Thomm Quackenbush

Time owed an alliance to the undying.

My soul is not satisfied with an inert universe. The gods may not make a habit of speaking to me personally, but I can't help but whisper comments to them.

Anger is a powerful, transformative emotion, one that can light the fire under us that propels us ever higher. However, the woman wasting time at the grocery story, the man cutting us off, the website that will not load are not the right targets for our energy.

She mourned the history that the invisible intruder had erased, but not enough that she would spend a second more of her future feeling the emptiness.

I don’t much care for all this talk of God washing away all my dirt. I like a bit of grit around the edges. It gives me character and does a passable job of faking depth, from a distance.

Though denigrated by some outside academia and research, she embraced knowledge for its own sake and what better way to honor that than reveling in the intricacies of the brain? If there were any answers to the human condition, if an immortal soul made its home anywhere, it was in its spongy gray folds.

Students view any teacher who does not bury them under work as some sort of mentally impaired kitten to be kicked aside.

She harbored the childhood presumption that the truly scary things could only find her in the night.

Kissing a stranger because that is what is done presages an unhappy year not for any supernatural reason, but because you are unsatisfied enough with your lot in life to put your lips on the line for a fallacy.

Even putting aside the culturally indoctrinated terror that someone in America will assume that two men engage in sodomy behind barely closed doors, there simply isn't an elegant way of asking someone of your gender to hang out for the first time.

My characters will happily march off a cliff if it is in them to do so, but may the gods help me if I write that the character is an alcoholic when they are not. They will fight me at every turn and it is their domain. A writer cannot win against a stubborn character.

Naps are not a sign of physical slovenliness. They are a sign that I am listening to my body. It will reward me with stable emotions, hormones that stay in check, social finesse, continued cleverness, and the ability to write prose that does not make me gag.