a small office. One of my rooms was redone into something similar to stalls. Machines and padded chairs were brought in with new plumbing and bright lights.

It took a long time to get this remodeling done and I knew for certain I was not going to be a school.

Strange people came in and tested big bulky equipment. They left. Stranger people came in and tinkered with things and then the familiar testers came back again. After this went on a repeated a few times I had a new sign over my door.

I had been converted into a dentist’s office with room for three patients to wait at a time. I had to wonder if the town expected an epidemic of toothaches.

I soon discovered that no one really likes to come through the door. I can feel the discomfort, the pain, the worry and the dread before they even get to the room in back.

They seem quite cheerful, putting on a good face, telling a flat joke. Then they get to the chair.

They lie down and mostly grip the arms. I fully expect them to bound up and take flight. Some of them do.

One gentleman, young, came in one day. He was a falsely cheerful as any of them. The woman got him in the chair and turned away. Like he’d be jolted by live wires, the fellow leapt up out of the chair and bounded straight out the door and the next door and the narthex where children hung their coats.

This happened a lot, but usually in a more controlled way as the patient talked his or her way out of the chair apologizing all the way out the front door.

Now, I’m empty again. They have left me as I am, one chair that they didn’t resell and a gutted x-ray machine. When people drive by they still call me the old school house. It is more pleasant that being called the old dentist’s office.

The Old Schoolhouse

Writerly Wednesday Welcomes Carrie Lynn Barker

Sally — Wed, 09 May 2012 06:02:19 +0000

Genesis

Welcome Carrie Lynn Barker to Writerly Wednesday. Click on the book cover to buy the book. Eternal Press has various formats to Meet your E-Reader’s Needs.

Bio: Carrie Lynn Barker is an avid writer who has been writing all her life. She is the author of four novels, the second of which was nominated in the paranormal category at EPICon 2012. She lives just outside of Los Angeles with her husband, filmmaker Brandon Barker and their two dogs. She’s a collector of books and tattoos, both of which she has many.

Blurb: Chris Fletcher, government experiment, healer, lover and friend, heads to San Francisco, where she again attempts to hunt down the man who created her, all the while being hunted herself.

As she seeks out the person who wants to kill her, she not only meets new friends, but discovers that her story has become something of a legend. While the underground experiment community has lifted her up to hero status, Chris knows the danger in such a thing and puts her focus on finding her maker. In the end, what she seeks to destroy may end up changing her life forever.

Excerpt: There were two women and one man. I had only known their kind once before in my life. I was… I guess the word is overjoyed at having found them.

The man was big, muscular but not too much, and had close cropped black hair. His eyes were golden brown, much darker than Jonas’s yellow ones, but still holding the same mystery. His face was a chiseled, utter perfection. Had he been another being I would have recommended modeling to him and his friends.

The women were just as beautiful and perfect. The taller one looked much like the man, who I knew to be her brother. She had long, flowing raven black hair that reached to her waist. Her eyes were the same deep gold color. Her features were striking, enough to make any man stop in his tracks.

The other woman, the one who thought of herself as their sister but technically was not, had shorter hair, blonde and soft. She was obviously the strong one, more of a leader than even the man was. She was plain, though still lovely, but I knew she was the wild one. Her eyes, when they finally locked on mine and noticed me watching them, were sky blue, bright and powerful. They reminded me a little of Starch’s.

Her name was Ripley, and she recognized me in an instant. Much to my surprise–or is it dismay? –she practically worshiped me. She spoke of me as often as she could, made it her mission in life to seek out the woman who started the revolution.

Well, I found her, and she wasn’t going to let me leave her sights until she got a proper introduction. Though I had no idea what she was thinking when the word ‘revolution’ went through her head. I am about the furthest thing from a revolutionary I can think of.

You can Buy your Copy of Genesis Here!

Carrie’s Website is Here

Interview

1. In three days, all power will go off, everywhere for a very long time. What will you include in your author survival kit? Paper, pens, lots of wine and cheese. Some candles and matches so I can write at night. Maybe some extra wine, just in case it stays out longer than I thought it would.

