Chapter 17: Connection vs. Attachment (I’ll find a better title for this chapter soon)

With less than a week to research and write the article, Jane decided she’d better get busy experimenting, trying out a few of the connection techniques she had researched, putting them to the test, and observing how well they worked.
It’ll be fun! she told herself, though it didn’t all turn out that way.

She began by saying hello to various strangers she passed in the street on her way home and observing their reactions.

“Hi,” she said as she passed a man in his 30’s, maybe ten years older than her. “Nice jacket.”
The man stopped in his tracks, looked her up and down, then said hello back and asked for her number.
“Sorry,” Jane replied apologetically, feeling flustered but thinking fast on her feet. “It’s just that my boyfriend has the same jacket, and I couldn’t help but admire it.”
The man looked slightly deflated, but nodded and turned away.

Oops, she thought to herself. Some of these techniques work a little too well! I’d better dial back the research a notch.

She reached the portal of her apartment building with no further misadventures, and stopped at the mailboxes to see if anything interesting had arrived.

“Hi,” she said absentmindedly to another resident who was extracting a few envelopes and a stack of junk mail from his own box.

“Hello,” he replied cheerfully. He shuffled his stack of mail into his left hand, then held out his right toward her. “I’m Chase, by the way. I just moved in.”

Jane shook his hand and looked up at his friendly face. Their eyes locked, and suddenly…she couldn’t look away. It felt like he had turned on a tractor beam and would not release her. It took her a moment to gather her wits and make her mouth function again. “I’m Jane,” she sputtered. “I’m up in 3C.”

“2D,” Chase replied, still clutching her hand lightly.

Jane had taken self defense classes, and the moves to twist Chase’s arm behind his back and utterly disable him flashed through her mind, but she had never learned a defense against his tractor beam gaze.

Then, out of nowhere, it struck her. It hit her hard, right in the chest, somewhere near her heart. A sharp inner pain there made her gasp slightly, and she withdrew her hand abruptly and finally managed to look away from his piercing gaze.

“Gotta go,” she said lamely, slamming her mailbox shut and heading for the stairs. Usually, she took the elevator, but she couldn’t stand the thought of waiting for it to arrive. She only wanted to get away from Chase and figure out what just happened to her!

Had he slipped her some diabolical toxin through their handshake? Was she about to pass out, or curl up and die, or transform into some disgusting alien creature designed to join him on his quest to take over the world, starting with some random Chicago apartment building?

No, probably not, Jane reasoned, but the pain persisted and she made her graceless exit as fast as she could go.

The post 1-2-3 Connect appeared first on Utah Fast Fiction.

The series begins with Courage, Love and the Meaning of Christmas. Follow Spencer and friends as he searches for the meaning of life, strives to learn audacity and change the course of his life, follows his inner knowing, faces life-threatening emergencies, and rolls with plot twist after plot twist from chapter one all the way to the final sentence.

Order from Amazon at bit.ly/artheart1
Now also available in audiobook! at adbl.co/3oSUG4c

Book 2, The Perfect Gift, happens one year later a week or two before Christmas. A lot has changed since book 1, but not nearly as much as is about to! This year, it’s Spencer’s roommate Ski’s turn for a miracle, and boy does he ever need one! As the plot once again twists the characters around in circles, keeping readers guessing about exactly how everything will turn out, you’ll learn about following your heart, healing, hope, and more.

Order from Amzon at bit.ly/artheart2
and very soon to be available in audiobook!

Book 3, The Art of Heart, is the grand finale, and it truly is grand, in so many ways! A lot more is about to change before all loose ends finally get wrapped up satisfactorily – and then some! You will love the characters, the character arcs, and all the insights about living with heart, forgiveness, and taking another chance. Oh, plus more life-threatening disaster to spice things up.

Order from Amazon at bit.ly/artheart

The post The Art of Heart Christmas trilogy appeared first on Utah Fast Fiction.

I found this book years ago and LOVE it, and wanted to pass it along to all other aspiring writers.

It’s MORE than just a thesaurus of positive traits, it ALSO includes a REALLY INTERESTING forward section explaining character arcs to help design your whole plot. Very helpful. Very concise and readable.

Get yours from Amazon at bit.ly/ptraitthes

Even if you don’t want to buy the whole thing, download the free sample and get a lot of the value!

While you’re at it, also check out the Negative Trait Thesaurus: bit.ly/ntraitthes

And the Emotion Thesaurus: bit.ly/emotiont

Okay, fine, you don’t want to read a post on UtahFF.com without a short story. Here’s a super-super-super-quick one for you:

Once upon a time, a hard-working, diligent, industrious, tireless, indefatigable, unrelenting writer ordered The Positive Trait Thesaurus, which saved her so much time and energy that she also took up water skiing, basket weaving, and even earned a degree in Russian.

