Bryant A. Loney

You do not need to be temperamental or upset to be a novelist. Don__ embrace the tortured artist rhetoric that any life difficulties might serve to benefit and enhance your writing. That__ damaging. Counterintuitive. Writing can be so incredibly lonely, and when you__e alone with your thoughts for long enough to produce a hundred thousand words of your own headspace, it can be scary. Suffering is not good for your art. Mental health care is. So talk to someone other than your future readers about the problems you are facing. Someone you know and trust. There is no shame in asking for help.

Are you afraid of the dark?_ I asked.__o. Monsters aren't real. This is real. I'm scared of what could happen when the lights go out.

Some people were simply created with the right genes and the proper social skills, I figured. They ended up at a lunch table with a group of good-looking individuals, like them, who did what all good-looking individuals managed: making the rest of us feel both envious of them and sad for ourselves, intentional or not. They had activities outside of school and followers online__eople of social necessity who sat at home on Friday nights and 'liked' popular posts in hopes that they, too, might one day be as attractive and personable.

The weekends are too short for sleep!

Sleep is the only thing I stay awake for.

There is no afterlife for wilted flowers like me.

Strict parents create sneaky kids.

You miss a lot of a person__ life when you don__ keep in touch. Maybe that__ the point.

I wasn't the only one hungry on the road, it seemed; a single bite__ven a minor scratch__rom one of the infected, and we were as good as dead. (And so the cycle repeats.)

There aren't nearly enough worldly mansions for the kind folks who deserve them.

How many of you were born in Oklahoma? Yeah, never raise your hand to a question like that again. We__e the mecca of beer-drinkin_ rednecks.

This jeweled coast does not shine for its gems are coated with grit.

Not all beaches are fun and sunscreen.

There's always hope. And oceans. Hope and oceans.

Nostalgia. It haunts us, it destroys us, and sometimes, its sentimentality consumes us piece by piece so that we may realize our once-familiar circumstance may never again return. It is a state of mind best indulged infrequently.

Pretty average headlines for a worldwide catastrophe,_ Jane remarked as she read from Hollywood's Highest. __ome man in Africa claimed to have found the cure for AIDS, yet another politician said something about the president and now formally regrets it, and a pop star OD'd while an actress lost fifteen pounds overnight, and here's how you can, too!_ She continued reading. __h, wow. The 'Celebrititties' section says she was in a car accident and her arms had to be amputated. Damn.

Pretty average headlines for a worldwide catastrophe," Jane remarked as she read from Hollywood's Highest. "Some man in Africa claimed to have found the cure for AIDS, yet another politician said something about the president and now formally regrets it, and a pop star OD'd while an actress lost fifteen pounds overnight, and here's how you can, too!" She continued reading. "Oh, wow. The 'Celebrititties' section says she was in a car accident and her arms had to be amputated. Damn.

We__e not a people worth saving, plain and simple. We__e completely beyond that__oth the undead and the few still living. Yeah, 'living.' Some life, huh? But it__ the only life we could ever possibly live if we want to stay alive another day. It__ our life that terrifies me.