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Showing posts from June, 2012

90 Percent Inspiration

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My daughters are adults now – thank heavens. I don’t mean they have turned eighteen; I mean adult -adults. They are of an age that I discourage them from calling me “Mom” in public. My youngest is a school teacher, for crying out loud. I cannot express the relief I feel in no longer having to portray some sort of idealized, Cleaverized version of motherhood, and we can just relate to one another as people. They actually seek out the wisdom of my experience rather than being offended if I offer it, and I even find myself asking their opinion on different topics to learn what is currently hip. (I am now being told that using the word “hip” is not hip.) Occasionally, we even have a bit of role reversal, such as when we went to Universal Orlando and I wanted to buy these magic tricks. My daughters tried to talk me out of it. “You know, you will only play with them a few times and get bored and never touch them again.” I whined until they gave in and let me buy them, but of course they we

Confessions of a Fan Fiction Convert

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Originally written and posted for Austen Authors. I confess: I was a Fan Fiction snob. When my daughters were teenagers, they wrote stories based on Forever Knight or Buffy or Star Trek (TOS) or anime (whatever that is). Then they would post them on websites where other people had done the same – and they would read each other’s work! One daughter wrote vampire versions of Phantom of the Opera and Gone with the Wind (clearly a genetic anomaly). I found the other in the gameroom staring at the computer screen late at night “just reading some fan fiction.” I didn’t get it! I encouraged them to use their imaginations, to write something “original.” Unless I was on the beach or in a plane, I read literature – Faulkner, Shakespeare, Austen, Twain. Why would they waste their time and energy with these distortions? So how did my conversion come about? Nothing as cathartic as Paul on the road to Damascus. The change came along so gradually, I was in the middle before I knew I had be

The Novels of Colette L. Saucier