The End.

Yeah, I know, that was the worst short story ever. Aren’t ya glad it was so short?!

The post Awesome writer’s thesauri appeared first on Utah Fast Fiction.

Okay, so they’re not entirely fiction. They’re MOSTLY not fiction. But I did expand on the backstories of our patients, details I couldn’t possibly know, in order to set the scene and make the stories seem all the more real. So I don’t feel bad about advertising them on this site :).

Get your copy from Amazon at bit.ly/rescuestories , and here’s a chapter for your enjoyment while you wait for your book to arrive:

Chapter 48: The Body

I was working from home when the pager went off at 11:30 on a Thursday morning in April. 02-02-69 – code for River-Provo-Missing Person. I changed quickly and jumped in the car.

A motorized wheelchair had been found tipped over near the river’s edge. We didn’t know if someone had fallen – either accidentally or intentionally – into the river. While Provo PD and Tom followed up on clues and leads, we began a thorough search of the river.

Lookouts were stationed on bridges to peer through the turbid water. Fishermen lining the shore were told about the search and asked to let us know if they saw anything. One of them had just been rescued from Utah Lake the weekend before and voiced his strong support for our efforts.

My team started at the lake and searched the shoreline for a body caught up in branches. Once we finished our area, we jumped into the river and floated down in case a different view would reveal something we missed.

The Provo ran as high and fast as I had ever seen it. A long, wet winter piled some stations above the Provo River drainage with over 150% of normal precipitation and climbing. Water managers emptied mountain dams as quickly as possible to make room for the anticipated spring run off.

Boats and watercraft passed us as they made their way up river on their search.

After completing our assignment and checking the jetty protruding a hundred yards into the lake, Darin drove us a mile up river and had just dropped us off for another floating search when a request came over the radio.

“We need more people in dry suits up here,” Tom said. “We may have something.”

Our ride turned around and we climbed back into the pickup for a quick lift up the river trail. We grabbed ropes, webbing and ‘biners from deputies to build a rope system across the river if needed.

The current upstream ran much faster than what we had searched near the river mouth. The lake began to dam up the river there and it ran deeper and slower. Here, it swept by dramatically, and floating down it would very likely wrap anything or anyone around a strainer – a log or stick in the current – that would prove next to impossible to escape.

Lucky for us, the white object – about the size of a t-shirt – that glowed eerily two or three feet below the water’s cloudy surface had caught against a log that divided the swift current from a shallow eddy. Four of us waded carefully to the protected side of the log and peered down.

“What do you think?” asked Swiftwater Sergeant David Lynton.

“It feels like a body,” assured Chris, one of the two team members who had already investigated, poking the body with a stick like an avalanche probe. Curiosity then got the best of him and he leaned over the log and down into the water. His eyes widened and he exclaimed, “I think I’ve got a hand!”

With a grip on the body, Chris didn’t want to let go and risk losing it. At the same time, we knew better than to simply pull. We stood no chance of winning a tug of war with the river once the body was dislodged from whatever hung it up. The river would rip it from our grip and we’d have to begin the search all over again.

Having already searched for three hours, there was no urgency to extract the body. This would not be a rescue but a recovery, and caution and safety was the name of the game.

Someone on shore tossed us the end of a throw bag rope and David reached down to attach it to the body. As soon as he bent into the river, however, the water pressure against his arms threatened to knock him over.

“Hurry,” Chris admonished, “my hand’s going numb.”

“Steady me,” David requested. “The current keeps shoving me too close to Chris’ whining.”

We grabbed onto his PFD and held him in place while he wrapped the rope several times around the body – what must have been the wrist – to hold it fast. At last we were ready to pull it free. Even if the current caught it now, we had fifteen feet to pull it into the eddy before the current swept around the next set of strainers.

Chris and David tugged on the rope and up came not a body, but half a body.

By the look of it, it had spent several months in the river. Its skin was bleached white, and large eyeballs protruded from their sockets.

Also, it was a goat.

The hand Chris thought he felt turned out to be the roof of its mouth. We joked about notifying next of kin and dragged it from the river.

We soon got word that the wheelchair’s serial number had led to the owner, who informed us that it was stolen the previous weekend. The thief had probably gotten tired of it (or the batteries wore down) and abandoned it near the river. The entire search had been a wild goat chase.

To read the rest of the stories, get your copy from Amazon at bit.ly/rescuestories

The post 75 Search and Rescue Stories appeared first on Utah Fast Fiction.