Writers have it tough. In my opinion, the discipline it takes to be a good writer is on par with the discipline it takes to be a master of meditation or yoga. They must be good story-tellers and they must be able to make the story relevant and interesting to a wide audience — which is much harder than people give writers credit for.

My goal writing is to improve my focus and personal discipline. This will help me later in life as my career as a psychologist, where I plan on writing studies and books that will help other people. I plan to continue the practice of writing every day, even if I do not yet write for a large audience.

Below are my best five pieces from the past few months. Thank you for reading!

• As Fate Would Have It — A Personal Narrative
• Cat Facts That Will Blow Your Mind
• Dealing Drugs on the Silk Road
• Mom’s Spaghetti
• What About the Children?

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In my family, my father and I were the creative types while my mom worked as a real estate agent. Although she never saw herself as an artist, recent life trials and tribulations have unlocked her natural artistic talents and she is now a bestselling author on Amazon and the upcoming resident artist at the Incline Village Public Library.

So, mom, you had a wild transformation in the past couple of years. After working as a real estate agent for 25-years, you left the business rather quickly to pursue a creative path. How, and why did you do that?

Well… I didn’t start out looking for something creative to do. I left real estate because it had become so stressful that it was no longer good for me, my health, or you and dad [your father]. I spent some time doing nothing, and when I was ready to look for work dad was diagnosed with cancer. I spent 14 months helping him until he passed away last year. After his death, I went back to finish a book that had been languishing on my computer for ten years. I published it on the day that would have been his 62nd birthday — September 7, 2016.

You wrote two other books before you left real estate… what was so hard about this third book, and why did it take so long?

My first two books were more like text books, written for The Everything series, and they were real estate related. I had a deadline and those first books were also knowledge based. My most recent book was from my heart and, without a deadline, it was never fully finished. After David passed away, I created my own deadline by setting his birthday as the launch date on Amazon.

Other than being an author, you have also recently started painting. Tell me about how that worked into your new creative path.

Well, you originally asked me to do a painting for you because you had that blank space in your living room. Although you and I both knew that I was inexperienced, you encouraged me to do it because you wanted an art piece from me. Once I started painting, my grief started to heal. It felt so wonderful that I bought a few more canvases… and soon I had a whole room in my house full of art.

What has been the public’s response to your arts?

My [most recent] book [Me & The Other Women] was on the best seller list on Amazon for a while, and I have had a positive response to it. Now, it is in Kindle format but I am planning to launch a paperback soon.

To my surprise, my paintings have been very well received. I often have friends over and several have asked to purchase paintings from me. I had not even considered selling until people offered to buy my work. I have three commission projects currently in the works and just received another call for one yesterday. Earlier this week I was asked to be the artist in residence at the local library. I will have a showing with 15 to 20 pieces in March and April of next year.

How do you see the future of your life as it relates to your art?

I am a bit afraid to think about the future. I spent my entire real estate career planning and virtually nothing happened as I planned. The planning became a part of the stress. The true creative process is letting things flow, it is hard for me, but I am doing my best to block out the idea of the future, and just let life happen. Of course, I do want to continue with my painting, I want to write more books, and I want to be open to any new creative pursuits that come up for me.

To see more of my mom, give her blog a look and her Facebook page a like. You can purchase her most recent book Me & The Other Women on Amazon Kindle, but keep a lookout for the paperback version.

In high school, I was so caught up with the adventures of being a teenager that I never stopped to think about college. When my senior year rolled around, I was startled that my friends were taking their SATs and sending off college applications, so I knew I had to get on the ball.

The problem with not knowing exactly what you want to do in life makes it extremely hard to pick a college that is right for you. I had a friend who knew from a child that she wanted to be a doctor, and when she submitted her early application for Baylor she was accepted right away. Another friend of mine had been a brilliant artist as long as I knew him, and received a full ride scholarship to Parsons. For me, the challenge of picking a college fell onto picking a career path.

