Things I Like Thursdays – Happily Ever Afters by Elise Bryant

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As I’ve been laboring over a Christmas romance novella I hope to have ready for this fall, I’ve been thinking about what readers want most when they pick up a book.   Snappy dialog, action, romance, suspense.  A few laughs, a few tears.  Any combination of these can make a passable story.  But what I really want when I read is someone I can root for.

Tessa Johnson is definitely someone to root for.

Sixteen-year-old Tessa, who’s moved not only to a new city but is also the new girl at a prestigious arts school, has to prove to herself, more than anyone else, that she’s a romance writer.  But that’s hard to do when your words suddenly ghost you and your best friend is hundreds of miles away, even in this technological age.

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Things I Like Thursdays – The Cleaner on Britbox

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When I first heard of The Cleaner, the premise of a crime scene cleaner originally had me prepared for CSI style storylines.  But I wasn’t disappointed to find stories centered on the living, not the dead.  So far, there are six half hour episodes of this British series told through the experiences of Paul “Wicky” Wickstead, as he goes about removing the signs of violent death.

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Thoughts About A New Year

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Honestly, after the last two crap fest years, I really don’t want to say anything to jinx 2022.

Two years ago, the prospect of 2020 and its clear vision of normalcy with a little travel thrown in, began with a late December 2019 trip to Texas, taking a train from San Antonio to Houston for Christmas at NASA.  March 4, 2020, found us on a day trip to San Diego on Amtrak, wondering how worried we should be about a virus we’d heard about lately.  Nine days later, we were locked down.  The Husband didn’t work for months, while I was lucky enough to work from home.  In hindsight, the word for 2020 would be Uncertainty.

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An Angel Named Hector

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Who says angels can’t be furry?  And have a big pink mouth and giant brown feet?

Hector didn’t begin life as an angel.  The happy little hand puppet was a 21st birthday present from my BFF, Zan, the month before I set out from Massachusetts to California with my mother in an LTD station wagon packed full of our earthly goods.  He relaxed on the bench seat between us down the Eastern Seaboard and shared our shock as, driving from Nashville to Memphis, we heard about the death of Elvis.  He quaked as we drove through blinding sheets of rain in Arkansas and dodged bats at an eerily dark campsite in southern Texas.  He soothed me as I experienced my first desert—all that empty space and endless horizon freaked out this suburban girl.  He settled with us in Orange County, where we decided to start our new life.

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Thanks Pop!

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Like most families, our story is complicated.  After a fairly idyllic childhood, my father walked out the door and never returned.  Naturally, even that part is more complicated than a patently dramatic statement.  Suffice to say, there’s a longer story and someday, maybe I’ll publish it.  But for now, the fact is he turned the world my mother and I thought of as solid and comfortable into chaos one August morning in 1973.

For the next 47 years, after awkward initial attempts to stay connected while I still lived back East, I only saw him once.  I kept our contact to exchanging letters because talking to him was just too painful.    Even though he had my phone number, he never called.  But he did ask to pass it to his step-son, so he could call me in an emergency.

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The Lost Art of Editing

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I warned you I might include rants on my blog.  Hey, here’s one now!

Disclaimer: I’m not perfect and don’t claim to be but I do my best to publish with the least amount of errors possible.

I’m not going to mention names in this rant.  I don’t want to embarrass anyone.  But please, if anything I mention here gives you pause to examine your own blog or social media posts, print or online articles, self-published books, etc., then this rant will not have been in vain.

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Sleepy Hollow at Muzeo

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Not feeling too wordy today, so here’s a bunch of photos from the Legend: 200 Years of Sleepy Hollow at Muzeo in Anaheim, CA.  Muzeo is a lovely little museum up the street from Disneyland.  It’s basically a big black box that affords flexibility for each exhibit it hosts.  I’ve seen Napoleon’s hat, costumes from Downton Abbey, part of Cheech Marin’s Chicano art collection, Russian icons, Buffalo soldier uniforms, spyware and rad black leather jackets, among other things.  If you’re ever in the area, look them up at Muzeo.org.

Outside

The view from the courtyard
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