For me, life has always been good. My wife and kids are the center of a great world. I have a job that pays well and I enjoy going to work. Living in the Pacific North West is easy. West of the Cascades we seldom get heavy snow, wild wind storms or giant earthquakes. Although we do get all of those features, we also get Tsunamis, volcanic eruptions and fore...
Night falls quickly on the plains of the Serengeti. Once the sun goes down, the clear, dry air barely scatters the waning daylight, and the day shifts into night with alarming rapidity. The nocturnal animals of the African plains come out to feed, and any sensible human being retreats to the safe light of the fires. It's debatable whether you could call the...
My duties as an anthropologist had been kept to the classroom for the past year, ever since I lost two of my closest colleagues in the jungles of the Yucatan to what everyone had insisted was nothing but folklore. A slug-like creature had literally consumed them. The reports from some of the local guides were that one of my friends even went in search of the...
Please vote. Please give me the support of your votes. I met Daniel at a Billy Joel Concert in Central Park two years ago. We were both alone and wandering through the crowd listening to the music. I remember it being so crowded but there were pathways cutout through the crowd to walk and, as if flowing water down a meandering stream, long lines of peopl...
It was just another day at the Jeffersonian Institute where Dr. Temperance 'Bones' Brennan and her team worked together with the FBI on solving particularly tough cases using modern forensic techniques. Dr Brennan and her colleague Dr Zack Addy were currently in the middle of the autopsy on another poor victim of a vicious crime and attempted to reconstruct...
Tori Lovelace was the kind of person who didn't react to her problems in public. She got upset on her own time, away from anyone who could worry about her. Tori panicked silently. Her silent anxiety was her superpower. There were very few people who knew about her nerves, and even fewer who'd actually seen her have a panic attack. She never felt comfortable...
How to start writing: Unless you are very experienced, just sitting and banging away at your computer is like jumping into your car and simply driving without a destination and a map. I know of several experienced, successful Authors that make notes and build the skeleton of their story before they finally sit down and write. When I write professionally (...
Annie pretended that she didn't know what she was doing. But she did. She knew exactly what she was doing. She pretended that she was just sitting there, in the little raised courtyard in her cousin's secluded North London back garden, with her skirt hitched up, getting some late-summer sun on her still-shapely legs. But she had placed her chair with great...
It was a dry heat, they always said. Amaya brushed back a few strands of black hair and paused for water. In the shade, even the whisper of a breeze cooled her. This didn't really qualify as hot, not yet anyway. Maybe it'd get there this afternoon. The kind of heat that soaked into your skin and your muscles and opened you up like a lover. Amaya sighed a...
You came into my dreams again this afternoon. I was hoping you would. Your hair was much longer than when I saw you last, falling between your shoulders and cut in a fringe in the front. I thought it was quite lovely. You were dressed in soft pink, in a dress whose straps fell around your shoulders. We walked down the streets as we always did a long time...