Featured Author: Afobos

My name is Afobos, and I'm originally from Greece. My family immigrated to the states in the late 60's ,and I've lived here since. I've always loved writing and have written quite a few things mostly for my own pleasure. 

Books by Afobos

I'm a massage therapist and have been practicing for the past 17 years--one day I'll get it right!

    I live 30 minutes south of Houston in League City TX with my 3 indoor cats. Outside I have possums, racoons, and lots of squirrels for company.

    I enjoy kayaking, riding sport bikes, the occasional windsurfing, and fighting the never-ending battle of the bulge. I used to be a bodybuilder back in the 80's and it kind of fizzled from there . . .

    I have worked in a lot of different fields ranging from pizza delivery driver to being a cook, teaching English as a foreign language, teaching Greek, being an interpreter, selling ladies' shoes, working private security, being a bodyguard, a delivery driver, etc. . . . Something about working for someone else though has never agreed with me. I guess you can't fire yourself, that's why I like working for myself.
    I speak fluent Greek, a bit of Spanish--which I learned from ex-wife's family--a little German, and you can catch my accent when I mispronounce words like sheets and sheep . . . . I'll let you guess what sheet sounds like when I pronounce it.
    In my line of work (massage therapy) I've learned to replace sheets with linens. Cuts down on stunned looks.

For more information about Afobos, please check out his books (above) or visit these links:

Massage Business

Facebook Author Page

Inspiration for the Writing Life by Katherine Valdez

Inspiration for the Writing Life

by Katherine Valdez

“Writers live twice.”
—Natalie Goldberg

I was sipping a bottle of iced tea and glanced at the writing inside the cap: “Spend more time on what makes you happy.”

    Writing, reading, running, movies, spending time in nature, and visiting friends and family make me happy. What if I couldn't do these things? What would a character in a story think or do, and how would he interact with people if he's not truly happy? If he's unable to pursue his passions?

    Writing prompts are everywhere, and everything in life is material for your writing. These details will help you tell your story. What are you passionate about? What do you want the world to know?

    I like to read my horoscope once or twice a week as simple food for thought, although the astrologer can be eerily accurate. One day last month, my horoscope said “You will have a strong feeling and a connection to a physical item. It's OK to be unsure as to why.”

    I happened to see a small, inexpensive journal while I was at the store, and was drawn to the blue and green shiny butterflies on the black cover. I'm almost finished with my current journal, so I took this as a sign that I needed to buy it. I could write a story about a girl who is drawn to some butterflies she sees in a park on her way to school, and decides to follow one that circles around her head before heading toward a grove of trees.

    Your journal can be a great source of material. I'm reading Keeping a Journal You Love, by Sheila Bender, in which she shares practical instruction, writing prompts, and journals entries from 15 respected writers such as Pam Houston, Denise Levertov and Ron Carlson.

    One of the most intriguing prompts from this book is “Write about something someone told you during the day and what it makes you feel about life.” I was explaining a dilemma to a friend recently, and she asked, “What do you want to do?” I had to repeat the question in my mind. “What do you really want to do?” Without taking anything or anyone else into consideration, my decision became clear. I now had permission to pursue my own happiness, guilt-free.

    This same thought process could end up revealing something about a character that I might not include in a story, but is important to understand. Maybe that character is hesitating to make the right decision because she knows it will hurt someone she loves.

    Add details that provide depth to your protagonist. What quirk or tendency does he have? Maybe it's something that annoys another character. Maybe it's a flaw that will affect the story's conflict.

    I've overheard some funny and interesting portions of conversations over the years, while standing in line at the grocery store, sitting in a coffee shop, or waiting for a movie to start at the local theater.

    In the November/December 2012 issue of The Writer, Diana Abu-Jaber, author of Birds of Paradise, said: “When I'm starting a new book it seems as if everything inspires me. I think of that time as 'sticky brain.' Anything can set off a story: an angle of light through trees, an item in the newspaper or a bit of overheard gossip. Basically, I think you have to be sort of naturally receptive toward inspiration. Be open to being inspired by whatever comes your way – then you'll never run out of ideas.”

