Military brats have this toughness: they're almost like orphans or foster children; they develop little mechanisms. It sets you up to look at things a little differently.

A few days after I began my short story, I returned to his desk and handed him my updates. He pushed his wire-rimmed reading glasses way down on his nose and focused on the two pages. “Okay, you got a beginning; you got yourself a middle and an end. You got a wing-dinger opening line. But you don’t have an establishing paragraph. Do you know what that is?”
He didn’t wait for me to answer.
“It’s kinda like an outdated road map for the reader,” he said. “It gives the reader a general idea of where you’re taking him, but doesn’t tell him exactly how you intend to get there, which is all he needs to know.

My husband and I had five biological children but we also have been raising 23 foster children.

When I was growing up, my parents took in foster children. From a young age, I learned that there are a lot of children in need.

As an adoptive parent myself of foster children, I have seen firsthand the glaring problems of the system currently facing this Nation.

Despite the best of efforts, many foster children are neither reunited with their families, nor adopted.