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How did Frankie’s precious designs get tossed into a crowd of screaming women? She’d better ask Reese.
What happens when you hire a hot male stripper to model your designs on the catwalk? Frankie sure found out!
Contact me for your next romance read. WhatsApp 758-1179, See sample chapters at https://simonataylor.net/trini-sales-page/ or message me here. Great prices on great books.
For my Trini readers, I now have copies of The Tantalizing Mr. Templar. They’re TT$80 plus postage. You can also order directly online from Amazon if you prefer Kindle.
Message me here to order.
Enjoy!
My new romance novel is out! Celebrate with me!
We dream or we die.
Maysoon Zayid likes to joke that her situation makes other people feel better about their lives. After all, she’s a brown-skinned, female, Muslim Palestinian with cerebral palsy. “If that doesn’t make you feel better about yourself,” she jokes, “Something’s really wrong with you!”
Yup. She’s got it coming at her from all sides. As she explained in her Audible memoir, Find Another Dream, she was robbed of oxygen by the drunken sot of a doctor who delivered her. She twitches incessantly, something she says is exhausting, and I believe her. She wasn’t supposed to be able to walk, but her father taught her how, by placing her feet upon his and walking her around the room, the way my father danced with me.
She got speech therapy to be clearly understood, and dance lessons instead of physio, which her parents couldn’t afford. And yet, when she announced in dance class that she wanted to dance professionally, her instructor patronisingly sneered, “Find another dream.”
Yeah, about that . . . . Not only has she danced and acted on Broadway, but she travels all over the world doing stand-up, appeared with Adam Sandler in Don’t Mess with the Zohan, and has a recurring role on General Hospital. And her TED Talk has, like, a hundred trillion views. You can check it out here.
Though American born, she travels to Palestine regularly, to act as an advocate for those who are suffering, especially the children. She’s somehow become the poster girl for many causes: women, brown people, Arabs, and the disabled, and manages to fill all those roles with great humour.
She has her own stuff going on on YouTube, too, like her video series, Advice You Don’t Want to Hear, and is a regular on celebrity talk shows and stand-up stages around the world. The book is short, but such fun that I went running to see what else she had out there.
You just got yourself a fan, girl!
Read it? Or are you reading something else you’d like to recommend. Tell us!
And incidentally, if you haven’t seen him in Titus, FIND IT AND WATCH IT!
Probably the first time I encountered Alan Cumming was in Circle of Friends. I was immediately captivated by his snarky, rat-faced character; his job was to make your skin crawl, and that he did very well.
I think I saw him next in the bizarrely anachronistic rendition of Shakespeare’s Titus, along with Anthony Hopkins. Once again, Alan stole the show. And my heart. He’s pretty high on my list of celebrities I’d most like to have dinner with. Or anything else for that matter.
So you can imagine how I felt about his memoir, Not My Father’s Son. Alan Cumming, reading to me about his fabulous and exciting life! What could be better?
Well, let me tell you, if you’re looking for butterflies and light, you chose the wrong book, my brother. Alan’s young life was horrifying, veering between poverty, cold, and nightmarish abuse from a brutish father who reminded me of old man Morel in D. H. Lawrence’s Sons and Lovers. I mean, he almost scalped him, for God’s sake.
It’s an old trope that out of immense childhood pain arise the most creative and artistic impulses. But damn. How do some people survive such experiences, not only with their sanity intact, but with enough drive and ambition to make something of themselves?
Of course, one of the best parts of the book (apart from getting the scoop on all his fascinating theatrical projects and his romantic adventures as a bisexual man) was the mystery surrounding his paternity. Apparently, his mother had an affair, and there was a high chance that Alan was not, in fact, the son of the monster who terrorised him most of his life. The suspense will make you chew on your cuticles as you wait for the DNA test, his mother’s confession, and all the drama. Was he his father’s son? Get the book, cause I’m not gonna tell ya.
What I can tell you is, if you’re a fan of Alan’s, you’d be doing yourself a disservice by not getting this book. It’s a masterpiece.
That’s my two cents. What’s yours? Please leave a comment.
As opposed to sitting on your hands and moaning that you’re out of ideas.
As a young writer, I used to think of my mind as some sort of divinely inspired mega-computer that was constantly online, plugged into the cosmos, being bombarded by story ideas, quotes and characters like the International Space Station is bombarded by space debris. I remember boasting gleefully to my agent, Deidre Knight of The Knight Agency, that I’d spent the weekend “downloading stories from my brain.” Talk about self-delusion.
