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A vampire leapt from the building and fell toward the survivor’s.  Erik saw it and instantly recognized it was heading to hit the group.  “Separate!”  He shouted loudly and pushed Patrick forward.  Patrick looked up and saw the vampire falling toward them.  He turned and screamed at the group.  Slowly, the group separated into two halves but the vampire swept up a large man, with a camouflaged vest and pants.  The man fought bravely and the vampire released him but fell into a group of infected.  Unconscious from the fall the man had no chance and the group lost another member.

“We need to get into that building,” shouted Erik.  The Haitian stepped away quickly and rose into the air.  “I will cover you.”

“Run!”  Erik shouted.

Both groups ran toward the closed doors of the Fields building.  The first ones to the door attempted to open the doors but…

I don’t usually spout off about religious or political stuff on this blog.  I leave that to Facebook but this was too much and I have to say something.  I don’t even have a category for this.

http://talkingpointsmemo.com/livewire/phil-robertson-rape-murder-atheists

I think this is disgusting and becoming the stereotypical thought on conservatives. This will pick up a lot of media and paint the ultra-conservative movement with a thick ignorant brush.
But this is also the fear I have. You take a thought like this and populate it within a few million like-minded individuals and you have a terrifying idea that Christians cannot kill and rape or I got this thought. Are you saying it’s ok that a Christian family gets raped and killed? They are saved so it’s ok they die, right? I don’t care if you are atheist, Muslim or Christian. It is not ok to be raped and killed! An…

Joe and I gave a Holocaust presentation yesterday at a local high school. This was challenging for me in several ways.

Typically, Joe and I will go to a school, or library, or other venue at a specified time and speak for roughly an hour or two, followed by a question and answer session. I enjoy this sort of thing. I’m always nervous, but afterward we have a jolly time interacting with the audience. And the book sale and signing is always a boost. But, recently I was asked by a teacher if Joe and I could speak to each of her World History classes in one day. Soon, other teachers wanted their classes to join in the discussion. One thing led to another, the presentation grew and grew, and it turned into a big day. Joe and I arrived early in the morning (7:30 a.m.) at the Little Theater…

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…

• Top 100 Most Searched-For Books of 2014 [Abe Books]
• 25 Painfully Unrequited Love Stories From Literature [Flavorwire]*
• Philip Levine, 1928-2015 [The Paris Review]

*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…