• Artwork,  Essays,  General Thoughts

    My biggest fear

    Fear. It can be crippling. It can also change as we age. What’s your biggest fear right now at this moment? Will you have the same answer tomorrow? Abandonment When I was little, my biggest fear was abandonment. After my father passed away, my mother remarried the man who would end up raising me and shaping my life in ways I didn’t know were possible at the time. I was only four, which is how old my daughter is now. I didn’t understand everything that had happened. I just had a fuzzy memory of my mother holding me over the side of my father’s hospital bed and telling me to…

  • Artwork,  General Thoughts,  High School Short Stories,  Short Stories

    The Summer of Reality

    This story was part of the collection of writing samples I submitted for the Creative Writing Scholarship contest at Arkansas Tech University in Spring 1999. I placed 4th, so I was pretty excited about that. The scholarship paid for my books for my first year in college.  The Summer of Reality, 1999 The last day that I was ever fifteen, I went to the mall with my Mom, my aunt Carrie, and my best friend Melanie. Earlier that morning, I mailed a letter that could change my whole life if the receiver decided to at least humor me. During the previous school year, I had developed a crush on a new boy…

  • Artwork,  General Thoughts,  Novels (my writing updates)

    Caroline’s Lighthouse

      My first new project is the rewrite of a book-length story, Caroline’s Lighthouse,  which I first wrote in early 1997 when I was 15. By “wrote” I mean the first draft was written in pencil on notebook paper. It’s a teenage love story with tragedy and a ghost story happening in the background. I drew the illustration on the book cover  in 1998 when I was 16 or 17. I am now working on the final rounds of edits and plan to go the Indie publishing route. My goal is to have the book available in made-to-order trade paperback and Kindle editions by the end of 2016. -Brandi Easterling Collins