As I spent more time writing (and as I grew the hell up), I realised that there’s no cosmic idea-generating alternative universe that has nothing better to do than throw ideas at me like litterbugs tossing beer bottles onto the highway. I discovered that finding ideas was hard—and finding good, fresh, useable ones was damn near impossible.
Y’all know what I mean. We’ve all been there, bashing our head against our keyboard like Don Music at his piano. “I’ll never get it! Never!”
But unless we want our store of ideas to dry up like a frog pond in April, we have to actively seek them out. Here are a few of the places I look for mine—and you can do the same.
Over the years I’ve collected enough newspaper clippings to line a hundred hamster cages. I’m always snipping or tearing out articles that strike my fancy, be they about gruesome murders, weird fetishes, charming towns, or inspiring people. Maybe I’ll never use 90% of them . . . but think of all the things I can do with that last 10%!
Let’s not call it eavesdropping. Let’s call it “Casual attentive overhearing.” People say the damnedest things. Gossip. Scandal. Pathos. Wisdom. Hilarity. It’s all there, falling from the lips of friends and strangers like manna from heaven. And all ya gotta do is gather them up into your basket.
Did you know my novel, Love Me All The Way, was based on a single overheard sentence? I once heard a friend remark that her mother always said, “Never let a man give you pearls; he will one day make you cry.” I was so excited by the idea that I immediately tried to find out how I could turn it into a story. Who would give who pearls? And why would he make her cry?
Or any other work of scripture or mythology. The Bible is my favourite source of story ideas, and many of my novels have noticeable threads that trace back to well-loved stories. And why not? The book covers thousands of years of human history and is crammed full of every human foible and flaw: vanity, lust, murder, rape, incest, infidelity, lies, scheming, angels, demons, birth, death, hope and redemption. And that’s just the first couple of pages!
That’s just a fancy way of saying “daydream”. If you have a day job, develop the skill of working through your story while looking offally, offally interested in the staff-meeting purgatory you’re stuck in. Take discreet notes in the margins of your notepad. Learn to get up and slide into your fantasy while leaving your body behind, looking poised and attentive at the boardroom table.
If I told you how many people have told me they want to be writers but hate to read, your earlobe hairs would all fall out from shock. Repeat after me: it is impossible to be a writer if you are not a reader. And no, I will not be taking counter-arguments at this time.
No, not the one with you, Forrest Gump, a motel room and a banana. Most of the time, dreams are your subconscious taking the piss out of you, but sometimes, the sneaky little diva throws a few gems your way. When it happens, for God’s sake write it down. Dream-ideas last for less time than morning dew on a warm car engine.
Sketches, drawings, charts and vision boards help you see what’s in your head. Once you see it, you can make it grow. And you don’t need to be the next great insert-hot-famous-artist’s-name-here to sketch out your ideas. You’re drawing for you and nobody else. Someone else thinks your WWII rapid-fire artillery canon-whatsit looks like a duck? Their problem, not yours.
Whatever you do, write your ideas down, no matter how dumb they sound at the time. Maybe the next time you look at them they’ll still look dumb.
But then again, maybe they won’t.
I’ve done my part. Now it’s your turn. Leave a comment below.
It’s like staring down a time tunnel.
My first (and only) book tour: a 10-city tour to promote A Thirst For Rain. In 1999, I think. (Insert Prince song clip here.) Man I was young. And now, looking back on my career and life, it’s interesting to reflect on what Young Roslyn thought about herself. Especially the part about whether or not to have kids! (I have two teens now.)
Wait! You aren’t leaving without leaving a comment, are you?
Funny mistakes are everywhere.
This is why you proofread.
It doesn’t matter if you’re in the science field or not. You can find a job in deep sea exploration.
Jacques Cousteau said, “Once the sea casts its spell on you, you are held in its net of wonder forever.”
Deep sea exploration provides so many employment opportunities, and not just for those involved directly in the sciences. The final episode of Deep Sea Wonders of the Caribbean talks about some of them.
I’m almost jealous of the next generation. There are so many new things to learn, and so many ways to make an impact that students looking for the ideal career will have no end of choices.
The Caribbean is sometimes called the Ring of Fire. Volcanoes to the left of us; volcanoes to the right of us…
There are 21 active volcanoes in the Lesser Antilles. That’s an awful lot of volcanoes! In Episode four of Deep Sea Wonders of the Caribbean, we explored one of the most famous, a subsea volcano called Kick ‘Em Jenny. This girl is so powerful that boats and planes steer clear of her, for fear of being brought down by her activity. She also has a kid brother called Kick ‘Em Jack.
Of course, subsea volcanoes are such a chemical-rich environment that sea creatures thrive among them . . . until the next eruption!