Wednesday, November 5, 2014

Back to the Keyboard

Having been away from this blog for several years, I'm happy to be back online. I have plans to update everything pertaining to this blog and website, eventually moving it. And even greater plans for more Chloe Devlin short story collections.

But for now, here are links to various collections that you can purchase with Chloe Devlin stories in them.

From Amazon:

1001 Arabian Slut Slaves in The Journey

Learning Her Lesson in Hot Spanking Stories 4

Let the Punishment Fit the Crime in Show Me the Love

Lorelai's Day of Play in Begging for It

My Lord's Rump in Spank Pants

Office Shenanigans in Do You Trust Me


From Kobo:

1001 Arabian Slut Slaves in The Journey

Company Picnic in Thanks for the Memory"

Hardly Working in Victoria's Secret

Let the Punishment Fit the Crime and My Lord's Rump in Spank Me

Ride A Horse -- Ride A Cowboy in The Rebound Guy


From Barnes & Noble:

1001 Arabian Slut Slaves in The Journey

Company Picnic in Thanks for the Memory

Hardly Working in Victoria's Secret

Learning Her Lesson in Learning Her Lesson

Let the Punishment Fit the Crime in Show Me the Love

Lorelai's Day of Play in Begging for It

My Lord's Rump in Spank Pants

Office Shenanigans in Do You Trust Me

Ride A Horse -- Ride A Cowboy in The Rebound Guy


From Xcite Books website:

1001 Arabian Slut Slaves in The Journey

Company Picnic in Thanks for the Memory

Hardly Working in Victoria's Secret

Learning Her Lesson in Learning Her Lesson

Let the Punishment Fit the Crime in Show Me the Love

Lorelai's Day of Play in Begging for It

My Lord's Rump in Spank Pants

Office Shenanigans in Do You Trust Me

Ride A Horse -- Ride A Cowboy in The Rebound Guy


From Xcite Books website -- the original anthologies:


Naughty Spanking One (in print and ebook)
       Contains:  Hardly Working
                        Ride A Horse -- Ride A Cowboy

Naughty Spanking Three (in print and ebook)
       Contains:  Learning Her Lesson

Seriously Sexy Two (in print and ebook)
       Contains:  1001 Arabian Slut Slaves
                         Company Picnic

Spank Me (in print and ebook)
       Contains: Let the Punishment Fit the Crime
                       My Lord's Rump

Tease Me (in print and ebook)
       Contains: Lorelai's Day of Play

Whip Me (in print and ebook)
       Contains: Office Shenanigans























Friday, October 9, 2009

"Has It Really Been 30 Years?"... or "You Look Great!" - Part III

Continued from yesterday – this is all about the Parkway East 9th Grade 30th Reunion.

I’ve read a couple of recaps and updates with pics of the actual reunion that took place at Llywelyn’s Pub in Webster Groves. From 7pm until after midnight, over 100 classmates teachers and our principal, plus assorted spouses reconnected with names and faces that we hadn’t heard or seen in 30 years.

To say it was an amazing, incredible, mind-blowing night is an understatement. But it was. The years fell away as we laughed and chatted and reminisced. And what was so amazing is that many of the labels that we gave ourselves or were given by others no longer mattered. It was as if they no longer existed. The social barriers just weren’t there because we were one united group of alumni.

I’m not always a social person. I don’t always feel comfortable in large groups or know what to say or talk about. But none of that awkwardness existed for me on Saturday night.

Walking into the private room at Llywelyn’s, I felt like I was on that old toddler show, “Romper Room.” I see Anne and Cindy and Sonya and Kevin and Linda and… the list was endless.

I’m amazed (and yet not) by the wonderful, generous and incredible people that our class has produced. Every story seemed better than the last, yet each one touched me. As I exchanged “catch-up info” with each person, I was stunned anew to realize how truly stupendous my classmates were and are.

I almost don’t want to do an individual recap. I’m afraid my memory will fail me and I’ll forget to mention someone. But if I do, it’s not because I’ve forgotten seeing them, it’s just because my tiny brain can only hold so much at once. While telling my mom and trying to recap, I kept saying, “Oh! And I also saw _____.” So here goes:

I found out many wonderful things about who my classmates are now. For example, Anne Broeder is a vet. Which is not surprising since she was always interested in animals and drawing horses throughout grade school, junior high and high school. And Ellie Grossman has her own web site and column at www.mishegasofmotherhood.com. Cindy Musterman, who I embarrassed by showing a picture of us from summer camp, owns a local college in St. Louis. And the list goes on. I spoke with Laura Keister (who lived 4 houses away from me) and Lisa Fuchs, who went to CA for 8th grade spring break with Holly Johnson, Lucy Jung and myself. There was Julie Bernstein and Jill Spiegelglass. And Stephanie Berin and Lori Oberdorfer. As I continued to move into the room, I talked with Kevin Levin and Leslie Stevens and Crystal Freeman.

