Author: Juliette Kings

We arrived at the Children’s Hospital Emergency Room at the same time.

He and his partner parked and I pulled up to their left and did the same.

I got out of my car and watched as the officer hurried from his seat and opened the back, driver’s side door.

When the officer grabbed the boy from the back seat of his police Tahoe, I knew almost instantly.

There was a split second though, before instantly I guess, where I didn’t know. For that split second, the officer looked like any dad grabbing his sleeping boy from the car and putting the boy’s head on his shoulder to carry him inside to sleep comfortably in his own bed.

For that split second, it was a sweet moment.

The officer, an around fifty year old white guy, clutched the little boy over his left shoulder gently, but with a clear purpose. The boy was small, a…

Which is more important? Plot or character? Though an interesting discussion—sort of like, Could Ronda Rousey take a Klingon with only her bare hands?—it isn’t really a useful discussion for anything other than fun. To write great fiction, we need both. Plot and characters work together. One arc drives the other much like one cog serves to turn another, thus generating momentum in the overall engine we call “STORY”.

If we goof up plot? Readers/Audiences get confused or call FOUL. Watch the movie Ouija for what I am talking about *shakes head*.

Goof up characters? No one cares about the plot.

New writers are particularly vulnerable to messing up characters. We drift too far to one end of the spectrum or the other—Super-Duper-Perfect versus Too Dumb to Live—and this can make a story fizzle because there is no way to create true dramatic tension. This leaves us (the frustrated…

I happened to walk past my boss yesterday while she was scarfing her lunch and realized I coveted her cheeseburger.  (Pictured: not her cheeseburger.)  I also realized that I didn’t immediately recognize where her cheeseburger had come from, which was odd, because I thought I had tapped out all of the available places to buy food around my place of business.  Anyway, long story short, she told me what the place was called and how to get there and I bounced off to go acquire me a tasty burger.  The place is a diner, and I got a seat at the bar, explaining that I just wanted my food to go, and was able to order almost immediately.

An old man comes and sits down right next to me.  This is a trifle odd, since there are seven or eight barstools at the bar, and none of the rest of…

The following ramblings (in her own words) were submitted by Juliette, from VampireMaman and WestCoastReview, while she was thinking through some unedited thoughts and memories.  We here at STMND think her ramblings are well worth reading through, appreciating, learning from, and spreading across the blogosphere.

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I often see special needs teens when I pick up my daughter at school. I always tell her how different it was when I was growing up. The special kids I see now are fashionably dressed, usually have great hair and are walking along like all the other teens.

So what are my experiences from the deep dark past?

My family has so many skeletons in the closet that it is starting to look like the famous scene in the Marx Brother Movie “Night at the Opera”.  You know the one where people keep coming into a teeny tiny little room and eventually…

Photo taken by (and used with permission from) my son Sevrin at his high school sailing team practice.

As I write this, there are seven teens asleep in my basement.  My son and his friends came back from their high school dance in high spirits last night. Laughing and joking loudly, they boisterously descended on my kitchen, devouring everything within reach (even some chips that I thought I had hidden pretty well).  These guys were the human equivalent of an invading colony of army ants, foraging insatiably through my refrigerator.

Now these boy-men are dead to the world, asleep in a puppy pile on my basement floor.  And I have to be honest – I am loving every single thing about these teens.   In fifteen plus years of parenthood, I have grown accustomed to – perhaps, in some ways, inured to – the many and diverse aspects of wonder in…

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*This list is a bit broader than their headline suggests: “For your Valentine’s Day pleasure, here’s a selection of literature’s most painfully unrequited, star-crossed and thwarted romances.”

The only reason I started listening to their conversation was because I thought they were talking about Russian royalty. As I stood in line to check out my groceries, two women in front of me were talking about someone named Anastasia. Since it was the title to one of my favorite Ingrid Bergman films, my ears perked up upon hearing that name. I quickly realized they were not talking about the movie so I lost interest in their conversation. Some time shortly after I was in a store and while in the shoe department I heard some people nearby talking about Anastasia and Christian. What were the chances I would hear the name Anastasia twice in one week? It was not long before I kept hearing about these two individuals everywhere I went, from the office to the health club to any retail establishment; it was unreal how many people…

My Aunt Priscilla died almost 20 years ago. She had a vibrance that captured anyone within her radius. Her middle name was Apollonia, but let’s just keep that among us, shall we?

To me, she was always fearless, or appeared to be, and I told her. She assured me she wasn’t. An example she shared was how the bedrooms and bathroom were divided by a parlor. No biggie, right? Wrong. The parlor was used for viewings and wakes when relatives died. She recounted how one night, when she was a toddler, she had to pee. The idea of walking past the corpse terrified her so much that she contemplated wetting the bed. She decided against it, and crept past the body.

Her family expected her to become a nun. She tried, but convent life wasn’t for her. Instead, she moved to New York City, much to the chagrin of her…

“God, I remember this place.  The crappy food, the crappy service.  It was the worse store I’d ever been too but they had top shelf liquor,”  Erik stepped over a broken chair and around a metal shelf that had fallen over.  It had been so long since anything moved in this place the dust tinted the white shelf dark grey.  He walked to the right and found an aisle full of canned foods.  Erik found a can of beans that sat in the center of the aisle and another can of fruit.  “Now I need a damn can opener.”  His body began to shake as he stared at the food.  A noise from near the back of the store started him.  That noise was followed by several meaty slaps upon the large picture window in the front of the store.  A pair of zombies had wandered toward the store.  Erik…

Our intention was to dance on his grave.

My beautiful cousin, who I’d not seen in 35 years, and I set out to dance on our grandfather’s grave. Our first dilemma was, of course, song choice. You have to have the right song. We bandied a few song titles about, Alanis Morrisette was a front runner.

Obviously.

We drove to the town where he lived, and where he is buried. We drove to the town where we were abused. Driving down the picturesque New England roads, I felt a little faint. Mary felt a little barfy. We pulled into a store parking lot, and Mary spent some quality time behind a dumpster, hurling. It happens.

We weren’t entirely sure where the cemetery was, so we pulled into a police station to ask for directions. I said, jokingly, We should go in and file a police report. Mary said, What would…