All posts by Teri

My Stolen Diaries Disclaimer

Teri's Novelog — My Stolen Diaries, , , , , , , , ,

DISCLAIMER

I have decided to go for it and start blogging my novel titled My Stolen Diaries.

In doing so, I first needed to create a blog category, so after much thought, I finally settled on: Teri’s Novelog — i.e. novel on a blog.

One day I’ll turn it into an actual book, but I’ve been saying that for the past thirty years, so in the meantime, here it is.

First things first.

My disclaimer:

My Stolen Dairies is a work of fiction. F-I-C-T-I-O-N.

Although its format is based on a personal diary, it’s not real.

It’s made up.

Places and time have been moved around to accommodate the book, and except the mentioning of some public figures, any resemblance to persons living or dead is purely coincidental.

The events expressed in My Stolen Diaries are those of the characters and should not be confused with the views and opinions of the author (me).

The author will not be held responsible or liable for any perceived or actual loss or damage to any person or entity, directly or indirectly caused by or alleged to have been caused by anything in My Stolen Diaries.

If anyone happens to see themselves in any of the characters, that’s on them and a figment of their overly imaginative imagination.

Click here for Chapter 1: In The Beginning

Chiaroscuro

Observe & Ponder, ,

I was cleaning out some old files today and found Chiaroscuro, my Brevard College literary magazine from 1972-1973.

I barely remembered the magazine, so imagine my shock when I opened it up and discovered that I was the Editor-in-Chief!

I also forgot about the stuff I wrote in it.

Yikes, it felt surreal reading through my 1972-1973 self.

Of the five things I wrote in Chiaroscuro, one screamed out from the rest:

Joanne

Individuals are peculiar. They say and do things that they don’t mean and regret later. We are all like that some time or another.

This is how I remember her. Twelve-year-old Joanne was about four feet eight inches, forty-five pounds, with hollow, pitiful blue eyes. Due to her unnatural thinness, her face was sunken and homely. She was one of a family of twelve, her father deceased. Her clothes were tattered and worn and extremely old-fashioned. You’d think this tiny forlorn youth would be understood by her classmates. Instead, she was our victim, marked for ridicule and laughter. I recall that she always appeared to be carrying the world’s grief upon her shoulders.

I never saw her smile.   Not once.    Not ever.

My classmates and I would swarm around her during recess, like bees after honey, and make her cry. One dreary afternoon she shyly approached me and asked if I’d hopscotch with her. I indignantly pushed her down on the playground cement and stalked away, feeling somehow insulted. She didn’t cry, though, for I suppose she was used to it. For the remainder of the school year, we constantly annoyed, ridiculed, and hurt her. And she would attempt nothing, but frown at us and walk with her head down to a secluded corner of the playground where alone, she would sit and stare into some unknown space, and cry sometimes.

Then summer came, and the homely little girl was pushed out of my mind until opening a local newspaper I fell upon her picture. She had died of leukemia, a disease she had known she had for years.

And as I stared at the photograph of the homely little girl with her large hollow eyes and her sunken face, I cried…

                                                for she was smiling…

Jesus. Was I a bully? I don’t even remember Joanne.

Did she even exist?

What was twelve-year-old Theresa trying to say?

Or maybe it was 1972-1973 Teri speaking.

I can’t imagine that I would bully, but then, if Joanne wasn’t real, who was I writing about?

And her clothes couldn’t have been tattered, worn and old-fashioned because we all wore uniforms.

Or maybe I saw Joanne outside of school in crummy old clothing.

But back in the day, I wore used clothes and shoes from Goodwill, so who was I to judge?

And why would I make fun of a homely scrawny kid who appeared to be carrying the world’s grief, when I was similar to Joanne in so many ways.

This also got me thinking about all kinds of places and times and events — triggers be damned.

I shoved Chiaroscuro back into my filing cabinet, depressed, not only by the thought that I might have been a bully but at the possibility that in some twisted way, I was Joanne.

Describing Thanksgiving

Holidays, ,

When I was in London last November, everyone kept asking me the same question:

Why are Americans so obsessed with Thanksgiving?

I didn’t want to insult anyone, so I left out some of the Pilgrim stuff.

How would they have felt if I told them that the Pilgrims were refugees fleeing persecution due to the brutality of the English monarchy?

They would surely have been insulted if I said to them that the Pilgrims fled England because of the despicable treatment by their government due to religious, cultural, and societal intolerance.

So, I told them the bare bones of Thanksgiving:

In 1620 the Pilgrims sailed from England on the Mayflower and landed near Plymouth Rock in what would later become Plymouth, Massachusetts. The Pilgrims had a good harvest that year, so they wanted to celebrate.

During that “First Thanksgiving,” European Immigrants broke bread with their friendly Native American neighbors in harmony and peace.

I didn’t tell them that the friendship between the immigrants and the Native Americans didn’t pan out and that most of New England’s native population was wiped out over the next few decades.

But what I did tell them was that every year we continue to celebrate the first time that races and cultures came together and left out the ugly stuff that happened after that initial Thanksgiving.

I also told them that in 1863 Abraham Lincoln made it an official national holiday. And that Lincoln proclaimed Thanksgiving as a holiday just a few months before he delivered the Gettysburg Address, declaring that in America, all men were created equal.

Several Londoners asked me if that meant that Thanksgiving is a celebration of American equality.

My answer was that Thanksgiving celebrates what makes America so great: Religious and personal tolerance, the belief that we are all equal, and the inclusiveness of every culture.

As I explained Thanksgiving, I said the words, but they felt empty to me. I wasn’t buying my explanation.

If I wasn’t buying it, why should they?

