Book signing for Traveling Light ...
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Welcome to the new Lloyd A. Meeker website! It’s been a few months gestating, but as I gradually learned what I needed I was able to communicate those needs to my designer, Kirsten Cassidy. Many, many thanks to Kirsten for her extraordinary — and rare — blend of artistic and technical expertise. The first time I saw my new banner, the light streaming through the forest, it took my breath away. Her original art and her skill with the back end combine to provide this writer with a platform that I can grow into. She’s been a joy to work with. If you’re thinking about creating a new website or redoing the one you’ve already got, I highly recommend her, without hesitation. Take a look around, and come back often! ...
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I wrote this piece seven years ago, as a piece of blog content when my first novel came out. To my amazement, it was the most visited page for as long as I had it up. I’ve dusted it off, made a few tweaks and offer it now as my first article here on my re-vamped site. It feels good to do that. I hope you enjoy it! — LM A Hero’s Journey I was probably thirteen when I first read that some of the great Renaissance artists dissected cadavers to get the anatomy right in their figures. Forced to imagine someone so driven to depict the human form accurately that he would willingly break serious contemporary laws and risk disease to examine dead bodies, I was disgusted as only a pimply teenager uncomfortable with what was happening in his own body could be.  But over time, I have come to admire those pioneers who understood that their art required this knowledge. They understood that what was inside, unseen, gave power and dimension to their work. The more I have surrendered to my love of writing, the more fascinated I have become with certain clearly identifiable themes in human experience – the ones that just will not go away. These archetypal themes are the bones, gristle and organs of good stories, and they have their own rules, just like the physical heart has its rules – blood in from the body through this vein, blood out to the lungs through ...
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A man’s character is his fate. This is the epigraph in Traveling Light, and has become an essential part of the way I see and experience the world. Sometimes this quote is translated as, “A man’s character is his doom.” I believe that’s technically more accurate, but the word “doom” in English has implications that aren’t so inescapably negative in Greek ...
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In 2006, I wrote this short short story as my entry in a contest called “A Picture is Worth a Thousand Words”. The story had to turn around this photo. It’s odd, I felt awkward writing to a visual prompt, but the story took no more than a couple of days to write. I still like it, so I’ve dusted it off for your reading entertainment. Crossing the River By spring the pain had dulled. It was no longer the unrelenting ripping sensation in Jake’s chest, as if he were a phone book being torn in half for a meaningless party stunt. Although he still was ambushed by grief occasionally, and wept helplessly then, he mostly now had calm. At first that calm had been the vague sweetness of Prozac, but Jake was done with that. The counselors at the hospice had helped. They had gently prepared him last summer when the cocktail had stopped working, when in barely a month Howard had turned into a breathing skeleton barely able to smile, when the wasting and the lesions had rendered him nearly unrecognizable. Knowledge of what was to come had been nothing compared to the event itself. Then they had helped him through those first horrible weeks afterward, when Jake could barely tie his shoes without help, the emptiness in the apartment so final, so silently perfect. They had helped him with the gnawing, wretched guilt of being alive, healthy and HIV-negative – and after nine years, alone. Now it ...
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