Houston firefighter, Jeff Taylor is a fireman’s fireman. No situation is too dangerous to keep him sidelined if lives are on the line. However, when control freak Lisa Matheson falls for him, she quickly realizes she can’t control Jeff or the death wish he seems to have…   To Protect & Serve The Courage Series, Book 1 To save other’s lives, they will risk their own Buy it on Amazon Kindle: http://www.amazon.com/Protect-Serve-Courage-Series-ebook/dp/B008391QB2/ref=sr_1_22?s=digital-text&ie=UTF8&qid=1337091378&sr=1-22 Buy it on Barnes & Noble Nook: http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/to-protect-serve-staci-stallings/1110805844?ean=2940014423410 “To Protect and Serve will hold you prisoner to its pages until the final one is turned. Prepare to cry, laugh, wish, love and maybe even cry again as you become enveloped in the hopes and feelings of Lisa and Jeff.” -Cindy Reiger

Don’t freak out. It’s not what you think, but I have to this point on earth lived 34 lives.  Let me explain.  In general, there are two ways to write a novel.

• The first way is to plot everything, to research, outline and plan every plot twist and event from page one to the final page before you ever write the first word.
• The other way is sometimes called Seat of the Pants—meaning you don’t know much about the story, you just start writing and let the book come to life as you write.

I use a lot of both ways, but I tend to think of it as doing what the Holy Spirit wants when He wants it done.  Most of the time I start knowing at least a scene or two of what happens. Sometimes all I know is who the characters are, sometimes I know bits and pieces of the story.  No matter how they start, each and every story has stretched me and forced me to grow.  I see these as Holy Spirit lessons in many ways.

The first way is I’ve learned I have to let go of “how I did it last time.”  However I did it last time is never how I will do it this time—that much I have learned.  This time will always be different.  This time will always have its own lesson to teach me.

The second way these stories have taught me is to give me the chance to live many lives—not just this experience I myself call life.  In some ways my characters are pieces of me.  In some ways I’m pieces of them.  When I write, for that time I “become” them.  I often take on various characteristics of them as I’m writing their story.  I’ve dressed new-age for a time because that’s how one character often dressed.  I’ve worn leather wristbands because that’s what a character wore.  When I’m in character mode, I listen to the world in a different way.  I listen to it the way they would.

I listen for the lessons they need to learn in the way they need to learn it, and in the process, I learn.  It’s a cool way to learn because as heart-wrenching as a circumstance in a book is, I have the option of turning off the computer and processing for awhile.  In real life, you can’t do that.

Through my characters I have experienced poverty and riches far beyond what I will ever have. I have worried about where my next meal will come from and about how to save a youth center from being closed. I have jumped off the edge of sanity into alcoholism and relived a drug addiction.  I have seen the loneliness of getting the dream you thought you wanted but missing the things that are truly important along the way.  And with every experience, I have learned in a way I couldn’t have from my own experience.

To date I have completed 17 novels. (I wrote this in 2005. I have now completed 31 novels, so I’ve now “lived” 62 lives!)  Since I write from the point of view of the hero and that of the heroine in each book, I guess that means I have now lived 34 lives.  This unique life experience—both my life and getting to marinate in others’ souls for a time—has taught me many things about this life that I couldn’t have learned had I only lived my own life experience.

I firmly believe that being able to walk in each of my characters’ shoes for a time has given me knowledge and understanding that I would not have otherwise been privy to gaining in any other way.  It has opened my eyes to how a single situation can be interpreted in radically different ways depending on the particular perspective of the individuals involved.  Because of this, I now understand that no matter how firmly you believe your experience is definitive, the other person is probably as adamant that their interpretation is the only valid one as well.

This knowledge has saved me on more than one occasion from assuming that because my interpretation of events was X that everyone else’s was too.  I am more willing to listen to other perspectives. I am more willing to dig for what’s really going on rather than assuming I know and going on faulty personal interpretation.

It’s a lesson I greatly value, and one I will forever be glad that God allowed me to have.  How else could you live 34 lives and not be counted insane?  Unless of course you were to read other’s experiences… hmm….  There’s an idea.