Here I was tying Thanksgiving together with America’s core values, but instead of feeling pride, I felt embarrassed, like I was an imposter.

And as I explained that Thanksgiving was a celebration of American values, not only could I see their pessimism, but sadly, inside, I felt it as well.

As I spoke out loud about American racial and religious tolerance, combined with the acceptance of multiculturalism, I was asking myself:

Am I talking American bullshit? Is Thanksgiving a sham? Is it merely an outdated holiday with no actual meaning?

God help us if it is.

The Teri Tome – My 2019 Hits and Misses

The Teri Tome - Top Hits and Duds,

I launched my blog The Teri Tome on March 18, 2015, and for those of you who are regular readers, you know that the things I write about run the gamut from personal to political to fiction and anything in between.

And even though The Teri Tome is almost five years old, the angst over whether to click “POST” and shoot my writings through cyberspace has never diminished.

I was recently asked by a friend to sum up 2019 in one word, and my first thought was: POST.

Of all the words I could have come up with, POST was what came to mind.

I guess because everything I do these days always comes back to:

“I’m so going to post a blog about this…”

Whether it be the mundane, the insane, the ridiculous, the heartbreak…

I can’t stop posting. Even when I know it’s not in my best interest.

Every Sunday, I go to the backend of my blog and check out my page views by post for the week.

And it never fails, that I am always shocked at the results.

The posts I hope will be a “Hit” are usually not.

Don’t get me wrong, I always go into my writing frenzy, with the thought in mind that whatever I write will in all probability be a miss.

It’s the only way I can go through the exhausting routine without getting my hopes up that people will like my work, and then being disappointed.

Hit or miss, I write anyway.

And I’m not trying to cry a river but writing a blog post takes a ton of time and energy.

Particularly the posts that are not in my best interest. Those are the most challenging and difficult to write. They take added effort and stamina, but they mostly take courage and a grueling mental toll.

So today being Sunday, I checked out the hits and misses, not only for the week but for all of 2019.

At the end of last year, I put together the Top Hits and Duds of 2018, which included the best and worst of all Teri Tome time (2015-2018).

For 2019, I thought I would change it up a bit.

I wrote 36 blog posts in 2019, so I decided to highlight the top two hits and the number one miss.

And since I took the time and effort today to analyze my best and worst posts of all time (2015-2019), I might as well share the top two hits so that today’s analysis wasn’t a complete waste.

The 36 posts I wrote in 2019 generated over 140,000 page views, which I suppose is okay.

I say okay, because in 2018, I only wrote 18 posts and had close to the same number of page views, so for 2019, double the posts did not equate to double the views. Not even close.

Oh well, let’s hope for better results in 2020.

I’ll start with the worst miss of 2019:

#1 MISS 


MY STOLEN DIARIES: A NOVELOG: Okay, to be fair, I only wrote this blog post one week ago, so it will take some time for it to work its way through the internet. And I’ve only blogged one chapter so far! I am so hoping that this post does well for the main reason that it is excerpted from a novel I have been writing — for like a gazillion years. Plus, I invented the word NOVELOG to describe my novel-in-a-blog, and I am hoping it sticks as a solid description for writers out there who are looking for a word to describe their efforts to blog their novels. #NOVELOG

And now for my top two 2019 posts:

#1 HIT

U.S. SENATE SEATS UP FOR REELECTION IN 2020: I was super happy that this blog post was the 2019 top post. First, because people should care about which Senators are up for reelection in 2020, and second, because this post took hours upon hours, and then more hours to pull together. So thanks to my readers for giving back!

#2 HIT

TURKISH SOLDIERS DROVE MY GRANDPARENTS OUT OF SYRIA IN 1920: I was thrilled to see this post hit the number two spot because anyone who has had to suffer at the hands of murdering dictators deserves to get the sympathy and recognition they deserve. Plus, I am so sick of Turkey getting away with their denials and lies about what they did to the Christians during the Armenian Genocide.       

B.O.A.T. (BEST OF ALL TIME)

#1 HIT OF 2015-2019

BULLIES ARE COWARDS AND WHY I REFUSE TO TURN THE OTHER CHEEK: Year after year, this post continues to outperform all the others, and to date, has garnered over 500,000 page views. And year after year I’m thankful for the blog traffic, but the fact that “bullies” is my number one keyword says volumes about the character of our world. And as history has shown us there are way too many psychopathic bullies out there. And from my own personal experiences, someone with a psychopathic personality disorder will always display some sort of mental disorder topped off by a narcissistic disorder. As far as I’m concerned, all three disorders are little more than a convenient label for crackpots and social deviants who over-estimate and exaggerate their abilities, status, intelligence, and looks.

#2 HIT OF 2015-2019 

MY SUN PHOBIA—JUST CALL ME DRACULESS: Ironically, my number two Teri Tome post of all time also features a mental disorder, this one born from anxiety and fear. To date, the page views for this post has exceeded the 400,000 mark. And since this post is about me, I will confess that through therapy I long ago discovered that my phobia was indeed triggered by an unfortunate event although my trigger had nothing to do with the sun. I’ll leave the full explanation for a future blog post.

In reviewing my 2019 hits and misses, as well as my top two posts of all Teri Tome time, I’m at peace with the results.

And I’m prideful that I continue to push myself to put it all out there, and okay, I have some regrets.

But what I don’t regret is when I am long gone, there will be no doubt about who I was, or what I felt, or where I loved, or why I feared.

Because, the who, what, when, why and where of Teri will be present in each and every post, regardless of whether they hit or miss.

Happy New Year to my loyal readers. I wish for you a 2020 that will turn many of your hopes and dreams into reality.