My Dearest Ms. Austen

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My Dearest Ms. Austen –

I hope this letter finds you well. Of course, you are dead, so I’m not really sure how “well” you could be. But for a dead writer, I do hope you are well. I hope your eternity is full of ink and quills and social situations to poke fun of.

To start, I would like to comment on a hero from my favorite of your beloved novels, one Mr. Fitzwilliam Darcy. Good God, woman, could you have created a more perfect man? You might already know this, but countless readers have lusted after your Mr. Darcy…particularly when he’s portrayed by Colin Firth on film. Yummy.

But I digress. Thanks for the high expectations. No woman deserves less than a passionate, stubborn, very-nearly-insulting, and intelligent man like Darcy, and no woman should settle for a man who brings forth less passion within her. I have my own irritating and adorable Mr. Darcy, and I wouldn’t trade him for the world.

More important than the dead sexy and very real Colin Firth or the dead sexy and very fictional Mr. Darcy, I would like to mention the nature of your words and your storytelling ability and how both of these things heavily influenced the direction my life has taken.

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As a little girl, I loved to read and be read to, not unlike many children; however, as I grew, I found that my passion for words stretched far beyond just reading them. I had a writer’s heart: first kindled in a grade school poetry competition, catching fire in an eighth grade reading of The Diary of Anne Frank, and consuming my soul in high school with the works of Hemingway, Lee, Steinbeck, Fitzgerald, and, a favorite, Ms. Jane Austen.

Ms. Austen, you are just one of my many literary heroes. Your words are just a few of the words that have touched me and molded me as a writer over the years. I collect characters and phrases from you and others, tucking them away like pieces of sea glass…to be used later, shining and sparkling again in my own words and worlds.

And so I dream of you, of having an ounce of your talent, of wielding a quill and a pot of ink as cleverly as you do. I dream of writing words that move millions, that leave a legacy, that still have life centuries after my death.

And of course, I dream of Mr. Darcy…

Sincerely and with great respect,

Ms. Kathryn Ross

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This letter was hand-written for the Lightning and Lightning Bug prompt: Letter Writing Campaign. We were charged to write a letter in 700 words or less to someone we'd never met. I was inspired to write to one of my literary heroes. 


Which of your literary heroes would you write to if given the opportunity? What would you say?


If you'd like to join the Letter Writing Campaign, you have until Wednesday to linkup. Hope to see you there!

Motherly Meltdown

I won’t lie. This week’s A Flicker of Inspiration prompt had me stumped. I don’t like it when prompts stump me. In fact, I get down-right annoyed when that happens. In typical badger fashion, I growled and groaned around the house this weekend, as I wracked my brain for a story to tell. 

The prompt challenged us to write an "It's Not What It Looks Like" scene. A scene where a colossal misunderstanding leads to something funny or drives the plot in some way.

I thought about it. And nothing came to mind.

Not a thing.  

And then, as it so often happens with these sorts of things, an idea fell into my lap. Thanks in part to some home improvements and my parents being over for the weekend. I’ll explain that at the end.

Behold, an actual response to the most challenging prompt I’ve faced:

Motherly Meltdown

It couldn’t be true. It wasn’t true. Not her baby. Not her sweet baby girl. Never.

But it was true. The evidence was in her hands.

Sarah’s body shook as she stared down at the tiny plastic bag. Tears filled her soft brown eyes, and she surrendered to the tragedy of it all as they began to fall in great drops, dampening the tiny bag and her shaking hands.

Emily had always been such a good child. Quiet, sweet, never a moment’s trouble to her or her father. She supposed she’d just been hiding this secret life from them all along. The sneaky little minx.

Sarah stood up abruptly, let the small bag of pot and clean pairs of panties she’d been putting in Emily’s underwear drawer fall to the floor. A glance around her daughter’s perfect purple room made her anger dissipate and the nausea creep in. Emily still had teddy bears for God’s sake. Show jumper trophies and ribbons lined the shelves along her ceiling. A poster of that ridiculous-looking Justin Beiber hung over her bed.

She was just a little girl. Fifteen-years-old. A baby.

And yet, not a little girl or baby anymore. If she could smoke pot, she was neither.  Sarah’s head spun as images of Emily danced before her eyes.

Emily as a black cat at Halloween, at every Halloween since she could crawl. “What do you want to be this year, baby?” “A black cat!” “Again? Hadn’t you rather be a princess or maybe even a witch?” “No, I wanna be a black cat!”

Emily as a graceless ballet dancer, wearing a plush airplane costume and sticking out hopelessly amongst her fellow dancers on stage.

Emily as a bookworm and excellent student, bringing home a report card with straight A’s and begging for ice cream as a reward.

