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NEW RELEASE! Troll Gurl and the Cursed Kingdom

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Troll Gurl is my attempt at writing a fairy tale. I don’t know if it was too much of ABC’s Once Upon a Time or reading Gabaldon’s Outlander, but this is just how Ginny and Jeremie’s story presented itself to me. I’m calling it new adult, but really it is the story of her entire life, from birth to age twenty. It could almost be young adult, except for the gratuitous sex scene (as is the case with all my books).

I had some issues I wanted to explore in this book, and I guess it was easier for me to do if a fantastical element was involved, where they all lived in a time so far removed from my own. But human nature is the same, no matter time or place.

I wanted to do something close to traditional romance writing with The Riley Sisters, to see if I could do it. And I think I, more or less, accomplished that, adding my own flair. But it left all the heroines feeling whole AFTER or BECAUSE they found their man. Don’t get me wrong, I love to read that kind of story. But in Troll Gurl, I made a conscious effort to make Ginny grow to be a full, satisfied person before she finds love in her life. Was I successful? Well, only you can be the judge of that! While the prince does save Ginny’s life in this book, she reciprocates by saving his as well.

This is my fourth book published in just under two years. I often regret not publishing sooner in my life. I always took writing seriously, but for personal pursuits such as a dream journal, amusing myself & my friends, and keeping my sanity. But really, in those years I was accumulating the experiences I write about now. So, if I am honest with myself, I never really lost anything. It was all a gain. But knowing how much those experiences hurt at the time, it is hard to look back on them with a positive light. They still try to dim the brightness.

There are five poems in the book that separate it into five sections. They were not written specifically for this book, but they fit so well you will think that they were. I pulled them from my archives, with dates ranging from 1994-2013.

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From the broken mind of Jennifer Friess, the joining of hearts & souls…
NOW AVAILABLE! Troll Gurl and the Cursed Kingdom

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Dreams – Part Two (Adventures in Dreamland)

To read about the evolution of my dream journal, please read Dreams – Part One (Dream Journal) https://imnotstalkingyou.com/2012/11/01/dreams-part-one-dream-journal/

When I dream about home, I most often dream about the trailer I lived in between the ages of 8 and 23.  The other night I even dreamed that my son was there, which is really weird because that place is long gone.  My son has never been there.  He wasn’t even a glimmer in my eye last time I was there.

This where i am when I dream of home. The saddest picture ever. I came of age in that home, and then it was just pulled out to the curb to be sold for best offer.


I also dreamed I had to grab my son and hide with him under the bathroom sink in the half (more the size of a quarter) bath because mobsters were coming to shoot us.  (The whole time, I kept thinking in the dream, “Was there really enough room for me to hide under that sink?”)  When I woke up, I was scared of the mobsters with guns blazing, of course, but not surprised.  I have dreams of people with guns chasing me every so often.

Illustration from my dream journal about my recurring wrist dream.


The first dream I can ever remember having was also one of the few recurring dreams I have ever had.   That was when I was really young – 4 or 5.  In my dream I was wearing my blue hooded sweatshirt and running away from bad guy sin a big grey factory.  There were big tanks and all sorts of walkways from the ceiling.  The bad guys saw me and shot me. I help up my wrist and there was just a hole through it with black sides.  No blood, not a realistic wound.  I could look right through the hole in my wrist at the bad guys. 

What terrible person would chase this girl through a scary factory and shoot her through the wrist?


Here it is in poem form:

The recurring dream

On a night i no longer remember
i got tucked into bed
covered up my head
and my mind turned on me

they are after me again
gun in hand
faster still i run
till this hole in my wrist is done

my blue-hooded jacket
among all the metal
the metal that passed right through me
without me noticing

they are after me again
gun in hand
faster still i run
till this hole in my wrist is done

fast-moving among the rafters
their steps echoing on the catwalk
thump-thump-thump
like my little heart

they are after me again
gun in hand
faster still i run
till this hole in my wrist is done

ducking behind the giant tanks
doesn’t matter what is in them
maybe it is the blood
that doesn’t flow from me

they are after me again
gun in hand
faster still i run
till this hole in my wrist is done

i can’t see their identities
just dark forms ever-moving
why don’t i stop & face them
the faceless

they are after me again
gun in hand
faster still i run
till this hole in my wrist is done

i’m scared, it’s dark
i run
but it’s all familiar
deep down
it is all a part of me

they are after me again
gun in hand
faster still i run
till this hole in my wrist is done

i’ve got you now
but you can’t protect me
from what only the night can see

they are after me again
gun in hand
faster still i run
till this hole in my wrist is done

i still can’t see
who i was meant to
grow up & be
this life is just a blur to me
as i run

they are after me again
gun in hand
faster still i run
till this hole in my wrist is done

i have a good life
but it is hard to see
looking through this blackened
hole in me

they are after me again
gun in hand
faster still i run
till this hole in my wrist is done

with roots like these
i can’t leave
but still I try to shake free
imagine it all some other way

they are after me again
gun in hand
faster still i run
till this hole in my wrist is done

i want what i don’t have
i don’t have all that I want
i’ll never be satisfied
with this empty hole

they are after me again
gun in hand
faster still i run
till this hole in my wrist is done

it’s eating away at me
still i run further
i can see them chasing me
always chasing me
my most vivid unreal memory
–JLS 05/11/06

I guess maybe that symbolizes my anxieties that I can run, but not hide from.  They continue to pursue me.