I sat down and had a bite with Anne, Cindy and Chrissa Pavlopoulos, who used to work for Boeing. Michele Finbloom joined us – believe it or not, she works with my aunt at OASIS. I was able to catch up with Glen Mitchell and Margaret Shoptaw and David Brown and Andy Brown and Jeff Eissman. I loved talking with Sandy Beringer and helping her look for (and stalk) her first love from junior high.

And then there were the people who I saw, but never had the opportunity to even say hi. The night just wasn’t long enough.

I can’t thank the reunion committee – Kevin Levin, Linda Bloomfield, Sonya Moranz, Ginger Fawcett, Diana Allen – enough. Not just for all their hard work, but for the great conversations and catching up.

As a writer, I should have a multitude of words and adjectives at my disposal to describe that night. They all seem so inadequate.

So I’ll just say that I hope we do this again and twice as many graduates of the Class of ’79 from Parkway East Junior High are there. Go Eagles!

Thursday, October 8, 2009

"Has It Really Been 30 Years"... or "You Look Great!" - Part II

Continued from yesterday – this is all about the Parkway East 9th Grade 30th Reunion.


Friday morning, about 10 of us gathered in the front office of Parkway Northeast Middle School to tour/explore the school. To see if our memories of where things were located were accurate, to see if it was as big as we remember.


It was… and it wasn’t.


Just to walk into the Great Hall where we ate lunch, or the Home Ec room (do schools really still teach Home Ec), or the band room, or the drama room, or the gym… brought back different memories for each of us. Some shared, some individual.


But how poignant it was to walk into the gym and see a Viking painted on the wall instead of an Eagle. Yet a few small traces of the past still remain. Some old red and gold flag football flags and some old sports letters for Parkway East Junior High were found in the gym lockup. Sandwiched between the purple and white wrestling mats in the relatively new small gym were some faded, cracked red and gold mats. And we all oohed and aahed… and wondered if we had flopped on that particular mat.


The building itself had a round circular section with classrooms on the outer edge. In the middle, the library was upstairs and the science department was downstairs.


When we went to school, the downstairs science area as well as some of the classroom areas such as Unified Studies, were large open areas, split only by partitions. Now, they are walled classrooms, most with no windows and only a door. Yet every single one of us had memories of trudging downstairs to go to science class.


We wandered upstairs to the library where I had spent lots of time, looking for and checking out books to read. The passing of time seems to have hit hard. There were far fewer books on the shelves than I remember, yet progress showed with the many computer stations available.


As we continued traversing the circle, we all marveled that while the classrooms themselves seemed smaller, the circle seemed so much larger.


After signing out of the visitors log, our final act was to take a picture in front of the school sign. Yet the sign wasn’t accurate – it didn’t reflect our reality, our memories. So we stood up one of the red and gold mats we’d been given and draped a coat over part of the sign so that you couldn’t see the “North.” It still said “Middle School” instead of “Junior High”, but at least it only said “Parkway East.” We are the Parkway East Junior High Eagles.


While I didn’t go to lunch that day at Culpeppers, I made sure to stop by the informal gathering at the Brick Tavern and Tap that night. I wasn’t sure how many classmates would be there. As it turned out, there were 6 of us. And I couldn’t have imagined a better group. It gave us the opportunity to really talk, catch up, and get to know each other. And I walked out of there, feeling as though I had just made 5 new/old friends.


The actual reunion event wasn’t until Saturday night. I’ll talk about that night in the next post.


Wednesday, October 7, 2009

"Has It Really Been 30 Years"... or "You Look Great!"

My first blog post in over a year and all it took was my 30th 9th Grade Reunion.

“Make new friends, but keep the old.

One is silver, and the other gold.”


A snippet of a song (I’m not sure if it’s from Girl Scouts or summer camp) keeps running through my head. Yet I feel like I made and remade new and old friends this weekend.


It’s been 30 years since the 9th graders of 1979 from Parkway East Junior High said a sad goodbye – to the school, to our friends, even to classmates we didn’t really know. Because Parkway East Junior High was special, different, unique.


