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The Anguish of Survival (What Comes After, part 2)

There was a peace by the creek that Iris could sense but not touch. She sat on the rocky overhang, her arms wrapped tight around her legs and her chin nestled in the hollow between her knees, and stared into the water as it wandered its way downstream, ignorant and uncaring of the devastation wreaked on civilisation in the last six months. She so desperately wanted to forget. The faces of the dead flickered before her, pale sweaty cheeks and weeping, crusted eyes and cracked, blood-flecked lips and that expression just before death took them, that moment of recognition and relief that the pain and suffering were finally over. And with the faces came the misery and hatred of being alive, again and again and again, as every person she had ever known, ever met, ever seen, sickened and died horribly and left her alone once more. Maybe it was punishment, retribution for the part she’d played, for her past. She had avoided the sick in the beginning, as everyone had, but as time had gone by a...
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Writing Strong Women

If I were to tell you that I set out on a mission to write strong women, that would be complete and utter bullshit. I started writing when I was quite young - I say eleven, though my mother insists it was earlier. At the time, I was super sick with ME/CFS; though at eleven I was a little better than the preceding few years, in which I spent a lot of my time on the couch, I still wasn't exactly radiating energy and enthusiasm. There wasn't much I could do but read and write - and I did both. I read voraciously, to the point where my mother stopped trying to read ahead for books above my grade level to make sure they were appropriate, and just trusted that I'd let her know if I didn't think I should be reading them. (I did.) My penchant for writing strong but imperfect female characters undoubtedly can at least in part be traced back to my reading material; I read books like Pride and Prejudice , Anne of Green Gables , Little House on the Prairie , Alanna the Lioness ...
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