Twin Peaks

Susan here.

DH and I wanted to try someplace new to eat last night. We’d seen a new restaurant being built near restaurant row, and since it had been finished for a few months, we decided to try it.

Remember TWIN PEAKS, that the nighttime soap opera that was on in the early ’90’s? I thought maybe this eatery was a nod to that show. I didn’t watch it, but info about it is still available online. It was an entire series based on one murder investigation.  Different twist, to say the least, but doomed to end. How long can you spend on one murder investigation?

The only thing I remembered about TP, the TV show, was that it was named after a real place where there are twin peaks. Again, it’s been a long time and I wasn’t certain about that memory. So, I looked it up. Here’s what the Internet says.

Twin Peaks in San Francisco has incredible panoramic views and sits at almost the geographic center of the City of San Francisco. With a height of 922 feet – Twin Peaks has two summits used for both view residences and television / radio transmission towers. Atop the summit is a reservoir holding 14 million gallons of water for San Francisco hotels and homes. Many birds also enjoy Twin Peaks views.

Maybe it was a restaurant in honor of that small part of San Francisco. Sounded like it could be interesting.

Little did I know just how interesting it would be.

We pulled into the parking lot crowded with cars and people, but not one handicapped space was taken. That should have been my first clue! DH looked around and asked, “What’s up with this place?”

“I don’t know,” I answered, happy to be out and about. The building had a covered veranda with a flat screen TV (tuned to the OU football game–ouch!) several tables, one which was occupied by a couple of guys whose table was COVERED with very tall, very empty beer mugs. By the time I saw that, we were half-way inside, and I hated to look like a chicken, who’d turn tail and scurry away.

We went inside, strolled confidently to the desk, and then looked at the cute little girl hostess. Yes, LITTLE GIRL in every sense. Even her uniform was little.

My first thought?

Can you spell H-O-O-T-E-R-S?

After numbly accepting the ready-to-seat-you buzzer, I looked around and noticed there wasn’t a person in the place over the age of 25. Murmuring to DH that they should have a sign up with an OVERage limit, we moved away from the desk and stood next to a couch crowded with kids, pretending to be twenty one. (Looked about 15 to me.)  

One of those girl got up and offered me her seat. Imagine, manners in a place named in honor of a certain portion of a woman’s anatomy.

We were told the wait would be about twenty-five minutes, but we were seated within five. (I think they were afraid kids would look in and be scared away when they saw a parent-aged couple waiting to be seated, so they moved us quickly.)

Our waitress wore the regulation low-cut short-shorts and scooped low short top–which left a lot of space between the pieces of clothing. Many of the waitresses had decorated that expanse in between with belly button rings and tats. Our waitress had a tattoo that rose diagonally from her waist, along her ribcage and disappeared under her top that said “Bella Mia”.

The food was okay, but the appetitzers better–at least the nachos were. When we asked about a drink menu, we heard about a special with beers, shots and coosies for only $6. Their peach tea was good. <g>

Everywhere we looked, there were televisions. Flat screened. And most tuned to watch OU lose to Nebraska.

To be honest, I think TP is a bar with a food menu–I doubt if I’ll go back. And like I told DH as we were leaving, I’m SO glad I’m not the age of most of those kids anymore. It was just too exhausting.

Home Again

Twisted Sister Meg here:

My body might have returned to mi casa but I’m not sure my heart has. I’m definitely still on “island time.” I don’t think I’ve ever been affected by a place as much as I have Cozumel. There was magic in the water, and I don’t mean the kind you drink.

This trip with good friend, Jane, has been planned for over two years, and we finally made it. Our first dive adventure together, and my first in the ocean. I could so easily become Ms. Limpett, not young enough to be Ariel.

The diving was more than I expected –the colors, the fish, the total freedom. A part of what made this trip fantastic were the people I was with. I knew no one except for Jane, but by the first evening, I’d made great friends. And that is important when diving because those around you can either make or break your experience, and may end up saving your life. Not mine as I did great even with mask problems. I did feel sorry for the younger adults? who experienced bad cases of BROWN BOTTLE FLU or green bottle if drinking Dos XX.  They missed excellent diving.

The people of Cozumel were gracious and warm. I’m not describing the “almost free for you, senorita” hawkers, but the everyday people. The Mayans are proud of their heritage and culture. I was privileged to experience Dia de los Muertos (Day of the Dead) and to see some Mayan dances.