Parkway East Junior High and its graduates (especially from 1979) were an anomaly – different from any other Parkway junior high school. See, we didn’t have a corresponding high school. There was never a Parkway East Senior High. So our class of several hundred students split up, some went to Parkway North, others to Parkway Central. Still more to Parkway West and Parkway South.


So instead of seeing people who you went to junior high and high school with at your high school reunion at the 10, 15 and 20th reunions, there always felt like something was missing. Classmates who you shared experiences with weren’t there to reminisce.


I know that the older I get, the more I reminisce. So at my 20th high school reunion for Parkway Central Senior High, I spent lots of time talking about things that happened. But mostly what happened in high school – yet I have certain memories of people, places, classes and experiences that didn’t mean anything to my high school friends who went to Parkway Central Junior High.


I missed my 25th high school reunion because I was at a writers’ conference. However, because of Facebook, I’ve begun reconnecting with old friends. But not just high school friends. I’ve reconnected with old college buddies, youth group friends, elementary school people… and friends and acquaintances from my wonderfully unique junior high.


Not long after the Parkway East Junior High class of 1979 graduated, the district made changes to some of the schools. A name change here, a redistricting there and pretty soon Parkway East Junior High became Parkway Northeast Middle School. And no longer did the students split up and go to different high schools. And no longer were they the Parkway East Golden Eagles with school colors of red and gold. They became the Parkway Northeast Vikings, now linked to Parkway North High School, who wore purple and white and were also the Vikings.


Little by little, every vestige of our past is being erased. As if it never existed.


But we did. We were the Eagles. We wore red and gold proudly. We cheered for our teams, hoping to beat the other junior high teams in sports. We trash-talked against the Colts (Central), the Vikings (North), the Longhorns (West) and the Patriots (South) – yet we knew that the next year, we would become Colts and Vikings and Longhorns and Patriots.


Some months ago, a couple of classmates were sitting around talking and came up with the brilliant idea to have a reunion for our 9th grade class. Between them and the rest of the reunion committee, they planned an unbelievable event.


And this past weekend, we gathered in St. Louis to celebrate a special time in our lives – one that is a unique experience that few have ever (and now will never) experience. Not only did we go back to school – we bypassed high school and went all the way back to junior high – literally and figuratively.


The weekend started out with a tour of the school on Friday morning. Find out how that went in the next post.

Wednesday, September 17, 2008

What's In Your Voice?

Recently, I was told that my voice is more romance than literary. Which wasn’t a big surprise to me. More of a duh moment.

But the comment came from someone who was reading an erotic novella of mine that I thought was a little bit on the edgier side, seeing as it contained some really hot sex and a climactic (pardon the pun) ménage scene at the end.

So I started thinking about my voice and how it fits in with what I’m writing, who is the best publisher for what I’m writing and whether or not I would want to or could even change my voice.

I went looking for definitions of “voice”. And here’s what I discovered.

I consider Barbara Samuel one of the premiere writers of voice as well as an excellent teacher. Every time I’ve ever heard her speak in a workshop I’ve learned something new. And one of these days, I’m going to scrape the money together and experience her voice class at The Girls in the Basement. I love the description she gives for the class –

“…to understand the elements that make her own voice unique… Are you a funny ethnic writers with a thread of poignance? A serious historical novelist with roots deep in a particular time? What influenced you to become a writer and what do you want to get from it? Who taught you to speak, and what have you read and loved? These are all elements of the writer's voice.”

Then, I clicked on link to Scholastic.com and found a lesson plan for teachers about helping students find a strong writing voice. And again, another piece of the pie regarding defining voice fell into my lap.

“I tell my students, ‘You know writing has voice if:

  • It shows the writer's personality
  • It sounds different from everyone else's
  • It contains feelings and emotions
  • The words come to life
  • It comes from the heart”

And of course, there’s also the Wikipedia definition: “Writer's voice is a literary term used to describe the individual writing style of an author. Voice is a combination of a writer's use of syntax, diction, punctuation, character development, dialogue, etc., within a given body of text (or across several works). Voice can also be referred to as the specific fingerprint of an author, as every author has a different writing style.”

Since I didn’t run away crying when I received the critique comment, I figure I’m strong enough to believe in my writing. I might not have the lyrical voice of Barbara Samuel or even the strong voice that Scholastic.com talks about. But I do believe that I have my own voice – and it’s not one that I could easily change. Nor do I wish to.

That’s your voice like? Do you wish you could change it? Do you like it? Let me know.

