"Da!" he cried. He ignored the twigs that tore at his bare feet. He forgot his shovel. There was Brett. There were the others coming in from the ocean. Rowan was swimming, Caitriona was wading, and Lukas had no choice. Tarin flew into his father's arms, nearly knocking Rowan off his feet and into the ocean.
"Faith, what happened?" Caitriona said. Mercy tried to wiggle out of her arms, but she held her firmly.
Tarin took a breath. "There's somethin' in the woods."
"It's a deer, Tarin," Brett scoffed.
"'Tis not a deer. It crawled like a spider, but it--it was a person it looked like--"
"A deformed deer," Brett said.
"It was the shadows playin' tricks on you, nothin' more," Rowan said.
"I wouldn't dismiss him so hastily," Lukas said. "Brett, go fer a walk. Tell us if ye see anything out of the ordinary, aye?"
"Besides the fact that you're wearing socks to the beach?"
"Lad--"
Brett left, and Mercy screeched, crying that she wanted to go with him. Caitriona told her to hush and drew Tarin close to her side. "What do you think it is, love?" she asked Rowan softly.
"Probably nothin'." Rowan's voice was gentle as he set an arm around his wife. "If anythin', it was the nokken who taught me to play the timpan. I missed our lesson last Tuesday."
Lukas muttered something under his breath--probably a prayer along the lines of "God, have mercy"--as he doffed his undershift and wrung the water from it. "I say we head home," he said. "There's a few wolves on the island. One this close to people might be mad." He put his undershift back on, but his knee-length braies were dripping and scattering dark orbs of wet sand around his feet.
"It wasn't a wolf," Tarin said. "It had hands."
"Lukas! Rowan!" Brett's voice came from around a bend. He was jogging. "We should leave."
"You saw it, too?" Tarin asked.
"No, but I know it's real, it's a human, and I know how it got here." He shoved his boots on, not bothering to brush the sand from his feet first. "There's a wrecked lifeboat not a dozen yards from here."

​"Steady, dear heart...there we go, look at you!"
Two-year-old Mercy McNeil grinned as she floated in the bay called Treacherous Landing, her mother Caitriona's hands nearby in case she should falter. A gentle wave came her way, and she laughed as she rose and fell with it. "Whee!" she squealed.
"Whee!" Caitriona smiled, scooping Mercy up and setting her on her hip. "Rowan, she's floating!"
"Good for her!"
Mercy's father, Rowan, was having his own problems. Something near him was floundering helplessly in the water, and Mercy looked on confused. "Wha's dat?" she asked.
"That's Da tryin' to teach Deydey how to swim."
"Deydey not swim?"
"Somehow, Mercy, Deydey never learned how to swim."
"Deydey old! Why not swim?"
Caitriona laughed. "I know. Let's go tell him you said that."
"Deydey!" Mercy shouted as Caitriona waded towards the fiasco in the middle of the bay. Rowan took hold of an arm, and the body it was attached to stopped floundering.
"It isn't difficult!" Rowan said.
"Aye, ye've said that!" said an elderly man with a Scottish brogue as he wiped seawater out of his eyes. "Memorizing the Greek alphabet isn't difficult either, but ye still can't get past theta!"
"You're a grown man, Lukas, how can you not know how to swim?"
"I'm sixty years auld. I shouldn't have to swim if I don't want to!"
Laughter erupted from the beach, where two boys were having a hole-digging competition. "Do you need help, Lukas?" called a thirteen-year-old twig of a boy. He was clad only in trousers, and his chest, where it was not sunburned or freckled, was as white as the sand he played in.
"He'll be fine." The second boy was legally an adult, but his actions had yet to catch up to his age. He had a beard and the broad frame of a bear, yet there was mischief in his eyes and a tone to his voice that suggested it would still get a bit deeper. "If anyone needs help, it's you, Tarin. You haven't even hit water yet."
"I have so," Tarin said.
The almost-adult stepped into the hole he'd made. "Come here. How's it feel being taller than me?"
Scowling, Tarin ran for the nearby woods. "I'm getting a shovel," he said.
There were plenty of twigs lying at the forest's edge, but Tarin wanted a broader one to dig with. So, spotting a fallen tree, he ran over to tear off a limb. "I'll beat you at somethin', Brett," he muttered as he pulled on a branch with all his might. "Someday, I'll win for once!"
Tarin  fell down as the limb broke off, twigs and dead grass scratching his sunburned back. A nearby scuttling noise caught his attention. Hoping to see a deer or a rabbit, he stood and looked around. He saw nothing.
"Hello?"
The noise stopped, and Tarin hopped onto the fallen tree to survey the forest. "No fair, Brett," he said. "You're twice my size. You don't need a shovel."
A twig snapped, and Tarin turned around to see a figure in the woods. He froze. Everything about it was wrong. It was too bony--its limbs too long, and bent at odd angles, as it crawled backwards into the underbrush. If it had a face, Tarin could not see it. There were only shadows.
Tarin ran.