Another amazing thing–for me, at least, was how fast I picked up Spanish…until I mixed my German for words I didn’t know. The people would smile at me, and wait, then help me with the correct word.

I’m hoping the magic of this first visit will continue when I head back. I’ve already checked into property there, but that dream may be on hold as Don isn’t quite as thrilled as I am. With my next book churning like the wake from the boat, I’ll be back in Cozumel soon.

I’ve posted some pictures on Facebook, but here are some.

Meet a Psychic II

I’d like for y’all to meet Debbora. In her very first sentence, she says something Cassaundra, the heroine in BLIND SIGHT, tells the hero. Is it great minds or a woo woo event? You’ll have to answer that.

 First off, I would like to say that everyone is born psychic.  I don’t think their is a person on the planet that hasn’t had a prophetic dream that has come to pass, or followed a “gut feeling” that proved to be correct, or had a “hunch” that proved dead-on correct, or people who just “knew” something was wrong with a child, a parent, a friend or spouse.  It’s just that over the centuries we have put “psychic skills” under manhole cover names, like “woman’s intuition” any many other names to hide what they really are – data collected from a place that does not include our five physical senses.  So this is where we get the label “psychic” or “of the mind.”

1-   What is the definition of a clairvoyant?

Simply put, the word clairvoyant means “clear seeing.”  It means that the person who has this skill primarily processes their incoming “psychic” data through the sense of sight first or with images.  This is not to say that their other senses are not engaged – they are – but only that this is the strongest “download” link.  Other psychics may have other senses that are dominate like clairaudient – or clear hearing – which means they process their data through sound first  or clairscentiat which means they process data with feelings and so on.  Almost all people are Empathic too.

2-   What’s it really like to be a clairvoyant?

Since I was born a clairvoyant it’s hard for me to answer this one.  It’s like asking someone what’s it feels like to have a right hand.  Since you always had that hand it’s hard to imagine what it would be like without it.  But perhaps the best way to answer this is that I pick up and process more data on more levels than most people. 

It’s kind of like radio reception.  Most people are plugged into just one radio stations at a time like 101 AM (physical reality) and 102 AM (dream reality), 101 FM (Intuitive reality) and so on.  Strong psychics are tuned into broadband reception and pick up many more stations at once, like satellite radio or TV so to speak.

Having that broadband reception is a natural part of who I am – so I don’t feel any different than anyone else.  However, other peoples reactions to my skills is very often a mix bag of pain, annoyance, joy and sometimes fear.  A small percentage of the world’s population has displayed psychic skills since the dawn of time.  People like Joan of Arc (a clairaudient), the Witch of Endor (biblical-medium), Nostradamus (clairvoyant), Edgar Cayse (Trans-medium), Jesus (Clair-everything) and many others.  Sadly, the general population not understanding how these people accessed their data and their understandings of nonphysical data put most of these gifted teachers and psychics to death.  True psychics today get a lot heat from history, religion and the misconceptions of psychic skills that are altered to fit Hollywood film scripts or in books. There is also a ton of fraud in this field too.

To someone like me that was born with the skills that’s a ton of baggage to work through. True psychics are healers and the best ones throughout history were ALL healers. Sadly today, many people look at psychics like carnival fortune tellers, and I will agree that there are many of them out there.  I’m not one of them. So when someone comes to me says something like, “Tell me something about me.”  I know they are looking for the carnival fortune teller and I walk away. 

To me this is like going to a doctor and asking them to describe your clothing.  You already know what you are wearing, so it’s a waste of his skills and time – and yours to even cover the topic.  However, if you have a problem or a crisis and need help, this is the best reason to consult a psychic for help, direction and HEALING.

Clairvoyant’s process their data in images and with time and training they come to understand what those images, feeling or senses mean and how to use that data to heal.  Clairvoyants tap into other levels of reality and often see, sense, hear or feel what other people miss or can’t sense.  The best way to describe what I see and sense when I’m working, is that I tap into an alternate reality or energy with half my mind, travel back or forward in time and space, capture images or data in a place where someone asks me to look and bring all that data back to relay it to the person seeking help. This whole process can take seconds or minutes. So in a way it’s a skill in working with active energy – what I call the Dynamic Energy of the universe.

