Horrifying Gifts for the Holidays

If your family is like mine, it’s big, and ungainly and the truth is, you just don’t know each other well enough to buy each other anything but an Amazon gift card. This will, of course, in no way stop you from wanting to play Happy Families, so you will spend a massive amount of

Today Is My Day!!!

For the last couple of years, I’ve participated in the Independent Bookworm Advent Calendar. It’s a literary countdown to Christmas, and every day, there’s a different short-story. I think it leans toward the Sci-Fi Fantasy end of the spectrum, but I’ve never really done the math. Today is my day. The door opened, and there

Writing as Real Life

Someone asked me if I was married, the other day… if I have kids… the usual small talk from someone I’d just met. She showed me pictures of her husband, her kid (he was pretending to be a Box Troll. I still haven’t looked up Box Trolls.) And I told her that I’m not much

The Secrets That Define Us

Years ago, before my grandmother died, one of my cousins was the first girl on the block to get donor insemination. About the same time, I broke up with the college boyfriend, and my grandmother–who was very much a matchmaker at heart–would bring him up regularly, probe for hints about the odds of us getting

Hello, Family. Good news! You’re My Blog Topic for the Day.

I’ve been keeping score. The number of times one particular aunt asks how I am vs the number of times she asks how some material possession is. Not exactly a nail biter here. Material possessions are slaughtering me. If this were a football game, the fans would have packed it in and gone home at

Help! Real People are Sitting on my Muse!

There’s something about bad news that brings out the opinions. People you’ve heard from twice in the last five years are suddenly front and center, telling you everything you’re doing wrong, how you could do it better, and how they could do it best of all. Hell, no! They’re not in my creative space. Most

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