Emily as a pot-smoking hipster with a lip ring and pink streaks in her hair….but wait, Sarah was getting ahead of herself. Still, the lip ring and pink streaks were sure to follow. After all, her daughter was a delinquent drug user now. There was no telling what would follow.

Suspension from school. Pregnancy. Jail time.

Emily’s life was over. And, thus, so was Sarah’s.

The other moms from Bunco would pass down their judgment harshly. She would be shunned from the Bunco table, cast off into a cruel, Bunco-less world.

Her church friends would pray for her, then shake their heads behind her back, tsk-tsking to themselves and wondering where she had gone so wrong. Hell was a certainty.

Nosey and vicious co-workers would lament about Sarah’s situation in front of their boss. Bossman would then call her into his office on a Wednesday and tell her that she’s fired for being such a horrible mother and for having such a pot-smoker of a daughter.

The media was sure to get ahold of the story, and once they did, unwanted fame would follow. She would cry as Oprah admonished her actions on an ugly orange couch. She would wince as her name and face were flashed on Inside Edition and Entertainment Tonight.  The Bad Mother.

Sarah’s spiral into madness was reaching its crescendo, when Emily bee-bopped into the room. “Mom, hi!” Her voice was spunky, sweet, not at all what Sarah imagined the voice of a gruff, pot-smoking hippy would sound like. A second wave of nausea hit her, as another imagined nightly news headline scrolled through her broken mind:

Pothead Daughter of Ruined Mother Adopts Fourteen Pot-Bellied Pigs, Marries a Gang-Banger, and Moves to a Commune.

Oh, the horror!

Gathering all of her remaining composure, Sarah bent down, picked up the small bag of pot from among the pink panties strewn on the floor, and met her daughter’s beautiful blue eyes. But before she could open her mouth and begin the never-ending trail of curses that she would lay upon her daughter, Emily interrupted.

“You found Yuki’s catnip!” She chirped, snatching the bag from Sarah’s limp hand and running from the room in search of her obese tabby cat.

With jaw slack and mind still racing, relief trickled in, and Sarah sighed, comforted by the thought that she wouldn’t have to live in a Bunco-less world after all. 

As I said, this story was inspired by my parent’s visit to our house over the weekend. They helped us put up tile in our kitchen, and at one point, my Mama fumbled through my junk drawer (can't write those words without a shout out for Dawnie, you'll know what I mean :) oh, and VISIT HER BLOG, you won't regret it) looking for a marker to mark the tile with. In that junk drawer is a tiny bag of catnip that closely resembles another substance.

Thankfully, my Mama didn’t quite react like Sarah, but I did wonder what must have gone through her head at the first glance of that bag…

This was written for A Flicker of Inspiration prompt: "It's Not What It Looks Like." If you haven't already, check out this fun and engaging writing community by clicking the button below:

All the World's a Cage

The steps led nowhere. Like some kind of an empty promise, they intrigued you, filled you with hope, and then left you standing disappointed and alone. Ada stood now, disappointed and alone, at the top of the steps, looking down at a valley of nothing in a country of nowhere.

Countless paths had led her to the same conclusion, and yet, in her particularly hopeful and naive way, she kept going. Always looking for a means of escape, a different kind of ending to the story she’d been living over and over again.

But there was none.

She was as disappointed and alone as she would always be, stuck in a world where steps led to nowhere and paths led to nothing.

Dwelling did no good, though, so Ada turned around and went back down the steps to nowhere into the valley of nothing.

It was time to eat. Although what they passed for food could barely be called that at all. Tasteless and vile cardboard, at best. At first, she wouldn’t eat it. She refused and instead searched the aimless paths for other options. After finding none, she forced the garbage down. Their prison food provided her with the nourishment she needed to keep fighting, keep searching for an escape.

A water source was located in the valley as well, dirty and contaminated water was better than no water at all. Ada drank thirstily and then started when one of her captors squealed and called her name.

“ADA!!!”

The little girl couldn’t have been more than five. Innocent and bright-eyed, an obvious victim herself. Ada felt towards this small child and didn’t blame her at all for her own imprisonment. In fact, she suspected the child might be a prisoner herself. And Ada thought that was a real shame indeed.

With empathy in her heart, she looked to the girl and smiled.

And the girl squealed again. “Mama! Mama! Ada just smiled at me!!!”

Ada’s smile faded as the girl’s mother suddenly approached. She was tall, lean, and had vicious look in her eyes. She was the most feared of Ada’s captors, the most hated.

She spoke, and her voice was filled with a mixture of exhaustion and mild distaste.  “Elizabeth, darling, don’t be silly.” She sneered down at Ada; her derision and disgust obvious. “Rats don’t smile.”

Author's Note: This was written for a Lightning and Lightning Bug Flicker of Inspiration prompt: Shuffle. We were supposed to have a major shift in tone within our story. To read some great stories, visit: