My name is Nancy Goldberg Levine and I am a newly-Indie-published author. My two sweet contemporary romantic comedies, “Mr. Short, Dark…& Funny” and “Mr. Tall, Tan…& Tasteless” are available now on Amazon.com. My first romance novel, “Tempting Jonah,” was published in 1998 by a small press company. In this blog, I hope to write about subjects I know something about such as short story writing.
Today, however, I want to write about how art imitates life. Sometimes, especially this year, I will write about something and then it will happen, almost exactly the way I wrote it. In fact, it happened again today. You can read my long, boring bio at the beginning of “Mr. Short, Dark…& Funny.” or the short version on my Amazon.com author page. To make a long story short, I had severe arthritis in my right knee and was operated on last year. There were complications from pneumonia, and I am still recuperating so sometimes I have to take cabs to work or home.
My dad likes to call the cab for me. It makes him feel important, so he called for one for me today at 11:30, and asked that I be picked up at my day job at 3:30. They didn’t show up until after 4. When they did, they went to the wrong building, I had to walk to where the driver was, and since I’m still not running races yet, I couldn’t catch up to the driver before he pulled away.There are some hotels near my office and there are always cabs and drivers hanging out there. The driver of the first cab I saw greeted me and opened the door for me, When I got into the cab, it looked almost exactly like the one my regular driver (the hero of “Mr. Short, Dark…& Funny” is loosely based on him). This driver started talking to me and he used a lot of the same expressions and said some of the same things my regular driver says. He was a Cincinnati Bengals fan; my driver is a Cincinnati Reds fan.
At the end of “Mr. Tall, Tan…& Tasteless,” the hero and heroine go to Maine and meet a cab driver who acts and kind of looks like the heroine’s brother. So…art imitates life.
Earlier this year, my driver (oh, that sounds so elegant, doesn’t it? LOL!) took my parents and I to Kenwood so they could pay a bill. There is a bakery next door and he said that he liked to stop there in the morning if he was out driving around in that area. Before he said this, I had finished a scene in “Mr. Short, Dark…& Funny” where the hero talks about going to a bakery at 5 a.m. when he was out driving around. (“Twilight Zone” music plays in the background…)
It’s happened that way several other times, too. What about you? Have you ever written something, and then had the same thing happen, almost exactly?
Get ready to laugh with me.
Nancy Goldberg Levine is the author of “Mr. Short, Dark…& Funny” and “Mr. Tall, Tan…& Tasteless,” available now on Amazon.com. She is also the author of “Tempting Jonah,” as well as more than 60 short stories.
Laugh With Me 