Sunday Brunch Blog - 11/17/2013

Hey Sunday Brunch lovers! I can’t tell you how thrilled I was by how many of you actually spent time thinking about what Disneyland ride you’d want to live in! I thought I was the only one who wanted to live in the Haunted Mansion or Pirates of the Caribbean.

Coincidentally, my son went to Disneyland last night with his friends, and I had such a pang of envy. I guess I really am still kind of in love with Disneyland. I miss the days when I had an annual pass, and if I wanted to I could just go on a weekday afternoon and walk the kids around in a stroller, have a snack, watch a parade, and feel like a special part of a really unique fantasy world.

Last week’s winner? Jess1

Here’s how my Sunday Brunch Blog works:  I invite a couple of your favorite authors to my blog and ask them a question. Sometimes my questions are silly, sometimes they’re thought-provoking.

My guests will share their answers with me and you, gentle readers, can give your answer to my question in the comment section below. I’ll choose one random person from the comments and reward them with an ebook surprise, it’s that simple!

Tell me what your answer to today’s question would be in the comments, and you could win an e-book!

This weeks question is:

What is your deepest, darkest desire?

Cause I’ve got it right here

What is my deepest, darkest desire?

Sh… you have to promise not to tell. It’s evil, I tell you. Evil. The height of decadence. Enough unmitigated desire to make you queasy. I swear.

So, you guys remember The Brady Bunch?

You do?

Remember Alice, the Maid?

I want Alice. To come work for me. And clean my kitchen and my bathroom and cook my food and remind me when I have appointments and to live in the upstairs and have no life so she can help my house look beautiful and my kids have clean clothes and my husband to never have to come home and raid the snack corner because I haven’t gotten dinner ready either.

*nods vigorously * Yup! *shudders * A clean kitchen. That’s sexy enough to have sex on! Oh my God! *fans self * Uh-huh. The very thought of it makes me hot. I’m going to go have some private time…

And then I’m gonna start dinner! — Author Amy Lane

Pre-order Christmas Kitsch at Riptide!

My deepest darkest desire…

I want to move to Catalina Island.

I know. Probably not what you were expecting. In fact, kind of ordinary run-of-the-mill fantasy, right? Wanting to move to a desert island? But…it’s not for the Mai Tais and the balmy ocean breeze. Well, I don’t object to those things, but that’s not the main attraction.

The main attraction is specific to Catalina. Have you been there? It’s like a trip back in time, a trip back to the 40s and 50s. In some ways, it’s like a living museum. It’s small, it’s isolated, it’s well-preserved. Like me.  They have jazz festivals and film festivals and art festivals. They have buffalo and rain and oarfish.

The water around Catalina is some of the most polluted in the state.  And there may or may not be a problem with teenage gangs. It’s expensive to visit and it sounds even more expensive to try and live there.

I don’t think they have a real bookstore and the theater is only open one night a week. But it has that giant old casino. And lots of watering holes. And very few people for half the year.

You can hear the seals at night. And the ocean. You can see flying fish.

A tsunami is eventually going to wipe the whole place out.

I want to run an annual writing retreat there. I hope it doesn’t take place during a tsunami.

So why is my wish to live on Santa Catalina a “dark” desire? For the same reason everyone’s wish to move to a desert island is a bit dark. Because a large part of that wish is the desire to escape, to isolate oneself. Myself. Not just for a vacation. All the time. Maybe that’s partly the reaction to a job where inevitably I spend so much of my life on line and on stage. Maybe it’s the desire to escape from responsibilities and the demands of being an adult. Maybe it’s not so sinister, maybe I’m just longing to remove myself from the modern, busy world and slip into a slower pace, step back…and then back again. But there’s no denying I like the idea of being out of touch, hard to reach. I’m afraid JohnDonne had it right:

No man is an island,

Entire of itself,

Every man is a piece of the continent,

A part of the main.

And speaking of deep, dark desires, how about a jolly little story about recovering from addiction? Alcohol addiction in this case. — Author Josh Lanyon

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Sunday Brunch Blog - 11/17/2013