Sara Dobie Bauer's Blog, page 23

“The Youngest Brother,” my new thriller, featured at Solarcide

Solarcide is known as the Home of Weird Fiction, a gallery of the dark and dangerous. What an honor to be considered such. What an even bigger honor to be their featured author for June 2014! Feast your eyes on the opening paragraphs of my noir thriller, “The Youngest Brother,” and follow the link at the end to read the full story at Solarcide.

The Youngest Brother

by Sara Dobie Bauer

In the crowded bar, it was easy to spot the man who’d just lost his father, come straight from the funeral to fo...

Let’s Talk about Cutting

I want to cut my wrists. Don’t panic; it’s not a serious thing. I don’t want to kill myself, but sometimes, when I’m daydreaming, I like to think about cutting myself.

I’ve been doing it off and on in secret since eighth grade. Once I hit my upper twenties, I stopped caring if anyone noticed. Now, in my thirties, good friends know how things are going based on my Band-Aids.

Again, this isn’t a suicide thing. It’s not a “cry for help,” as Marla Singer might say. I don’t cut for attention. I don...

Mating Habits: A Sherlock BBC Fan Fiction

He was tall with gangly limbs and a graceful walk. Too-bright eyes darted with too much energy. Maniacal black hair and pale skin. Obscenely full mouth. But too skinny. Tired. Exhausted. Starving for information and wanted for different reasons by every woman at the London Library.

There were the older women in their sixties, who wanted to take the young man home and feed him, give him a bed for sleeping. There were the women closer to his own age who wanted to take him to bed and do no sleepi...

McConaughey, Leto: Golden gods in Dallas Buyers Club

Jared Leto as Rayon.

I could go on and on about the awards. For example, both Matthew McConaughey and Jared Leto won Oscars for their performances in 2013’s Dallas Buyers Club. It was also nominated for Best Picture and Best Screenplay. We all know awards aren’t everything. In fact, sometimes, Oscars indicate a yawn fest. Not in this case.

Dallas Buyers Club is the based-on-a-true-story of Texas cowboy and rodeo man Ron Woodroof. Ron was a man’s man. In the opening scene, he’s banging two chick...

The Marla Singer photo shoot with Chris Loomis

Marla Singer, played by Helena Bonham Carter.

I’ve always had an affection for Marla Singer, the accidental antagonist of Chuck Palahniuk’s Fight Club. She has an affinity for pills, cigarettes, and despair. In the words of Tyler Durden, “At least she’s trying to hit bottom.”

I understand her, the way she throws herself into a relationship with a man she calls “the worst thing that ever happened” to her. I understand her yearning for rock bottom, because at the bottom, we are alone. There is n...

Everything that Remains: The Minimalists explain “why-to”

I was fortunate to interview Joshua Fields Millburn and Ryan Nicodemus for SheKnows. Separately, they’re cool dudes—guys you’d want to have beers with on a beach somewhere. Together, they’re known as “The Minimalists.” Sound kinda like super heroes? They are.

When both in their waning twenties, they dropped everything, well-paid jobs included, and embraced the philosophy of minimalism: less is more. They truly realized, in Fight Club fashion, the things you own end up owning you.

The less belon...

Screw You for Saying Life Sucks

I’ve had a lot of people tell me lately that life is not a bowl of cherries. I’m not sure what they’re trying to accomplish by the routing of this cliché. Is this supposed to make me feel better?

I was in Florida for a week, and I never wanted to come back to Phoenix. I wanted Jake to move to the beach with the dogs and me. Burn our house down. Forget about our jobs, our belongings. Become perpetual beach bums. I could bartend; he could fix and rent out bicycles. So long as we were near the sa...

The Chicken Incident (I Don’t Like Blood)

“I am not amused.”

You know that scene in Clerks where everything goes to hell and the guy shouts, “I’m not even supposed to be here today!” That was me yesterday.

I flew home from a wonderful vacation in Florida Tuesday night knowing full well that my husband would be slaughtering chickens all day Wednesday. Jake has been raising Cornish Cross chickens for months now, and it’s a cool endeavor. They’re pasture raised, healthy chickens, fresh from farm to table. (You can buy one here.)

I’m proud...

Why My Husband is Hot

My husband is cut like Brad Pitt in Fight Club. He has honey brown eyes that melt women into puddles of lusty angst. He has a single dimple when he smiles, and he smiles a lot. He has an ass that Michelangelo would have sculpted into a fifty-foot statue. He has a voice that makes Jell-O quake. And those are his lesser attributes.

Jake married a girl with depression. He married a difficult wife, and yet, he makes adorable growling noises and kisses my neck until I laugh. He holds me when I cry....

An H and Five Ws with Painter/Photographer Chambers Austelle

Chambers Austelle (great name) is a Charleston, South Carolina, native and artist. I own four of her pieces. One—a black and white photograph of a forest that I understand she took while almost falling from a car—was a wedding gift. I have a spooky Halloween painting of a haunted house and two glorious portraits of my dogs.

Sure, I’m an obsessive fangirl, but she’s also my sister-in-law. My brother is a musician, and I find it miraculous that two artists can cohabitate and still love each othe...