We all have our la-la-la song. The thing we do when the world isn't singing a nice tune to us. We sing our own nice tune to drown out ugly.
A name is important. It isn't something you drop in the litter basket or on the ground. Your name is now people know you. The very mention of your name makes a picture spring to mind, whether it's a picture of clashing fists or a mighty mountain that can't be knocked down. Your name is who you are and how you're known even when you do something great or something dumb.
Saying "please" without saying it to someone you don't want to say "please" to in the first place tops the list of hard.
One of the great things about being a grandparent is you get to redo what you didn't or couldn't do as a parent. Oftentimes we forget that even while the parent is parenting, they're still a growing person. They're still trying to fix themselves. They're still out there not doing everything a hundred percent correctly. I had the best parents I could ever have, but the kinds of things that they were capable of doing, the things that they said and did, were very destructive to my sister, brother, and me. But they're so much more than those things.
mixing comes natural. i just ought to. not am i mixed to perfection, i have aptitude for art and colors.
I'm very objective about what I want to have happen to my protagonists and where that has to come from. On one hand, it does help me that I had a mother who might have taken the last dollar and bought a pack of cigarettes or something, but I also had a mother who exposed me to art, music, other religions, different foods. My mother was very adventurous in her own way, so she fed the part of me that was going to grow up to be a writer. But there's always, too, the opposite response that helps me to create.