Sorry for not posting on Monday. I attended my sister's basketball game. Anyway, I have an important news update for you: it's currently snowing in Texas.
Let me back up a bit. On Super Bowl Sunday, I was wearing short sleeves. My mother was wearing short sleeves. It was seventy-five degrees or thereabouts, and it was so pleasant that I took my crochet outside and let my dog bother me while I worked.
That was three days ago.
This morning, it was raining. I'd turned the heat off on Sunday and forgotten to turn it back on, so I woke up at 5:15 this morning, absolutely freezing. I fed the dog and put her out--she's an outside dog, but we spoil her, so she sleeps in the garage when it's cold or rainy. She didn't want to go outside. Once I finally got her outside, she wanted to come straight back inside. And when Mom told me to put her sweater on her, my dog was happy. (She looks very cute in her sweater. She got it for Christmas this year.)
Anyway, I did typical Cold Day things. Stay in bed and study. Procrastinate. Drink tea with breakfast and wear my fuzzy slipper socks. It was nice.
And then, just when Dad came home from work, it began to snow.
My sister begged me to come outside and have a snowball fight with her. At first, I objected. I'm an adult now, I told her. I have to clean up after dinner, I told her. But outside I went anyway, and I found that quite a bit of snow had been sticking to my and my mom's cars. I made a few dozen snowballs with my sister's help, and we had at it.
I stood on one side of the yard. My sister was on the other. The driveway between us was No Man's Land. And so began the war.
It was fun. I got hit in the head once. I got hit in the backside. My sister stepped in dog poop, but she didn't care because she was wearing my shoes. I lost the fight. To celebrate her victory, my sister rubbed a snowball in my face and just about shoved it in my mouth by accident. But still, somehow, I had fun.
When's the last time you played in the snow? Or, if you don't live in a region where it snows, when's the last time you thought you wouldn't enjoy something, but ended up enjoying it anyway? Let me know in the comments below! God bless you, dear readers, and don't forget to Like us on Facebook!

I started out my class with hope. Hope that the books we'd read in class would be interesting. And W. Somerset Maugham's The Painted Veil gave me that hope.
Apparently, Maugham--which is apparently pronounced "Mom"--is or was a pretty famous writer back in the 1920s. That was a hundred years ago. Dang. It feels like it should be closer to eighty. Anyway, this particular book is also set in the 1920s, but the issues it deals with are relevant today. Because romance and revenge are always relevant.
Right off the bat, we meet English socialite Kitty Fane and her lover, Charlie Townsend. And we realize that Kitty's husband, shy and boring but super-nice-guy Walter, knows what's going on.
Now as if that wasn't exciting enough, Walter gives Kitty an ultimatum: she can convince Charlie to divorce his own wife and marry her, or she can come with him to a cholera outbreak in the Chinese city of Mei-tan-fu. (Walter, unlike Kitty, has a decent reason to go to Mei-tan-fu. He's a bacteriologist. And I should specify that they're living in Hong Kong, which was under British control at that time.)
Since Charlie is too selfish to divorce his wife, Kitty goes with Walter. And there she learns that maybe, just maybe, life isn't all about her. 
I devoured this book. The characters were lively, the narrative was paced well, and there were some good themes explored. I especially like the way Maugham dealt with religion. After arriving in Mei-tan-fu, Kitty starts to volunteer at a convent that takes in orphans. The nuns inspire her, and their faith is portrayed in a positive light. That being said, while the nuns encourage Kitty to seek God, they don't force their religion on her. And this, I believe, is how all Christians should witness to other people.
The book isn't very funny. There's some romantic drama involved, but not much actual love. But somehow, it's still a good book that managed to capture my attention. I think I finished it in two or three days, which is more than I can say for the Hemmingway novel...
​What's your favorite classic novel? Let me know in the comments below! God bless you, dear readers, and don't forget to follow us on Twitter!

