When you die at the Stormcove, you go through intake, then stay at the Stormcove until you get used to being dead and are ready to transition - or stay. Rob, Annie, and Virginia are the Greeting Committee, awaiting four new residents.

I started the weekly newsletter several months ago and it's been arriving in subscriber mailboxes every Tuesday morning. However, now that I've added indie book reviews and started doing more with images, it's eating a large chunk of time I should be using to write other things - and I found I don't always have fresh "heads up" tidbits for writers, either. So, I'm skipping this Tuesday (2/17) and going to a second-and-fourth-Tuesday schedule. Instead of weekly, it will arriv

“I’m only here to please my mother. I tell her I’m not a child anymore, I’m an independent, self-supporting adult. But she still worries.” “So you’re here to alleviate your mother’s concerns.” Typical shrink talk. They were sitting facing each other across a narrow table, apparently the doctor’s workspace, papers and pens scattered all about. Jasper fidgeted nervously. What kind of therapist is this? Can’t he afford a couch? “There’s nothing wrong with me. I just like order

I peeked through the lashes of one eye while the nurse talked with a stranger. I’d been playing possum ever since I woke up in the hospital. “Is she unconscious?” The stranger wore a business suit, nicer than most caseworkers wore--a lawyer maybe? Her stiff posture was topped by square shoulders and a weathered face made more severe by the pull of silver hair tightly skinned back.

Death and evil, that’s what she felt pouring at her from the forest.

It was a dream, not a nightmare. She hadn’t been frightened, but she needed to know who had been with her and why she had been running and where she was going. The specter was a benevolent presence; there had been some other reason she was racing through that maze. But the details faded too quickly for her to grasp them.