Five for the Price of One

MERRY CHRISTMAS!  Da, Fiorella honors her father's Russian Orthodox heritage by leaving Christmas decorations up through January 7.  One busy year, she even honored it through March.
*
How about a paranormal romance featuring a senior citizen couple as the heroes--Crankyman and Sweetywoman.
*
Bringing you up to date on social media for authors pimping their brand--FaceBook and Twitter are out, newsletters are in.  Frankly, Fio prefers Goodyear blimps with trailers.
*
Fiorella wonders if big-time singers ever get tired of warbling the same songs again and again.  But maybe the audience is what revs them up.  On the other hand, Fio tends to go around the house bellowing out "Go Tell Aunt Rhodie," one of her fourth-grade favorites, whether Husband is there or not.
*
Fio may have said this before, but she'll say it again.  For years, she thought the Boston Pops were so called because they were  all fathers.  She was shocked when she first noticed females in the orchestra.

Paranormal Parade

It dawned on Fiorella the other day how much of our classic literature is what we now classify as paranormal. Think about Homer's epics--the appearances of the gods and goddesses in the Iliad, plus the bizarre creatures encountered in the Odyssey. Think about Grendel and the dragon in Beowulf. In fact, think about Beowulf himself, swimming around for--eight days was it?--fully armored. Think about Spenser's Fairie Queen.

Shakespeare was something of a realist, but in Midsummer Night's Dream, he too dipped into the paranormal.

Fiction lets the mind run wild, and apparently human minds tend toward the abnormal--uh, paranormal.

I Feel Your Pain

Forgot to mention that toward the end of her presentation, the writing group's psychic lecturer said never to tell her about any operations or illnesses because she was so sensitive she would feel all our pain and anguish herself.

On the way home, Fio suddenly realized the remark may have been aimed at herself. Walking into the meeting area that evening, she'd run into Friend Joy, who was sitting and talking to the speaker, so Fio sat down and joined in. Somehow Friend Joy and Fio started talking about eye surgeries, of which your Fio has had several, all of which she described with her usual dramatic gusto. The psychic got up and left.

Now Fio's many eye surgeries were painless, virtually bloodless, and quite successful, so what was the psychic channeling?

Maybe she's just lily-livered. Or maybe she didn't like Fio taking over her spotlight.

Thursday Night

Fio, as usual, had a great time visiting with friends at her local writers' league meeting Thursday night. She started out enjoying the speaker too, who was billed as someone who would talk about using the paranormal in one's writing. Fio expected to hear about world building, consistency, and the wide array of fantasy beings available for literary exploitation. But nooooo! The talk was, instead, all about opening ourselves up to the paranormal, thus making us smarter, more creative, and in tune with the universe.

Well, as you know, if Fio got any more creative, she'd be certifiable, and she's fairly bright too, so the speaker's basic premise didn't sit right with her. She let it slide, though, because she was enjoying the lady's style--humorous, anecdotal, and charming--until the disorganization and self-glorification started annoying the heck out of her.

Nothing hung together. Our psychic was turning the pages of a looseleaf notebook which she apparently usually taught a many-sessioned enlightenment course from, picking out items seemingly at random to talk about--sensitivity, intuition, ESP, auras, ghosts, you name it. Her time ran out before she got to UFOs and extraterrestrials, which--I kid you not--were also in her landscape.

The questions afterwards settled on auras. Now Fio has never seen an aura in her life, although she doesn't doubt some people do, just like she herself heard music as color rather than pitch before intensive ear training.

On being instructed to trust their guts and look at auras of people around them, various members of the audience began seeing the glows and told the speaker hers was green, which she explained as the color of a healer. Fio focused on the speaker and sent her own subconscious roaming around, but instead of an aura, it came up with the word "evil." At Fio's nudging for a further explanation, her "gut" came up with "not who she claims to be." Fio received the distinct impression of a second identity, and shivers a little even now as she writes her intuition down.