    A friend gave me Journey to the Heart: Daily Meditations on the Path to Freeing Your Soul, by Melody Beattie. Just before finishing this blog post, I read the entry for today's meditation, about awakening to the storyteller within. “Each of us has a story to tell, a story to share with the world...Tell it with joy and flair. Commit to telling it with love and passion.”

    Good luck on your writing journey! I'd love to hear what inspires you.

About the Author

Katherine Valdez writes short fiction and personal essays. She was a finalist in the Grey Sparrow Journal 2012 Flash Fiction Contest and her short story “Little Red Riding Hood Seeks Vengeance” appears in the anthology Open Doors: Fractured Fairy Tales. Contact her at www.KatherineValdez.com and find her on Twitter (@KatValdezWriter) and Facebook (KatherineValdez2012@gmail.com).

Featured Author: Timothy Hurley

   

About the Author

Timothy Hurley is a writer, retired physician, and family man with four children and six grandchildren.  Coast-hopping between New York City and San Francisco Bay Area, he writes literary, speculative and humor fiction.  His heroes, M. Twain, E.A. Poe, and E. Hemingway, among others, are not returning his emails.  His works-in-progress include collections of New York and Mars short stories, The Grumpy Old Men’s Club, and a memoir of his medical career.  When not writing, he reads, and often walks the neighborhoods of New York searching for the perfect pizza.  Timothy and his wife, the architectural historian and author, live in Brooklyn.  They will celebrate their forty-fourth anniversary the day the Mayans bring the world to an end, but they’re not afraid.  Timothy blogs occasionally at The Lunatic Assylum, his name for Earth, and tweets at @timothyhurley3.  Email Timothy at thelunaticassylum@gmail.com.

Published work:

“The Book Report”, humorous book review of Me Talk Pretty One Day by David Sedaris at The Satirist, thesatirist.com September 2012.
“Being in the Box”, speculative flash fiction at Fiction and Verse, fictionandverse.com, October 2012.
“Hanzel and Gretyl: A Boomer Fairy Tale”, humor short story in Open Doors 2 anthology, eBook and paperback, Wayman Publishing, December 2012.

FREE eBooks--A Tribute to EC Stilson's Angel Baby

Zeke Jackson was born on 11/18. At the end of January the following year, he died in my arms.
    Today, to honor my son on his birthday, three of my eBooks are available for FREE download. Here they are:

 

    

Zeke would have been ten today. I'll never forget him or the lessons he taught me.

About the Author

Elisa spends most of her time taking care of four rambunctious kids who are better than green eggs and ham. They're pretty darn fun, but despite that, after she had kids, her boobs shrunk, she lost hair, but gained a greater sense of humor!
    When she's not scavenging through the vents, where her son--the Zombie Elf--likes hiding things, she's sewing, playing her violin, or writing.

Blog: Crazy Life of a Writing Mom

Twitter: ECwrites

Author Site

Into the Void By Rayne Debski

Into the Void

Rayne Debski 

It works like this. You’re on dive boat in the ocean. The current is ripping at three to four knots. The wind causes the water to stand up in peaks. Your scuba tank is strapped onto your buoyancy
compensator which hugs your torso. You test your regulator to make sure your breathing apparatus works. You look over the side of the boat. Visibility in this chop is about one foot, and you’ll be diving down to eighty feet. Someone hands you your photographic gear. You turn and sit on the side of the boat, exhale, and tumble backwards into the void. Seconds later you’re in the deep blue, clearing your ears, descending slowly, and feeling the exhilaration that comes from entering another world. You don’t know what you’re going to encounter, or how the photo shoot will turn out. You’ve spent years taking underwater pictures that were over lit, under lit, spattered with sand you inadvertently kicked up, out
of focus, or just plain dull. But you’ve persevered. And by now you’ve done it so many times you know that when you spot a particular piece of coral, or a flaming scallop, or the sun shining through the water at a certain angle, you can use the knowledge you’ve acquired to compose a photo with elements others
have used but in a way that’s unique. And you have the awards to prove it.
    Writing fiction isn’t very different. There’s the knowing what to do and how to do it. And there’s the doing it. Several years ago I heard about a creativity experiment in which Japanese art students were divided into two groups. Both groups were given several days to complete their assignments. Group A’s assignment was for each student to make a single drawing, perfecting it as much as possible. Group B was told to produce as many pictures as they could in the allotted time. At the end of the experiment, researchers found that the students who did several drawings produced better, more original work than the group who used the time to create a single piece.
    A blank page (or an empty screen) is the writer’s void. Trying to write the perfect story is the writer’s nemesis. Jump into the void. Write. Learn the rules. Then learn when to break the rules. Use the tricks you’ve acquired to bring characters alive, to give your stories a unique voice, to use time and place to weave a fictional world where things happen. Write. As much as possible.

