Russians, Ukrainians (And Some Others) Fight to Rescue Cats in New York

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Are You Prepared for a Zombie Apocalypse?

Zombies have been on my mind lately partly because I’m enjoying “The Last of Us,” the fungus-pandemic horror series on HBO, and partly because of something that showed up in my inbox. Many data tidbits are pushed to me, so they don’t always stop me in my scrolling tracks. But this one did just that. Did you know that more than one in 10 Americans think a zombie apocalypse is inevitable? Among the believers, more than half apparently believe it’s coming in the next 30 years.

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Sharing the Love, or Stealing?

Say you have a friend named Monique who’s lost her job. You know she can barely scrape together enough change to pay the rent, and she really needs some positive distraction. You give her the passcode to your Netflix account so she can get some laughs out of “The Extraordinary Attorney Woo.” Heck, you’ve already given the code to some of your other friends, who have in turn shared their Apple TV+ and HBOMax account codes with you.

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Will The Truth Set Us Free In These Polarized Times?

Deep in the heart of Becky Chambers’ award-winning “Wayfarers” sci-fi novel trilogy there’s mention of a show that changed the course of relations between regular humans and some sentient beings on another planet. At first, any meaningful friendship between the two types of “creatures” was impossible. They kept their distance. But then they started to reach the middle ground after some entertaining content emerged in which an alien and a human became friends. It grew wildly popular, and after 10 years, the two civilizations warmed to each other, turning the course of history.

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Why They Die — Mastering the Art of Killing Off Characters in Fiction

“He’s scared to look at me in the eyes and start to understand what’s about to happen to him. You know, he picked the wrong family. We’re not scared of conflict. We’re not running. We’re coming at him.”

Those are the words of Steve Goncalves, speaking to CNN’s Jim Sciutto about the alleged murderer of four University of Idaho students. Among them was Gonclaves’ daughter, Kaylee.

This recent example of senseless violence is horrifying, and it’s so easy to get behind Goncalves’ rage and overpowering need for justice. And at the same time, we can be haunted by other forms of death, which might seem quiet by comparison but are devastating.

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Love and Caring in a World of Senseless Tragedies

In early November I was hit by a car. At the time, I was walking down a residential street in the early evening, wearing an orange jacket and crossing a well-lit intersection. I was thrown onto the entrance ramp of a highway running down the side of the Hudson River, from The Bronx into Manhattan.

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California Romance and Culinary Delights — The Making of ‘Casserole Courtship’

What do you get when you marry up one of California’s gorgeous Central Coast beaches with scrumptious food and romance? In the hands of Elizabeth Guider, those elements have become a page-turner novel called “The Casserole Courtship.” Her seasoned, realistic approach to fiction explores how some pretty fascinating people find love — or not.

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Elves and Magpies: The Mysterious Ways Writers Tap Into Rich Veins of Inspiration

Lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about the pods of people who support and sustain our lives. Pods of family members, pods of friends, and (in my case) pods of people who are obsessed with writing fiction. The writer group is made up of people that I know personally and others whose work I admire and who give me a greater understanding of the craft.

I turned to the writer pod recently to gather some thoughts about an enigma when it comes to fiction. It involves a question that writers get asked all the time but many of us find it hard to answer: Where do you get your ideas?

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The Comparison Trap: How to Get Back on Track When Others Succeed

There once was a belly dancer named Carmen. She wowed crowds from Coney Island to Cairo. Really hot men dropped at her feet when she did the Turkish Figure Eight. They didn’t call her Magic Hips for nothin’. Another dancer named Stardust won the International Belly Dance Championship, and Carmen was back a ways in the rankings. She just couldn’t curb her sense of despair and jealousy. She felt like calling the whole shimmy-thing off. Maybe she should just become a bookkeeper for her shady uncle’s dump truck biz like he always wanted.

My fictional Carmen just danced into a very particular circle of hell: comparing herself to someone with similar aspirations who scored a coveted victory.

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‘Where Then Is Paradise?’ — Reflections on Asteroids, Putin, Scarcity, and Love

You may have heard the news that scientists uncovered new understandings about the asteroid that hit planet Earth 66 million years ago, destroying three-quarters of all plant and animal species, including dinosaurs.

