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The Things That Follow You - Installment Three: The Incident

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  THE THINGS THAT FOLLOW YOU A Penny Dreadful · Installment Three There is a particular kind of trouble that begins with a perfectly ordinary morning. The coffee is hot, the emails are waiting, and someone in the office is asking whether you have a minute. You have no reason to suspect that by lunchtime, your reputation may be in question, your job may be in jeopardy, and the people who are supposed to help you may be looking at you as though you are the problem. Melody Hart arrived at Whitmore, Hale & Pierce that morning expecting another day of learning the ropes. She had no idea she was about to become the subject of an investigation. Chapter Three: The Incident By the following Monday, Melody had convinced herself that the photograph was probably a misunderstanding. This was not because she believed it. It was because believing it was something else entirely. A photograph of her apartment building could have been taken by anyone. Nashville was full of photographers, real es...
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The Things That Follow You: Installment Two - The Art of Being Helpful

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  THE THINGS THAT FOLLOW YOU A Penny Dreadful · Installment Two By the end of Melody Hart’s first week at Whitmore, Hale & Pierce, she had learned that there were several kinds of help in the workplace. There was the useful kind, which involved answering questions, explaining procedures, and occasionally pointing out that the printer everyone had been cursing for twenty minutes was unplugged. Then there was the other kind. The kind that arrived uninvited, rearranged your calendar, corrected you in front of your colleagues, and somehow left you feeling indebted to the person who had made your day considerably worse. Caroline Voss, Melody was beginning to suspect, had perfected the second kind. Of course, Caroline was always smiling. And that, Melody thought, was probably the most unsettling part. Chapter Two: The Art of Being Helpful By Friday, Melody Hart had learned three things about Whitmore, Hale & Pierce. First, the coffee machine on the eleventh floor was temperamenta...
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The Things That Follow You - Installment One: A Very Promising Opportunity

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  THE THINGS THAT FOLLOW YOU A Penny Dreadful · Installment One Some women move to Nashville for the music. Others come for the promise of a better life. Melody Hart came for a job, a fresh start, and the rather quaint belief that being good at your work might actually count for something. Chapter One A Very Promising Opportunity Melody Hart had not moved to Nashville to reinvent herself. Reinvention sounded exhausting, and at forty-something, she had already spent enough time trying to become the person other people seemed to expect. She was perfectly happy to remain herself, thank you very much, provided she could find a job she enjoyed, pay her bills without developing a nervous twitch, and go an entire week without discovering some new professional catastrophe. The position at Whitmore, Hale & Pierce seemed promising. It was a global law firm with an impressive reputation, elegant offices, and a salary that made the cost of moving to Nashville seem almost reasonable. Her ne...
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Are We Overmedicated? When Did We Stop Teaching People How to Function?

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  FACT: Western medicine has become very good at diagnosing problems and prescribing solutions.  QUESTION: But are we, as a society, spending enough time asking why so many people are struggling in the first place? We live in a society that wants everything now. Instant gratification.  We want faster food, faster internet, instant answers, overnight delivery, and immediate relief from anything that makes us uncomfortable. Apparently, we want our brains to work in the same manner. Can't concentrate? There might be a pill for that. Feeling overwhelmed? There's a medication that might help. Trouble sleeping?  Here, take two.   Struggling to get organized, manage your time, or finish what you started? Perhaps it's time for an evaluation.  I'm talking about considering what's wrong or missing from your environment , as opposed to what's wrong with you. Now, before anyone reading this accuses me of suggesting that ADHD isn't real (does anyone still read this...
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Echoes From A Psych Ward

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My neighbor is the last person you'd expect to have stories that keep you awake at night… She's kind, funny, always has a cup of tea ready, and never seems in a hurry. But one afternoon she casually mentioned that, as a young nurse in the 1970s, she worked in a psychiatric hospital in northern Scotland. I asked her what it was like. She smiled and said, "Well... you had to be good at running." I laughed. "Running from the patients," she said without missing a beat. I wasn't sure if she was joking. Then the stories started. She described long stone buildings perched on a lonely hillside, where the wind seemed to whistle through every corridor. The wards were filled with people who had been there for years—some with nowhere else to go, others so ill they rarely spoke. Some wandered the grounds quietly. Others could become unpredictable in an instant. The nurses learned to read the room. They knew who needed a kind word, who wanted to be left alone,...
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Break a Leg!

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 Hello and Happy Summer!  I've always been one of those people who tells friends to "break a leg" before a big performance, presentation, or event. To me, it was simply a fun way of wishing someone good luck. Recently, though, someone called me out on it. "Why would you tell someone to break a leg?" they asked. It was a fair question, and it sent me down a rabbit hole to find out where the phrase actually came from. The explanation I'd always heard was rooted in theater superstition. Actors and actresses were believed to be wary of wishing each other "good luck." The thinking was that openly hoping for success might somehow tempt fate and cause the performance to go badly. So instead, performers would say the opposite: "break a leg." By wishing something seemingly unfortunate, they hoped the reverse would happen and the show would be a success. It's a charming story, and one that has been repeated for years. But as I dug a little deep...
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"In Thin Air" - Installment Eight - The Edge

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  PREFACE During the Victorian era, “penny magazines”—often called penny dreadfuls—revolutionized storytelling. These serialized thrillers were sold in weekly installments for just a penny, bringing suspenseful tales to the working class and transforming fiction from an elite luxury into an affordable pastime for the masses. Today, in the Information Age—somewhere between TikTok scrolls and rapidly shrinking attention spans—I’m resurrecting the spirit of the penny dreadful. But this time, it’s completely free , delivered right here on my blog. So without further ado… (drumroll please) Welcome to my first serialized short story of "In Thin Air":  Installment Eight The Edge The drive to the trailhead took almost an hour. Snow still clung to the higher elevations, lingering in patches beneath the pine trees. Daniel drove with one hand on the wheel and the other resting casually on the center console. For a while they talked about ordinary things. Work. Travel. The absurd price o...
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