2. Where did the idea for the work you are promoting arise? Genesis is the sequel to my first Eternal Press novel, Revelations. After writing the first draft of Revelations, I didn’t plan on continuing, but a friend was so hooked she convinced me to keep writing about the characters. The story just came naturally once I rewrote Revelations to accommodate a sequel. The third book in this series, Exodus, is due out in November, and it’s all my friend’s fault.

3. What do you like to read? I’ll read anything but Edna Ferber is my favorite author. I love her strong female characters and her easy, flowing style of writing. Once I pick up something by her, I can’t put it down, no matter how hard I try. She puts her readers right in amongst her characters and brings time periods to life like no one else.

4. Tell us about the most exciting place you have ever visited? Santa Fe, New Mexico has always been a standout for me. I don’t know why. It’s not something I can put my finger on but when I think about my favorite places to visit, that’s my number one. I could have stayed there forever and if I ever do go back I may never leave. Louisiana, as a whole state, stands out pretty well, too.

5. What is the most mundane, day to day, thing you can share about yourself? I drive down famed Melrose Boulevard every day when I go to work. To me, that’s pretty mundane. I also drive by Paramount Studios on my route. Also mundane…

6. What scares you the most? Avocados. Don’t ask my why. They’re scary. All green and squishy and slimy, like Swamp Thing. So natural yet so unnatural. Also, they attract skunks.

7. Tell us anything but keep it G rated. Due to a malfunctioning synapse (or something) in my brain, I don’t feel pain like a regular person. It’s hereditary; my grandpa had it, my mother has it, and I have it. I feel little to no pain and, as a result, I end up with cuts and bruises and have no idea how I got them. If you ask me if my tattoos hurt, I will honestly tell you no, because they didn’t. Not even the lucky shamrock behind my ear.

From Sally – I haven’t had unexplained bruises since my last year of college. Oh, wait, the water-bed was giving me black and blue hip that I didn’t know I had until I underwent an emergency appendectomy. My husband commented that it looked like someone man-handled me during transfer to the OR table. It took a few months to figure out it was the edging on the water bed and I was harming myself every time I climbed out of it. Way TMI right?

Keywords:
Genesis, Carrie Lynn Barker, Revelations, Paranormal, Eternal Press

Clematis Ever After or My Brown Thumb

Sally — Sun, 06 May 2012 18:24:30 +0000

I am known for my brown thumb.

Plants under my care either die or almost thrive. Because of the survivors I will not claim the black thumb and the ones that wither on the vine, well, I can’t grab the green thumb prize.

When we first moved into our home I spent the first summer plucking things out of the flower bed. I left a few weeds to see what they might become and discovered I had been murdering columbines by the bushel.

I put a Clematis in the southwest corner of the north flower bed more than a decade ago. It lived and bloomed.

Each year in October or November we cut the brown dregs of the summer growth back to maybe four inches above the soil.

In June when Montana weather grudgingly gives into summer, the vine shoots up and almost appears to grow before our eyes. Six inches during the night is not unusual.

In August it begins to bloom. Purple. Mostly four petals, sometimes five. It bows its heavy head of purple.

Yes, I cut it back to here...

Last fall, I don’t know what happened but we didn’t cut the vine back. We left it and I thought I’d go ahead and clip it at the end of May when I put in the summertime flowers.

In late April some leaves began to come back to the vine. A few at a time until new growth appeared probably four feet up.

For at least a decade we have been cutting this back and I have to wonder how big it might have been if we’d only let it go.

Check this out! Yes, Growth on the Brown Stuff

It looks fairly scruffy and I suppose we’ll be able to figure out what is really dead in a few more weeks. We have only given this poor vine three months of growth. This year, I wonder if it will bloom in June or July and take over the porch like Kudsu in the south.

Enjoy the scruffy photos of my unfettered Clematis.

Don’t Touch Anything Sharp!

More Green Stuff...

This part is over my head.. Dare I try to Cut out the Brown?

Fiction Friday – Poorhouse – If Walls Could Talk

Sally — Fri, 04 May 2012 06:21:56 +0000

I am a house that doesn’t really exist anymore. I was run by the county and a pinch more friendly than the workhouses I was modeled after.

Being poor is a reflection on a person’s social skills, his slacking nature and should not be encouraged. So I was not designed to give pleasure of any sort, I was supposed to give the bare minimum. Shelter.

