CioranIf chaos theory applied to anyone, it’s Will and Tom. Best friends since childhood, life takes very different courses for them until they’re thrown back together in the middle of their own individual chaos. Surviving the terrors of war in Northern Ireland and the heartbreak of childlessness and a broken marriage, Tom learns that bravery isn’t about daring death, it’s about facing life. For Will, it’s about being yourself – or in his case, herself, as he starts an unusual journey towards being just that; the woman, Billie.Chained Melodies is the extraordinary story of how two men find not just courage, but self-belief and the true nature of love."Touching and almost heart-breaking, this is a novel to tickle your heart strings."“...breath-taking and intriguing...”“...a 'must read" novel.'”“..quite beautiful, with a certain poetry in the tone."

    Lauren's determined to reinvent herself, but she's panic-stricken when she sees Harry, who she knew a few years ago. Luckily Harry doesn't recognise her, and she knows she has to make sure it stays like that. Lauren, unlike Tilda, settles in well. She makes friends, is helping to organise the school fashion show, and has boys asking her out. But just as her life finally seems to be looking up she starts receiving macabre packages. When she gets a message: 'Isn't it time your new friends knew all about you?' she has to admit that someone knows her secret. But who - and what should she do?

    Now an adult, Alexander is Lexi, a beautiful woman trying to make her way in the world as she saves enough money for the surgery she desires.John has one goal... To make the Olympic ski team. His entire focus is on his dream. That is until he meets Lexi. She has a way of making him forget everything and he knows his world will never be the same now that he's met her.A quick friendship forms between the two, and it's clear John wants to take things a bit farther, but Lexi hasn't told him her secret, sure he will up and leave like most the others in her life do when they find out.Unable to deny the growing emotions between them, they both have to make life-changing choices that could easily break them apart. Teaching both that sometimes in life, you have to take a chance or risk losing it all.

    Through decades of quiet dedication and single-minded devotion he has achieved the successes one strives for in life, both with his family and career. Close to retirement and to sitting back and enjoying the fruits of a successful career and marriage, a malicious spurious complaint at work should have no material consequences on his life, but it starts a domino effect, and before long he finds himself shockingly dismissed, divorced, without a home, and with a criminal record. This story explores a convoluted tragic journey of divorce, rich with emotion, loss, betrayal, revenge and confusion. Along the way it explores the dynamics of what makes a relationship weak and vulnerable, or strong and resolute. It’s not a miserable story, but one of resilience, hope, and true love. It is told with an immense depth of feeling, insight, humour and faith, and there are many truly surprising twists and turns as the story unfolds.

    She loves her job and she has a comfortable bed. Granted, her love life is non-existent, her pot-smoking mother is wreaking havoc in her apartment, and she is starting to suspect that her lesbian best friend might be secretly in love with her. But none of that matters when Davey meets Danny, a kind, loving, intelligent man who just may be the love of Davey's life. Until it turns out that Danny is harboring a secret of his own.

     After struggling with the death of her lifemate of over a century, Tara spends what the leaders of her clan considers an unreasonable amount of time in finding another. The clan needs offspring, they insist. While soaring over a meadow, Tara sees a dragon intruder attack a shepherd. Outraged, she intervenes and saves the young man from certain death. Breaking a two hundred year old pact between man and dragon forbidding any contact between the two, a powerful yet dangerous bond slowly grows between the dragon and her boy. This is a fun short story, at 5300 words. Stories two and three are already written. They continue the series and will be available shortly! I hope you enjoy them all.

    A heart warming, slow burn, late in life, friends to lovers story.Georgina owns an independent coffeehouse. Her co-owner, ex lover and sometime friend with benefits, has recently died in a car accident. Grieving, and trying to keep the business going, she finds out the half share has been willed to a complete stranger.Catherine has flitted from job to job, always searching for an important missing piece in her life. Dumped by her boyfriend, jobless, single, penniless and soon to be homeless, Catherine receives a letter which could solve all her problems.Georgina has said she would never again date a straight woman. So why is Catherine continually invading her thoughts? Catherine knows she isn’t gay. So why is she feeling something more than friendship towards Georgina? Will Georgina let her past control her future? Will Catherine acknowledge a future different to her past?Set in a coffeehouse on a busy, bustling main thoroughfare into Bristol. The Perfect Blend introduces us to the owners and characters who frequent the establishment.

    He's on the football team and he's dating one of the prettiest girls in school. Alan is the new kid. He wears lipstick and joins the Fashion Club. Soon enough the football team is out to get him. Adonis is glad to go along with his teammates . . . until they come up with a dangerous plan to humiliate Alan. Now Adonis must decide whether he wants to be a guy who follows the herd or a man who does what's right. From critically acclaimed author Paul Volponi comes this discussable and finely wrought story of bullies, victims, and the bystanders caught in between.

    The stories follow the daily life of Click, a straight-edge transgender kid searching for community, identity, and connection amidst chaos. As the stories unfold, we meet a pack of newly sober gender rebels creating art, families and drama in dilapidated punk houses across Portland, Oregon. Roving Pack offers fast-paced in-your-face accounts of leather, sex, hormones, house parties, and protests. But, when gender fluidity takes an unexpected turn, the pack is sent reeling.