About the Author

Rayne Debski has been an innkeeper, a college instructor, an editor, and an organizational development manager. She now lives and writes in central Pennsylvania, where she shares her life with her husband and their enthusiastic yellow lab. Her award-winning short fiction has appeared in several online and print journals and anthologies, and has been selected for dramatic readings by professional theatre groups in New York and Philadelphia. She is the editor of Aftermath: Stories of Secrets and Consequences,
forthcoming from Main Street Rag Press in December 2012. Between hiking, cycling, and kayaking adventures, she continues to work on a collection of linked short stories.

Publications where her stories have appeared:

Aftermath: Stories of Secrets and Consequences, edited by Rayne Debski

 

"Support System" by Rayne Debski (Necessary Fiction)

 

"In the Country" by Rayne Debski (The Quotable)

"In Love, We Are" by Rayne Debski (6S: The Love Book)

"Hunting Season" by Rayne Debski (A Community of Writers)

"Insurrection" by Rayne Debski (XX Eccentric: Stories of Women and Their Eccentricities)

 

"My Neighbor's House" by Rayne Debski (Thema: Off on a Tangent)

 

"Move On" blog post

Featured Author: Mickey Hunt

Meredith Eugene Hunt  (aka, Mickey Hunt)

 
My brother treated me to eight days in Rome, Italy a few years ago. We stayed at a private apartment half a mile from the Vatican and walked everywhere.  Imagine, he a “liberal” from Berkeley and me, a “conservative” from North Carolina, wandering the streets of that city museum of civilization together, napping in the Pantheon, climbing above the dome of St. Peter’s Basilica, savoring chocolate gelato as a street-side lunch.   The talks we had!
    Much could be said about that marvelous trip, but for our purposes here, the most important part was barbecue sauce.  Stubb’s barbecue sauce.
     At a certain alimentaria (Italian grocery) in Rome, I was amazed to discover bottles of Stubb’s on the shelf, and all the way from West Texas.  Stubb’s was once the favorite at the dinner table with me, my wife, and six children, and it seemed so out of place in Italy.  I guess Stubb’s gets around.
     And it’s tasty enough you could slop some on roast possum and enjoy.  Possibly I exaggerate.
     A picture of Mr. Stubblefield is printed on every bottle. He’s a handsome older man in a cowboy hat.   We share a lot in common.  His most famous quote is “Ladies and gentlemen, I’m a cook” and   his second most famous quote is “My life is in these bottles.”  I like those quotes.  They’re inspirational.  So, following Mr. Stubb’s example, I will simply say “Ladies and gentlemen, I’m a writer and my life is in these stories.”
     Therefore, open up a bottle.  Read one of my stories, either true-to-life or speculative.  What they all contain, I hope, is fun entertainment that offers intriguing, maybe even unsettling perspectives.

Find me at www.chaoticterrain.com.  Then, go to Short Stories.

Myth in THE BEAR WITH TWO SHADOWS By Roland D. Yeomans

Myth in THE BEAR WITH TWO SHADOWS

Roland D. Yeomans

 

Charles Reed has graciously allowed me to slip in through the back door of this cyber domain to talk a bit about the hero of “3GOLDILOCKS & THE BEAR” and my Native American Lord of the Rings, THE BEAR WITH TWO SHADOWS.

    Or rather about the meld of the world's myths that makes for the world of Hibbs, the bear with two shadows.  Why two shadows?