In days far off a man who couldn’t provide for his family had to bring his wife and children with him to gain entry. The women were segregated and set to work and all custody and claim to the children was forsaken.

Over here, in America, poor houses were run by the county. Someone over looked the running of the house and rules were strict. Able bodied men worked and because I was a farm house they could somewhat support themselves from the gardens, small crops and animals they tended.

A doctor could visit at his own expense. Out of guilt, debt or cheery Christian attitude. They came and went.

The homes like mine were places of last resort, hard luck and a reflection of economic times.

As America adopted a sort of welfare system, social security and such I fell out of use.

By the time I was built, children were no longer allowed to enter, but they had their own, there were orphanages.

The insane and infirm were given their own shelter, shared, I heard, with those who were dying from tuberculosis. It was a grim time.

I closed down a long time ago but I still remember the gloom, the hopelessness. The hunger. The victims of circumstance.

In the 1980s most remaining orphanages, hospitals for sick and infirm people closed down suddenly. They called it deinstitutionalization. I called it the birth of homelessness. The poor and anti social now reside in shelters, crack houses, jails, juvi centers. The worst off who don’t end up in jail are standing on corners, sleeping under the overpasses, having soup out of small trailers with Bible phrases painted on the sides.

We do have a poorhouse that is allowed, a place of last resort, but no one likes to talk about it that way. It is a place where our oldest, the frail, the almost sick and recovering people live out their end days being cared for by underpaid rotating staff.

It comes, usually, one step after a retirement community or assisted living facility. Nursing homes are run like I was and are still run by the county. The income for upkeep comes from the social security and welfare systems, a combination of state and county funds. But shhhh don’t say that too loudly.

I am out of fashion, I no longer house the unfortunate, the drifters, the insane, the orphaned, the poor, I’m really just a tumbled down corner at the edge of a farm, run by very pleasant people just barely able to get by, even with assistance from various programs that dictate what they grow and how.

Is it good that I am gone? I wonder.

I thought when they closed my doors I might be rehabbed much like other houses and buildings no longer serving the people who built them. I thought it was a sign of better times. It wasn’t it was a sign of a country trying to disperse its poor and unfortunate, to spread them out, to look away.

It isn’t that I want to be rebuilt, leave me here as some piled stones, lead paint chips, a heap. Leave me as a silent unassuming memorial to times and people we our country would rather not observe.

I’m not really gone, any more than I am the sum of my brick and mortar, the silent desperation I housed, the wanting.
Poorhouse..
__

Join me on Wednesday for Writerly Wednesday and again next Friday when a new house speaks.

Don’t touch anything sharp!

Writerly Wednesday Presents Kim Richards – Haunted Mansion Project: Year One

Sally — Wed, 02 May 2012 06:05:12 +0000

Welcome Kim Richards to Writerly Wednesday!

Haunted Mansion Project: Year One

Haunted Mansion Project: Year One buy link (Damnation Books)
Amazon Buy Link

B & N Buy Link

Website

Bio:

Kim Richards is an author, editor, and publisher. She and her husband own and run Damnation Books LLC which is a small press with two imprints: Eternal Press and Damnation Books. Originally from Roswell, NM, she lives in northern California.

Blurb
Introduction by Rain Graves. In the fall of 2010, ten horror writers met at a haunted mansion to spend four days together. Joining them were a group of paranormal investigators who studied the house and reported their findings. This anthology is a collection of the fiction, poetry, journals, real impressions, and investigative conclusions inspired by that weekend. E.S. Magill, Rain Graves, Nikki Boscia, Loren Rhoads, Sephera Giron, Kim Richards, Yvonne Navarro, Weston Ochse, Christian Colvin, Dan Weidman, and S.G. Browne share their secret fears, desires and the disembodied voices of those from beyond. Proceeds from this anthology go toward future Haunted Mansion Project events.

Excerpt

Now, however, her first look at the Haunted Mansion in person is enough to make her head and heart pound. Nothing she’d seen on the web could convey the size and sheer intensity of the place, the dimness of the full-width front porch and second floor balcony even in full sunlight, the expanse of windows on the uppermost floor that swallow light and seem to give back nothing. She doesn’t want to go in, but the taxi that drops them at the bottom of the heart-shaped front lawn is already pulling away and Justin is picking up his suitcase behind her.