Copyright Staci Stallings 2005

I write because I can talk to the paper and not be interrupted or misunderstood or frozen mid-sentence by a quizzical stare from a listener’s eyes.

I write because I can’t (nor would you want to watch me) sing or dance or paint or sculpt or provide anything else of artistic value to the universe other than what I can create with my paper and pen.

I write because my days are numbered; I have less days to live than I have already lived, and the abstraction of mortality is waning, replaced by the very concreteness of careening years.

I write because I kept my mouth shut for too many years of my life. I write because I could exorcise the ghosts of the past, the goblins of the present, the amorphous fears of the future wielding a cheap plastic-barreled pen and a college-ruled notebook.

I write because words spoken are swallowed by time. Words written are meals cooked today for a banquet to be held later. I write because I have lived an unexpected life and the surprises–both full of dread and full of awe–would otherwise drift uncharted.

I write because I want my children to know me, not mother me or wife me, or sister me, or aunt me, or grandmother me. But Christa Me. The deep and the shallow places. I want them to have access to bits of my soul, perhaps slices of me that they may not hunger for until I am no longer here to feed them.

I write because, in doing so, I shape the memories, give them words that will be my eternal life breaths.

A recent survey showed that two-thirds of today’s teens use “nonstandard elements” in their school writing assignments.

This is news? OMG.

I’m LOL with my BFF who’s a real QT.

“Half of the teens surveyed say they sometimes fail to use proper capitalization and punctuation in assignments, while 38 percent have carried over the shortcuts typical in instant messaging or e-mail messages, such as “LOL” for “laughing out loud.” A quarter of teens have used :) and other emoticons.”

Can you say “text messaging”? Get a stopwatch, grab a teen, and see who can read the following faster:

Romeo and Juliet – Text Messaging Version

Act 1

Login: Romeo : R u awake? Want 2 chat?
Juliet: O Rom. Where4 art thou?
Romeo: Outside yr window.
Juliet: Stalker!
Romeo: Had 2 come. feeling jiggy.
Juliet: B careful. My family h8 u.
Romeo: Tell me about it. What about u?
Juliet: ‘m up for marriage f u are.. Is tht a bit fwd?
Romeo: No. Yes. No. Oh, dsnt mat-r, 2moro @ 9?
Juliet: Luv U xxxx
Romeo: CU then xxxx

Act 2

Friar: Do u?
Juliet: I do
Romeo: I do

Act 3

Juliet: Come bck 2 bed. It’s the nightingale not the lark.
Romeo: OK
Juliet: !!! I ws wrong !!!. It’s the lark. U gotta go. Or die.
Romeo: Damn. I shouldn’t hv wasted Tybalt & gt banished.
Juliet: When CU again?
Romeo: Soon. Promise. Dry sorrow drinks our blood. Adieu.
Juliet: Miss u big time.

Act 4

Nurse: Yr mum says u have 2 marry Paris!!
Juliet: No way. Yuk yuk yuk. n-e-way, am mard 2 Rom.

Act 5

Friar: Really? O no. U wl have 2 take potion that makes u look ded.
Juliet: Gr8

Act 6

Romeo: J-why r u not returning my texts?
Romeo: RUOK? Am abroad but phone still works.
Romeo: TEXT ME!
Batty: Bad news. J dead. Sorry l8

Act 7

Romeo: J-wish u wr able 2 read this…am now poisoning & and climbing in yr grave. LUV U Ju xxxx

Act 8

Juliet: R-got yr text! Am alive! Ws faking it! Whr RU? Oh…
Friar: Vry bad situation.
Juliet: Nightmare. LUVU2. Always. Dagger. Ow!!! Logout

by cartoonist Roz Chast, first published in the New Yorker

Honestly, using text language in writing isn’t so much an issue with my students. But, please, oh please,tell me who in the educational food chain abdicated the teaching of CURSIVE?

They print EVERYTHING. Sometimes using all upper case letters, some using all lower case, and sometimes using an arbitrary combination of the two, but contrary to the standard rules of punctuation. Every year there’s the token bubble letter kid, the one who dots everything with a puffy heart, and one year I had someone use a star as a dot. Every paper sparkled. Then, inevitably, there’s the dreaded ant scrawler. S/he’s the one whose handwriting is so microscopic, the Constitution would take up less than half of a looseleaf page.

