New Malice in Memphis Anthology.

This is the latest Anthology for Malice in Memphis. You can find it on Amazon.com or BN.com. It is available in hardback, trade paperback and ebook/kindle.

It is here.. I am officially a published author. I have one story in the anthology "Bluff City Mysteries" by Malice in Memphis and working on a couple of stories for the next Malice Anthology....Mid South Ghost stories.

I haven't done this in a long time...too long in fact. So much has changed since the last time this blog was updated. I have gotten involved with working the Mid-South Con for the last couple of years, joined Malice in Memphis and am now the newsletter editor for the second year. I have joined the Mid South Buccaneers which makes me a Pirate, written a story about a murder on Mud Island that is set during the Pirate Faire and it is with the editors and probably bleeding red as we speak. If it is chosen it will be published in an anthology. I turned 50 in December of 2012 and my daughter took me to dinner with my closest friends and then to Pinot's Palette to paint and drink wine. It was the best birthday I have ever had. I discovered painting early in 2012 at Lord of the Beans when a local lady was having a painting party there. I painted an scene with 3 owls in a tree on 2 8x10's canvases.

I wanted to run right out the next day to get another canvas to see if I could paint a picture on my own. That idea was shot down by everybody saying I didn't need any more hobbies. Gee some people, they just didn't want me to drag them into another hobby. I let it go for a while. I attended the Memphis Comic and Fantasy Con at the Hilton Memphis and Pinot's Palette was there. I was able to paint another picture, this one of my choosing of a wolf howling at a borealis.

I didn't care for it as much after I got it home..so i bought some paints and I changed it...

I didn't let anybody deter me from diving head long into painting. I was still doing my embroidery and making items for sale. I have a set that I make for baby showers that include a baby wipes case, a pacifier holder, a bib and 3 burp cloths. I have a set for wedding showers too. 2 bath towels, 2 hand towels and 2 washcloths that are given to the bride and groom in a tote that I make. Their initials are on all the towels (usually in 2 colors) and on the bag. Usually my daughter buys the sets for her friends that have gotten engaged or married. Also ordered a few baby shower gifts. I have a lot of orders from my daughter, and my cousins. However I still wanted to paint. So my daughter planned my birthday dinner the weekend before at a restaurant of my choice, Colton's and she gave me a wine glass that said Birthday Girl and an XL wine glass that she and my friends (Lisa, Dee, Missy,and Missy's daughter Amber who was in on leave from the Army) had signed at the restaurant. She left the restaurant to go to the liquor store and picked up some wine and we all went to Pinot's Palette for a 3 hour class and painted Christmas Starry Night.

I am hooked on painting and I want to learn how to paint in oil paints and watercolor as well as acrylics. I have a wonderful watercolor painting of my daughter that passed away 28 years ago that was done by one of my mother's renters. It hangs on my living room wall between Nicole and Kevin's senior pictures. I always wished I could paint like that...and maybe one day I will. I have one last painting that I did for 2012 and I took the class with Dee and a high school friend Debbie Crowder so that I could learn how to paint glass and make it look real. It is called Wine Glass triplets.

I posted the picture of the howling wolf on Facebook and had someone ask how much I would charge to paint one for her brother as a Christmas gift. I told her and I painted the picture more like I thought it should be. She wanted one like the original one I did so I painted another one...she bought both of them. She also asked me to paint one for her daughter of a peace sign and 2 owls.

The ladies that I sew and knit with on Friday's from the church, liked the Christmas Starry Night paintings so one of their belated Christmas gifts was a smaller version of that painting altered so that they could hang it up anytime not just at Christmas. I think that 2013 will be a good year for creativity. Maybe I will improve my painting.

