Sew Melissa Writes

For being a perfect stranger, Wren had never been gladder to see the husband and wife walk in on Christmas eve and be seated in the tables she was assigned to. He looked frail and walked a bit slower but seemed healthy. She looked concerned but still was smiling brightly as if the world was all fine and dandy for her. Wren dropped off the tray she was carrying and rushed directly to their table.  "Hey! How are you feeling?"  He sighed. "Like I'll die if I have to eat another plate of hospital food, never mind my ticker." He chuckled and picked up the menu. "Sam, remember..." His wife ticked the menu down with her finger. "The diet."  "Yes, I remember." He sighed. "I'll take the chicken salad, no dressing, with water."  Wren smiled and scribbled it down.  His wife looked over her menu. "Pulled pork sandwich with macaroni and baked beans, and sweet tea, please."  Wren wrote it down. "Your daughters didn

The Christmas season was one Wren never looked forward to. Being an atheist meant she could have found much better ways to spend the month of December than listening to Jingle Bells  and Silver Bells  and the annoying little bell over the door in the restaurant where she worked.  But there were some days when she genuinely hated the month all the more so for the impatient, rude customers who seemed to think that Christmas was their perfect excuse to demand quicker service and a better attitude from her at the end of her shift- and this went double-time for the Sunday crowd. Wren was used to the church people coming in droves on Sundays, and they were, for the most part, decent tippers, even if those tips often came wrapped in those little papers throwing a fiery hell and peaceful heaven in her face. She could tolerate them long enough to give a fake smile and pick up the cash they left for her.  However, today was not one of those days.  On the first Sunday of the month, just as all th

Let's just start with... no, that isn't my dog. It's a stock photo. Y'all know I'm a cat person. Writer's block is so  fun.  Especially the kind that lasts, y'know, months. I've been in a creative writing freeze since probably December. I tried to do some minor writing on several books, but it just wasn't working.  Then I kind of figured out that I wasn't going places or doing things to give me new ideas, and the lack of interaction with people meant my people writing abilities were diminished down to a speck of dust on the bottom of a vault floor.  Not fun. Thankfully, I've been getting out more, doing more, and I'm slowly building up steam again! It's taking time but I wrote an entire chapter in one night, and it wasn't even horrible when I read it again.  There are plenty of days where my mind has plenty of idea and I have plenty of time to write, but I still don't, and that's okay, too. It's better for me to write

Fondest greetings to you all. I have written you an opera  a tutorial! * Nods towards my Phantom of the Opera loving readers* As my friends will know, I have been scouring the internet looking for a good (free) CCW purse pattern for a while now, and so far, my searches have been fruitless. Unless one is willing to pay an arm and a leg for a pattern, the only other option was to pay two arms and a leg to order a CCW purse. Seeing as I need both arms and legs I currently possess, that wasn't happening, and I had to create a third option:  Altering a pattern.  Now, I love  altering patterns, and though it gets frustrating, I enjoy the challenge. I had made Swoon's Ethel Tote before (though I hadn't made it exactly according to the pattern that first time) and really liked the pattern, and since finding free purse patterns I like is almost as difficult as finding a free CCW purse pattern, I decided to use it. I already had a basic knowledge of the pattern, i

I know, I know, you're thinking, long time no write, Melissa!   Well, I didn't want to write without having something worth writing about, and since this is a bookish blog, it had to be... bookish, you know, and I didn't have anything bookish to write about.  Until I thought of one of my favorite pastimes: comparing books to their movie and TV counterparts!  Now, normally, I'd just complain about how inaccurate the costumes were or how poorly the book was 'updated' to be made into a script, but today, I'm just going to compare the basics of Jane Eyre  and its film versions.  Jane Eyre  was introduced to me by my bestie up in Maine a couple years ago. I had heard of it many times, but hadn't read it, and she assured me I would love it. She was correct. I read the book twice back to back, and still enjoy reading the book again to find little snippets I missed the last time I read it.  You might have already known the book's synopsis,

I should have known it would happen one day. See, it all started last night. I was getting some more e-books- the good, free, clean kind, you know?- and then it all broke out. A war among my to be read books. The devotional books started praying that this would all end soon, and began compiling comforting words for the fallen in battle. The poetry books began writing eulogies for their lost comrades. The advice books tried to get everyone to sit down and talk out their differences, but one karate book slipped in the mix and suddenly HEE-YA! The dictionary and thesaurus began compiling a list of correctly spelled ways to surrender. The crime novels started organizing the perfect crime to get rid of the competition. The romance novels started fainting and crying for a knight in shining armor. The cookbooks... well, actually, the cookbooks were busy trying to make their way into the kitchen for the feast that would be prepared after the fight. The conspiracy theorist b

For the most part, Jerusha didn't like it when people read over her shoulder. Oh, sure, she tolerated it but she didn't like  it. She could understand when necessity required it, but she couldn't enjoy the feeling of eyes scrutinizing her works as they happened. But for her favorite fan, she didn't mind. Jerusha's sister, Ann, was one of the few- nay, the Only- person given leave to read as Jerusha wrote. Why this started and how it became accepted, Jerusha knew not, but her sister enjoyed it, and often was helpful, so she was given exclusive rights to read what the world had not yet seen. Then the day came when Jerusha turned Ann loose with her writings, permission granted that she could read (and perhaps spell check) the efforts of many evenings spent straining her eyes at a computer screen. Ann was giddy and carefully censored any words that might even slightly be thought of as criticism of her older sister's writings. Thus how she won over Jerusha to