All the News that's Unfit to Print

Fio suspects The Donald's goal is not to be President Trump, but King Trump.  Why else would he have named his son "Barron?"
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Romance writers are like bitch dogs in a puppy farm--always under pressure to produce.
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Fiorella's neighborhood association is considering issuing windshield emblems to residents so cars that don't "belong" in the neighborhood can be easily identified.  But what about maids, yardsmen, tradesmen, and rental cars, and relatives?  And what if it's at night?  And what will we do if we catch one?

Conspiracies and Coincidences

Friend Jeanell's life would be a field day for conspiracy theorists.

 During the same time frame, three women, all with names beginning with J, all romance writers, all members of ARWA, all on the shady side of fifty, had their computers go down. Then there were Jeanell's former neighbors--the husband's given name was the same as Jeanell's younger son's middle name, the neighbor's older son's name was same as Jeanell's older son's name, and the neighbor's younger son's name was the male version of Jeanell's daughter's name. Which all goes to prove that sometimes a coincidence is just a coincidence. However, about those three computers....

Competition

Strangely enough, although Fiorella is a very competitive person, she cannot bear to watch competitive shows on TV or participate in NaNoRiMO, which is a yearly competition in which romance writers egg each other on to write an overflow of words.  Regarding the TV shows, Fio identifies with each contestant and does not like to see anyone lose, and, regarding NaNoRiMo, Fio's competition is not with other writers.  It's with herself as she molds each sentence so it will say exactly what she wants it to. Or so she hopes.

AKA

We're all driven to fiction one way or another.  Some of us write it for publication, some of us generate it to explain what we don't understand, and some of us live it.  Fiorella is one of the first type, conspiracy theorists are examples of the second type, and the third type is the most interesting--people who reinvent their own lives.

Okay, we all do that to a certain extent, celebrating or mourning our lives as the mood hits us, but Fio is talking about people who live the part, like Andrew, a fellow teacher at Fio's last college gig.  Fio liked Andrew a lot.  She considered him a close friend--after all, he supported her when the Hand and the Hammer ganged up against her with their own fiction.   But Andrew got tossed out on his ear when it was discovered he'd falsified his educational credentials.

Fio should have figured out there was a problem.  Andrew was evasive when Fio tried to pin him down on his graduate studies, the academic and publishing connections he set up for her never quite panned out, and somewhere along the line she learned he was telling people people that he and Fio had known each other at another college, which wasn't true.  But she disregarded these red flags because Andrew was charming and funny and told her all the inside gossip, which might have been as fake as he was.

Fiorella doesn't know what became of Andrew, but she would bet he's set up another full and fictional life somewhere.  She wishes him well.  He never did any harm to anyone but himself.