Athena Grayson

Life, Act Two: Stress Is A Language

Stress is a language your body uses to tell you many things. You should learn to speak it, and listen when it speaks. It has much to tell you about yourself–and about others.

Life, Act Two-sdays: Second Adulthood

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the series I’m working on right now. The WinterJacked series masquerades as a paranormal romance, a romantic fantasy, or a contemporary chick-lit/women’s fiction hybrid. It doesn’t seem to live comfortably in any of these genres, though, because its genre hasn’t caught on yet. I’m talking about the peculiar […]

Life, Act Two-sdays: Infrastructure

Infrastructure. Most people think, “roads and bridges” when they hear the word. When you’re into Act Two on the stage of life, infrastructure is the knowledge that those stationary set-pieces will be doing double-duty, serving as sketch-definitions of many spaces in which you tell your story. By the time Act Two rolls around, you have seen […]

Life, Act Two-sdays: Tragi-Comedy

Ever notice how most “serious” films, “important” books, and “hard-hitting” media tend to be depressing in nature? They either feature terrible people doing rotten things, or awful things happening to good people for no good reason. I have to wonder why? Why is senseless death so much more “keepin’ it real” than, say, the triumph […]

Life, Act Two-sdays: Love The One You’re With

One of the liberties granted to me by entering Act Two is that I’m no longer so aggressively marketed to as I once was. Oh, I’m still chased down like a tired fox by a pack of starving ad-hounds when it comes to appealing to my motherhood and my skin elasticity, but I’m not so […]

Life, Act Two-sday: All In

Be passionate about something, and whatever that something is, if you’re passionate about it, do it.

Life, Act Two-sdays: Get Out Your Dictionary

The dictionary defines words. The sounds we make have meaning and the dictionary helps to codify that meaning, at least for words. But what about concepts? In the course of moving through Act I, I learned the definitions of some concepts that are Act I-appropriate. Thanks to the onslaught of marketing nonsense aimed towards young […]

Life, Act Two-sdays: Childish Things

“When I was a child, I spoke as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things.” 1 Corinthians 13:11 One near-certainty of Act Two is the assumption that we should be beyond “childish things.” But which childish things? And who […]