About the Book
In the stories that make up Real Life Choices, the characters find themselves in unusual circumstances where they face psychological and/or moral challenges. Depending on the story, these unusual circumstances include criminal wrongdoings, sexist attitude, seemingly unreal video game characters, ghost sightings, afterlife figures and bizarre environments. Both characters and readers are left to make choices about the interpretations and conclusions of these events. The stories move from the simple to the absolutely bizarre to force the characters, different in every story, to make choices in these more and more difficult situations, while they are almost always left to their own devices. The stories can be classified as psychological/supernatural and philosophical fictions. The first story is very short. After an explosion in the building, a strange meeting takes place in an office with originally anticipated guests from the business community--or, so it appears. In the second story, a teenager runs away and is saved by an "angel". The third tale focuses on a mystery surrounding an emergency call a truck driver receives through his CB radio. It is followed by, "My Chosen Path", which is about a female security guard who finds drug dealers at an abandoned warehouse on the property she guards at night. As things get complicated, she finds herself running for her life. In the story, entitled, "On the Road of Destiny," a biker stops to offer a ride to a fellow motorcyclist left on the side of the road with a motorcycle that would not start. When he declines the help, the biker suddenly takes off, refusing to even stop at the next repair garage to let the mechanics know about the stranded motorcyclist. The next fictional account, called "Magical World," follows a video-gamer, bored of everyday life, who finds himself in a battle with his game characters one night on the way home from work. The bizarre event spills over to the next day. The gamer struggles to find explanation for the mysterious events, taking place around him. In the long tale of "The Hermit's Journal," the protagonist is a psychology professor who isolates himself on a mountain at winter time, living without any human contact, in order to write a book. Even though he is aware of the fact that only one woman lives on the mountain across, he keeps seeing two women. The mystery behind the two women captures his attention while he is also dealing with the psychological effect of isolation on the day-to-day basis. In the final story, called "Lucidity", the protagonist finds herself walking on Grey Street with a pressing need to complete three chores. With ever increasing bizarre events taking place, she finds the chores difficult to complete, until she figures out the cause of the bizarre happenings. Aware of the cause, she needs to make a choice about how to proceed given this knowledge. All stories represent real life situations in a sense that it is possible for virtually anybody to be faced with such challenges and difficulties in real life.
About the Author: M. J. Mandoki was born in Hungary. She moved to London, Ontario, Canada, at age seventeen. At the time of her arrival, she was unable to speak any English. After having learned to speak the language, she enrolled at the local university. She attended Western University (University of Western Ontario) from 1993 to 1997, earning a B. A. (Honours) in philosophy and French literature. After a few years of work, she returned to school in 2003 to get an M. A. in philosophy at Brock University. She focused on Eastern Philosophy and defended her master thesis, called Philosophy of Death in Plotinus and Vedanta, in 2006. In 2006, she enrolled in the PhD program at McMaster University. She withdrew from the program in good standing for personal reasons in 2013. Her inspiration to write arose from her experience in philosophy. Although she absolutely loves philosophy, she realized early on that philosophy essays are rather boring and difficult to get through. Philosophers are not trained to be entertaining in their writings! Therefore, she started creating lengthy fictional examples in her academic essays to make the work more exciting and easier to understand for the general public. After leaving the PhD program, she poured this passion into creative writing. She released her first novel, The Curse, on October 1, 2014. She is interested in epistemology, philosophy of death, philosophy of religion, metaphysics and ontology. Outside philosophy, she also reads on near-death experience, death-bed vision, reincarnation theories, mysticism, Greek mythology and altered states of consciousness. She is married and lives in London, Ontario, Canada.
