François I had a huge influence upon the developing French fashion industry — For my inaugural post in my new publication, Fashion Police, I began wondering about the history of fashion design. My passion for designing clothes is fairly new and I’m pretty ignorant on the subject. I can name some 20th-century designers, but go earlier than that and I’m clueless. I began…

Some People are just life’s Victims [5] — Previously Ruth couldn’t fully escape the past, because dreams reminded her of the troubled life she left behind Silence still hung over the house like a blanket when Xander let himself out and unlocked his car. He’d slept in the spare room so as not to disturb Mandy, an arrangement…

I was a reader and a writer before I could read or write. I sat with my mother at four years-old and verbalized stories as she wrote them down. I thumbed through encyclopedias at my grandparents’ house looking at pictures. School progressed, I fortunately became literate, and kept writing short…