Barbara V Evers

© Barbara V. Evers, Sorry no picture of the bird! If you're on Facebook, you've probably noticed the multitudes of quizzes you can take to determine "Which one are you?"  I've taken the Disney Princess assessment (Belle), the What Career Should You Actually Have (CEO), the Which Pet Should You Have (a hedgehog!), and so many more.  When it came to What Kind of Bird Are You, I got the great horned owl. Sometimes, I post the answer to these quizzes (all of them appear to come from Buzzfeed.com if you're interested), but if the answer sounds off or weird, I don't bother.  I did post the great horned owl, which prompted a writer friend to ask:  "Hmm.  Is that owl perched on a giraffe?: If the question sounds offbeat to you, then you might want to check some of my posts about giraffes .  I love giraffes and use them in the novel I'm hoping to get published some day.  The irony of this question falls in the answer (as most ironic questions...

Today I wrote a scene about death. Actually, I rewrote the scene.  I never felt like I had gotten it right, before.  Writers know what I mean.  Sometimes a scene works, but you have this feeling like something is missing, an element that makes it stronger, that draws the reader into the story without effort. In the story, a young girl, witnesses the death of her mother after the end of a long illness.  I wrote this scene several years ago before my own mother's health began to decline. Every time I worked on this scene in the past, I wondered if I had it right.  After the events of the last month, somewhere in the back of mind, I realized my scene still missed something crucial, a feeling it took me days to find words to even begin to describe.  So, I wrote what I knew.  I wrote about the emptiness overwhelming my insides. I drew from the feeling of wandering through life like a character in a movie just after a bomb explodes.  You've see...