Laura Jones ability to write short stories and vignettes fills me with not a little bit of envy!  Mostly I admire the skill and I love scrolling through my LiveJournal Friends’ list to find a snapshot of story.  I’m never sure when I’m reading pure story and when I’m getting a cleverly disguised blog entry.  Are her characters just characters?  What inspired this latest scene?  But you can never just assume that everything is a scene from real life, names changed to protect the not-so-innocent—much like the WFG tagline says, .fictions. reveals truths reality obscures.

It’s hard to focus on any specific storyline, as this is a collection of separate stories rather than a novel or serial tied together by character or place.  The stories most often focus on young women, college aged, like the author herself.  Very often there are intimate portraits of relationships, sometimes bordering on romantic, sometimes painful.  Sexual themes are never told in graphic or lurid terms but some stories leave you with a disturbed, troubled feeling as they touch on unpleasant situations or histories.

The stories about writer’s block are my favorites, as she takes the very moment of frustration and turns it on its head, making a story out of the inability to tell a story.  But no matter what tale, or not-tale, she is telling, I always stop my scrolling to read.

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