    Isn't there a duality of natures in all of us - a white wolf and a black wolf, both contesting for control of our spirit, the Lakota would say.  And the one who wins?  The one we feed.

    Ancient cultures were defined by their mythology, shaping the sacred stories to show their values, beliefs, and concerns.  Those myths expressed the spiritual and intellectual life of the people of those cultures.

    Those myths had superhuman beings such as Gilgamesh of Mesopotamia - not just a culture hero, but he was the founding father of a whole society.  Hibbs is such a character, more than what he seems, though less than what he yearns to be.

    In many myths, the discovery of knowledge is related to the human characteristics of curiosity and playfulness.  Such is the case with the ever-curious, ever playful Hibbs  -- much to the consternation of the mysterious Turquoise Woman.

    She represents several dualities common in myths :

Trickster -

The Native American tricksters often take on animal form such as Raven or Coyote.  That particular role is taken on by Little Brother, often seen as a hawk.  But rarely, and luckily so, seen as Chaos or the ThunderBird.

Goddess/Teacher  -

Estanatlehi, the Turquoise regally assumes this role, much like Spider Woman.  Though a helper and teacher, she can also be dangerous and unpredictable.  And that is to be expected as she is also :

Gaia -

The Turquoise Woman is the electro-magnetic consciousness that circles from pole to pole of our world.  She is, in fact, the mind of this planet, who can take physical form.  And because of that she leads to an important aspect of my novel :

THE MELD OF THE WORLD'S MYTHOLOGIES -

The Australian aboriginal aspect of the Dreaming flows into my novel, shaping the universal Great Myth of Hibbs' adventures.  Why universal?  Which of us does not dream?

    Hibbs' adventures in the Dreaming, the creation time, interconnects all the world's myths, turning the landscape of the entire world into a living body.  The Lakota see the world as one large web of life, each strand vibrating to the beating of the heart next to it.

THE MYTH OF THE BEAR WITH TWO SHADOWS

Myths are not fixed truths.
    Rather they are ever-winding, ever-shifting paths to misty glimpses of possible answers to questions.  And each wanderer down those paths asks different questions, so their eyes and hearts whisper different answers.

    Sometimes those eyes are at odds with the hearts.  And considering the two shadows we share with Hibbs, should not this be so?

    Thank you for letting me draw back the curtain a bit for you to peek into the myths which live in THE BEAR WITH TWO SHADOWS.

AUTHOR BIO

WHO IS THIS STRANGE MAN WHO WROTE THIS BOOK?

My family left Detroit when I was quite young so my last memories of Detroit are hub cabs and knee caps. The further south we went, the hotter it got. So I was glad when we stopped in Lafayette, Louisiana, because I was real sure the next stop would have been Hell.

    A year there taught me to say "sir and ma'am" and to pronounce David and Richard in really strange ways when they were last names. And it was not a pretty sight when I said Comeaux for the first time.

    Lake Charles was the next stop. I remember standing in the front yard of our new home, watching the neighbor across the street beating in his front door (his wife had locked it) with a fence post.

    I looked up to Mom and said, "You know, if I had a degree in Psychology, I would probably understand what's going on there."

    She ruffled my hair and said back, "Lot's of luck with that."

    And she was right. A master's degree in psychology hasn't unlocked the why's of the pain I see. It just helped me put fancy labels on them.

    I have been everything but a pirate, but since I once worked for a tax preparation firm, I guess you could say I've been that, too. I was a teacher for awhile. Then, a family counselor. My mother contracted cancer, and I emptied my savings, opening my own bookstore to give me freedom to go with her for her out-of-town treatments.

    Mother died. The reason for my store died with her. I saw an opening at Lifeshare Blood Center in the Product Management department. I applied and was hired. And the rest is infamy, ah, I mean history.

    I've been writing most of my life. Most of my old writings burned up when my home burned to the ground. But now, I have an e-book, THE BEAR WITH TWO SHADOWS, on sale at Amazon HERE.

Hibbs also appears to fend off the Twilight of the Gods in post-Katrina New Orleans along with the Lakota shaman, Wolf Howl, in END OF DAYS. Click HERE for more information.