Another misconception about psychic’s in general is that we walk through our whole life with our psychic sensors wide open all the time.  This misconception may be the reason why we get people that just walk up to us and say, “tell me something about me.”  They assume that our psychic sensors are ON all the time. This is not the case.  True psychics are super sensitive to vibration energies in peoples aura bodies, animals aura bodies and everything physical and nonphysical.  So we learn to shield our aura body sensors from the constant bombardment of unwanted data.  Otherwise, it would be like listening to a 1000 radios and TV’s at once.  This static would (and has) driven people crazy.  So we learn NOT to go probing or poking unless we are asked.  So finding and using the OFF button or shield in this case is critical.

3-   How is a clairvoyant trained?

People who are born with or who acquire strong psychic skills in their lifetime often seek out professional training to get control of their skills or to train those skills to broader and finer tuned receptions.  For example, if a clairvoyant has a vision of something that’s ok – unless you are driving down the Interstate at 70 miles an hour – then that’s a huge problem.  Many strong psychics get professional training to get personal control of their own on and off switch.

When I was about 14 years old I came to the understanding that I was getting data that other people were not getting.  I knew I needed control of my “off” switch but there were no psychic schools out there then.  So my logic at the time said, well Jesus was a psychic and I have a few of those skills so I’ll study Him.  But after studying over 15 religions in detail – they never taught me where to find my off switch. So I became a read-a-holic reading all things psychic – I learned a lot of wonderful things reading hundreds of books – but that was not enough.

Lucky for me that I found the Astrological Institute of Integrated Studies which is the same school that trained John Edward of the popular TV program Crossing Over and Cross Country.  Studies at school include a wide range training exercises including meditation, learning how to shield your mind, how to open your mind, how to find objects, how to heal, how to direct energy, how to gather energy and how to turn on and off your perceptions on command and how to tune into other levels of reality – like crossed over light beings.  We are also encouraged to read widely and are trained in professional ethics.  This is where I learned I had an off switch and learned to control it.

4-   What do you do with your gift?

Everything.  I feel that people like me don’t come here to play with skills as strong as mine, so I help people in any way I can.  While I am trained to do the standard things people expect of a psychic, like give readings to see things in future, or the past, or lock on to life paths to find truth, I also find lost objects, pets or people and from time to time I do mediumship and any number of other things.

However, my favorite work is teaching people how to use the psychic skills they were born with – to empower their lives to be fuller, richer and how they can have greater control of their own reality.  I’ve written 8 online books teaching EASY step by step directions or understandings on topics like; Touch Healing, The Psychic Da Vinci Code, Paranormal Mysteries Unraveled, Psychic Science, Dynamic Ghostology 1 and 2.  The Angel Protection House Blessing was written by request this year when I was approached by a group of paranormal investigator hobbyist who were having trouble with “critters” following them home from investigations and needed help setting up home protections.  So other peoples needs often direct my writing and teaching.

Also I am the director and organizer behind PsychicSchoolHouse.com where I and several teachers teach everyday people how to use simple psychic skills to empower their everyday lives.  I also do lectures and workshops on metaphysics at sci-fi conventions, psychic fairs and other public events.  I also do weekly online workshop at my web site and I also work with psychic children and their parents.

5-   When did you first realize you had this gift?

The first validation of my psychic skills came when I was 4 years old.  In the 50’s they had several TV programs that were aired live.  One of these programs was Route 66, where the last shot of the show was aired live when the credits ran.  Route 66 was my mother’s favorite show. During one of these live shots, I went  crazy crying and screaming  ”Mommy he was hurting and I have to get to him.”  So I proceeded to try and climb into the back of the TV set - which in that time was an array of  hot glass tubes. My mother wrestled me out from behind the TV, rolled me into a ball and rocked me for over an hour to get me calmed down.  And that was that…or so she thought.

However, the next Sunday my mother read in the newspaper that at the close of “this weeks” Route 66 episode, George Maharis (one of the stars of the show) was taken by ambulance to the hospital with sever stomach pains, which turned out to be a life threatening case of food poisoning.  At that moment, my mother looked at me like I had grown two heads – she didn’t understand how I felt what he felt or how I did that – she only knew that I did and it was validated by the newspaper.  She knew something was different about me, but she didn’t want to discuss it either.  

6-   Has it ever caused you problems?

Many times.  Between the ages of 8 and 11 I accurately saw (in detail) and predicted 3 deaths in the family – a trend that stills hold true today. This is extremely hard to cope with now but even harder when was an 8 years old.  So having a skill like mine is sometimes like a double edged sword – it cuts both ways.

