Hello, I want to introduce myself. @shirleyannparker.medium.com I was born in a small town in the south of England. That is to say, in the UK. I was raised there until my Dad hauled the family up to his home city in Yorkshire when I was in my teens.

You May Not Have a Choice, No Matter What Others Tell You (The incomplete version of these two articles was published on my website https://shirleyannparker.com back in February, 2015 if you want to skip ahead and search for them. You might want to just wait!) You can edit your own…

Even When We Don’t Like That Idea Some people take great umbrage at the idea that life is an audition because “we’re here.” We already got the part, so to speak. In actual fact, the only thing we had to do in the Pre-Mortal Existence was to listen, and then…

What Probably Won’t Fly with Readers Like Me Before you begin actual story outlining, consider that some topics are almost poisonous in fiction. People don’t like reading gory novels, or stories that don’t have happy endings, except maybe the horror crowd. Readers traumatized by today’s vicious events don’t want to…

Even when it’s the truth Truth has always been the standard defense against a claim of defamation whether slander (spoken) or libel (written). If a statement is true, there’s no way you can prove the statement is false, and there’s no defamation case to pursue. I’m not a lawyer and…

Yet what can we do about it? The Universe always reaches out to us, to show us great beauty in vast sweeps of sky and mountain and ocean, or in the perfection of sea stars and cactus blossoms, or in tiny, jeweled flight. The Universe also begs us to pay…

Where is the leadership of the silent majority? “My tongue will tell the anger of my heart, or else my heart concealing it will break.” William Shakespeare, The Taming of the Shrew When Americans were still chicks, even cockerels and pullets, they clung to God who gave them the foundational…

Some people will reject your friendship I’ve written about wanting or needing to create our own family from friends we’ve made: co-workers, church friends, and others. This is especially comforting for those whose own family is a little bit, or a lot, dysfunctional, or lives far away. Having had to…

But do they? Should they? We are expected to be happy with the relatives we found ourselves among when we arrived on earth. Some claim we chose our family structure before we came here; others say no way were we that stupid. Personally, I think we were assigned to families…