Throughout fall of my senior year there were various assemblies for colleges that wanted to recruit students. One assembly was for University of Oregon, which I took a liking to for its beautiful campus and wide variety of majors. In the next couple of weeks, I begged my parents to drive me up there so I could check it out. The clock was ticking fast to when applications were due, and I told myself that if I did not like University of Oregon I would take a gap year.

My French teacher knew I would not like University of Oregon, and warned me in the weeks before that it was very sports oriented and too big for a small-town girl. When I arrived at the school I saw she was right, and I felt completely deflated. The image I had in my head of college was like that of the universities I saw depicted in early 2000s television shows like Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Veronica mars, but UofO was nothing like them.

On our way down the I-5 the car started spluttering, and all the warning lights that can go on in a car blinked on all at once. We were just a couple of miles from the first Ashland exit, and fearing that our engine would somehow blow up my dad drove into the picturesque little town. It was my first time in Ashland, and while my dad found a place to get the car repaired my mom and I walked downtown.

I did not know there was a college in Ashland until we decided to walk all the way down Siskiyou Boulevard. Dad had taken the car to the other end of town, and instead of taking public transit or calling a taxi we figured it was a nice enough day to walk. When I first saw the “Welcome to Southern Oregon University” I got this feeling in my stomach that we should at least walk the campus.

As fate would have it my phone buzzed as I was walking towards the Stevenson Union, and a girl from high school who was a few years older than me, Julie, was calling. She had seen me walking across the campus, and thought that I was there to tour the school. When I told her I wasn’t she said to meet her at the rock circle in five minutes.

Julie was an extremely awkward girl in high school, someone who hardly ever spoke and had a lot of strange hobbies. When I saw her that day she had come completely out of her shell, and emphatically told me how comfortable SOU had made her. When she was a senior in high school she also had no idea what she would do from there, but she professed that the faculty at SOU had made it easier to find her place.

There was a reason the car broke down, and a reason I ran into Julie that day. While I still do not know if there is some higher being that decided I would end up in Ashland, or it was sheer luck, I’m so glad it happened. Needless to say, I applied to one school.

• Sir Winston Churchill Loved Cats

The most popular cat lover in the past century was bar none Sir Winston Churchill, who served as Britain's prime minister from 1940–1945 and 1951–1955. He enjoyed the company of many cats and kittens during his years, and his last cat — a ginger cat named Jock — was given to him for his 88th birthday. Before he died, Churchill made sure there would always be a cat named Jock at his Chartwell street home, which later became a national trust. Today, a ginger tabby named Jock VI inhabits Chartwell.

• Egyptians Placed Cats Above Human Life

The Egyptian goddess Bastet, who was the deity of cats and protector of the home, is likely the reason Egyptians thought so highly of their cats. They were so devoted that the export of cats from Egypt was strictly prohibited, and they created a specific branch of government to deal with this issue. In this department, agents would go to other lands to find and return cats that had been smuggled out. If a cat was killed, the penalty was death.

When a family cat died, all the inhabitants of the house would shave their eyebrows as a sign of morning and as homage to Bastet, and the mourning period was completed when their eyebrows grew back.

• Cats Aren’t Fully Domesticated

Domesticated animals are not able to live in the wild and rely on humans for their survival. House cats, however, are only semi-domesticated and can live ferally because of their relatively recent foray into the domestication process. The first recorded skeleton of a cat who was buried with a human was discovered in Cyprus and dates back to around 9,500 years ago. To contrast this, the likely ancestors of the domestic dog date back more than 30,000 years ago.

• Unlike Dogs, When A Cat Wags Its Tail It Might Mean It’s Angry

Felines have much more complicated gestures than their canine counterparts, and it often is difficult to determine their feelings. While you may observe your cat flicking his tail back and forth behind him, do not mistake this gesture for excitement. The tail flick is a sign that the cat is annoyed. However if his tail is sticking straight up and quivering, this is a sign of a happy cat.

• Cat’s Cant Taste Sweets

Human beings enjoy five different kinds of flavors: sour, bitter, salty, umami, and sweet. While most omnivores share this characteristic, obligate carnivores (like cats) lack the protein that allows them to taste sweets. So, although you may think your cat is enjoying the sugary whipped cream you give her, all she’s tasting is the milk underneath.

