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When The Lilacs Bloom
Way back when Kelly and I were planning our wedding, she said she wanted it to be when the lilacs were in bloom. Worked for me. Anytime is a great time to be married to Kelly…
🥰 Love Is The Honey 🍯
Life is the flower for which love is the honey. ~Victor Hugo
Almost three and a half decades later, love is definitely the honey that comes from a life blooming with Kelly.
I am so privileged to have her as a best friend, wife and the mother of my children.
We’re finding new ways to entertain ourselves since the kiddos stopped being kids and started having lives of their own.
But, thanks to 21st Century living, we’re in constant contact across the miles and it’s almost the same as having them here in the house.
And yet, it’s better because we can keep up with them and talk with them and love them to pieces, but we don’t have to feed or clean up after them! 🤣
It just doesn’t get better than that.
💜 Lilacs 🤍
Lilac – How to grow and care for it
When the lilacs are in bloom, she said.
Fortunately, our wedding fell on the most beautiful weekend of the month.
It was such a nice day and everyone had a fun time at the reception.
It’s fairly rare when Kelly is wrong about something, and this was not one of those times.
Our wedding was on the perfect Saturday. She called it exactly right.
🦇👨🏻 Holy Purple Cannibals! 💣💥
Robin in Peril 59
🌹 Flower for every time 💐
If I had a flower for every time I thought of you… I could walk through my garden forever. ~Alfred Lord Tennyson
How touching and so true. I smile when I think of Kelly, and I try to carry that through to my characters.
The standing rule for the Sentinelsverse is that people are presumed to be competent in their field (police, lawyer, housewife/mom, politician, superhero, gangster…) unless explicitly shown to be the exception to the rule.
This not only applies to professions but also to lifestyles.
Married couples are assumed to be happily married unless the prose shows one or both of the spouses scheming or stepping out.
Why?
Because I’d like to depict a world in which we can assume competence and deliberateness to be the baseline.
Even when everyone is trying to do the right thing, bad stuff can happen.
Good people try to mitigate the harm. Bad people try to profit or benefit from it.
There is plenty of drama available without making everybody in the whole world teetering on the brink of divorce or struggling with a drug problem.
Plenty of that exists in the world, to be sure. Just the same, I believe that to be less prevalent than popular fiction or mainstream TV shows would have us believe.
I think it’s okay to let most people be well-intentioned and sometimes have to face adversity rather than having everyone mired in some kind of swamp of thinly veiled depravity or existential misery.
Even with happiness as the baseline, 💩 still happens and we can see how happy, well-adjusted people cope with it in contrast to how the unfortunate few who don’t have that solid base wind up facing the same adversity.
I mean, my Doctor Doom sort of character is actually a very nice man. He is a 1% of the 1% of the 1% old money guy with a strong sense of noblesse oblige. He’s good with kids. His constellation of charter schools are funded by a network of wealthy and mega-wealthy donors who provide scholarships for kids to attend his schools. He’s a patron of the arts. He’s an all-around good guy.
Unfortunately, he’s in on a family secret that was recently disclosed to him. Being that he is the upstanding citizen that we’ve seen him to be, he’s having none of it. Even so, one cannot fight a dark undercurrent in society by playing nicely. The stakes are rather grim and the opposing force has a structure and ruthlessness that makes the Mafia look like unruly kindergarteners. He’s playing a long game with a dreadfully specific expiration date.
To me, antivillains are much more interesting territory than antiheroes. The latter are a bit overdone these days. It’s time to flip the script and see how that plays out.
Book 3, The Sentinels: Heartstrings, has Seventeen chapters completed and plenty to go before the dramatically climactic end to this installation of the Sentinels Chronicle.
That’s all for today. See you back on Saturday for sizzling 🥩 steaks…