Broken Lives Matter

My book is frustrating me at the moment! I've been writing for an hour, and I haven't added anything; I'm just editing, trying to make it all flow reasonably together, which is a disaster. There's so much to tell, and yet so much I don't think I need to tell, and there's always the little editor in my head telling me "don't add this, elaborate on that ," and it's driving me insane! Still, it's wonderful to have a concrete project to be working on again, and this time it's really something meaningful. Thank goodness I have this story, and thank goodness it happened to me, otherwise I would have gone on forever writing little fiction pieces that never got published, living at the government's mercy, thinking that was all I was good for. I just have to keep reminding myself tenaciously that I am strong enough to write my story; it's not going to kill me to put it all together and relive the hard parts. It might hurt a littl

By 9:00 this morning I was so glad it was Sunday. The smoke detector from my basement with a 10 year lithium battery posted on it, had actually survived three years past its life expectancy. As my house used to be a rental, then vacant, then a HUD house just waiting for somebody to care about it again, this small favor is definitely miraculous. On Friday, unfortunately, it had just about reached the end of its life and began "chirping" its swan song. This high-pitched intermittent beeping could be heard all through the house, and was giving me a headache and making the dogs even jumpier than usual. So I removed it with surprising ease from its mount in the basement and thought I did the right thing to disable it so the chirping would cease. Apparently not. It continued to chirp for 24 hours. Yoshi could hear it chirping alongside its silent "cousin" in a plastic bag I'd hung from the inside garage door knob, and refused to go outside through that door to

Well, I have always said I like New Year's Eve the best for surprises, and even last night it didn't disappoint me:) First, a friend and I threw together plans to finally see Les Miserables together, and it was spectacular! All of Charles Dickens' A Tale of Two Cities came back to me, as its details of the French Revolution were amazingly well reproduced in the movie. We were both so enthralled with the story, I think, and so blown away by the acting, that neither of us shed a tear during most of the heart-wrenching scenes. I even managed to have just "welled eyes" during "I Dreamed a Dream" and "On My Own." Then, just like in A Tale of Two Cities , the ending consumed me. We were both in pieces by the time the credits rolled. I felt like I could have been wailing...but I saved the other movie-goers from that spectacle:) Turns out I wasn't the only one to have that reaction to Les Mis , as comments on Facebook reassured me, so I fee