Hello Readers, Writers, and Friends,

Today’s post is rather lean as I have cookies to bake and cheesecake to make so that all is well in hand for Thanksgiving. So have at it as you always do. Comment below with links to where we can see your take on today’s prompts and of course, please share this with all the readers, writers, and friends you know.

Today’s prompts are: letters are returned, former child star

Sometimes I wish life were still like the regency.

When your affections were rebuffed or a friend didn’t want to speak to you anymore they returned your letters.

I know because I played a ten year old in a classic remake of some Jane Austen novel or something. Maybe it was Dickens. i don’t remember.

I just know my line was, “But why did he return your letters?”

Now it’s all digital. Now it’s just blocked accounts and ghosted text messages. It’s so cowardly. And so unfair.

He promised.

He promised he would be there for me, make sure my career stayed on track. And he promised he would keep an eye on me. Yeah, right, a wandering eye maybe. Most people don’t realize that there is a reverse ugly swan affect. You start out adorable, and that’s all people can say about you for years, even when your sixteen and you’re ready for people to start calling you hot, they don’t.

You’re just so cute!

And then, in like six months, you go from being adorable to, “oh that’s Cassie Shays? That adorable little girl? Wow, that’s too bad.”

You’re awkward phase hits so hard that no casting director will give you the time of day and your agent starts suggesting to “pivot” careers.

And your producer from your biggest hit, the one that kissed you with tongue for the first time, closes out the email they gave you completely.

:Message not sent:

It’s not even the proper slap in the face that a packet of letters and a lock of hair sent back with a message about how they’d been misunderstood and they wish you all the best. At least then there would be closure. There would some moment when you could be totally are that this guy was a lying dickhead. Instead there’s just the internet crickets chirping into the void.

So you decide to go to law school.

You graduate top of your class, you sail right through the bar, you find a high powered L.A. firm that is willing to go after the companies that exploit the lives fo the young for the sake of their entertainment machine.

And that is why, ladies and gentleman of the jury, I am here today representing my client who at 14 has been booted from her smash hit television show for, and I quote, “Getting too ugly for the screen.”

~Anika