Becky Flade, Author

I finished my book. Well, to be exact I completed writing my first full length book; some 226 pages of original, if not necessarily good, text. I read On Writing by Stephen King and he suggested putting your finished first draft in a drawer and walking away from it for at least 6 weeks. Then read it fresh and from scratch with a red pen and be merciless in your revisions: "kill your darlings". I had to find something else to do in the meantime and coincidentally I was done just in time for NaNoWriMo. I got to writing a completely new idea that had just come to me; not the one that I had had fermenting all that time and was planning to write about in November. The storyline I'd been baking for weeks was a young adult drama about alcoholism, abuse and forgiveness. The story I ended up working on was a mystery/romance and while I liked the characters and their back stories, the story well, it didn't work. I love the movie Throw Mama From the Train . If you haven...

It's a quiet Saturday afternoon at home. Nicky & Shay are napping on the chaise. Morgen is beside me on the couch; I'm writing & she's playing a video game. Moments like these aren't particularly memorable. Years from now it won't be hey remember that afternoon in November when we did nothing spectacular? But I've determined that these are the moments that make life worthwhile. It's not the laughter or the tears. Families are not defined by their tragedies or accomplishments. They are marked most by the quiet moments together. Otherwise why would parents, even the most practiced, still sneak into their newborns nursery solely for the purposes of watching them sleep? We stand in the dark marvelling at our creation, entranced by the flutter of lashes as she dreams. The silence allows us the unique opportunity to hear a soft sigh or a dreamy chuckle. My current introspection has inspired me to reflect upon the series of silences that have formed the fou...

I was going to continue the story of me and my soul mate finding each other and falling in love all over again. Then I thought I’d write about my near-miss with a deer last night and how proud of myself I am for how well I avoided hitting Bambi with my van. Or that my friend’s newly eighteen year old daughter is in the hospital with kidney failure and dangerously high blood pressure when a week ago she was healthy. The baby my other friend had just two months ago that I got to hold and snuggle yesterday making me wish for the gazillioneth time that I hadn’t had my tubes tied five years ago. Thought maybe I’d write about my mom being sick with both flu and a stomach virus and how it makes me flash back to how ill she’d been during my youth and how my family not only survived that but I think came out stronger on the other end. Or maybe I’d blog a little about my sputtering attempts to complete NaNoWriMo this year and my gloomy outlook on the possibility of success. I considered sc...

Only a few weeks, maybe four, after my friend and I told my teenage daughter about this boy that had loved me in high school, he found me on Facebook. I'd looked for him a time or two, unsuccessfully, so when I saw the friend request in my FB inbox I was incredibly excited and only minutes after he sent it, I accepted it and began asking him about his life. He shot me a quick email giving me his email address and suggesting we communicate that way. Emails were exchanged over the course of an afternoon and he sent one asking if he could ask me something. I always get nervous when someone says can I ask you a question? To my way of thinking if you're not sure if you should ask... don't. Cautiously, I gave him the thumbs up. He asked if I still dance around to Madonna in the mornings when I get ready for my day. I was just blown away that he even remembered such a silly little detail and invited him to attend a friend's Labor Day bbq with me. He said yes. Then he st...

August before last my friend and I were discussing with my then sixteen year old daughter good guys that we hurt when we were young, intentionally or not. Those guys that you look back and realize you’d screwed them up royally or that did or would’ve really loved you had you given them the chance. Maybe not the one that got away so much as the one you pushed away, out of a moving car, without warning or safety gear. The guys that you threw over always for some jerk whom ended up breaking your heart. That’s the karma of it all. You casually, or even not so casually, break the heart of someone else in your pursuit of another and that individual ends up breaking your heart, casually or not. I had one. He loved me. I mean really loved me. In that intense world altering kind of way that can be just as overwhelming as it is comforting. I was fifteen; he was sixteen. Too young for a love that burned that hot and so we hurt each other but I was the one that walked away. The reason...