“Get moving, would you?” he asks. He puts his free hand in the small of her back and gives her a little push, just enough to make her stumble. “We haven’t got all damned day.”

But they do. In fact, they have four full days.

Just In – I acquired the Table of Contents!

Table of Contents

Foreword by E.S. Magill

Introduction The Haunted Mansion Project Year One by Rain Graves

The Findings

Investigation Narrative by Nichole Boscia

The Facts

Haunted Mansion Rules and the Writers Who Mock Them by S.G. Browne

Touched by Loren Rhoads

Journal of a Paranormal Mind by Rain Graves

Notes From the Haunted Mansion by Sèphera Girón

Sounds like Faith to Me by Kim Richards

Coming Home: Some Thoughts on Haunted Houses by E.S. Magill

From the Haunted Mansion

Photographs Taken by Attendees

The Fiction and Poetry

Depictions by Yvonne Navarro

Red Road to Spirit Mansion by Rain Graves

And Not a Drop to Drink by E.S. Magill

Ghost Meter Blues by Weston Ochse

He Journeyed Through Midgard by Christian Colvin

The Journal by Kim Richards

Insane Cinquains by Dan Weidman

In the Night, In the Dark by S.G. Browne

The Old House(At 324 OAK Street) by Rain Graves

The Third Room by Sèphera Girón

A Curiosity of Shadows by Loren Rhoads

About The Haunted Mansion Project Year One Contributors

Interview

1. In three days, all power will go off, everywhere for a very long time. What will you include in your author survival kit?
A crate of paper, a box of pens, and a case of slow-burning emergency candles (for when that muse comes out in the dark).
2. Where did the idea for the work you are promoting arise?
I spent several days with other writers on a writer’s retreat in northern California. We stayed at a mansion which was rumored to be haunted. Well, being writers…we wrote.
3. What do you like to read?
I read a lot of varied stuff. It’s probably easier to say what I don’t read: celebrity books, biographies, & political books. Just about anything else I’m up for but I am partial to fantasy, science fiction, and horror.
4. Tell us about the most exciting place you have ever visited?
Germany. Before we were married, my husband’s work sent him to Germany for six weeks and I went too. While there, I wrote a story, Die Weib Frau based on a pair of real castle legends. It’s included in the anthology, Mother Goose is Dead.
5. What is the most mundane, day to day, thing you can share about yourself?
My morning routine: make the coffee, feed the cats, and turn on the computer.
6. What scares you the most?
Things which could actually happen and on a personal level. Also, I guess it’s a bit psychological but horrible actions people take but for a good reason. A couple of examples might be choosing the death of a child so a train full of people can live or maiming a person now to prevent their death later. Would you call that horrifyingly acceptable? Shudder.

From Sally – I thought I was the only one who thought like that. It is a good thing we write it out and don’t go acting out our what ifs.

7. Tell us anything but keep it G rated.
I have two grown sons whom I’m extremely proud of. They’ve both become incredible young men despite their mother and life circumstances at times. I have a grandson who will be one in June. I’m not ready to be called granny just yet though.

Thanks Kim! I know how incredibly busy you are and I am honored you came to guest on my blog!

Don’t forget to come back next week. All of the Writerly Wednesday posts are at http://writerlywednesday.com . And on Fridays I post a Friday Fiction story. Thanks for coming and if you’d like to get these posts by email I have a submission form at the top of the page.

Be Well Everyone and Don’t Touch Anything Sharp!

Fiction Friday – Crack House

Sally — Fri, 27 Apr 2012 06:38:07 +0000

I was a crack house.

Unlike a meth house, the crack isn’t all that toxic to walls and floors. The freebasing steps are fairly ordinary and no one needs to strip down a battery to make the rock. Most of the work is done before the stuff even enters the country.

All I know for sure is that the stuff turns a fair and steady income for someone. I also know the smell, the worst of it, comes in on the people who drop in and hang out.

The high from crack hits faster and must really be something to experience because people come back again and again trying to recapture that first high like a middle aged guy in a sports car tries to regain his unspent youth.

My rooms are littered with garbage, human feces, condoms, pipes made of glass, clotted, filthy, smelling like burned plastic all the time.

The smell I have heard goes away. I once heard the worst human decomp smell even goes away if you spend enough time around it.