In high school I went on a trip with my French class to Paris, and there is an album on Facebook completely dedicated to photos of me sleeping. I am sure plenty of people are jealous of my ability to conk out during a 12-hour plane ride, but this transportation and motion induced narcolepsy is a CURSE. Try missing out on seeing the Eiffel Tower light up at night because you’re passed out on a boat, or having someone steal your underwear at a foreign laundromat because you’re passed out on top of the washing machine.

I’m not sure where the worst place I fell asleep was (San Francisco BART was probably the most dangerous), but I do know the worst person I fell asleep on. I was on my way back from India when I was seated on the plane next to this Australian man who had spent a month camping in the Himalayas… and he had not taken a shower since he had started his trip. This dude was rank, he smelled the way a rotten bologna sandwich in a gym locker would smell, and I gasped for breath as he bragged about how the trip had taken him to a new plane of existence.

Luckily for me I was also taken to a new plane of existence in just a couple of minutes of the plane taking off, because I could not listen to this guy ramble any more. When I woke up, I realized that I had not only fallen asleep on the guy, but he had taken the liberty of laying me down in his lap and leaning over to fall asleep on my back. Creepy? Check. Even creepier? The other passengers on the plane who were taking pictures and videos of me snoring on this dude. Yikes.

Trump has promised to drain the swamp of all lobbyists but every single person on his cabinet is an alligator.

Even Kendall and Kylie Jenner are cashing in to the dystopian young adult novel that is our future by announcing the release of their new book — The Time of the Twins.

EXTRA (not from the past two weeks):

Donald Trump is the Nickelback of presidents, but according to a survey by Public Policy Voting people rated Trump lower than Nickelback, on par with hemorrhoids and cockroaches.

Home to three of the top ten most liberal cities in the United States, the Bay area has played host to many anti-Trump protests in the past five days.

The protests started in Oakland Tuesday night when it became clear that the president-elect would be Republican nominee Donald Trump. Around 250 outraged residents poured into the streets and began to riot. They smashed store and car windows, set several fires between 10th and 27th streets on Telegraph Avenue and Broadway, and closed the 12th Street Oakland City Center BART Station.

Police officers responded to the scene in riot gear as protestors made their way towards the highway, but the officers made no arrests. Only one woman was reportedly injured that night, after she was struck by a car.

The riot died down by 3am, but when afternoon came on Wednesday the protests grew. In San Francisco, a silent mourning crowd of thousands wound its way down Market Street with a police escort to a vigil at Harvey Milk Plaza. The plaza, which was named for the first openly gay politician to be elected to California government, served as a place for individuals to express their stance against Trump’s homophobic platform.

Later that evening, demonstrators made their way to the Mission District to gather outside of City Hall. Many of the protestors were students at local colleges.

“I’m sad about people being deported who I care about. About women losing the rights they fought so hard for,” said San Francisco State University student Kayra Reindel about why she was protesting. “I have friends whose parents are undocumented, who are terrified at the prospect of losing their parents.”

Meanwhile in Oakland, a protest of about 7,000 people gathered on opposite ends of the city, with plans to converge at the federal building. Although the protest started out peaceful, demonstrators grew violent as the evening wore on. Police used tear gas and flash bang grenades while protestors threw rocks, bottles, and fireworks.

In a statement about the violence, Oakland’s Mayor Libby Shaff urged Oaklanders to choose community over chaos in the coming days.

“As the Mayor of one of America’s most diverse and progressive cities, I understand the shock and dismay so many feel about a Trump presidency,” Shaff said. “I assure all Oaklanders that our government will continue to protect ALL its residents and we will continue to defend our progressive values.”

Despite the statement, a smaller number of Oaklanders rioted Thursday night, blocking traffic on Interstate 580. According to police reports, two people were arrested on the highway for breaking a fence and teargas was deployed but there were no reported injuries.

Friday afternoon, students from several San Francisco high schools hosted a walk-out. More than 1,000 students left campuses across the city and marched towards the Civic Center Plaza.

“We’re trying to inform people about white supremacy, racism, homophobia, everything,” said one young woman involved in the walk-out. “We’re tired of always feeling like we never have a voice.”

