Miceala Shocklee's Blog, page 2

Desperate: A Free Short Horror Story for Halloween

Happy All Hallow’s Eve, spooksters.

I’ve finished up “Desperate,” a short horror story, and am releasing it on Gumroad for Halloween! You can read the start of it here and, if you like it, hop on over to my Gumroad store to download the full thing for free/pay-what-you’d-like.

It’s got monsters, and fire, and edge. It’s got gore. It’s a little bit haunted. And that makes its characters a little bitdesperate.

Actually, that’s the title.

Desperate

They’d been a desperate threesome. Nikki had m...

The Dust of When You Are Collapsing

Depression is a game that you can’t win because the rules aren’t ones that you get to make. Depression is a game full of false starts and trap doors and smoke screens you thought maybe, for once, were windows. Depression is a game that’s for lasting, not for winning.

Depression is good at gaining allies. Time, and wounds that refuse to scab over. Disappointments and anxiety and the eyes of strangers that glance at you the wrong way. Subverted friendships and cancelled plans and one too many s...

Free Stories!

Update: I’m now on Gumroad!

I have a lot of stories lying about my computer, sitting more or less patiently in their folders on my desktop waiting for me to try to publish them or submit them to a literary contest or, ya know, forget about them for years on end. And while some of them I’ve gone and flung out into the world already, mostly, they’re just sitting there.

So I’m giving them to you! To have and enjoy! For free!

Well, mostly free. Flash fiction, shorter poems, and short stories up...

Hope is a Lioness

“Education breeds confidence. Confidence breeds hope. Hope breeds peace.”―Confucius

No.

Or at least, not always.

Education breeds knowledge. Knowledge can make you stand up and shout and stomp your foot, because here is your evidence, here is your fact, here is your goddamn certainty that this thing here is so.

Knowledge can also make you sit down and shut up because you know, youknowthat you are a human and have the capacity to be astoundingly wrong.

Knowledge breeds awareness. And sometimes...

Complicated

I am a millennial. A twenty-something. A whatever-you’d-call-it. Mostly I’m just a young adult trying to get her shit together. This is my general impression of most members of my generation, whatever their current socioeconomic status. We might have a good job with lots of money and work we love to do, or we might have no job and no money and be getting really fucking bored of the wallpaper in our parents’ basement. But no matter what, for the most part, we’re trying.

The world got a lot big...

So Give Us Something Better

Slate journalist Amanda Hess released an article today entitled “Let Them Blog” discussing why “the panic over pro-anorexia websites and social media isn’t healthy.” Her article talks about the function behind the form, and how vilifying a very grey area of self-expression ultimately nets more harm than good. She does an excellent job analyzing the nuance that “pro-ana” has evolved into over the past decade or so, and I highly recommend reading the entire piece for yourself.

Especially since...

15 Things That Happen When You Wear A Pride Flag In L.A. Today

15 things that happened today when Iwalked around L.A. wearing a pride flag tied super hero cape-style (because honestly, what other style is there?):

1 smiling thumbs-up 8 knee-jerk reaction smiles (that I noticed) 1 compliment on my “shawl” 2 happy stranger waves 2 sets of approving horn honks 1 high five from an LGBT rights canvasser

I also got yelled at by one probably schizophrenic man, but that’s about standard for early morning on the Promenade. Whatcha gon’ do.

[image error]

source

And as a write...

what you do when no one is looking

source

InThe Little Princessby F. H. Burnett, the main character – a young girl called Sara who starts life the daughter of an affluent Englishmen riding the boom of colonialism – falls from her position upon her father’s death and finds herself poor and friendless. Having just traded in her furs and silks for the rags of a scullery maid, Sara wonders whether she, who has been always told she is a good child, reallyisone. Is she truly kind and gracious, or was she merely so generous because w...

Memorial

I’m never really sure how to respond to things like Memorial Day.

To start with, I am not a veteran. I have never been to war. I have never trained for war. I have not been close to war in any sort of meaningful way. Any opinion I have is from observations, not experience. Therefore, I am willing to forfeit any and all opinions I have on anything and everything having to do with war and veteran status as second to what an actual veteran has to say. It feels incredibly presumptuous, to even th...

Sláinte

So I hear your country kinda looks like this again.

Roughly two months ago, I was in a gay bar in Dublin. Oh, the foreshadowing.

It was St. Patrick’s Day. Two of my hostel mates and I had met a local named Jonathan after we scaled a building to get a better view of the parade. “I come every year,” he said. “When my parents stopped taking me, I just started taking myself.”

In our post-parade quest for water [me], a bathroom [me], and Guinness [everyone else], we eventually wound up at what I’m...