Guest blogging

I've been doing a lot of guest blogging lately. It is a great way to reach out to new audiences and familiarize them with what you do. I've been fortunate to meet some great bloggers who have invited me to share information with their readers.

Today I'm visiting Bob Sanchez and talking about writing creative non-fiction. That almost seems like an oxymoron, but it isn't. It is the art of embellishing true stories or incidents with bits of exaggeration or info that---well,  isn't quite the truth but generally based in truth.

Anyway, it is a very interesting genre to work with. My upcoming novel, Confessions of a Cougar, is a good example as are a few of the stories in my new collection of short stories, The MAFIA FUNERAL and Other Short Stories, now available in Kindle and paperback. The title story in Mafia Funeral is about 95% true--I know because the character Sue was actually me. See the yellow car on the cover? It was like a daisy in a black sea. Our yellow Pontiac convertible and 40 black limousines for the mobsters who flew in for this funeral in an off-duty police escorted procession to the cemetery. You can bet people driving the freeway that day rubbernecked.

Likewise, for another story in the collection, the award-winning story, The Second Time Around is the story of when my former mother-in-law remarried her first husband 36 years after they were divorced and she had to figure out how to tell my husband his "dead" father was alive and kicking. The wedding scene could not have been funnier if written by a comedy screenwriter for a movie. I've been told it would make a great movie or TV comedy.

Creative non-fiction can really be fun as well as a walk down Memory Lane. Since you are the director of this tale, you can yell "cut" whenever you want to or slide in a rewrite of what actually happened, tweaking it to be the way you would have liked it to be.

Looking through my photos for this post, I came across this one. Now this could be the basis for a fun story--the time Phyllice and I got to go inside an Oscar Meyer Weenie Wagon. We both were given "weenie whistles" as a memento of our visit.

Have fun and visit Bob Sanchez/ blog to read what I have to say about creative non-fiction. Comments welcome. http://bobsanchez1.blogspot.com/

Why I believe in fate

I had to write this while it was fresh in my mind. Unless you watched the Today this Sunday morning, the names Joe Parker and Rick Hill won't mean anything, but it's an amazing story. A story that validated why I believe in fate. Joe and Rick, two guys in their thirties who were both raised in Massachusetts actually share the same father, but they never knew each other.

Joe was placed in the foster system as a tot and Rick lived in the next small town. Somewhere along the line Rick learned that he had a half-brother, but never tried to find him because he didn't have a clue where to start.

Fast forward. It's 2011 and Rick and his family took a trip to Hawaii. They weren't staying near Wakikki Beach, but rather on the other side of the island. For some reason, Rick said he didn't know why, they circled the island that day and took a walk on the beach. Rick, his wife and kids stopped to pose for some photos with the surf in the background. A typical tourist thing to do. Mom or Dad takes the shot while everyone says cheese. This time something different happened.

Enter 38 year old Joe, who had moved to Hawaii and was working in the hospitality industry. So he's walking along the same beach, sees the family taking photos and offers to take a shot of all of them. As Joe said, "I'm in the hospitality industry now so I decided to be hospitable." While they were talking, they both noticed the New England accents, and as people from the same area often do, each asked the other where he was from. Turned out they lived one small town apart.

Then they exchanged names of people they knew. That's when the world stood still. One of the names was their mutual father. The half-brothers had found each other through a quirk of fate. Why was Rick at Wakikki Beach that day when he never intended to go there? What prompted Joe to move to Hawaii and how did he wind up on the same stretch of beach at exactly the time his half-brother and his family were taking their vacation shot? What prompted him to offer to take a photo?

No one can really answer those questions, but it's why I believe in fate.