 I don’t believe in a god, not in the traditional sense anyway. I guess that’s what being raised Catholic has done to me. But I do believe in energy. I do believe in right and wrong. I do believe in kindness and truth. And not everyone else is like that. I’m learning that. I’m learning that there are some really ugly people in this world and I’m not talking about their outsides. I’m talking about their souls, their essence, the people they are.
I am not perfect. Far from it. And I have accomplished a fair share of mistakes in my short time on this Earth already. But I have never gone out of my way to hurt a person deliberately. I know that there are two sides to every story. I’m not stupid. I’m a good listener. I care about the feelings of others—sometimes too much and that is what gets me into trouble, caring for the wrong people sometimes. But I don’t have a malicious bone in my body. Some people may call that weak. True or not, it is simply the person I am. And if others choose to view me as weaker, there is really not much I can do about that. I’m fortunate, though, that for every rotten person who chooses to jump to conclusions or who chooses not to ask questions and listen to the answers, there are a dozen who do—people who care. People who listen. People who can see the truth in the cracks of others’ lies. People I am fortunate enough to call friends. Life is never going to be easy, and the life of a writer comes with all kinds of its unique issues. The more public I become, the more I open myself up to slander and lies. Some days it's very easy to give up. But it also opens those doors to friendships and a wealth of goodness too, people who are wonderful and forgiving and kind and supportive. People who are not motivated by jealousy or greed, but by love. The Beatles once said: “All You Need is Love.” I believe in that simple phrase. The simpler, the better. Perhaps “you may say I’m dreamer, but I’m not the only one.” Being kind and forgiving and supportive and sensitive isn’t weak at all. In fact, it takes courage and strength not to succumb to hatred. It’s much easier to choose that path. Instead, I’ll choose love and that is my strength.
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  I never really get or understand the need for prologues or epilogues in narrative. I often skip them. I’m not sure why exactly. But perhaps it does stem from Shakespeare’s quote: What’s past is prologue. Perhaps that is precisely it. It isn’t just about narrative but life and how I want to experience it. I’m not saying that the past isn’t important. Of course it is. The past is what makes up the present. It’s all of our experiences bundled into this one, bigger moment called life. What makes me laugh, cry, trust, distrust. Why I like a particular food or smell or song. Nostalgia I suppose. But it is faint and fleeting as I try to grasp what it is that makes me feel in that moment. It’s still, even then, about the moment of now. It always makes me think of E.E. Cummings and "for life's not a paragraph/And death i think is no parenthesis." The smell of freshly cut grass that may take me back to watching my dad mow the lawn while I read by the pool as a child may remind me of him. I may cry or laugh thinking of him. But it is that moment, again, the present moment, that I am living, feeling, breathing, experiencing. I can never go back and say, “Stop. I want this moment forever. Freeze it. This feeling of happiness. Pause. Don’t move. This is it.” I feel it only because I live it. In the present. Being mindful of that is important, even with polar opposite feelings. For as I remember those moments I sat in awe of my dad, I sit here now with a smile and a tear at once. I love that I have the memory and I cry that it is gone, like so many people I’ve lost in my life. But the memory itself, only happens in the present. So I guess with narrative I want to feel the story too, as it’s happening. Right then. I want to live the story with the characters. The narrative itself, for me, should tell the stories of the past within the framework. To me a prologue and epilogue try to tell me how I SHOULD feel or think rather than let me, the reader, decide. Let me ponder it, figure it out as I’m reading. Let the words and actions and settings of the characters help me to deduce why a character has become the way he or she is. Let me decide what the future may hold for them based on what I’ve read of their story. Let me keep a sliver of my imagination intact. After all, isn't that why we read? "By the time I recognize this moment, this moment will be gone."--John Mayer   Why do readers get upset when characters tell lies in our books? Or cheat? When I first published the Natalie’s Edge series, it was a criticism I got—“I’m not reading this. She cheated!” Again? Really? More constructs for our genre? I guess “Romance” can’t have realistic events and people? I give up!
We all lie. Make no mistake about that. Lying is part of being human. When someone asks you a question—the infamous: Do these jeans make me look fat? for instance—rather than hurt someone’s feelings, we might tell them a slight lie, a white lie as it has come to be called, for myriad reasons. We don’t want to hurt their feelings, to tell the truth does no one any good, negative consequences far outweigh the positives, and the list goes on. You may say lying takes shape by omission as well. This way may be a step up from the white lie. It isn’t a direct lie, but you simply answer equivocally, with a half-truth by omission. Others may argue it’s not a lie if it’s not clearly stated in a sentence. Are you married? “No, I’m not,” but leaving out that you might have a commitment to someone is an example of a lie by omission. I argue it’s worse, perhaps, than the white lie. And again, I am here to say, of course, I am guilty of the lie by omission as well. Cheating on someone, going behind someone’s back, asking another to lie for you, those even jump higher up the ladder, and yup, I have been guilty of that in the past as well. I am not going to sit here and call myself a saint. Sometimes being in love can truly blind us and make us do stupid things. Yeah, sure. I did just use that excuse. And so do my characters. Are we really that righteous, that above it? But there are times when lying goes way, way above the white lie vortex and instead, leaps into a black abyss of complete immorality. These lies are the ones that take effort, planning, fore-thought. These are the lies that can’t stand alone. These are the lies that cause lie upon lie upon lie to be told, perhaps even bringing in others into the mayhem of the swirling storm of deceit. These are the lies that hurt people. They hurt their psyche. They hurt their ability to trust. These are the lies that can scar a person, not physically, but mentally. And if these people become characters in our books, we grow to dislike them, hate them even. These are our true villains. In real life, those types of lies come from people who are who they are. You cannot thrust your own morality onto another. You have absolutely no control over what another human being does or is capable of doing. You must accept that. The only thing you can control is how you behave after it. How you react and how you deal with it. That is the ONLY thing in your control. You cannot control the actions of others but you can control the actions of yourself. And for me, I choose to realize that lies told like that have nothing to say about my character but about another’s. People like that don’t have character. But in our books, we can choose to have the “good guys” win, to have the bad guys get what’s coming to them. Maybe even to suffer. Or, we can choose our bad guys to find redemption. And that, too, is the question we must pose in our real lives. Some people deserve forgiveness. But there are others, who do not. Why should our books be any different than a reflection of authenticity? |
I LOVE to write and read. I particularly enjoy reading erotic romance that has tons of emotion in it. I hope you will ask me questions and share your favorite authors and novels. I welcome all feedback.
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