Tuesday, September 9, 2008

Creativity Comes In All Shapes and Sizes


Creativity comes in all shapes and sizes. I discovered something about myself and my creativity this past weekend when I learned all about creating ATCs (Artist Trading Cards). Up until now, my creativity was limited to writing (I’m a plotter) and counted cross-stitch and various other needlework (all with patterns to follow).

The revelation came when I realized that despite being “creative”, I do prefer to follow patterns and outlines. Learning to make the ATC cards with no outline, no pattern, not even an idea of a theme for my cards, was quite scary.

I sat for a while, contemplating the blank card. All around me, a huge stack of supplies was spread out. My friends, Eden and Sabrina, were busy creating cards. They had shown me some of the basics, using the different types of ink, stamps, and colored pencils. And Eden had shown me some of her previous cards – very intimidating.

And we’re not talking a few stamps or inks – we’re talking A LOT. There were at least 30-40 stamps spread out on the table, with at least that many still in the storage tub. I had my choice of 12-15 different types and colors of ink. And that didn’t include the bags and bags of various types of patterned paper that could be cut and glued to the card. Nor did it take into account a multitude of stickers.

But I finally took a deep breath and plunged right in. In no time at all, I was cutting paper, gluing shiny objects to the cards and muttering to myself.

At the end of the evening, I had three finished ATC cards – in three different sizes. I used different techniques, trying each one out. They’re far from perfect, but to me, they represent a leap of faith in my creative ability. A leap of faith into the unknown, the scary abyss of free-wheeling creativity.

Here they are – for your perusal. Please be gentle with your comments. But I do plan on creating more.




Thursday, September 4, 2008

Thursday Thirteen - 13 New TV Shows

Thirteen Things about Chloe Devlin
13 New TV Shows

1.... My Own Worst Enemy (NBC) - Monday - The division between a suburban father and his superspy alter ego breaks down after an implant in his brain begins to malfunction, leaving his two identities fighting for dominance.

2... The Mentalist (CBS) - Tuesday - A celebrated psychic-turned-detective with a powerful gift for observation investigates crimes for the California Bureau of Investigation.

3... 90210 (CW) - Tuesday - just like the original.

4... Fringe (Fox) - Tuesday - Drama with sci-fi elements following the FBI probe of mysterious deaths aboard an airplane that landed at Boston's Logan Airport. But the deaths aboard Flight 627 are only the beginning of the story. Executive producers include J.J. Abrams ('Lost') and his 'Mission: Impossible III' co-screenwriters, Roberto Orci and Alex Kurtzman.

5... Gary Unmarried (CBS) - Wednesday - A recently divorced man adjusts to being single again after 15 years of marriage while also raising two kids with his controlling ex-wife.

6... Knight Rider (NBC) - Wednesday - Crime-fighting supercar KITT returns in Mustang form in this revved-up retread of the 1982-86 TV series. Here, a jaded ex-army ranger (Justin Bruening) teams up with the souped-up auto in a desperate search for KITT's vanished creator (Bruce Davison). They also gear up to battle criminals out to steal KITT. David Hasselhoff, star of the original show, makes an appearance. Val Kilmer provides the voice of KITT; Deanna Russo and Sydney Tamiia Poitier also star.

7... Life on Mars (ABC) - Thursday - A modern police detective wakes from a coma to find himself working as a cop in 1973, and must readjust to life even as he seeks a way back to his future.

8... The Eleventh Hour (CBS) - Thursday - A top biophysicist is called in by the government to investigate unusual scientific happenings at the 11th hour.

9... Kath & Kim (NBC) - Thursday - A comedic look at the contentious relationship of a dysfunctional mother-daughter duo and their adventures in middle-class suburbia. This American remake is based on the Australian show of the same name.

10... The Ex List (CBS) - Friday - thirtysomething woman revisits past relationships to find her soul mate after a psychic informs her one of them is her future husband, but if she doesn't locate him within a year she is destined to remain single for the rest of her life.

11... Crusoe (NBC) - Friday - A castaway and his native friend endure the perils of living on a deserted island in this adaptation of Daniel Defoe's classic novel.

12... Valentine (CW) - Sunday - A family of Greek gods brings soulmates together, while keeping their true identities as deities a secret.

13... Easy Money (CW) - Sunday - A drama series following a family that runs a high-interest loan business.

Get the Thursday Thirteen code here!

The purpose of the meme is to get to know everyone who participates a little bit better every Thursday. Visiting fellow Thirteeners is encouraged! If you participate, leave the link to your Thirteen in others comments. It’s easy, and fun! Trackbacks, pings, comment links accepted!