Don’t let them kid you, though. The smell clings to their hair, their clothes, their very souls. I wonder if they have to cut their hair in rehab, I am sure it grows out of their scalps with the plastic smell already in there.

I know about decomp. Some guy died right over there by where the board is coming off that window. He laid there in his own filth and everyone else’s’ for nearly a week before someone finally had enough of him and shoved him out back.

If anyone came to claim him or took a report, they certainly didn’t bother coming inside to ask any questions.

Some of the women, well, wait, now, all of the women who came in and stayed any length of time were pretty skanky. No one really ran the place. People just came in and stayed. They bought the stuff somewhere else. Then they’d get into a squabble with someone else and move on or the supply chain would be disrupted and I’d empty out for a while. The folks would find another place to hang out.

Sometimes a lower form would come in, these kind used heroine a whole different kind of beast. The crack users thought themselves above the heroine users and two the two never mixed for long.

There was a guy who used to come in once in awhile, he had a Bible and a prayer book. He never got here soon enough to reach them. They came here for one reason and it wasn’t for a prayer.

The worst part was how I affected the other houses that surrounded me. Crime, burglary, mugging, petty theft, vandalism, prostitution and rape follow these people who come to shelter here. The decent folks don’t hang around. I am like a black hole at the center of a neighborhood that is collapsing into me.

Businesses don’t open here, who wants dinner with the family here where no family exhisists? Anything nice is bound to be robbed. People can’t even get car insurance on my streets. The rent goes down in despair, only the folks unfortunate and unemployed move into the houses and apartment buildings and they are prime feasting for the suppliers who take advantage of the poor.

Most of them out of pure giving up give into the dream. They put down some money, just enough, they buy that first high and then they begin to sink into a trap they won’t get out of. They already have nothing to lose when they move in.

I’ve been boarded up, tape and notes of condemnation have clung to my doors, windows and warnings have been posted.

People get rousted out and only the most depraved venture in for a week or two. Then, they all come back, new faces but old needs. Needs as old as time itself.

It is like high tide and low tide depending on who got rousted, the supplier where ever he is and the user. There is a relative nearness and farness to consider, too. If the supplier is too far away, this place pretty much falls off the radar while a newer ramshackle house opens up. When a supplier comes back within range I fill up again.

Someday, some slum lord will make a small investment, they’ll come out, haul away my crap and condoms and broken glass. They will paint and window and put a regular family here, but the neighborhood will not respond. A reputation is hard to live down. The family will not like the neighborhood, the stray addicts will un nerve them and they’ll move one night without a word and probably a few months owing on the rent.

For now, I smell like an out house where plastic milk jugs have been set fire to down in the hole.

__A Crack House

Writerly Wednesday Welcomes Bob Nailor

Sally — Wed, 25 Apr 2012 06:05:59 +0000

Welcome Bob Nailor to Writerly Wednesday!

Bob Nailor

”2012: Timeline Apocalypse” Buy Link

Bio:

Bob Nailor’s latest novel release is “Three Steps: The Journeys of Ayrold” through Amazon.com and prior release of “2012: Timeline Apocalypse” (Oct 2010 from 23 House Publishing). He has many short stories on the internet and is a contributing author to several anthologies including “Guide to Writing Paranormal,” “Mother Goose is Dead,” “Dead Set: A Zombie Anthology,” “Nights of Blood 2″ which he co-edited with Elyse Salpeter, “Firestorm of Dragons,” “The Complete Guide to Writing Science Fiction” which he received an EPPIE award, “The Fantasy Writer’s Companion,” and several others. Coming soon is “Guide to Writing Horror.” In addition to writing, Bob also does seminars on the art of writing having taught a class at Lourdes College in
Toledo, OH, assisting with the Maumee Valley Writers Conference for 3 years and being the coordinator of the NW Ohio Writers Conference for two. He also has done writing seminars at conferences, libraries and writer group meetings. Bob’s usual writing genres are fantasy, science fiction, horror and adventure. He lives in NW Ohio. Bob has a website at http://www.bobnailor.com which lists all his books and stories.

Blurb:

It is Wednesday, December 12, 2012. In nine days the Mayan calendar ends and an apocalyptic disaster will befall mankind. Ironically, the fate of the world is in the hands of Barry Hargrove, detective non-extraordinaire, who is in search of a relic he knows as the Baton of Time, and whose importance he does not fully comprehend.

