Category Archives: Fiction

Got to have faith

As I sit here smoking a skinny joint from the balcony of my posh Hollywood Hills mansion, I cannot help but remember the days when I slaved away in a dilapidated nursing home for $9 an hour.  The management were such scumbags to me there that they fought over giving me my yearly $0.30 raise and settled on a $0.15 raise for one year and a whopping $0.10 for the following. Thank-you sir may I have another!?
During those days when my boss would leave for the afternoon, I’d stare out the window and wonder how the hell I ended up in this mess. I would watch the sun go down slowly from my office window and know it was only temporary and that one day I would transcend this position by a million percent. I hated it there.
I don’t really care about mansions. I don’t really care about marijuana. I do care about options and possibilities. I don’t live in a mansion and I don’t smoke pot, but I would like the flexibility to do so if I wanted to. I have always had an interest in film. When I write my books, I envision them in three dimensions. I see them playing out in my head like the movie and that is how I often create realistic dialogue and dramatic tension. Some of the people I admire most are Quentin Tarantino and Kevin Smith, both writers and famous filmmakers. Both are also individuals who would be considered late bloomers by society’s standards.
Tarantino worked at a Manhattan Beach video rental store until he was thirty. It was around this time a friend with connections encouraged him to write Reservoir Dogs. It took him three weeks to write the screen play and once made into a film it received high acclaim at the Sundance Film Festival. The rest is history….
Kevin Smith has a similar story. Smith worked as a clerk at a convenience store. Around age 30, Smith maxed out his credit cards and borrowed money from family to create the epic film Clerks. The production of Clerks cost $30,000. It was filmed with a regular video camera in black and white. Smith used the convenience store where he worked as the movie set. Filming in black and white allowed him to conceal the fact that they were always filming at night (because the store was open during the day) thus giving them more flexibility for the chronological details of his script. After the completion of the film, he entered it into The Sundance Film Festival where it was picked up by Miamax almost instantly.

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Filed under Dreams, Fiction, Film, Inspirational, Life Lessons, Motivation

Literature From Hell Part Deux: Ethan Frome Edition

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If you’ve been following my blog, you must know about my longstanding aversion to Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. The fact that I was forced to read Heart of Darkness over ten times and write even more papers about it— gives the book’s title more meaning and as the author, make’s Conrad’s inspiration for the title pretty obvious to me. If I made a list entitled “Hayley Rose’s Least-Favorite-Most-Hated Literature of All Time,” though Heart of Darkness would surely dominate it, I can say with assurance that it would have company, ahem, Ethan Frome.

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Filed under Fiction, Journal

No Such Thing as Love Like in the Movies?

I have been told there is no love like in the movies. I disagree. For example, this weekend I went with my boyfriend to his family’s cabin in Vermont just over the border of Western Mass. It was a beautiful weekend, the fall leaves cascaded from the oaks and maples like delicate Chantilly drapery. Saturday afternoon, we road our mountain bikes to a summit where we had a picnic. It was perfect, he’s so sweet, he even brought my favorite, lavender champagne! To be honest, most of the weekend, we were cut off from the rest of the world holed up in the cabin’s foyer under its vaulted ceilings. It was so cozy by the roaring fireplace. The heat lit the room like a grenade in a fox hole.

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Filed under Art, Dreams, Fairy Tales, Fiction, Heart, Love

Lunch with Hansel and Gretel

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It took some intense psychoanalyzing and a ton of candy to keep me buzzing, but I think I finally figured out why I love Thomas Kinkade so much: because his cottages remind me of one of my favorite fairy tales, “Hansel and Gretel.”

Who could forget these two innocent German children who wander into the woods after their parents abandon them? The story intensifies as they soon happen upon a house made of chocolates, gingerbread cakes, and candies; a life size gingerbread house, every child’s dream! I remember the first time my grandmother told me this story. A real house made of dessert? I had to see it for myself. My eyes widened in anticipation.

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Filed under Fairy Tales, Fiction, Life Lessons, Writing

Fiction Friday IX- Open Call

This Friday, I participated in Rita’s Fiction Friday IX- Open Call

Rita’s Guidelines Were:

  “Write a story using all the weapons in the original Clue game:  a knife, a wrench, a lead pipe, a candlestick, a revolver and a rope.  The fun part of this is that these items do not have to be used in a murder scenario, but can be worked into any kind of story in any manner you wish.”

Here’s what I came up with:

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Filed under Fiction, Fun, Writing