Also rarely (Thank God!) the powers-that-be will send me a warning for someone – I have gotten about 5 of these in my lifetime – so they are very rare.  On the other hand they are very accurate.  It’s a hard thing to approach someone cold and share a warning.  And 4 times out 5 the people just blew me off with nasty comments and did not take the warning at all.

One these rare warning I gave to a young single mother with a 5 year old child.  I saw that the man she was dating was going to harm the child in a horrible way – I saw the entire scene unfold.  I warned her strongly to never leave the child alone with him ever.  She blew me off telling me I was nuts, and she married the man.  Six months later she got overseas duty and left the child with him.  Then the couple had a big fight on the phone and he was so enraged he turned his anger on the child and brutally beat and rapped her – she was 6.  He eventually went to jail and the child had to have several surgeries to repair the physical damage – but the mental damage…

In situations like this, the psychic beats themselves up, wondering over and over if they could have said or done anything more to turn that reality around.  So sometimes having pre-knowledge of events is a very heavy responsibility to bear.  We just have to keep in mind that in the end it is that person who his the final decision on their life path’s decisions…all we can do is provide direction and hope they will make a change or take action.

7-   Can you tell us a couple of stories?

I was once contracted by Federal Marshals to work on a cold case that was 7 years old.  They gave me no data at all except the name and age of a child. Slowly, I connected into this child only to discover she was dead – horrible feeling to drop into that without warning! I get her location in the mountains, buried in a dense woods which was too vast to search. They already they knew all this. Over a few weeks time they had me “see” the crime and then they had me turn my attention to the perpetrator of the murder. Since I’m a clairvoyant and see in images and I’m also a psychic artist, I sketched an image of man and faxed it to them.

Using my sketch, they found the man (they said my sketch was a prefect match of him) and located his residence – just three miles from the location of the crime.  Carefully, they set up legal reasons to search his residence where they found article of clothing and other things taken as trophies from more than 7 missing little girls.  He was arrested and was eventually sent to prison. So I played a small role there in helping them get a criminal off the streets.

I also work with private investigators from time to time on cold case murders – its not my favorite work it’s very painful for me, but I help were I can for the families involved.  I’ve also helped locate lost parents for adopted children, helped locate lost objects like wedding bands and rings and I’ve done a lot of psychic healing’s.

My favorite work is teaching people how to program their own realities. I work from time to time with the local abused women’s shelter to help these women reprogram the abuse cycle and get their lives back. This last spring I had an older couple come to me for a consultation that were in a sad state.  They had no home, no jobs, no car and they were living with a woman who was abusing them.  Both felt hopeless with no way out.  Step by step I taught them how to program their own reality and told them if they stuck to the program religiously they would see good results.  Three weeks later (I’m NOT kidding) they showed up at my house.  The two of them had 3 jobs, they picked up a mobile home for a song and moved it onto her property and moved in. They were in town to show me the used van they just bought.  I’m always amazed at the wonders of what people can do when they are given a few tools to empower their own lives. It’s a beautiful thing to see.  

In my opinion, a professional psychic with strong ethics is all about finding the healing path for people.  So it’s not about “fortune telling” even though that comes with psychic skills, it about healing people so they can get their lives back and walk in present time with all the joy and happiness they want.      

Sadly, this is not the driving force for all psychics. As you know fraud runs deep in this profession – as it does with many other professions.  As for me I help and heal people with my skills one person at time.  That is the life of a true psychic – helping others.

Do you have any more questions?

Let me know.

All the best,

Debbora

PSYCHIC SCHOOL HOUSE

Thank you for inviting me to participate with your blog interviews. I appreciate the opportunity to teach a little about what psychics are – there’s a lot of misconceptions out there.  I sincerely appreciate your part in helping out with some of these misconceptions.

 I ask all our psychics for their “brags–books, websites, organizations they belong to, etc, so we readers can support them. Here’s Debbora’s answer.

Ok on brags:  I have two books that people can order on Amazon.com both are anthologies.

