Susan Mary Malone

Almost all writers do other gainful employment to put food on their tables. It’s just a fact of this business, along with most of the arts. The old statistic was that 3{6464318088dfd005ab448827a59cc6b2cc907b812a28fd79b32dfd5dcd883448} of published authors (meaning published by reputable houses) made their living writing. The other 97{6464318088dfd005ab448827a59cc6b2cc907b812a28fd79b32dfd5dcd883448} had another job via which they ate. And […]

Okay, now, this really tweaked me. Researchers from Harvard Medical School and the University of California, San Diego, in a study with the British Medical Journal, found that if you’re happy, thank your friends and family network! The study showed that happiness occurs in a collective group, and then spreads through social networks like a […]

Dreamtime figures into so much of my fiction. I just love dreams, don’t you? I love playing them back and figuring them out and seeing what they’re trying to tell me. I Just Came Here to Dance opens each chapter with a night dream of the main character, each building upon the last until the […]

You know, some days are just annoying. And some, kinda awful. And sometimes, rotty stuff lasts for more than a day or fourteen . . . Despite best efforts, now and then (hopefully only now and then!) a sack of manure gets dropped on your doorstep.  Happens to us all.  And even in the midst […]

Don’t you just love doing so?  When you know that something you did causes someone to smile, caused a burden to lighten, brought a ray of sunshine to a cloudy day.  Isn’t that the coolest thing?  And don’t we all wish we could spread more of it, both to others and ourselves? I read the […]

So of course we all have things we do well and those we don’t—traits and gifts and all those sorts of things.  We’re better at some efforts and try to steer clear of the ones we’re not.  And some of us realize that more clearly than do others. A dear friend of my brothers’ and […]

You know, it just is.  We laugh about that in derogatory terms of folks who know nothing.  But I’m talking about the ignorance of suffering. Life is full of heartache, and none more than when we lose someone we love.  There’s a weird quirk in my brain when that happens, which takes me to the […]

I am the world’s best at shooting my own self in the foot. You know how it is—you’re on the journey, goals in mind, clicking off one task after another, knowing you’re getting somewhere, and all of a sudden you make some bone-head move that sets you back, oh, about fifteen years.  Or so it […]

We hear this word batted about all the time—or at least I do.  Maybe it’s because my life in just about all aspects revolves around the arts.  We say a writer has potential.  A book has potential.  A puppy has potential as a show prospect J This of course translates to all vocations and avocations […]

It came to me in a dream, as my stories often do.  Or I should say the glimmer of a dream, shining shards of light cresting a hill.  A hill I knew, or thought I did, remembered from somewhere like a déjà vu whispering from the periphery of the mind. Up an incline, into the […]

Because of course they go together.  Well, not literally at the same time or you might cast your dog into the truck on his blind retrieve (which I saw done once, but that’s a different story.  And yes, alcohol was involved!). But once our training group gets done in the field we uncork the fruits […]

You know how a phrase gets stuck in common vernacular and won’t go away?  Usually those play around for a while and then finally thank god’n greyhound disappear.  But some go on and on and on and on, forever to drive us bonkers! One that drives me nuts started creeping up about ten years ago […]