Stacey E. Bryan's Blog, page 9

CATS, CHRISTOPHER WALKEN & KARMA

Karma: destiny or fate, following as effect from cause.

I find karma very confusing. Simply put, it’s supposed to be a cause and effect thing. The masters paint it as a pool of water, and if you toss in a tiny pebble, you get tiny ripples back. If you heave in a brick…well, you can imagine. Big splash, big noise, big waves…

That makes sense to me. I guess we’re supposed to live our lives only tossing in pebbles whenever possible, in order to keep the resulting ripples down, and probably throw...

THEY LIVE! (In Short Stories First)

I’m fascinated by the idea sometimes of writing a short story that gets made into a movie. Imagine working on something for a couple of weeks, a month max. You’re pretty happy with it. A magazine accepts it for publication. Then one thing leads to another and eventually you’re sitting in Mann’s Chinese Theater one […]

via They Live! (in short stories first) — Laughter Over Tears

The Past is Prologue

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Found a home for my short story “Terminator Too.” http://www.fictionontheweb.co.uk/ Lots of good stories in this zine, for those so inclined…

 

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Writing: The Art of War

Laughter Over Tears

A Tale of Two Cities is apropos to what I want to say here. At least the first line, that is.

I think some of the best advice and worst advice my parents ever gave me was to say, “Keep one foot on the ground and one in the clouds.”

This was after they realized that my special interest in life was writing. Meaning that I wanted to be a writer. Which, I guess, must have been almost the same as me saying I wanted to ride bulls in the rodeo or apply to Clown College.

Gasp. O...

Unrepentant

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Time travel. Romance. They go together like Bogie and Bacall, thunder and lightning, mashed potatoes and gravy.

It’s a guilty pleasure of mine. And I’ve read quite a few. But then one day I stopped reading them. Because I was sick of them.

Something deep inside began to balk against the knight or highlander or king’s soldier or Earl’s wide shoulders and strong thighs and muscles for days living on a 6’ frame.

How good was nutrition back then? Not very! Did they have kale? An overabundance of...

Joe Vampire, by MJ Gardner

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“Joe Vampire,” MJ Gardner’s sequel to “Evelyn’s Journal,” offers a well-paced, straight-forward and often humorous look into the pros and cons of being undead.  As the relationship between Joe and Evelyn deepens, it simultaneously grows more complicated. And while Joe seems to be on the road to recovery, it also feels precarious somehow, like we’re nervously watching an inexperienced tightrope walker make his way over a yawning chasm.

In the meantime, it’s interesting to see Evelyn becoming...

Heaven and Hell

 

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So here’s the thing about adoption and being adopted: it’s a mixed bag.

I was adopted when I was a year and a month old. I’ll elaborate on why over a year went by before I was snatched up by someone in another post, ’cause that’s a whole different arena.

Anyway, once you’re taken in by a family, if the people who adopted you clue you in early on, you basically go through most of your life with two opposing thoughts:

Boy, was I lucky that someone wanted me bad enough to bring me into their...

Eating Noise

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I bet you can’t guess where I was last Saturday. And the Saturday before that. You might think: The DMV? Workshop for Beginners? (For what? Does it matter?) A carnival?

I’ll give you a hint. Here’s what always happens.

There’s a steady trickle of familiar and unfamiliar characters.

The woman with paperwork amassed around her; paperwork which can’t exist without her fingers plumbing their depths, caressing their edges, rearranging their order, thus gifting all around her with a ceaseless rust...

“Evelyn’s Journal” by MJ Gardner

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For readers who would like to deviate slightly from the usual vampire tales out there, Evelyn’s Journal departs just enough to make it stand out from many others. Told from the point of view of a 17-year-old mixed race girl who has lived at her private school almost her entire life, Evelyn enters into a physical relationship with her 50-year-old piano instructor which eventually leads her into the supernatural world of the “undead”.

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At first it was hard for me to relate to Evelyn or see her...

LOST ANGELES

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I was reading a fellow blogger’s post recently about Heloise and Abelard, and I feel extremely lightweight talking about “La La Land”  compared to the fascinating mini-treatise focused on the 12th century’s version of star-crossed lovers who predate Romeo and Juliet by hundreds of years.

But what are you gonna do? “La La Land” exists. It got huge crowd reactions and an Oscar darling. I wanted to find out what all the fuss was about.

Ryan Gossling’s Sebastian and Emma Stone’s Mia are sorta st...