Memoir Prompt: Scars

“The storm is expected to make landfall by 9:00 p.m. here near Duck, NC. Hurricane Isabelle is currently a category 3 hurricane with 125 mph winds,” the weatherman from Virginia Beach announced. He was standing in the blowing rain on the boardwalk in Duck, NC so that he could keep the Hampton Roads area apprised of the status and location of the storm. I had begun packing away our valuables and pictures to store in the unit that we were renting at Uncle Bob’s Storage units up on Military Highway as you come into Woodshire Mobile Home Park where we lived. I was also waiting for Kevin to get home from school. We were planning on staying with friends as the news was advising full evacuation if you lived in a mobile home. I loaded up the car and drove down to the storage unit. I had to move some of the boxes around so that I could get the new boxes in. I picked up a box to move it and had to put my right hand underneath for extra support as the box was heavy but not as sturdy as it should have been. As I went to set the box down, I moved my hand across the bottom and felt a stinging sensation on my hand below my thumb. I really thought I had just scratched it. When I pulled my hand out I had an inch and half long and an inch deep gash in my hand just above my thumb and it was bleeding. I am really surprised that I was not totally freaking out about the cut but I was relatively calm. I searched one handed through boxes to find something that I could put on the cut and realized that I still had to bring the stuff out of the car and put in the storage unit. I finally found a kitchen towel in a box and wrapped it around my hand and then looked under the box and found a dime sized chunk of glass stuck in the tape on the bottom of the box and tinged with blood. Now bear in mind that I am right handed and that would be the one that was injured. I unloaded the boxes and closed up the storage unit and drove back to my trailer, picked up Kevin and drove to a friend’s just down the street. Kevin wanted to stay at Jo’s with Jo's kids Chris, Sarah and Alisha while Jo went with me to the emergency room at the Portsmouth Naval Hospital. I had changed the towel to a clean washrag and drove myself to the emergency room. I only had to wait about 25 minutes to be seen. They put in 4 stitches and gave me a tetanus shot and prescription for Lortab for pain and sent me home with instructions not to get the wound wet and change the bandage every day. I drove back home, dropped off Jo and picked up Kevin and packed up clothes and headed to a friend’s house to ride the storm out. We managed to weather the storm with no damage to our mobile home and only minor inconveniences of having to leave and go to a safer location and wait until it was over. Several of our neighbors were not so lucky. One double wide had a tree trunk lengthwise in the middle of their home, others had skirting or roof shingles missing. Most of the damage from the storm was minor in our area. I had lived in the Hampton Roads area of Virginia for about eleven and half years and the only time I ever evacuated for a hurricane. To live on the east coast where hurricane season goes from June 1st to November 30th requires a certain amount of patience. Patience to ride out hurricanes, deal with tornados that are a result of said hurricanes and dealing with all this as a single acting parent. My husband John is in the Navy and is away most of the time. At the time of Isabelle John was stationed in Great Lakes IL for a class that he needed before reporting to his next ship. Did I mention that patience is not one of the virtues I possess? I finished what I was doing, then drove myself to the hospital, and back home, packed what I could and left my home not knowing if it would be still standing after the storm passed. We survived and the only real reminder is a scar on my right hand and the memories of our last hurricane in Virginia.

*Note: This is a memory as I recall it from Fall 2004 and all of the weather info may not be exact. Hey it was a hurricane and very stressful, so deal with it. That's my story and I am sticking to it.

To the Right, WRITE!

*This was a writing exercise where each person wrote 4-5 lines and then folded the top of the paper down to cover all but the last line. Then each page was passed to the right and then next person would write something based on the last line from the person before. The papers would continue around til it reached the original writer and they had to write enough to finish the story however they wanted it to end. Then each person read the whole story with some very interesting and hilarious parts to it.
This is my version of the exercise.



The alligator glided through the water
Looking for his dinner
A large wolf ventured to the water’s edge
Dinner is served
No, not steak and potatoes,
Nor chowder or Brunswick stew
But some chianti and fava beans
And one last ingredient…..YOU!
I plan to devour you first with my tongue.
Your fragrance will seep down to the deepest
Crevice of my palatial pallet. I won’t let a
Single drop of your desire escape me.
I won’t stop until you and I are both satisfied.
“Satisfied with what” he said. Having a voracious
Appetite for all things edible. He cleaned out
The fridge in a minute.
“Garfield!” Jon screamed. There was merely a
resonating horrific silence. All had become hushed
The world itself was quiet as the bombs dropped.
After the blasts, no static, no screams or shouts.
Only smooth resonance of nothing. He laughed
And thought, “Nuclear winter never looked this good.”
The ground rumbled. The sky parted and golden
sunshine spilled onto a bloodied and broken earth.
The earth growled and lurched forward
dumping people onto the ground.
The wet ground soiled their freshly laundered
clothes. “I told you we should have rode,” the new
hand shouted, “wagons are for old men and
women.” He stood trying to find a dry clean
place to wipe the mud from his hands.
But his jeans were as dirty as his hands.
And his boots were muddy. He knew his wife
Would skin him alive if he tracked anything
into the house that she would have to clean up later.
Maybe he would just shift back into his wolf form and
Go down to the river to clean up before coming home.
He would bring back the gator for tonight’s dinner.

My Darling Daughter

As I sit by your graveside,
I think of the things you might have become;
You could have been anything you wanted to be.
An artist or a writer perhaps, maybe one day a mother,
Now you are an angel looking down on us each day.
Devoted.
Juanita D. Houston ©
January 10, 2010