Take a trip to the lush, equatorial jungles of Palenque, to the ruins once know as L’akam Ha where a ghostly Mayan priest/chief known as Chac Tun B’alam rules today. There are many secrets to be revealed from an unlikely group of people: a skeptical doctor, a sexy newscaster, a small Mayan street urchin, a shaman, and a mysterious housekeeper. They must somehow work together to align the forces of the Mayan calendar, and save our world.

Ancient history and legendary Mayan gods – K’ul’ulkan, Ah Pukah, K’inich Ahua – come alive in today’s world as our solar system passes the center of the Milky Way in December 2012. The star, planet Venus, dies and The Pleiades, the center of creation, will be a part of the harmonic universal lines.

2012: Timeline Apocalypse is not a typical doomsday disaster, but a tale interwoven with the myths and legends of the Mayan calendar, and its curious end-date. Can our civilization be saved? Only in Palenque, at the ruins of L’akam Ha, city of the ancient chief K’inich Janahb’ Pacal, can the true meaning of the calendar be deciphered. if time does not run out first.

Excerpt:

I heard a cry, looked up and there in a ray of sunshine, a bird spread its wings in a stretched arc above its head. He had his red crest completely fanned out and it radiated in the sunlight. The tips of the feathers, both in the wings and the fanned tail were aglow, the colors iridescent in the morning light. My heart lifted at the sight. It appeared the bird was about to ignite and burst into flame like the legendary phoenix being reborn.
“Magnificent, isn’t it?” Montoya whispered behind me.
“Stunning,” I replied softly not wanting to break the magic.
“It is a moment like that when an Mayan priest realizes the fullness of communing with the creatures of the forest. You and I are of the modern world, the one filled with hustle and bustle, steel and concrete; but if you allow yourself to drift back a thousand years and know nothing but nature; what would you think.” Montoya asked.
It was an instantaneous thought. “An omen,” I whispered knowing full well it was the answer he was searching for.
“It is still an omen today,” he said. “That is the Northern Royal Flycatcher and is sacred. Now, look beyond to the next tree. Do you see it? The red breasted bird in iridescent blue-greens and those two long tail feathers? It’s called a quetzal.

One of he rarest birds in the jungle and most sacred to the Mayans.” Montoya waved his hand in an arc at the trees. “Now it is up to me, a priest of the Mayans, to decipher what this very fortuitous omen is. Come, let us talk.”
He motioned me toward the ruins. We crossed the small growth of jungle which hid the road from the ruins. Suddenly the path turned and again, like before, the ruins spread before me with all their splendor gleaming in the early morning light. I could see Benita and the kids moving toward the palace. A few other tourists wandered the grounds. A cool, early morning breeze tickled my neck then was quickly replaced by the heat of the rising sun.
“Appears to be another hot day,” I said hoping to break the silence.

Interview

1. Since the power went off for me several years ago for approximately two days, I have a little more respect for the olden days when I was a child of the 50s. What would I, as an author have ready? I touch-type so I’d make sure I had an old manual typewriter and a ream or two of paper, some of that white crap used to correct typing errors (I don’t make a lot, but do make some!), a couple of typewriter erasers and a 24pk of batteries for my cassette player. Of course, if I had the luxury of a generator, well, I’d just open the office window, plug in my laptop and type away but I don’t have one, so I am more realistic. When we lost power that time we made sure the freezer was kept closed to keep the food frozen — we should have ate the ice cream, it melted away — well, doh!

2. All the hype of 2012, a video about the Mayan ruins and after watching a lot of crappy 2012 end-of-the-world movies … I figured I could write a better story. If my readership is a baromter of truth; I guess it was better.

3. I enjoy a good, solid science fiction, fantasy or horror read. I like the epics of my youth when I read Henry Rider Haggard, Edgar Rice Burroughs, Edgar Allan Poe, Robert Howard, and Fritz Leiber where heroes were heroes, dark stories weren’t guts and gore and there was still a mystery to the world and space.

