Entries by Tanya Dawson

Cafeteria Halloween Food

Halloween plays a huge role in my upcoming novel, Andersen Light: A Mystic Creek Novel. There’s a big to-do at the lighthouse, at the high school (even the “teachers dressed to reflect their class subjects”), and many nighttime parties are in the works. Oh yeah, and something else happens Halloween night, but never mind about […]

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I Thank Winter and Welcome Spring

[I quite recently wrote this prose and read it for a Unity service. Spring ― I’m ready! Bring it!] The cold and bare limbs of the trees wave in the chill wind as if whispering goodbye to Winter. Stark fingers of branches jab at me, demanding, Look! Look inside! Take an honest view into the […]

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Comfort

Getting Personal on Changing Comfort(s) Stress and Familiar Comforts My year has been woven with grief and its associated emotions, debilitating flu, the annoying presence of shingles, and agent query rejections. When stress hovered like a Charles M. Schultz’s Pig Pen dust storm, I reached for favorite comforts in the name of self-care. I binged-watched […]

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Star Trek

I spent many days in my childhood with Star Trek. Like lots of us, I often came home from school to an empty house. I didn’t much notice the emptiness and like my fictional character, Georgie Jones, I wasn’t lonely because there were Star Trek reruns. It was fantastical and dramatic, yet there among the […]

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Close Connections

What close connections pull fictional characters Georgie Jones and Luther Andersen together, aside from the little matter of a prophecy? Grandma and Grandpa Jones Luther is a lighthouse keeper, professor, and Georgie’s eventual mentor. He’s also a long-time family friend. A man of indeterminate age, Luther knew Grandma Jones’s aunt Betty before Grandma was even […]

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Willing

Georgie Jones is not a balker by nature. She chooses instead to be willing—or at least willing to be willing. Willing to Act Early in the story and from the safety of a willow tree in her dad’s yard, primary character Georgie recalls intolerable behavior back at her old home in Starkton. She was held […]