Mindful Musings Book Blog

She went looking for an old flame and found a serial killer instead. When Beth lost her father to cancer and her husband to another woman, she didn’t know where to turn. So she pulled herself together and headed for their old family cabin in the mountains of New Mexico for some comfort and some comfort food at the historic Drugstore Café. Like a lot of us when we are hurting, we automatically attempt to retreat to a happier time in our past. For Beth the happiest times were the summers she’d spent at the cabin with her dad, a single parent. She distinctly remembered helping him in the tiny kitchen, chopping vegetables while he cooked. They’d had a very special relationship.  And then she’d met eighteen-year-old John, her very first crush. She’d thought he would always be there, every summer, but then he had joined the military and disappeared. No way he could be back on the mountain, could he? That had been years earlier.  She couldn’t wait to find out. Unfortunately, on the way to the

Food for though, huh?  Listen, I'm an author who's fat.  Or perhaps I'm a fat man who happens to be an author.  Whichever.  But I will acknowledge that food plays an important role in my life, probably too important a role.  And as with many parts of my life, my love for food plays an important role in my writing.  I spend some time in many of my works talking about what the characters eat and drink.  I'll talk about a few of them with you. In my short story "Shug," appearing in the anthology Shadows Over Main Street 2 , the setting is a farm in the years right after World War II.  The main character, Vesta, has lost her husband in that conflict and lets the farm fall into decrepitude.  Along comes Shug, and he helps her get the place back into shape so that he can plant some…well, you'll have to read the story to find out exactly what he plants.  But there are plenty of scenes of eating, all good, 1950s farmhouse stuff—fried chicken and mashed potatoes, s

Dishing It Out, Dystopian-Style Original Syn is a dystopian epic where our world has become totally unrecognizable… or maybe not so much, if we just squint a little. Fifty years after an epic event called the Singularity, the entire world is divided into just two categories: The powerful, age-defying Syns ("synthetic citizens," human-computer hybrids with extraordinary enhancements) and the dying, oppressed Originals (those who did not merge their bodies with machines). A decades-long war between Original and Syn is almost at an end, because after an attack on their reproductive systems, the Originals are on the verge of extinction. But then Ere, one of the world’s last teenage Originals, meets a beautiful, powerful Syn girl called Ever, and suddenly questions everything he’s ever been told about his lifelong enemies. Meanwhile Ever realizes there’s a dark side to the world she’s always taken for granted. And unbeknownst to either of these star-crossed lovers, there’s a revo

Why Hard Cider? By Barbara Stark-Nemon Several lifetimes ago, at the beginning of a career and the end of a marriage, I spent a year living in England. I worked at my first job as a speech and language therapist, and teacher of English as a Second Language at the American Community School in London.  At 27 I had taught English for two years in America, then gone to graduate school.  I had traveled to Europe several times, and even studied in Austria for a summer, but I’d never lived and worked outside the 50 mile radius of where I’d been born, grew up, attended university. I worked hard all week, but on weekends I explored London and then traveled farther afield.  I loved the culture of pub life in big cities and small hamlets.  Nothing ever seemed to taste as good as a ploughman’s lunch after a morning’s country walk. Thick slabs of local cheese slathered with chutney or mustard, piled with butter lettuce and tomato and sweet pickle on a crusty roll. I never tired of trying each pub’s