Two researchers from the University of Michigan initially reported the findings in NGU Advances. And a later report in The Washington Postdescribed the asteroid this way: “The researchers drew on previous research and assumed the meteor had a diameter of 8.7 miles and a density of about 165 pounds per cubic foot — roughly the weight of an average adult male crammed within a volume the size of a milk crate.”

Read More on Medium

Russians, Ukrainians (And Some Others) Fight to Rescue Cats in New York

Read More on Medium

Are You Prepared for a Zombie Apocalypse?

Zombies have been on my mind lately partly because I’m enjoying “The Last of Us,” the fungus-pandemic horror series on HBO, and partly because of something that showed up in my inbox. Many data tidbits are pushed to me, so they don’t always stop me in my scrolling tracks. But this one did just that. Did you know that more than one in 10 Americans think a zombie apocalypse is inevitable? Among the believers, more than half apparently believe it’s coming in the next 30 years.

Read More on Medium

Sharing the Love, or Stealing?

Say you have a friend named Monique who’s lost her job. You know she can barely scrape together enough change to pay the rent, and she really needs some positive distraction. You give her the passcode to your Netflix account so she can get some laughs out of “The Extraordinary Attorney Woo.” Heck, you’ve already given the code to some of your other friends, who have in turn shared their Apple TV+ and HBOMax account codes with you.

Read More on Medium

Will The Truth Set Us Free In These Polarized Times?

Deep in the heart of Becky Chambers’ award-winning “Wayfarers” sci-fi novel trilogy there’s mention of a show that changed the course of relations between regular humans and some sentient beings on another planet. At first, any meaningful friendship between the two types of “creatures” was impossible. They kept their distance. But then they started to reach the middle ground after some entertaining content emerged in which an alien and a human became friends. It grew wildly popular, and after 10 years, the two civilizations warmed to each other, turning the course of history.

Read More on Medium

Why They Die — Mastering the Art of Killing Off Characters in Fiction

“He’s scared to look at me in the eyes and start to understand what’s about to happen to him. You know, he picked the wrong family. We’re not scared of conflict. We’re not running. We’re coming at him.”

Those are the words of Steve Goncalves, speaking to CNN’s Jim Sciutto about the alleged murderer of four University of Idaho students. Among them was Gonclaves’ daughter, Kaylee.

This recent example of senseless violence is horrifying, and it’s so easy to get behind Goncalves’ rage and overpowering need for justice. And at the same time, we can be haunted by other forms of death, which might seem quiet by comparison but are devastating.

Read More on Medium

Love and Caring in a World of Senseless Tragedies

In early November I was hit by a car. At the time, I was walking down a residential street in the early evening, wearing an orange jacket and crossing a well-lit intersection. I was thrown onto the entrance ramp of a highway running down the side of the Hudson River, from The Bronx into Manhattan.

Read More on Medium

California Romance and Culinary Delights — The Making of ‘Casserole Courtship’

What do you get when you marry up one of California’s gorgeous Central Coast beaches with scrumptious food and romance? In the hands of Elizabeth Guider, those elements have become a page-turner novel called “The Casserole Courtship.” Her seasoned, realistic approach to fiction explores how some pretty fascinating people find love — or not.

Read More on Medium

Elves and Magpies: The Mysterious Ways Writers Tap Into Rich Veins of Inspiration

Lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about the pods of people who support and sustain our lives. Pods of family members, pods of friends, and (in my case) pods of people who are obsessed with writing fiction. The writer group is made up of people that I know personally and others whose work I admire and who give me a greater understanding of the craft.

I turned to the writer pod recently to gather some thoughts about an enigma when it comes to fiction. It involves a question that writers get asked all the time but many of us find it hard to answer: Where do you get your ideas?

Read More on Medium

The Comparison Trap: How to Get Back on Track When Others Succeed

There once was a belly dancer named Carmen. She wowed crowds from Coney Island to Cairo. Really hot men dropped at her feet when she did the Turkish Figure Eight. They didn’t call her Magic Hips for nothin’. Another dancer named Stardust won the International Belly Dance Championship, and Carmen was back a ways in the rankings. She just couldn’t curb her sense of despair and jealousy. She felt like calling the whole shimmy-thing off. Maybe she should just become a bookkeeper for her shady uncle’s dump truck biz like he always wanted.

My fictional Carmen just danced into a very particular circle of hell: comparing herself to someone with similar aspirations who scored a coveted victory.