Wind, ethereal
rushing like the spirits of
happy kids at play.

Dandelions sprout
leaves are eaten and seeds blown
little parasails.

Flowers adorn the
prairie vast and beautiful
a princess's crown.

The sun is angry
it seeks to cook us alive
boy with ants and glass.

Timers dinging in
the distance; the race is now
sadly beginning.

I'm so sorry about forgetting to post on Monday. I hope I can offer an explanation.
I'm currently taking four college classes. One of them has a reasonable pace. Two of them, taught by the same professor, are super laid back. One of them, however, is indescribably awful.
It didn't start out too bad. "Read two short stories and make a comic strip," our teacher told us the first week of class. But then reality hit, and now I'm screwed.
See, we have to read a book a week for this class. Which, under normal circumstances, isn't too big of a deal. The first book we read was The Painted Veil by W. Somerset Maugham, and it was a decent book. Read it in two days. And then, since I want to get a head start on next week's work, I've started reading our next book.
Four
Hundred
And seventy
Pages.
And, of course, it's by Ernest Hemmingway. For Whom the Bell Tolls, to be exact.
On Monday, I don't know what happened. I got busy. I forgot to write my blog. No worries, I thought to myself. I'd write it Tuesday. But on Tuesday, my dad sent me on an errand to a distant town, and I was gone the entire afternoon. I made myself dinner and adulted until, at last, I collapsed exhausted on my beanbag chair and...I don't know. Probably watched YouTube.
Wednesday, I thought. Wednesday for sure.
But school comes before blog, and I started reading that blasted book by Ernest freaking Hemmingway. I got to page 120 and, after (among other things) seven pages of dialogue about a group of people hacking Fascists to death with farming equipment, I fell asleep for forty-five minutes and woke up wondering what dimension I was in.
And then I went to church.
And that brings us, dear readers, to today. Where I still don't know what the devil I'm doing. But oh well, I suppose. Does anyone ever know what they're doing?
I've decided that a person's main responsibility in life, besides loving God and His children, is to do your best and have fun. I'm a bit rusty on the "fun" aspect of that statement. But that's what I'm going to try doing.

Good morning, dear readers! Let me catch my breath--
Okay. I'm good. I think.
My laptop battery is dying. My internal battery is dying. See, my college classes started Monday, and on Tuesday, I drove 45 minutes to another state to attend classes at Southeastern Oklahoma State University.
Yes, I have some experience with college classes. I have my associate's degree, after all. But all but two of my classes have been online. This semester, I'm taking two online classes and two in-person classes. I still have no idea what I'm doing.
The Southeastern campus is a lot older than the community college I went to, but in all the right ways. It has a vast lawn full of beautiful mature trees, a towering library with columns and the names of great writers like Shakespeare and Dante carved into the wall near the roof. The stairwells--oh, the stairwells! You open a door into a little vertical hallway, hear your footsteps echo as you ascend the stairs, and reemerge in a completely different room.
The classes...those, though. I'm not sure what to make of those yet.
One of my professors is an older man with grey hair pulled back in a ponytail. He wore a plaid button-down over a Grateful Dead graphic T-shirt and spoke so softly during the lecture that no one else dared sneeze for fear of drowning him out. He swore more than any of the students did and showed us a VHS. But he seemed like a nice guy. "Just write five haikus by Sunday and submit them online. You're good," he said.
My other teacher, on the other hand, was a blonde lady. "We will be reading ten books and watching the movies made off them, in addition to writing three papers and a comic strip," she said. "You have three group presentations that will each be one hour long. Start working NOW."
My classmates, fortunately, didn't seem to be terribly awful. One of my classes has two other girls with my same name in it. Fortunately, one of them goes by her middle name. In my other class, there's a rodeo boy who waltzed in late wearing a cowboy hat with a feather stuck in a beaded band that ran around the crown. 
I have no idea what I'm doing. The 90-minute-round-trip drive certainly curtails my study time. On the bright side, I've already read some of the books we'll be studying--most importantly, The Scarlet Letter, which was written with rather complicated language. 
That being said, dear readers, if I post late once in a while--or even skip a post here or there--don't worry about it. It's just me being busy. I'm not dead (probably). And on Mondays, expect to see some of the poetry and short stories I'm writing for class. I'm glad I'm taking mostly English classes this semester. 
Do you have any advice for a panicking college student? What was your most memorable class to be in? Let me know in the comments below! God bless you, dear readers, and don't forget to check us out on Twitter!

