WHERE’S MY BOOKSTORE, DUDE? by Melodie Johnson Howe I love reading the Sheriff’s Blotter in our local village paper. Recently I came across this bit of news: Friday, December 27, 2:30p.m. – Deputy Bordon, Deputy Neel, and Sergeant Moore were dispatched to a residence on Ladera Lane to investigate a report of a burglary. The […]

DON’T TELL ME THE PLOT by Melodie Johnson Howe My friend Lenore called yesterday. “Hello?” “Literature smit-a-ture,” she announced angrily. “You read my short story?” “No. I was three hundred pages into An American Tragedy by Theodore Dreiser…” “That means you have about two thousand more pages to go.” Undaunted she continued to rant, “and […]

A NORMAL LIFE by Melodie Johnson Howe The last two weeks I have spent some time waiting in doctors’ waiting rooms. Waiting rooms are the equivalent of purgatory on earth. The most you can hope for while waiting is a magazine not dated earlier than 2002 and that you are not sitting next to some […]

BUDDY, CAN YOU SPARE A SHAMUS? by Melodie Johnson Howe The big three auto makers flew in on separate corporate Lear jets to ask for a bailout, and then in a theatre of the absurd moment returned to DC in their battery operated Volts, Bolts, or Watts and asked for even more money. Of course […]

ON GIVING THANKS FOR FAMILY & NOT BEING ABLE TO SPELL by Melodie Johnson Howe It is difficult being a writer, a wife, mother, grandmother and great grandmother. I am always working on two levels: my accepted one as wife, mother, grandmother, and great grandmother and that other pesky side of me, the writer. Thanksgiving […]

SPOOKING ME II by Melodie Johnson Howe Before I was interrupted by the fire, I was writing about my excursion into the CIA. Even spies need to eat. And the CIA has one of the biggest food courts I have seen. Think of a football field filled with neon signs reading Burger King, Barbecued Ribs, […]

HELL IN PARADISE by Melodie Johnson Howe There has to be a hell in paradise because if there weren’t one there’d be no reason for writers exist. The day before the Tea Fire (Montecito/Santa Barbara area) my doctor put me on steroids. When I asked him what the side affects were, he told me I […]