Because of You cover/banner/whatever: http://i23.photobucket.com/albums/b390/writergirl_ny/Characters/BecauseofYou.jpg

DUE TO THE WAVE IN PLAGIARISM ON THIS SITE LATELY: I am warning anyone who even THINKS momentarily about stealing my work, I will bring a lawsuit on your ass so fast your head will spin. Every work on this site is original and COPYRIGHTED. Don't be lazy, use your own ideas. We writers work long and hard to bring ours to fruition.

1-15-09 Special Note: If you read my stories, you will probably notice that in most--if not all--of my stories at least one of the main characters is an avid reader. I am aware of this, and it is intentional; in 2002 a mere 46.7 of the U.S. adult population read literature. The way things are going, reading as a leisure activity could completely disappear in half a century. I am not okay with this. I promote literacy--if you have children, read to them. If you know children and have the opportunity, read to them.

:) And that's all for today's public service announcement.

I am completely aware that my story summaries kind of suck, but I find it extremely challenging to sum up a whole story in a few letters more than a text message. Also, I do not write simple stereotypical stories. They're okay, but they're really not my style-- I like "real people" characters, so... (However, my oldest stories --Brothers and Best Friends and the early chapters of The Promotion-- are going to be less realistic, because they are the first things I've ever written outside of fanfiction and I didn't have the firm grasp of the personal writing style I have since developed.)

Because of You is nothing like Romeo & Juliet (and although I may be slightly biased, I think it's the best story I have on here, so if you don't mind drama, I HIGHLY recommend that story); Unwanted is not a sob story about a misunderstood youth and pampered princess, The Promotion is not going to be your typical employee-boss Two Weeks Notice kind of situation, Brothers and Best Friends is not your everyday teen pregnancy story, and Beautiful Mistakes is nothing like The Nanny or The Nanny Diaries or any other nanny-oriented story I've ever read or watched--prepare to be surprised.

It's just that I have to sum up the hundreds of thousands of words that I'm going to be writing in less than 255 letters, and I'm not good at it. I vote to abolish the 255 letter count and at least give us 300. Come on now.

For any readers of Brothers and Best Friends, I had initially put the baby name voting at the end of one of the chapters, but didn't really factor in that reviews kind of trickle in all the time, so... I lost track. I think Reid might have been winning, but then I saw that the site has this great new polls option, so if you look right up there at the top of my profile, there should be a little opinion poll, so feel free to go vote!

All the world's a stage,
And all the men and women merely players;
They have their exits and their entrances,
And one man in his time plays many parts,
-Shakespeare

I believe that stories have this power--they enter us, transport us, they change things inside us, so invisibly, so minutely, that sometimes, we're not even aware that we come out of a great book as a different person from the person we were when we began reading it. - Julia Alvarez

LOGAN: Either we can take a tough but survivable amount of pain now, or stay together and deal with unbearable pain later. So I vote for the pain now.