I’m excited to announce that one of my short stories will be released tomorrow, December 1st, 2017, in the anthology, ON FIRE. I’m waiting to find out from our editor when the price will go up, but one way or another, you’re not going to get a better deal than this. With just one click, for 99¢ you’ll get 25 fantastic, guaranteed to be burning hot stories delivered to your Kindle.
Thanks so much!
BURN, BABY, BURN
Capable of creation and destruction, fire burns within us.
Behind the thick, black smoke of our lives, we blaze with our own unique flame.
While love compels some, others feed greed and lust into their hearths.
A tool for the deft hand, used with magic or as a weapon, but irresponsibility leaves deep burns and promises dreadful consequences.
ON FIRE brings to light twenty-five tales that explore this unpredictable yet beautiful element.
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I spend so much time reading, editing, and (occasionally) writing fiction these days, I sometimes find myself narrating my movements around my house. Usually only in my head … usually. So I have to ask myself, why bother with ink? I do suppose it helps convey my narration to other people … but seriously, do you need to know I need to buy more toilet paper? My narration is incredibly interesting, as you can see.
Speaking of ink, I’ve recently discovered the joy of gel pens. Particularly Papermate InkJoy gel pens. They’re fantastic to write with. They make me want to write … well, pretty much anything. Shopping lists, permission slips to send my son off on field trips, notes about other people’s books … Hey! I should write a book of my own! Yeah, I should get on that.
I’m sitting here looking at my inky black cat. Why in heaven do we think of black when the word “inky” comes along? Ink comes in so many different colours now. We’re not living in an age where we have to use a feather to write with. And a pot of ink … can you imagine? Having to do that? Our computer screens would be a mess!!
Abuse of the elderly–seems like the definition of that would be easy. Don’t abuse them physically or verbally, don’t take advantage of them, and have patience for their failing memories. Simple, right? Apparently not.
Going back a few months, you might remember my mention of my mother not being well. She lives in a retirement home just up the street from where I live, apart from the six weeks she spent in the hospital from last June until August. She fell and broke her neck. I’m not exaggerating–she actually fractured the vertebrae at the top of her spine. It didn’t for a minute stop her from walking, but I was cautioned that if she turned her head a certain way, she might finish herself off. Since she couldn’t be trusted to keep her neck brace on, she was confined to a hospital bed.
Since then, she’s been told that when she goes out for a cigarette (because she can’t smoke inside, naturally), she has to take good care to keep her walker with her and watch where she’s going. Fast forward to last week.
She fell, yet again, this time breaking her ribs. Will she stop smoking and stay inside? Of course not. She’s been smoking since she was fourteen years old. Seventy-four years ago.
I started off by giving her cigarettes to the nursing staff, in hopes that she’d have someone to go out with. This, of course, was far beyond my better judgement to take them away altogether because of the risk of pneumonia with broken ribs. That worked for a while, until she started to complain to both myself and the staff that we were treating her like a twelve-year-old.
So, she got them back. And guess what? She’s fallen two more times, hitting her head both times.
So I’m stuck. She can’t remember from one minute to the next that going outside is a life-or-death situation. When I explain it to her, she says all right, she’ll wait for a nurse to go out with her. Less than two minutes later she’s asking why there are no cigarettes in her room. What do I do? What is the worse abuse? Denying her what is arguably the one pleasure she has in life to save her life, or letting her kill herself because she doesn’t remember?
