Ringing In 2021 Quotes

I like to say the idea of Phantasma came to me all at once, hitting me like a ton of bricks one cloudy afternoon in November 2021, but truly, my experience with obsessive-compulsive disorder has been building to this story for a very long time. During the process of brainstorming the sort of adult romance I wanted to debut with, I was going through a period where my obsessive-compulsive tendencies were flaring up more than usual and the voices in my head were getting a little too bold. To my friends, these compulsions were alarming little anecdotes over lunch—‘that sounds like a horror movie’ one of them said (affectionately)—which is funny because, to me, someone who has lived with OCD my entire life, it was just another day of being unfazed by the increasingly creative scenarios my mind likes to conjure. OCD has such a wide range of symptoms that it makes every person’s experience with it different. Unfortunately, it has also become a commonly misused term conflated with the idea of being overly neat and clean, when in reality a lot of people with OCD have much darker symptoms. In my experience this has made explaining the real effects of OCD very hard as well as making it more difficult for people to regard the condition seriously. It’s so important to me to convey, with the utmost sincerity, that I know people are not doing this to be malicious! Because of the misuse of the term, however, some of the ways this disorder is shown in this book may come off as exaggerated or dramatic—but the details of Ophelia’s OCD are drawn directly from experiences that I, or someone I know who shares my condition, have had first-hand. And it’s still only a fraction of the symptoms we live with daily. Ophelia’s story is a love letter to my journey of getting comfortable being in my own head (as well as my adoration for Gothic aesthetics and hot ghosts). And while her experience with OCD, my experience with OCD, might look a lot different to someone else’s, I hope that the same message rings clear: struggling with your mental health does not make you unworthy of love. And I hope the people you surround yourself with are the sort of people who know that, too.

When I was writing The Between during that tumultuous time after Hurricane Andrew, I wondered if a white supremacist as the story’s villain might feel too “old fashioned.” I naively thought perhaps the sacrifices of my parents and the people they worked with in the civil rights era had created a world where the violent racism referenced in my book might not ring as true. Then the Oklahoma City bombing happened the same year The Between was published, carried out by white supremacist Timothy McVeigh. In 2016, Donald Trump was elected president, and white supremacy and racism gained prominent voices from the highest level of the United States government. On January 6, 2021, armed insurrectionists took over the U.S. Capitol to try to invalidate the presidential election—in large part because they did not want Black votes counted. Like

With the exception of Ghislaine Maxwell, who went on trial for sex trafficking in late November 2021, none of the accused participants in the Epstein ring have been indicted. The

The Unanswered Question by Stewart Stafford Ask a body why it lies in a grave, And no answer shall ring in your ears, Ask the rat that squeaks like a knave, And there is nothing to ease your fears. See lightning's fiery eye wink a hint, Hear thunder belching out proud, Hail is flicked off like lint, Dumb as a corpse in its shroud. Mourners do splutter and cry, In unison or solitary grief, Hysteria governs their reply, Tongues pocketed by sorrow's thief. Only when you lay in dirt senselessly, Do answers come out of reach, Secrets clouded eternally, To an owl's shrill and wise screech. © Stewart Stafford, 2021. All rights reserved.