Is My Face Red! | by Linda Brendle
I have all sorts of excuses for not posting a blog on Monday and for not posting one earlier today. Some are interesting and some are not, but the real reason is a little embarrassing. One of my fellow AKA Literary authors mentioned a writing contest, and I decided to give it a shot. It was fiction only, so I took a deep breath and wrote my first work of fiction since I was a sophomore in high school. After tweaking it to my satisfaction, I went to the contest site to check out the submission procedures. The first thing I saw was “OPEN ONLY TO LEGAL RESIDENTS OF PENNSYLVANIA WHO ARE AT LEAST 18 YEARS OLD AS OF THE DATE OF ENTRY.” Well, duh! The name of the contest is “The 2013 Central PA Magazine Writing Contest.” So, I have a story that’s all dressed up with no place to go. I know it’s not my usual genre, but give it a read and let me know what you think.
New Beginnings | by Linda Brendle
I was sitting in the waiting room of the dentist’s office the day it began – a typical waiting room with nondescript furniture, bland wall prints, the faint smell of lemon-scented cleaning products and antiseptic, the distant sound of a drill. I was looking at a magazine article titled “New Year, New Beginnings” – looking but not reading. I was in the season of endings. My marriage ended after twenty years, and a couple of ill-advised relationships ended much more quickly. My career ended in a corporate downsizing, and my stint as a caregiver ended with the death of my mother, taking half my retirement savings with it. The rest of my plans for a semi-luxurious retirement ended when the stock market and the housing market crashed at about the same time. All my new beginnings had faded, and I’d resolved to make do with what was left. (more…)