My college classes started today. Unbeknownst to me, I had to complete a five-hour-long orientation that included a mandatory hour-long video about sexual assault. So, needless to say, I don't have it in me to write a coherent short story.
However, I was cleaning my room yesterday and found a folder containing the rough draft of Where the Clouds Catch Fire. I'm making the decision--a horrible decision, probably--to share with you how Where the Clouds Catch Fire almost started.
Please, for the love of God, remember that I was thirteen when I wrote this. So don't judge. For my reputation's sake, I'm changing some names and spellings, and also the dialect. (My thirteen-year-old self had never heard an actual Irish person talk and just winged it.)
​So, without further ado...

"Lynder! Lynder, wake up! Come play with me!"
The thirteen-year-old girl opened her eyes, brushing her red-blonde hair out of her face, and looked at her brother. "Tarin, please don't call me Lynder," she sighed.
"Fine then, Alynn. Will you play with me?" the boy asked.
"No. I'm tired."
"You wouldn't be tired if you had slept last night," the boy countered.
"And I would have slept fine last night if a certain seven-year-old hadn't been flopping like a dead fish next to me!" the girl snapped. "I can't wait to get to Scotland and off this silly ship. Now please, leave me alone."
"Aw, fine," Tarin sighed. Alynn rolled over in the tiny  bed she had made out of furs and blankets, with sailcloth being used as a tent. Alynn fell half asleep. Five minutes later, the tent's door was thrown wide open.
"Lynder?"
Alynn sleepily rolled over. She didn't need to look to know who was speaking to her. "Father, my name is Alynn."
"You're being lazy, girl! Get out there while there's light to see by!"
Alynn looked up at her father, Rowan McNeil by name, and his broad-shouldered silhouette. As her eyes adjusted to the bright light, his features filled themselves in: sharp blue eyes, red hair, large mustache. She dared not disobey him. "Yes, Father."
Alynn crawled out of the tent and was quickly greeted by Tarin. "Alynn! Will you play with me?"
"Sure," Alynn yawned. She walked over to where Tarin had built a fort by leaning shields and oars against a rowing bench. The crew paid no attention to them as they sat rowing, or talking direction on the high deck.
The Darting Swallow was a Viking's cargo ship, also called a Knarr. It had two covered areas, one on each end, that were stocked with provisions for the journey. The ship rode high in the water, and the sides were just high enough to keep the waves out.
"Look, Lynder!" Tarin cried, waving a sword in the air. "I'm a pirate!"
"Put that down before you kill someone," Alynn hissed. "Namely yerself. And my name's Alynn, not Lynder."
"Aw, Lynder. The sword's got a cover on it," Tarin sighed. "I have an idea! You can be in the fort, and I can protect you from Vikings!"
"That is the best idea you've ever had," Alynn smiled. She curled up in the fort and promptly fell asleep.

Hello, dear readers! Today I decided to do something a bit different than usual...IF I can get the stupid video to load...

The books mentioned are:

• Laura Ingalls Wilder's Little House series
  
• Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice (because Macbeth was sad and a little weird)
  
• C.S. Lewis's Narnia series, along with The Four Loves, Mere Christianity, and The Screwtape Letters
  
• Frank McCourt's Angela's Ashes
  
• Amanda G. Stevens's No Less Days
  
• Ransom Riggs's Tales of the Peculiar
  
• My very own Where the Clouds Catch Fire and Where I Stand, available on Amazon, Kindle, and for free on Kindle Unlimited--as well as by clicking the "purchase" tab above.
  