Southern Nights – Watercolor Dreams

Writers for Relief: An anthology to benefit the victims of Katrina – The Kiss of Venom

Also I have 7 online books/courses at: http://www.PsychicSchoolHouse.com/course_general.htm

Touch Healing for Plants, Animals and People

Paranormal Mysteries Unraveled

Introduction to Psychic Science

The Psychic Da Vinci Code

Dynamic Ghostology:  1 – 4 The Nonphysical Entities

Dynamic Ghostology:  5 – 8 The Composite Entities

The Angel Protection House Blessing (New 2009)

I am currently working to market The Soul Bonder, a Futuristic Paranormal Romance – I have a pitch with Samhain Publishing on Monday.  Yikes! 

Organizations I belong to:

The BestPsychicsDirectory.com

RWA

Association of Science Fiction and Fantasy Artist (ASFA)

Web site for art: http://www.IntegrityTech.com/debborag.html

Facebook (Debbora Wiles)

Twitter (PsychicDebbora)

I’ll make sure to go up and check the blog to answer any questions – send me a note when you post it! 

Thanks and hugs,

Debbora

Games I Can’t Play

I have another confession to make. I’m a horrible game player.  Oh, I’m good at drawing games (pencils and paper are my friends)  and fair at word games such as Pass Word. But when it comes to computer games, I’m lousy.

My sister Amy is a champ. Of course, she spends part of most days playing. I just play a few times a year.

But, still! She wins EVERY game of solitaire she starts. I can’t win one. She plays Freecell, I have no idea how it works. She even plays a game with multi-colored jewels. I don’t even know the name of it.

I can play Spider solitaire, but rarely win. And I play ONE color only. Amy plays two colors and kicks butt.  

And get this: Amy is the one who, 18+ years ago was in a horrible wreck and had “permanent brain damage.”

As if.

 

Sisters, Sisters

There were never more devoted sisters.

You aren’t here so listen to me sing, are you? Sorry.

Susan here. (Bet you guessed already.)

I thought I’d catch you up on the sisters. (And tell you why I’ve been the Lone Blogger lately.)

Twisted Sister Margaret–aka Meggie, aka real-life-kick-a$$-heroine–is off to sunnier shores, pretending she’s an ocean going turtle. I hear she’s soaking up the rays and diving with the fishes. I can’t wait for her to get home and post some of her uber cool pics for us!!!

BTW: I couldn’t remember when she said she’d be home, so I gave her a call last night. First at her house–no answer. Then on her cell.

I had quite a surprise when a recording came on her phone speaking Spanish! I quickly saw dollar signs being flushed as I remember the price of calling a foreign country. While I love you more than my luggage, Meg, I didn’t need to talk to you THAT badly.

Twisted Sister Marilyn’s mom has been ailing for a while now. She spent time in the hospital, then the docs sent her home. Insurance wouldn’t okay her for extended care (bet you can guess what’s up with that!) so she went to one of Marilyn’s sister’s houses, where the three girls took care of her. A full-time job even for professionals in a extended care center!

I gave Marilyn a call last night. The TS Mom worsened, so she was taken to the emergency room at 11:00 am and at 6:00 pm when I reached M, they were still in that same emergency room. A-C-K!!! I’m waiting for TS Marilyn to let me know how things are going.

With TS Meg splashing about and TS Marilyn getting hands on experience to be a nurse, it leaves only me to blog.

Hopefully one of them will surface before you’re sick to death of me.

Question: If a woman is my Twisted Sister’s mom, does that make her my Twisted Mom? Just asking.

Be sure to watch for the next psychic interview on Saturday!

Meet a Psychic

Hi guys! Today we have the first of several interviews with psychics. If you’ve read BLIND SIGHT, you’ll know I write from time to time about the paranormal. (In Blind Sight, the heroine is a touch psychic who learns that a serial killer is at work in her small town.)

 Not being psychic, I’ve often wondered what it would truly be like.

So I sent out a call on the Romance Writers of America FF & P loop (I think that stand for Futuristic, Fantasy and Paranormal, but this morning I won’t swear to it. LOL.)

There’s a great bunch of women on that loop, and a few very special ladies have stepped up to help me out.

Here’s our first psychic.

Mild mannered mail carrier by day, psychic by night – NOT – Marley Delarose is a native of the D.C. area and a RWA PRO member of FF&P, Nola Stars, DSRA and GRW. A former manager and computer trainer, she is working on a paranormal series and regularly blogs about software programs for writers. Visit her blog at www.marleydelaroseauthor.blogspot.com and her soon to be redesigned website at www.marleydelarose.com.

