Overcoming My Fear of Bears (Part I)

Rough-housing teenaged Alaskan brown bears, aka grizzlies!
This is why humans and bears can't play together!
[Photo copyright Linda Jo Hunter]

I’ve had a terrifying phobia of bears all my life. The first time I saw one I was three years old and fell deathly ill. Ironically, my older sister is a bear expert, serving three seasons as a grizzly-viewing guide at a lodge in Alaska and writing a popular book about her experiences. She took this picture at close range. (!!)

Karma? You bet! But decades later in life, I still hadn’t overcome my knee-melting, stomach jolting FEAR at the very thought of bears. Until last week.

A new short story by ME! Only 99 cents!

Hey Everybody! I just published a short story on Kindle for fun, and here's the link to it. It's cheap, too! But a darn good story, I think. :) A love story with a dash of mystery and a hint of metaphysics, of course.

It's called "The Black-Sequined Dress" and if (unlike me) you can remember how to spell sequined, you'll find it on Amazon Kindle if you search for it. Or search for my name. You can actually read a free sample even though it's a short story! Here's the link:
http://www.amazon.com/The-Black-Sequined-Dress-ebook/dp/B00658TOI0
Don't have a Kindle device? No worries. Go to Amazon and download the free Kindle for PC or Kindle for MAC or Kindle for Whatever software and you can read it on another device. (I don't have a Kindle either so I use their software on my PC.)

I'd love to hear your reviews. You can post a comment below. Or even better (especially if you liked it), you can post a review on that empty review section on Amazon! :-D

Warning: You will find some promotional info at the end of the story about my novel *Cosmic Dancer.* It's what we authors must do. Hope you're not offended. You can always skip it, and I promise you will have already gotten your 99-cents worth of story.

Now about that Coffee-Break Tale ... of course it has an unusual back-story. It's me, right? So I was just sitting at a keyboard in California one day in 2003 when someone started telling it to me in my head. The subject matter couldn't have been further from my thoughts.

This was before Joseph and I moved back to the Midwest. It had been 30-some years since I'd lived in southwestern Michigan, and I never ever lived in Indiana. However, my grandfather came from somewhere in the southern reaches of Indiana. As far as I know, this isn't his story. Is it? And my mother's Amish and Mennonite relatives came from northern parts of Indiana, but this doesn't seem to be their story at all.

Yet it definitely feels as if the story were "dictated" to me by someone who needed the tale to be told. I still wonder if they weren't related to my grandfather somehow. And I haven't gotten past the emotions yet, which still affect me no matter how many times I've read it. (Joseph too.) My own story? No, I don't think so ... but ???

But if I say any more, I might give something away ... So--enjoy!