    A predominantly white Reichfield High has lost every game in the last few years to the North Prep, a school with mostly Mexican, Brazilian, and Filipino students. For the first game of the season, however, Addie and his teammates are confident that they will win—because they’ve personally made sure the lead player of the opposite team will be unable to play.Addie and his supremacist and misogynistic friends are ill-prepared for what comes next, though. They are defeated by Shaylee, the best soccer player North Prep has ever seen—who also happens to be a girl. Given an exception, Shaylee is allowed to compete in a team of all boys.Unable to accept defeat, Addie is convinced that Shaylee must be using illegal methods to beat the Reichfield team. He sets out to expose her, but discovers instead that he has secrets of his own…Learning the dark history of his own origin and of the powers that be, Addie and his unlikely new friends must work together to challenge the corrupt, racist and fascist ruling class who could destroy society as they know it.

    Katie O'Connell does--a Wish List actually. Because she longs to be someone new, the kind of girl you take notice of and remember. Someone who isn't just a part of the background. Unfortunately, Katie has no idea how to make that happen, but her outspoken best friend does: a Junior Year Wish List of goals, starting with earning a role in the senior play, and bookish Katie reluctantly agrees. Now she has barely ten months to meet all five goals that will transform her from a bookworm to a butterfly. Wish List in hand, Katie draws her motley crew of dramatic friends closer for support to launch her Junior Year with a fresh (somewhat anxious) attitude. Until the boy who was her first childhood friend, the boy who disappeared right before her tenth birthday, shows up on the first day of school pulling her quiet life into an emotional tailspin. His reappearance will start Katie's junior year with more questions than answers. Why did he leave? Where has he been all this time? Can friendships last after a seven-year break? Is achieving her Wish List possible now? Most importantly, will he be the one to make Wish Number Five a reality?Author's NoteFeminism is about equality and the freedom of choice. The choice to: wear makeup or not, to wear loose fitting clothes or tight fitting clothes or not give a damn about my clothes at all, to like boys or girls or both or neither. It’s about women having choices based on equality of the sexes. There’s no wrong way or right way to be a woman. Just like men, women can care about their appearance or not care, women can be thin or curvy, short or tall, women can be smart or ignorant, women have the freedom to be whatever type of human they want to be at every stage of their life.High school is the next step in a teenager’s life that allows them the time to explore those choices in greater detail just like college, or trade school, or their first paying job, or their fifth, or their 20th will. High school students are dealing with real life adult issues but with little autonomy—stress of home life, relationships, figuring out who we are, what we want to do, who we want to be, how we’ll change, how we deal with change, our sexual identity. High school is all about self-discovery, and, unfortunately, having to do it all weighed down by society’s pre-conceived notions and subjective judgments about our choices and the tiny cramped boxes they think we belong in.If you think it will make you happy, try being a drama geek, try being a cheerleader, student government, a mathlete, an athlete, a bookworm, a scientist, a journalist, a singer, a dancer, an artist, or an observer of life. Dress up, dress down, dress comfy…just be safe and be happy.Please, please, please don’t let anyone tell you who or what you should be, or how you should act, but also please listen to advice from others that's given respectfully with the hope that your path will be a little less bumpy than theirs was. Be and do what makes you happy, dip your toes into the waters of our beautiful diverse world, or cannonball in and explore every nook and cranny you want to until you find the perfect fit, and don’t be afraid if you outgrow what fits and want to try something new. That’s the beauty of life, we don’t have to be stagnant. We have the freedom to change.Katie wanted to explore and try something new, be someone different for a while to see how it fit, but she never lost her true self, she was-and always will be-a book-loving artist devoted to her family and friends.

    It seems a great opportunity, but Francis has never seen a town, or been away from his family, and he is very afraid."

    This is a young adult novel unlike any other—an authentic portrayal of the issues faced by a child growing up with a sexually ambiguous body.Jameson can be like other boys after minor surgery and a few years on testosterone Well, at least that’s what his parents always say. But Jamie sees an elfin princess in the mirror, and male hormones would only ruin her pretty face. For him to become the man his parents expect, Jameson must leave behind the hopes and dreams of a little girl. But what is so wrong with Jamie’s dreams that they can’t be her life?

    With the help of David Tushingham, he has adapted Salman Rushdie's classic children's novel, Haroun and the Sea of Stories for the stage. Set in an exotic eastern landscape peopled by magicians and fantastic talking animals, Rushdie's novel inhabits the same imaginative space as Gulliver's Travels, Alice in Wonderland and The Wizard of Oz. Haroun sets out on an adventure to restore the poisoned source of the sea of stories. On the way he encounters many foes, intent on draining the sea of all its storytelling powers.

    Her idol, her older sister, jogs headlong into the lights of an approaching car, and dies. And Julie falls in love with a girl who both is and isn't an echo of her older sister, a long-limbed Francophone named Patrice-who is also a devotee of the Institute of Temporal Illusions, a Church of Scientology-like cult.In Julie Thatch you cannot help but see shades of Stieg Larsson's Lisbeth Salander. Jeanne's former writing teacher at the University of Texas, Alexander Parsons (author of Leaving Disneyland and In the Shadows of the Sun) writes: "The Dream of Doctor Bantam is one of those books you read every few years in which, page by page, you come to think of the characters as a part of your own dear, weird, and intransigent family. In Julie Thatch, Thornton has written a character as memorable and compelling as Holden Caufield or Oedipa Maas. She is alternately hilarious, maddening, and enchanting, a fearful and fearless smartass who enlivens every page of this fine novel."With illustrations by the author.