A few of them must confuse “margin” with ‘margARinE” because their sentences spread out all over the paper. Early in the year, I have to introduce “Mr. Paragraph” to those who’ve yet to learn the fine art of indenting.

I suppose I digressed. But to bring it back around, the survey about teens using informal language in school was conducted by–wait for it–telephone.

The delicious irony.

TAFN

1. So, while I and many of my writer friends are brooding, writing, angsting, plotting, marketing, writing…here’s a new book I discovered yesterday: MILK EGGS VODKA Grocery Lists Lost and Found. And here’s a blurb: HOW Books introduces “Milk Eggs Vodka: Grocery Lists Lost and Found,” a new book by über-collector Bill Keaggy. “Milk Eggs Vodka” features 300 real grocery lists recovered from shopping carts and parking lots across America and other corners of the globe. Keaggy dissects each list with his acerbic wit and offers intriguing insights about what we eat and why.

I spotted the book yesterday before my writing workshop and booksigning at Bay Books in Bay St. Louis, MS. Delightful group of writers and artists at the workshop, and I loved just hanging out, cruising the shelves and talking to Kay Gough.

Obviously, I’m missing a wealth of opportunities for books as further evidenced by: Found: The Best Lost, Tossed, and Forgotten Items From Around the World.

I actually think these books are brilliant social commentaries, and I find them fascinating.  If nothing else, I think I’ll buy them because somewhere in there is a book waiting to happen.

2. As if we need more proof that getting drunk is the epitome of stupidity (love the sound of that…): A 47-year-old (as in the name of everything holy, how many brain cells have you already murdered) man lost a bet with his drinking buddies. So…what’s a guy going to do? Well, when you only drink six, and they’ve had more, you let them set your prosthetic leg on fire.

What’s truly fortunate and amazing is that they did manage to distinguish the prosthetic leg from the real one. The flames, however, did not. They spread to his butt and back.

And his drinking buddies helped, right? Sure they did. As reported by the Las Cruses Sun-News, “The sheriff’s office said the man took his clothes off because of the pain and his friends decided to take him to the hospital. But they got nervous and instead dropped him off on the side of the highway.”

3. Attorney General Eric Holder Jr. said that the ten Russian spies “posed a potential threat to the United States” by explaining (justifying?) the recent trade.

Okay. Then why did it take TEN YEARS of watching them to determine that?

4. Ray Nagin is no longer mayor of New Orleans (can I hear an “AMEN!”), but his arrogant carelessness lives on. The city had $72 million in its “rainy day fund” in 2007.  From 2007-2009, it must have stormed to the tune of $65,000 a day because the fund today is zero.

Over $3 million was spent on Armstrong Park, which he touted as his legacy. I suppose therein lies the irony; the park is trashed because the contractors he hired were inept. And the ten foot statue of Louis Armstrong was not only cracked, here’s the rest of the report from Times-Picayune’s Jarvis DeBerry:

“Not only did the company demonstrate an inability to install sidewalks; not only did the company damage the statue of this city’s most influential musician and cultural ambassador; but A.M.E. Disaster Recovery also damaged curbing, knocked a light pole into the lagoon, broke manholes and sprinkler pipes and cut power and phone lines.”

Perhaps he was the spy left behind…

But the threads fray when I’m frantic to shove them all through the eye of the needle of sanity. I want to make order out of chaos, but the memories and the pictures and the stories waiting to be told are like bolts of lightning–powerful, visible, yet impossible to clutch.

I think this happens most when I’m creatively procrastinating embarking on what will be an emotional archeological dig. The feelings are buried alive, and I’ve been content to ignore them. Hoping, dreaming, praying that logic will suffocate them. But, no. They demand to be noticed. And while I create chaos, thinking I will somehow murder them with inattention, they wait patiently.

And what do I fear? Having to bear the weigh of regret, pain, loss? Even too much sunshine burns and blinds.

But I know I must continue to stitch the stories together, to resist the untangling of the threads, and to listen to the whisper in my soul.