Helena Mary Cole

Autistic, Catholic writer

Category: Uncategorized

  • Hi, it’s me again

    Okay, this is me again (not my fiction).  I know I disappeared for almost the entire summer. A few blog post ideas came to me in the past months, but I didn’t want to post them until I’d left the narrative in a reasonably good spot, and then editing those…

  • After the Banana Split

    On the day Alex was well enough to eat his lunch in the kitchen (Mrs. Newcastle was bustling around on the other side of the island), Parker came and sat opposite his son. Mrs. Newcastle quietly came over and put a mug of coffee down in front of him. “Thank…

  • The Banana Split

    Sandy spent remarkably little time thinking about the fact that Jay Belden had held her hand, or at least she kept putting off thinking about it till Alex was well. To that end, she visited him in the hospital every day. Her initial fears for his life quickly became nothing…

  • What Happened Next

    One day in mid-July, Jay breezed into the Old Hall’s kitchen around supper time and nodded at Aunt Fiona, who was standing behind the kitchen island with her arms folded across her chest. “Hey, Aunt Fi,” he said, and was about to breeze on through to the east hallway, when…

  • The Chapter after that (Sandy’s Birthday Party)

    And so, Jay found himself locked into a deal where he had to be nice to Sandy. And it worked. Sort of. It worked until Alex got a couple of pet mice, and Jay couldn’t resist dropping one on Sandy’s shoulder just to see what would happen. It scuttled up…

  • The Next Chapter

    On Tuesday evening the following week, when four o’clock came, Jay walked into the east living room, in full baseball uniform and said, “Practice got cancelled because of the rain. My mom’s here visiting Aunt Fiona, so I figured I might as well tag along and see what you’re doing,…

  • A Chapter from the Backstory

    One day, not even a week later, after the weather had taken a sudden turn towards summer, Sandy came to the Old Hall after school and found Alex outside on the back terrace. He had a blanket covering his lap with his sketchbook on top of that, and he was…

  • Writing naturally attracts autistic people

    If certain careers naturally attract people with certain personality traits, like dentistry being a natural career path for sadists (see Little Shop of Horrors – great joke), then I think it follows that writing books as a profession attracts autistic people. Not all writers are autistic and not all autistic…

  • Do more quiet, hidden things

    When I was in the evangelical Protestant church, there was a popular story that went around, that came from a popular book, and crept from there into sermons, and Bible study groups, and the like, and that story goes something like this: Note: the person telling it would usually frame…

  • Red Hair to the Rescue

    When I was a teenager and into my late 20’s, I weighed about 120 lbs, at about 5’ 4” tall, had long, natural red hair (in my college years, I wore it short, though) and was generally considered a pleasant, agreeable person. Some may have even told you the adjective…