Wow, Susan, I’ve never discussed this in public before much less on the internet! But it will probably be cathartic.

Hmm, psychic. That word has always held a bad connotation for me, smacking of charlatans, palm readers, fortune tellers and 900 numbers. So, I looked it up on Dictionary.com – ‘relating to or denoting faculties or phenomena that are apparently inexplicable by natural laws, especially involving telepathy, esp or clairvoyance. (of a person) appearing or considered to have powers of telepathy or clairvoyance’ I guess it is what it is, no matter what name you apply to it.

You asked me to describe the curse (no, I’m sorry, you said gift). But that’s how I felt about it for about twenty years. It wasn’t something controllable with obvious results like one of our novels. I knew it was happening but tried to convince myself I was imagining it. If it had just been something small, I could have ignored it.

I was in my twenties the first time, singing in a local club and mid-song I got a – okay I’ve never known what to call it – vision, picture, mind image, waking dream? – so for the sake of argument let’s just call it vision. I know it’s seems so X-Filesy, but there ‘ya go. Anyway, the vision that came to me was of blood dripping down glass doors like those at the front of a retail store. Lots of blood. I didn’t know what to think.

My boyfriend had taken my sports car and planned on returning for me so I was worried that he’d had a wreck or something. Twenty minutes later, one of the local cops in the lounge who was off duty was called to come to a scene at the mall. It seems someone had attacked the manager of a clothing store and one of his employees, killed and robbed them. The police knew something terrible had happened when a patrol car drove through the parking lot and spotted the blood all over the glass front doors.

The next time was close on the heels of that. Our bridge over the River was being painted. As I drove over the bridge one afternoon, my gaze locked with one of the workers and tears came to my eyes, my thought was, ‘oh, it will be so sad when he dies’. The next day the newspaper reported one of the workers fell to his death on the bridge.

Any wonder why I denied these ‘visions’ were real? I mean, what could I do? Who would believe me? And yet I was always left with the feeling that I should have done more. A friend of mine used to say, “Don’t premonit about me!” and my husband would just cluck his tongue and say, sarcastically, I think, “Sometimes you just know.” (He didn’t believe it until one of the only visions I had that identified him, saved him from serious harm three days later.)

Eventually, it turned into a dreamlike ‘knowing’ that someone was going to die. I learned that this unknown person had less than a week. But I usually didn’t know who it was until after it happened and I could put the clues of the ‘vision’ together.

The last time this happened was April 1, 2003, but it wasn’t an April Fools joke. I was watching David Bloom, the NBC reporter who was embedded with the Army during the Gulf War, and I had a similar reaction to the bridge incident. But what was I to do? Call NBC? Right. Five days later, I remember feeling so terribly guilty that I hadn’t done anything.

When the guilt got to be too much, I asked a preacher about them. He said, it was of the devil. But one of the wiser women in the church said, “Just pray for whoever it is. It’s all you can do.” His attitude is one of the prime reasons I never talked about it before but I know he was wrong.

You asked if I can ‘reach for it. No, but I know I sometimes shut it off, at least the dire premonitions. Being able to tell that a Highway patrolman is about to top the hill when you’re doing 67 or when a deer is about to run in front of your car are welcome ‘hunches’, lol. Here’s something I found interesting. I took the Myers-Briggs personality test several years ago and my personality said it was 75% more likely to be psychic, so maybe the level of ‘ability’ is linked to intuitive personalities.

These days, I’ve accepted the mystical aspects of my life and the world and I welcome any opportunity to help, even if all I can do is send out my prayers and positive energy.

13 GHOSTS

This is a nod to one of my favorite “spooky” movies. To be honest, it’s funnier than it is scary, but when I first saw it, I was little. And it made a big impression on me.

 Maybe it’s the black and white, but it still sends shivers up my spine.

Check it out. I still love it!

 

 

Anything Hairy in Your Cemetery?

My sister and best friends and I had many favorite places to play when we were kids. Like Slut Linda Trout, one was our local cemetery. We didn’t climb on head stones, run across graves, steal flowers or any other disrespectful things we could have done.

So why in the world did we like to play there?

Well, it was close to home and just a little out of our parents’ reach. (And close enough they could grab us if we were needed.) We enjoyed walking around, reading the old stones. Finding the prettiest and spookiest ones.

There’s one “stone” that looks like hand poured cement with hand curved metal letters that says, “Unknown.” (We just knew someone had to have crept into the grave yard and buried this guy in the dark of night.)

