Stress brings thoughts to my mind, and those thoughts bring guilt, which causes stress… but life goes on — It seems my mind is in a place where it needs to do some deep thinking. No, who am I kidding?! My mind doesn’t have a mind of its own, even though I sometimes think it has. Are you still following? Because I think I'm getting myself confused. I wrote…

The home for all fictional and non-fictional stories of five chapters or more (last update: 19.03.2023) — As many of you might have noticed, once a week I post a chapter of the series, Thirteen Years. I publish that series on ‘Serial Stories’, a publication I created a couple of months ago. Why Serial Stories? I used to post the chapters for Thirteen Years with a different publication, but there…

Finding your way through my ever-growing content — I started publishing stories on Medium in February 2021, and with my ever-growing content, those stories needed some kind of index. Before 15 September 2023, the date of the last update, I had my index in this post, adding links to my different lists. But, I wanted it to look…

Several tips to edit your shorter stories, but which also work for those longer ones — There is a big difference in writing a story of less than fifteen hundred words, as opposed to a story of three or ten thousand words, or even a full novel. With shorter stories, the trick lies in getting your reader engaged in the story quicker. …

We didn’t talk every day, not even every week, but always stayed interested in each other — I joined the medical corps at the end of 1989, and was stationed in the personnel office of a military hospital. Back then, every office had a mixture of uniformed and civilian personnel. …

They say ‘The Lord giveth, the Lord taketh away’, and in my life I had one beautiful, yet sad, example of that. No, this is not a piece about religion, but about life’s strange ways… — On Sunday morning, 13 February 1983, the phone in our hallway rang, and my father answered. My bedroom was closest to the phone, and since we were just back from church, I was in there, taking off my Sunday dress and getting into something more casual. …

Shadows Of Mayday #43: Saying goodbye #2: One by one their loved ones bury the victims — Start reading here Series: Shadows of Mayday Several personal stories of people boarding the same plane, which crashed in the Namib desert on the coast of Namibia…marierebelle.medium.com On the same day of Kaitlyn’s funeral service, Anthony was buried on the farm of his parents in The Free State, one of the nine South African provinces.

The first time she woke up with this feeling, she didn’t recognize it. The next time, she did. — Lips moved, but no words broke the silence of the night. An arm jerked, but the covers kept it from flying aimlessly. Eyes rolled from side to side, seeing images on the inside of her closed lids. A low moan broke the silence in the room. She awoke with the…

Sensual and erotic stories had been my default genre for a long time — I was fourteen when I wrote my first sensual story. I say sensual, because I cannot brand that one as ‘erotic’, despite it being too spicy for a fourteen-year-old. It hinted at sex, but never described or discussed the act. After that, I had written nothing for years. The next…