Rainbow Snippets

I think I still owe some comments from last week. Sigh. It's the last month of the semester which always turns into insanity and Camp Nano starts today! I will be working on this story for it (in part, I have two projects).

I'm sticking with These Haunted Hills and Brendan has just asked Josh to tell him about Ash Cave. It's slightly over 6 sentences but they're short and I wanted it to make sense....


"The cave is about seven hundred feet long and about a hundred deep. The waterfall cascading around us is from the east fork of Queer Creek.”

Brendan arched one of his eyebrows. “Really?”

Joshua shrugged. “Didn’t name it and I’m sure it means the strange sort of queer, not the me kind.” His face flamed. “Did I say that out loud?”

“You did.”



And here you go, Queer Creek spilling over the rim of Ash Cave.




If you'd like to play along, Rainbow Snippets is a Facebook community where we post up 6 sentences of one of our LGBT stories every Saturday. It's been fun and you can find it here. Be sure to check out all the offers! It's been a great supportive group!

A is for Absence

A is for Absence. In this case, the absence of my Sunday Small Talks as I take part in the A to Z blogging challenge, where in you write for 26 days (taking Sundays off) and each post naturally reflects a letter of the alphabet. Oh I suppose I could go rogue and post on Sundays too, and just not make it part of the challenge but to be honest, about all I would have said in the Sunday posts were a) I’m still doing Camp Nano and b) I’m editing Conned. It wouldn’t be riveting blogging anyhow. I do plan on going a little rogue and keeping Rainbow Snippets as a separate posting thing not part of the challenge.

For the challenge I plan on talking about writing, things I’ve written, characters, places in the various stories and all that sort of thing. I hope it’ll be interesting. There might even be pictures. It might even be coherent (but some days I don’t promise even that).

A is also for Aaron, the main character in my first novel Kept Tears. Aaron is an upper arm amputee from the war in Afghanistan. He was using the Army to hopefully pay for medical school and got called up as a medic. He came home without his arm below the elbow and barely retained his leg. The story opens after he’s been home for a few years, been through tons of physical therapy and is at the University of Pittsburgh resuming his studies.

I’d wanted to do a character like Aaron for years. I did my medical residency at various VA hospitals and wanted to represent disabled veterans in at least one of my novels. Threaded through the novel are real projects to help veterans (if one was in the mood to support those charities, like Project Wolfhound and Wounded Warrior, though that one took a hit from some less than honest CEOs). I also gave Aaron something that didn’t yet exist when I was seeing patients in the VA, a functional prosthetic for the upper limb hooked into the nervous system (just like automail in one of my favorite anime/manga of all time, Fullmetal Alchemist). I had a lot of fun with Aaron and would love to revisit his world.

If you’d like to see Aaron’s world, you can check out the novel Kept Tears here.



And this is what I had in mind for his upper limb prosthesis though this video is from after I wrote Kept Tears and shows more information than was available to the public at the time. (Aaron wouldn’t have it all the way to the shoulder as he has that part of his arm)

This would be closer to Aaron’s prosthesis

As a doctor, I can’t tell you just how amazed and delighted I am in how fast this technology is growing. Until just a few years ago upper limb prostheses weren’t particularly functional.

Also on Saturdays expect a link to my other weekend challenge, Rainbow Snippets. You can see a snippet of my work every Saturday and this week’s can be found here. It’s set where I live this week, in SE Ohio.