I heard a kid in school onetime say that his mother had told him that if you dream the same dream three nights in a row, it will come true.

Shortly after I heard this, I had two dreams about my dad in about four night’s time.  I was so terrified I would have the third dream and it would come true that I couldn’t sleep for several nights.  The third dream never came.

The first dream, if I can remember, was my dad came back and we were talking in the kitchen.  (My dad died before I was born.) He thought I should be happy to see him, but I was really mad.  I was yelling at him that, “It was wrong you weren’t here all those years.  I had to grow up without a dad.  Do you know how terrible that is?  You want me to just forgive you?”

But in the second dream, he wanted to take me away with him and I was no longer angry.  I was asking him questions and was really curious.  I never did give him an answer in that dream.  After I woke up, I was afraid if I had another dream that I would say “yes” and I would die in my sleep in order to go with him.  It scared me very much.

I dream about tornadoes every so often.  The dreams reflect my real life feelings about them.  I am scared to death, but also very fascinated by them.  The thought of a tornado coming for me is terrifying (This time, its personal?).  Yet, the thrill of a tornado warning trip to the basement or watching a storm chaser show on TV is exciting.  (Once my husband and I drove through an area that had been hit by a tornado two weeks earlier.  Not a pretty site.  So devastating.  I couldn’t even bring myself to take pictures.)

I am out of the habit of writing down my dreams nowadays, but this dreams was very “powerful” and, once you read it you will see that it just begs to be included in a blog post. I have used it to show the format for which I record my dreams. (Click the picture to enlarge.)

As I come to the end of this post, I am torn.  Do I go back to a dream journal as a means of greater understanding of self?  Or do I face the fact that I am adult with too many other responsibilities in my life right now?

Hmmm…Maybe I will sleep on it.

I’m not stalking you. is NOW ON FACEBOOK! “Like” that I’m not stalking you and get an update when there is a new post to read. (It is sort of like YOU are stalking ME.)

I am a Shipper, and I didn’t even know it.

I have watched Fringe from the beginning. Sometimes the science-fiction element begins to lose me. But I continued to watch because I like Joshua Jackson. And when it started to look like Olivia and Peter could be love interests, I totally rooted for it. Week after week, I found myself frustrated that the writers teased me, and kept them apart yet again.

I often find myself in this situation. I refer to it as the “Moonlighting Effect”. On Moonlighting, David and Maddie got together in the third season. In that case, it ended up pretty much killing the show. I feel like because of that instance, TV writers across the country are now afraid to ever get their male and female leads together. They are so afraid to lose viewers. Well, I am here to tell you, you will lose viewers if you continue to keep characters apart!

I am also rooting for the leads on Castle and Bones to get together. (On Bones, they finally have—thank God! But I feel totally cheated out of seeing their early relationship: post-sex to birth of baby. Anyone who has been in a relationship knows that the first six months or year together is the most fun and exciting.) I have felt SO passionate about this for years, with many shows. I never dreamed it had a name. Or a presence on the Internet. I just always thought I was being a silly romantic recovering TV addict.

Then in my Entertainment Weekly a few weeks ago, they had an article on “shippers”. I started reading it. I had no idea such a thing existed. I had no idea that I WAS ONE OF THEM!!! According to the article “Just Do It” (click here for a related article), the word shipper is “Derived from the word ‘relationship’, a fan who’s deeply invested in romance – or the possibility of romance – between two characters. Shipping runs the gamut between ‘just having fun’ [to] ‘scary-stalker serious’.” I learned from the article that hardcore shippers talk online about their passion, or even write fan-fiction about it. I don’t go that far. But for the right TV-potential-romance, I could. The only time I ever wrote fan-fiction was for the Fearless series of Young Adult books. (More on Fearless in a future post.)

The article mentioned all the shows I have mentioned above: Fringe, Moonlighting, Castle, Bones. Probably the audience for most of these series are drawn to the tangible “will they or won’t they” element because they lack enough romance in their real lives. Why make the audience suffer more? I can be a control freak. I totally should have become a TV writer like I dreamed, so that I could control all these characters and make them do what I want them to.

I’m not stalking you. is NOW ON FACEBOOK! “Like” that I’m not stalking you and get an update when there is a new post to read. (It is sort of like YOU are stalking ME.)

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