I am an artist and this is my garden of words. Copyright @2015, All Rights Reserved

A young woman who was always the life of the party, quick to tell a joke, always smiling and happy, tragically dies at age 23. What her mother found after her death reflected a much different young woman, her poetry. Her words showed a young woman crying out to feel loved, wanted, beautiful and worthy. Struggling to accept herself as the wonderful, happy, beautiful young woman everyone else saw her as. Her words reflect the pain and torment she allowed another to cause her. It is her mother's most heart felt desire to reach even one young person struggling to accept themselves. To encourage them to open up and talk to someone, to know they are never alone, to know their feelings are validated. She also hopes to reach a mother that perhaps feels her daughter is perfect and completely in charge of her life, as mothers often do. After reading her poetry, hopefully it will facilitate conversation, confirm unconditional love and help to end words that a mother never hears. I am her mother and these are her words.

There are summers...and then there are summers. Nathaniel has been friendzoned by Jimmy Jacobs FOREVER. Jimmy, beautiful, reckless and more than insane, has never given him a second thought. Still, he was sure that given enough time, things would change between the two of them. And one particular summer, they did. Set against a hot summer full of roadtrips and teenage madness, Chasing Nirvana is a coming-of-age story that attempts to get answers to a burning question: How do we find something worth living for?

Summer Jacobs knew full well about her town’s tradition. Every year at the end of the summer, a party would be held on school grounds without the knowledge of the parents or the teachers. It had been happening since before Summer was born and never once was anyone the wiser. This year however, everyone was going to find out. Summer had planned a weekend of alcohol, bad decisions and horrendous photo’s which she would later un-tag herself from on Facebook. A whole weekend with her friends at the biggest party of the year, without any worries or parents telling her what to do. So how she ended up trapped in the school with a deranged psycho killing her classmates off one by one, she will never know. It wouldn’t have been as bad if she was trapped on her own. She would have been happier to face the lunatic solo rather than be trapped with a guy who kept using the life or death situation to make passes at her. His theory was being so close to death should definitely loosen her up, and by ‘loosen up’ he definitely meant ‘get naked.’ Along with his friends who between them had the IQ of a baby tree stump, an outcast who probably still had Spiderman bed sheets and the cheerleaders who were more worried about all the blood staining their new white jeans, they had to somehow make it out of there alive. And to think, Summer’s biggest worry that weekend was waking up with a brutal hangover… ©makeandoffer

"Go ahead," I said, backing up against the pink wall of the shop. "Do something other than glare at me." I waited. One, two, three seconds... and nothing. I raised my chin at him. "You're boring me, mute boy." He stepped closer. Leaned toward me as his gaze burned into mine. Then... ❀ ❀ ❀ After three months in juvenile detention, it's time for Romy Pereira to help out with her family's flower shop. And it's not all bad... until they hire Jack Michel to work beside her. He doesn't speak, communicating with glares and scowls instead of words, and seems to be more interested in literal rocks than other human beings. And with an ex-convict mother, her friends drifting away, and the flower shop falling apart, the last thing Romy wants to deal with is Jack's attitude. She'll forever praise the day he screws up big time and gets himself fired, but until that day comes, it's mostly one cold-hearted girl, her silent (but still infuriating) coworker, and a whole lot flowers. [word count: 100k] [originally written in 2014-2015; re-write completed 2020-2021] ❀ Rankings ❀ #1 in #badgirl #1 in #goodboy #1 in #flowershop #1 in #sociopath