WISHFUL THINKING

Okay, the new installment is long overdue, and I know it is. Groan, groan, groan. I had an issue with the manuscript and then another long and nasty one with the plot. Finally things seem to be a little settled between me and all the issues, and I guess I can post again pretty soon. Maybe tonight if no other issues crop up. I've been busy reading Stephen King's UNDER THE DOME, a terrific book with terrific plot twists, and have just about finished that high-octane read so I can soon begin my next one- a book by Helen Grant, called THE GLASS DEMON. I'll be putting up reviews soon of both, although I don't think any review can do justice to King's book- which should be read!!!  More on SHADED coming soon! The lovely and wonderful Misha has agreed to promote this book, and you can read what she had to say about it here I also did a new and very  surreal photomanipulation I call The Memory Lane (um, literally)

Ani Raye has been asked to appear for an appointment at her principal's office. This is a strange request and she finds herself wondering what could possibly await her behind his orange door. In the school cafe, she meets with her best friend Khyran (K) and her trainer Stratten. K and her mother substitute Willa is also introduced.  I pushed myself into moving out of the chair as the Lowers tittered nervously and gazed at my table. The rest of the Mess Hall shone while my table looked like an aerial view of the Great Massacre. I walked to the front of the Hall and paused with my hand on the handle of the pull-open door. Someone had whispered my name. I glanced from one gleaming surface to the next, squinting against the stark fluorescence of tube-light against steel, and heard it again. ‘Ani!’ ‘What?!’ I asked, too loudly, voice echoing in the stillness of the empty hall. Strange, how I thought of it as empty even with all the Lowers in it. Those blue-robed servants never seemed...

Going away for two days, so till then tata....

This is my world, encompassed in four walls that held me and two hundred other kids inside a sprawling fifty-acre plot. Here, bloody fights and bloodier gang brawls were as common as the rising sun.  I could navigate with ease the cobbled pathways worn to rubble by pounding feet even blindfolded.  I knew every stone of the walkway leading to the cliff just past the wall; the memories of hatred and love and fighting and passion etched into each one like a permanent tattoo. The tall and torturous climbing wall, the fake war zones, the bright classrooms, the arena with its adrenaline rushes….everything was as by-heart to me as the back of my own hand. Lots of random facts about the School was loaded into me, too- like the fact that the Trainers are hard-assed jerks; or that you could always predict the weather for the day if you knew the sea well enough to look from the cliff and make out the subtle changes in it; or that below the solitary cedar at the far end of the campus was...