ALISSA YARBROUGH

Perfectionism is not one of my strong points. I know because I have a couple of family members to whom that overriding drive is a continual plague on their existence (at least, from my point of view).

I'll let you in on a secret: my dream job is to be a juggler in a circus. It doesn't have to be in one of the rings, just in a corner of the big top, where I'll stand in the sawdust, sending the multicolored pins reeling into the air in effortless yet precise coordination.

A "Super" Short Story (6 Min Read) Tasha has made a new man out of me. And I'd die to regret it. I exit the Bugatti under the radiance of a full moon and spring up the flagstone steps leading to the simple, even cottage-like house compared with the mansion I'd driven from. Modest yet elegant. All attributes drawn from the gentle hands managing the unpretentious property. The Japanese Maple, sprouting from the red garden mulch, is reviving from the state the previous owner had

Our society is a visually controlled one, saturated with cinema and flashy videos in order to maintain our shortening attention spans. I'm seeing the same drift in fiction, a molding of the writing to keep up with the dopamine in the action-packed movies. We are showing all right, but along the same vein, we're going overboard in describing every detail as we would see in a motion picture.

Birds Alive!, the first book in the Empty-nesters Cozy Mystery series by Jen Dodrill, is about a woman who finds herself an empty-nester once her youngest child has left for college. Somewhat listless and seeking to turn over a new leaf, she starts a bird-watching club and gets more excitement than she anticipated when the club's first outing involves the death of one of their members.