As the week came to the close, protests began to die down. On Saturday, a few small protests broke out. 100 people gathered in San Francisco to march down Market Street to Embarcadero and back again that afternoon, and later that evening around 100 protestors converged at 14th Street and Broadway in Oakland. Another group of 100 met near the UC Berkeley campus and marched through the city’s downtown corridor.

Although the protests have become smaller and farther between, it is apparent that Bay Area residents are pained over the election results. Despite the pain, people continue to gather together to fight for what they think is right.

Sergio Quintana on Twitter

Demonstrators take to the streets again in the Bay Area to protest President Elect Donald Trump.

Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children’s title may mislead parents to take their young kids to the movie but be warned, this PG13 gothic fantasy has a dark tone that may not be suitable for young audiences. The movie, adapted by director Tim Burton, is a beautifully executed take on the first novel in Ransom Riggs’ best-selling trilogy. Despite its gorgeous cinematography, the film started out too slow and ended too fast, leaving the viewer with many unanswered questions.

The story revolves around teenager Jake who ends up happening upon his grandfather’s body. Before his grandfather utters his dying breath, he tells Jake that he must go to the “island on the postcard”. During this scene, Jake sees monstrous figure that his companion does not seem to see. A month later, Jake is pictured in a psychologists and flashes back on memories of his grandfather’s story about a home with all sorts of peculiar children. The psychologist theorizes that Jake saw what he did at the murder sight because the mind plays tricks on people when they go through extreme trauma, and tells him that he must go to Wales to see the children’s home for himself in order to get closure with his grandfather’s death.

Here, the scenes skip forward rather quickly without much explanation of why, when, or how Jake and his father get to Wales. Although it is presumed that Jake is 18 at this time, his father keeps him by his side and is too nervous to let Jake go away on his own. To me it seemed odd to include this part, other than to build Jake’s character as someone people presume is mentally ill.

Jake ends up finding the children’s home only to see that it was bombed in the last world war, but when he comes back the second day a group of children that he had seen in his grandfather’s photographs show up to take him to their “time loop” where every day is September 8, 1943. They did not explain how the time loop worked very well, only that they could not stay in his time for more than a few minutes without aging and dying, and that Miss Peregrine controlled the loop. I felt that the movie could have spent more time explaining this aspect, as it became important later in the film.

Most of the character development focused on Jake and Emma, but the movie failed to develop the characters of the other peculiars which made it difficult to understand their peculiarities and their pasts. If the movie becomes a trilogy like the books, I hope it spends more time on the character development of each person as it seems important to the story.

In order to keep spoiler alerts to a minimum, I would suggest that people who like Tim Burton’s Sleepy Hollow and Beetlejuice to go and see Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children. Despite a rocky footing as a narrative, it is a beautiful visual experience that in the end has you craving more.

Typing “drugs, weapons and hitmen” into Google Chrome is not going to bring you a page of results where you can access and purchase these items, but if you open the anonymous Tor browser and enter an intricate URL you might find exactly what you seek.

These secure and highly encrypted websites are called darknet markets or crypto-markets are commercial websites that can only be accessed with specific software on a peer-to-peer connection. In less complicated terms, they are online black markets that cannot be found by a search engine on an average computer.

The king of crypto-markets was once the Silk Road marketplace, which mainly dealt with drugs such as cocaine, MDMA and LSD. It was considered the king of its kind because it used the anonymous power of Tor, the crypto-currency Bitcoin, and the encryption program known as Pretty Good Privacy which made it the “safest” place to buy drugs online. The Silk Road was not easily accessible for this reason, and knowledge of its URL was spread by word-of-mouth and occasionally darknet forums to limit access.

Ross William Ulbricht — or as he was known on the Silk Road — “Dread Pirate Roberts” — was the mastermind behind the website. The 29-year-old had been an engineer and was studying solar cells when he became interested in the Austrian School of Economics, which places a great emphasis on free market economies. The Silk Road was more or less the epitome of a free market economy, and combined with Ulbricht’s interest with drugs and his dislike of government control it was the perfect black market startup.