4. My mind cuz it continues to amaze me.

5. I’m retired, I write. Waking up each morning and finding out I’m still breathing is a high point in my day.

6. Reading my stories after they hit print and seeing all the glaring errors I made.

7. I enjoyed being a clown, doing magic, face painting and all that but now I’m getting too old and crotchety so I just enjoy getting out in traffic with my car and being that old fart driving 15mph in a 30mph zone just to tick off some young person. Yup! That’s me in front of you!

”2012: Timeline Apocalypse” Buy Link

Reviews:

My Writer’s Cramp – Book Review: A favorable review at http://mywriterscramp.com/book-review-2012-timeline-apocalypse/#more-2976

Henry Lazarus – Book Reviewer: A very favorable review athttp://www.henrylazarus.com/sf0311.htm

Amazon – some reviews, very good ones at http://www.amazon.com/2012-Timeline-Apocalypse-Bob-Nailor/dp/0982477708/ref=sr_1_5?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1299207835&sr=8-5.

Thanks Bob for being this week’s guest!

Keywords:
2012, Bob Nailor, fantasy, adventure, 23House.

Fiction Friday – If Walls Could Talk – The House that Jack Built?

Sally — Fri, 20 Apr 2012 17:09:05 +0000

A picture book was found in my walls during a renovation. As the story goes, I am the house that Jack built.

Now, I don’t want to cast doubt but I am not in the country side. My yard would hardly hold a cow but malt, a cat, a dog, sure, I can see that.

I object on the grounds that a single fellow named Jack could never have built me without some help from someone else, a crew, for certain.

I prefer to think I was not built upon a lie. I want to think it was one of the workers who included the picture book because his name was Jack and he liked the story.

I didn’t know it was there, it never shifted or crumbled, until they pried it loose and opened it in the middle. It gave right away, a broken spine and puffed up pages. It fell into two bits. The pictures were barely faded.

The owner called the newspaper who sent someone out for photos then the local news stations came and did a story. It is so preposterous. If anyone sat for only a moment and thought about it they would realize it was all a lie.

The fact, in my case, remains, that the book is real and it was walled up inside of me.

I think the family would have been better off by finding a bundle of money, gold coins, bonds.

They removed the book and put it on display under plexi-glass at the city library. When people in town drive by, they tell their children that I was the House that Jack Built.

This is the house that Jack built.
This is the malt that lay in the house that Jack built.
This is the rat that ate the malt
That lay in the house that Jack built.
This is the cat that killed the rat
That ate the malt that lay in the house that Jack built.
This is the dog that worried the cat
That killed the rat that ate the malt
That lay in the house that Jack built.
This is the cow with the crumpled horn
That tossed the dog that worried the cat
That killed the rat that ate the malt
That lay in the house that Jack built.
This is the maiden all forlorn
That milked the cow with the crumpled horn
That tossed the dog that worried the cat
That killed the rat that ate the malt
That lay in the house that Jack built.
This is the man all tattered and torn
That kissed the maiden all forlorn
That milked the cow with the crumpled horn
That tossed the dog that worried the cat
That killed the rat that ate the malt
That lay in the house that Jack built.
This is the priest all shaven and shorn
That married the man all tattered and torn
That kissed the maiden all forlorn
That milked the cow with the crumpled horn
That tossed the dog that worried the cat
That killed the rat that ate the malt
That lay in the house that Jack built.
This is the cock that crowed in the morn
That waked the priest all shaven and shorn
That married the man all tattered and torn
That kissed the maiden all forlorn
That milked the cow with the crumpled horn
That tossed the dog that worried the cat
That killed the rat that ate the malt
That lay in the house that Jack built.
This is the farmer sowing his corn
That kept the cock that crowed in the morn
That waked the priest all shaven and shorn
That married the man all tattered and torn
That kissed the maiden all forlorn
That milked the cow with the crumpled horn
That tossed the dog that worried the cat
That killed the rat that ate the malt
That lay in the house that Jack built.
This is the horse and the hound and the horn
That belonged to the farmer sowing his corn
That kept the cock that crowed in the morn
That waked the priest all shaven and shorn
That married the man all tattered and torn
That kissed the maiden all forlorn
That milked the cow with the crumpled horn
That tossed the dog that worried the cat
That killed the rat that ate the malt
That lay in the house that Jack built.

What a bunch of mouse crap. But it makes the children smile and sets them off for two or three stanzas.

__I am Not the House that Jack Built