Read More on Medium

‘Where Then Is Paradise?’ — Reflections on Asteroids, Putin, Scarcity, and Love

You may have heard the news that scientists uncovered new understandings about the asteroid that hit planet Earth 66 million years ago, destroying three-quarters of all plant and animal species, including dinosaurs.

Two researchers from the University of Michigan initially reported the findings in NGU Advances. And a later report in The Washington Postdescribed the asteroid this way: “The researchers drew on previous research and assumed the meteor had a diameter of 8.7 miles and a density of about 165 pounds per cubic foot — roughly the weight of an average adult male crammed within a volume the size of a milk crate.”

Read More on Medium

Gold in My Pocket: A Circle of Hands That Lifts Me Up

By Janet Stilson / April 6, 2021 /

She wasn’t going to say it out loud, not at first. But finally, Alice Elliott had to admit what she wanted most for her film, THE COLLECTOR OF BEDFORD STREET: to win an Academy Award. At the time, Alice was speaking with members of a support group. She was in the middle of a marketing…

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Hold Your Darlings Closer

By Janet Stilson / March 30, 2021 /

“Don’t laugh,” I told him. David and I were at our favorite Korean spa in Flushing, Queens. And I’d picked a quiet area, where people could lie out on cushy chaise longues to rest or sleep. We were all alone. He knew something was coming; he just didn’t know what. “I think we should get…

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Diamonds in the Streets, and Why I Love Them

By Janet Stilson / March 9, 2021 /

Many artists are like crows. You know, the big black ones that scavenge objects out of fields. We have a habit of finding little moments in time, little word droppings, a marble stone, a funny twig, that we love as if they were diamonds. And we scarf them away for use later on, in stories…

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Book Review: Victor LaValle’s Novel, THE DEVIL IN SILVER

By Janet Stilson / March 2, 2021 /

If you went into a coffee shop in New York City before the pandemic, chances are you’d have found somebody hunched over something that they were writing, maybe in a notebook, maybe on a laptop. They wouldn’t be much to look at, for the most part. We writers are like rats in big cities. Everywhere.…

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Petra Throws a Fit; Janet Offers an Olive Branch (and Some Scotch)

By Janet Stilson / February 23, 2021 /

20 FEB. 2021 Cher Janet, Saw that our interview posted on the Women Writers, Women’s Books site. And while I stand by every word that I said, people are likely to get the wrong idea about me. Yes, I recounted many things about my life in your novel, THE JUICE. But people who have yet…

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How “No” Gets Me Where I Really Want to Go

By Janet Stilson / February 16, 2021 /

Lately I’ve been thinking about the power of “no.” By that, I don’t mean someone who refuses to stop making advances on an alarmed date—or “No don’t touch that hot pot, you frickin’ idiot.” Instead I am referring to people who have been my mentors, who raised their hand in a big stop sign, making…

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The Truest, Most Secret Part of My Life

By Janet Stilson / February 9, 2021 /

I want to tell you the truest thing about me on this day, of all days, when my novel THE JUICE is being released. It’s something that I rarely talk about to anyone but close friends and family, because there’s a sting to it. It has to do with this guy, pictured above, David Chachere.…

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My Foolish and Most Splendid Adventure

By Janet Stilson / February 2, 2021 /

Several years ago at a cocktail gathering in Hong Kong, I mentioned that I was going to Malaysia on vacation in a few months. The people I was with were seasoned TV executives who worked in the Pacific Rim and had traveled extensively throughout it. Without hesitation, they recommended that I climb Mt. Kinabalu. And…

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Rebel With a Gigantic Cause—And a Gigantic Crush

By Janet Stilson / January 26, 2021 /

It’s no mean feat to catch a glimpse of Jarat Ellington, let alone interview him. The guy has pretty much erased every image of himself that was published on the Net. Privacy is one of his abiding obsessions in life. And I suppose that’s one of the reasons why he was so intent on sabotaging…

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Top Ways of Managing Stress in These Bizarre Times

By Janet Stilson / January 19, 2021 /

I had an idea in mind for this week’s post—something funny and a little frivolous. But right now, the people around me are so stressed out by events in all our lives. So many of us seem to be stumbling to find the focus and level of enthusiasm they need to put their best foot…

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