Finding a Place to Hide
When I was eleven years old, I witnessed a car accident while waiting at a red light with my mother. It was a complicated intersection and someone turned when they shouldn’t have causing two cars to collide.
It wasn’t a major accident. Both cars were still drivable, just crumpled on their front corners. It was dark out, but under the spotlight of the street light, I watched as both drivers stumbled out of their cars, both bleeding from their heads. They approached each other angrily, starting to yell as they got closer and closer. When they reached each other they started punching and shoving, all while blood dripped down both of their faces.
It was a tough scene to unsee for an eleven year old.
My parents had plans for the evening. I told them that I was fine and they should go, even though I wasn’t fine at all. When they left, I was left alone with the thoughts of what I had seen.
I remember I could not stop myself from shaking. Even as I held my own hands, the trembling wouldn’t stop. Distracting myself with television didn’t work. All I could see in my head was the men clawing at each other through blood drenched eyes..
I went to my room and the safety of my bed and picked up The Hobbit from my library pile, the selections of books I kept on my desk next to my bed. I had gotten The Hobbit from the bookmobile, the mobile library that used to park in the gravel lot of the golf course near my house every Tuesday. A metal corridor of books delivered to my neighborhood each week.
I began to read. From the first page, turned by my still quivering hand, I was captivated. Still shaking, I kept reading. Before long I was off on an adventure with Bilbo and Gandalf, laughing at the unexpected party, smiling as Bilbo outwitted the trolls. My nerves calmed, my shaking stopped, and the vision of those two bleeding men fighting in the street began to fade.
New images appeared in my mind. Images of imaginary lands filled with fantastic creatures. Of heroes and villains. Of good triumphing over evil.
I was taken away from the harshness of the real world around me and dropped into a world far, far away. That night when I slept, I dreamt of wizards and elves.
In reading, I found solace and calm. I found a place to hide when reality grew too harsh to handle. I immersed myself in the world of the story and forgot all about this world with it’s accidents and fighting.
That is the great power of a story. Any story. To take us away, to show us places we’ve never been or never could be. To help us see a world, any world, through someone else’s eyes.
In reading that night, and many nights since, I found a place to hide.
At least for little awhile.
Nine characters, five stories, one marriage.
Can one writer save them all?
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Unfinished
By Amy Snyder
Fiery Seas Publishing
Women's Fiction
July 25, 2017
Mirabelle is a writer who just can't finish any of the stories she starts. When her twins leave home for college, they take with them Mirabelle’s sense of identity. As she strives to adjust to her empty nest she is visited by someone unexpected: a character from the very first novel she ever attempted to write.
Characters from all of her unfinished works begin to materialize in her home, in her car, at her job. They talk, yell, and some even throw things at her. Mirabelle can see them, smell them, touch them and though she knows they’re not real, she can’t help but engage them. She created them, after all. They become part of her daily life and she finds herself alternating between hiding them from and sharing them with her almost-always-doting husband, Alex.
Some of Mirabelle’s characters are like good friends, encouraging her to finish something she’s started. Others manipulate her for their own needs and story lines. Good and bad, these characters are part of her and Mirabelle discovers she needs to both fix and finish them before they destroy her life, her sanity, and her marriage.
About the Author:
Amy Snyder began writing when she realized the strange things that happened in her imagination were far more interesting than the things that happened in her real life. After earning her degree in Radio, Television, and Film from Northwestern University, she worked at a financial brokerage house, a nationally published magazine, an advertising agency, and most recently, an elementary school as a Math Tutor, Substitute Teacher, and Library Paraprofessional.
But she’s always been a writer.
Amy lives in Glastonbury, Connecticut with her husband, two teenage children, and two cats. While she has been known to talk out loud to the characters she’s writing, she hasn’t had an actual hallucination…yet.
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