The Silk Road was allegedly founded in February 2011 when Ulbricht made a post on psychedelic mushroom site Shroomery.org as someone who simply “stumbled” across the website. He asked for feedback, and was immediately met with skepticism. However, it did catch on and Shroomery users passed the information around. By June 2011, the website became popular enough for journalist Adrian Chen of Gawker to publish an article exposing the Silk Road, showcasing screenshots of the webpage and explaining how BitCoin was used to buy the drugs. Although he did not publish an address to the site, its popularity boomed more than ever.

When Gawker caught on, so did the FBI and they began trying to hunt down the dealers and masterminds behind Silk Road. They were not able to work fast, and the marketplace hung on until 2013. During its time it raked in an estimated $1 billion in sales from thousands of drug dealers and a million users, making it the Internet’s largest criminal empire in history.

In early 2013, the FBI located the Silk Road server, and though it was supposedly secure, they copied the server in its entirety. This included all user accounts and millions in Bitcoin wallets, exposing vendors and customers to law enforcement scrutiny. After the takeover of the website, it was not long until they came across the dread pirate himself — Ulbricht.

Ulbricht did not know the FBI was watching his every move, and despite jumping through many hoops to make the Silk Road as private as possible he made a couple of small mistakes that lead the FBI right to him. Among them, he accidentally used his real name when making a post on the Silk Road before changing it to the alias “Frosty”. The FBI traced Ulbricht back to a San Francisco address, and he was arrested at a public library in October 2013. They seized $3.4 million dollars in BitCoin, which meant that Ulbricht could have been making around $20,000 per day as the administrator of the Silk Road.

Although the Silk Road has been shut down by the US Government for good, there are still plenty of crypto-marketplaces on the web. The Silk Road is currently in its third edition, with plenty of copycats lurking on the web.

One thing I know about myself is that I can be very punny, and about half of the 25 headlines I wrote were very stupid clown puns. I picked the ones catchiest to me, and crossed my fingers that people would feel the same.

Here are my original 25:

1. The Phantom Clowns
2. Cirque De Soleil Gone Rogue?
3. The Fear of IT
4. Clown College Drop Out Rates Skyrocket
5. Red Noses
6. Carnie Carnage on the Rise?
7. Killer Clowns go for the Juggler
8. Stop Clowning Around!
9. Clowns Never Had a Good Image Anyway
10. Party Stores to Stop Selling Red Noses
11. Clown Hysteria — Not So Hysterical
12. Crazy Clowns Go for the Funny Bone
13. Clown Halloween Costumes Last to Sell
14. Everyday Jesters Forced Into Hiding
15. Creepy Clowns Just a Bunch of Bozos
16. Coulrophobia Rises to #1 Fear
17. Ronald McDonald, Krusty the Clown and Pennywise Forced Into Hiding
18. Underground Circuses Shutting Down
19. Not-So-Nice Jesters
20. Assure the Kids There’s No Clowns Under Their Beds
21. Nobody Laughs During Election Year, Not Even the Clowns
22. Clown Sightings Signify the Beginning of the Purge
23. Their Weakness is in the Funny Bone
24. Keeping Away from Clowns
25. Clownocalypse

I was surprised that my two headlines did the worst and the one I thought would not get much engagement did the best, with an engagement rate of 7.9%. I think the reason that my headline Clown Hysteria — Not So Hysterical received the most engagement is because of the word play on “hysteria”.

Overall this was an eye-opening activity that taught me to be more aware of my headlines if I want to get my work out there and in the open. I know that my own sense of pun humor might not be the best way to get my point across, but something catchy and short will do the trick.

Abigail Masters on Twitter

Clown Hysteria - Not So Hysterical #COMM206 #clownscare16 https://t.co/8I8F3EuLHX

Abigail Masters on Twitter

Killer Clowns Go for the Funny Bone #COMM206 #clownscare16 https://t.co/8I8F3EuLHX

Abigail Masters on Twitter

Carnie Carnage on the Rise? #COMM206 #clownscare16 https://t.co/8I8F3EuLHX

View my original article here.