Monday Mentionables: Truth is Stranger than Fiction

Happy Monday, everyone! I had a crazy busy weekend, which actually started last Thursday, as I went on a road trip and visited 3 good girlfriends from my past. They all live within 2 hours of each other, though they're all from different points in my past. I decided to take a few days and make a long overdue trip to see them all. Breakfast with one, lunch with another, dinner with a third. Whew!! I'm exhausted now...

I loved catching up with them all, talking about the good old days and also filling each other in on all the new developments in our lives, but I was also left with the striking thought that truth really is stranger than fiction. Each friend has her own path, her own life, all very different (one's a single mom of 2 who lives with her parents; one's a married mom of 3 who's lived in 5 different states over the last 10 years; and one's a never-married Shakespeare professor). And yet they all had these fantastic stories. You want to know why writers never have a lack of story ideas? Here, in no particular order, are real-life plots and characters taken from my girlfriends' lives...

~Next-door neighbor invites all the neighborhood kids (sans parents) on a limo ride which ends up including the  neighbor's impromptu wedding before the ride

~Husband and father of 7+ years turns out to be gay and having an affair

~Child returns from a visit to her father's house with an evil spirit attached, which prompts the need for an exorcism to get rid of said spirit

~Independently wealthy man moves in next door, turns out to have Aspergers Syndrome, but is also one of the city's most philanthropic men and thus has women wondering how manageable a marriage to him would be

~Local midwife is pregnant and prescribed a "potato-only" diet, which leads to her husband calling various people in the neighborhood whenever they run out of potatoes

~Former lover who now lives on the other side of the globe proposes an affair of convenience whenever the two of them are in the same country

And believe me, the list goes on. Great fodder for books, right? How nice when catching up with friends can also inspire my Muse LOL :)