We take a break from our regularly scheduled programming to tell you that today, January 6, is Alynn's birthday. Since she was born in 950, she'd be 1,070 years old today. If we say she was born the year I created her, which was 2014, she would be six. But since good books are immortal, along with the characters that make them, we'll just imagine her at whatever age strikes our fancy. And I, of course, will be telling the story that Rowan told her every year--the story of the day she was born.

Alynn was born in Limerick, Ireland. Her father Rowan, at that point, was a fisherman, and so they lived in a small house near the River Shannon, where Rowan set out six days a week to ply his nets. But on the first Saturday after New Year--Epiphany Eve--a frightful snowstorm set in. Rowan put up no argument when his fishing partner and next door neighbor, a cantankerous older man by the name of Seamus, decided to head home. 
And it was a good thing Rowan did head home. The storm got worse and worse, and by the time he was safely inside his own four walls, the wind was screaming like a banshee and the snowflakes were so thick that he couldn't see more than three feet in front of him.
Rowan noticed two things right away. The first was that everything in the house was spotlessly clean. The second was that his wife, Caitriona, was still cleaning.
"Caitriona, for God's sake, will you sit down and rest a bit?" he said, shivering as he took off his boots. His feet would be cold, he knew, but he'd rather be cold than see Caitriona dry away every footprint he left on the dirt floor. She seemed unwilling to welcome her first child into a home that had a single speck of dust in it.
The moment he'd finished doffing his boots, Caitriona was in his arms. "How long do you think the storm will last?" she asked.
"Can't say, as of yet. Why? What's wrong?" Rowan, like any decent father-to-be, had a healthy sense of panic.
"Nothing--we've hours yet until anything happens, but I'm just frightened--I hoped my mum could be here--Rowan, don't you dare--"
Rowan opened the door, but Caitriona grabbed his arm and pulled him back inside. "If you're going to fetch the midwife in this weather, Rowan, you'd best put your boots back on first. And make some sort of mess for me to clean up. I need to keep my mind off things."
"Shouldn't you be resting?"
"Rowan."
And with that, Rowan put some wood on the fire, making sure to toss soot and sawdust everywhere, and left to fetch help.
The storm, somehow, had gotten even worse. Rowan ran face-first into Seamus's hut before he saw it, and he realized what he was doing. In this weather, it would take him forever to find help, and forever to get home--if he got home at all! So, against what he would have normally called his Better Judgement, he went into Seamus's house and stood shivering for a moment, too cold to speak.
Seamus must have recognized the look on Rowan's face, because his usually stony face softened a bit. "Bad weather for the stork to fly in," he said. "Go back home. I'll fetch help for you."
"You're certain?" Rowan asked, shivering.
"I was in yer boots once, laddie. Go on."
And so Rowan went home, where the soot and sawdust was already cleaned up. He finally got Caitriona to sit down, and together, they waited.
The storm kept raging. Caitriona squeezed his hand until his fingers curled inward from lack of blood, and still, no Seamus. Her water broke, and still, no Seamus. Time ticked on until Rowan was sure it was midnight, and still, no Seamus.
Finally, heart hammering and mouth as dry as an overcooked chicken, Rowan caught the baby. He had just enough time to announce "Cait, it's hideous" and hand the thing to its mother before passing out cold on the floor.
It was half an hour before Caitriona noticed. As far as she was concerned, her new baby girl was the most beautiful thing in the world.
By the time Rowan woke up, it was seven o'clock on Epiphany morning. The storm had stopped, Seamus was there, the midwife was there, and Caitriona was half-asleep. The baby was wrapped in blankets and pillowcases and held tight against her mother's chest to keep her warm.
Of course, when Rowan told the story to Alynn and all the siblings that followed her, he claimed the first words he'd said upon seeing his daughter were, "Cait, she's beautiful." Caitriona would smile and shake her head every time she heard the story, but she'd never correct it. Rowan's version suited her well enough.