She was a ray of sunshine, a warm summer rain, a bright fire on a cold winter’s day, and now she could be dead because she had tried to save the man she loved.
Oh honey, someday a real man is going to make you see stars and you won't even be looking at the sky." Excerpt from Grace Willow's Last Minute Bride
You are enough to drive a saint to madness or a king to his knees.
You are enough to drive a saint to madness or a king to his kneesExcerpt from To Kiss a King by Grace WillowsComing this summer to Amazon Kindle and paperback.
Every single person is a fool, insane, a failure, or a bad person to at least ten people.
To evade insanity and depression, we unconsciously limit the number of people toward whom we are sincerely sympathetic.
His room was a sickly dual-tone of crimson and charcoal, like an Untitled Rothko, the colours bleeding into each other horribly and then rather serenely. The overall effect was overwhelmingly unapologetic but it grew on you like a wart on your nose you didn't realise it was a part of your identity until one day it simply was. His room was his identity. Fiercely bold, avant-garde but never monotonous. He was red, he was black, he was bored, and he was fire. At least to me he seemed like fire. A tornado of fire that burned all in its wake leaving only the wretched brightness of annihilation. His room was where he charmed and disarmed us. We were his playthings. Nobody plays with fire and leaves unscarred. The fire soon seeps into chard and soot. The colours of his soul, his aura, and probably his heart if he didn't stop smoking.
Fantasy, an unflagging optimism is necessary for a writer at all stages of this rough game. A kind of madness is therefore necessary, when there is every logical reason for a state of depression and discouragement. Perhaps the fact that I can react with utter gloom to this is what keeps me from being psychotic and keeps me merely neurotic. I am doing quite a good day's work today. But I am also aware of the madness that actually sustains me, and I am not made more comfortable or happy by it.
Believe in YourselfWhy must we see something to believe in its existence?The wind itself cannot be seen by man, but all have felt it's gentle touch and watched the mighty trees bow as it swept past.We cannot see love yet its nurturing warmth is the essence of our being and sorrow can touch our very soul. For remorse is like a ripple on the ocean, once given it remains only in the heart of the receiver.Yet all of these cannot be seen only felt. Why then do you doubt your self-worth? For though it cannot cast a reflection in the mirror you have only to look in the eyes of those you love toSee it clearly.Prologue To Kiss a KingTo Kiss a King Copyright © 2017 by Julie Brookshier and Robin WoodsAll rights reserved. Except for use in a review, the reproduction or use of this work in whole or in part in any form is forbidden without written permission of one or more of the authors.This is a fictional work. Names, characters, places, and events are merely the product of the authors' imaginations or used fictitiously, purely for entertainment purposes. Any resemblance to actual persons, living, dead, or undead or any business establishments, events or places past, present, or future, is entirely coincidental.
Here, by the grace of God and an inside straight, we have a personality untouched by the psychotic taboos of our tribe - and you want to turn him into a carbon copy of every fourth-rate conformist in this frightened land! Why don't you go whole hog? Get him a brief case and make him carry it wherever he goes - make him feel shame if he doesn't have it.
Imagine a young Isaac Newton time-travelling from 1670s England to teach Harvard undergrads in 2017. After the time-jump, Newton still has an obsessive, paranoid personality, with Asperger’s syndrome, a bad stutter, unstable moods, and episodes of psychotic mania and depression. But now he’s subject to Harvard’s speech codes that prohibit any “disrespect for the dignity of others”; any violations will get him in trouble with Harvard’s Inquisition (the ‘Office for Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion’). Newton also wants to publish Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica, to explain the laws of motion governing the universe. But his literary agent explains that he can’t get a decent book deal until Newton builds his ‘author platform’ to include at least 20k Twitter followers – without provoking any backlash for airing his eccentric views on ancient Greek alchemy, Biblical cryptography, fiat currency, Jewish mysticism, or how to predict the exact date of the Apocalypse.Newton wouldn’t last long as a ‘public intellectual’ in modern American culture. Sooner or later, he would say ‘offensive’ things that get reported to Harvard and that get picked up by mainstream media as moral-outrage clickbait. His eccentric, ornery awkwardness would lead to swift expulsion from academia, social media, and publishing. Result? On the upside, he’d drive some traffic through Huffpost, Buzzfeed, and Jezebel, and people would have a fresh controversy to virtue-signal about on Facebook. On the downside, we wouldn’t have Newton’s Laws of Motion.