We’d make up stories about why (and how) this young person or that couple died.

 These are the only fenced off headstones in the place. We decided they were a Catholic couple (we didn’t know any Catholics. LOL.) The large gray stone is the husband’s, and the small one, which looks as if it were carved from a rock out of a nearby creek, the wife’s.

I used to feel sorry for the wife because she got stuck with the ugly rock tombstone, while the husband got the professional looking one. Now I love the hand carved essence of the darker stone, which looks like a log, standing on end, with a cross at the top.

Now and then, we’d pretend there was someone skulking around, getting ready to kidnap us. Last time we played that game was right after my sister got over Mono. Apparently we pretended too well, because she was so frightened, she paled to the color of white marble.

Which scared me so badly, we gave up the game after that.

This is one that really scared us the week after we saw the old Dracula movie with Bela Lugosi. We decided this vampire was so mean, even a stake through his heart couldn’t kill him. They couldn’t keep him in his grave, so they had to cement over him to do it.

A few years ago (after we’d quit playing up there) it was discovered a Confederate General had been buried in our cemetery. Wouldn’t we have had a blast if we’d known it back then! 

I still enjoy walking through our beautiful cemetery, remembering old times, visiting friends who’ve passed on and, of course, making up stories about how and why some of the residents died.  

Do you have a favorite cemetery? (Or cemetery story?)

It’s almost Halloween. Why not share?

A Little Bit of News

Nurse Marilyn here, checking in before heading off to hook up Mom’s IV. (Nope, never, never, ever wanted to be a nurse when I was a kid. And here I am . . .)

I’ve been missing in action a lot the last few months, but hopefully things will improve soon. On the downside, Mom had surgery, got an infection, had more surgery, and my computer absolutely refuses to let me online on dial-up, which is all we have at home. On the upside, I finished AJ and Masiela’s book, so it should be in New York by now, and I have access to high-speed wireless at the hospital, my sister’s (where Mom is staying) and my baby surgeon’s office (where I spend a good deal of time).

Plus, I got new cover art for BIG SKY LAWMAN, my entry in the long-running Montana Mavericks series from Silhouette, which means that BSL is being reissued. When I know more about when and where, I’ll post it here. It’s a great cover, though you’d never guess to look at it that the hero is Indian. LOL. That’s okay. You’d never guess to look at the cover art for PASSION TO DIE FOR that the heroine is blonde, either. A few people I’ve mentioned that to said, “Heroine? There was a heroine on there?” Okay, I get it. Tommy is just too gorgeous to spare a moment looking elsewhere.

I also got a copy of the typeset manuscript for A LITTLE BIT DANGEROUS in the mail the other day, along with a note that it’s being reissued for the mail subscribers. I still love that story. I liked Chance and Mary Katherine, and their first meeting in the book — she slugs him — is still one of my favorites.

And, ta-dah, my last bit of news: I’ve been asked to do a novella for Silhouette Romantic Suspense along with Loreth Ann White and Linda Conrad that will be out next October. Not many restrictions to it: it’s got to be a reunion romance (my favorite kind), it’s got to be suspenseful, it’s got to take place at Christmas, and it’s got to be only 20,000 words.

20,000?!? I’ve written shorter — my GABRIEL’S ANGEL in the Y2K anthology was only 15,000 — but sheesh, it’s a challenge. And to get suspense in there, too! I’m looking forward to giving it my best shot — and offering up gifts to the Goddess of Brevity, because when it comes to writing, “short and sweet” ain’t me.

Some Things Are Better Left Unsaid. . .

The Twisted Sisters, minus one, went to the Chisholm Trail Book Festival in Duncan, OK, on Saturday.  Susan might not have been able to make it, but we remembered her!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

A commercial success for the sisterhood it was not.

I know we brought joy to the junior high boys, especially one who took several pictures of the Twisted Sister Foam Board! Eventually, he even asked Marilyn and me  to be in one picture. He loved our book marks and magnets!

 

Our RWI sisters, Sharon Ervin & Romney Nesbitt, were also there. I was thrilled to see them!!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Here’s a shout out to the woman in the pink Oklahoma State shirt. You made us laugh and we enjoyed visiting with you.

The best things about the festival: the lunch by the Comanche Band boosters, the kids who were dressed in story book costumes, and spending time with Marilyn.