Monthly Archives: February 2012

Nonfiction Bragging–The Trickster

My bragging series or “How I Attempted to Embrace Self-Promotion” continues with an entry from my nonfiction creative writing, published online in 2010. This one is a short piece on the disappearance and recovery of Loki, our orange tabby cat who went missing for 8 months back when he was a year and a half old. Here are the first few lines:

Loki is the Norse god of trickery and mischief. He’s a shape-shifter, and I’m pretty sure our tomcat is one of his chosen forms. We picked out the name Loki before we went to the shelter, and yet it fit him perfectly.

I wanted an orange tabby because I’d always heard they were the friendliest cats. At the shelter, I was drawn to the loudest meower, a runt of a kitten with a deafening purr even from behind cage bars. He was the only orange tabby there. It was fated that we’d take him home, and he worked his charms to ensure it.

He proved to be a mischief maker just like his namesake. He claimed all of Woodcroft as his domain. Loki was well fed and well loved, but he still fooled many unwitting humans into thinking his easy purr and plaintive meows were signs of hunger. The neighborhood became his personal 24-hour buffet.

 

The rest of “the Trickster” can be found in online Independent Weekly as part of their annual Dog Days of Summer issue. “The Trickster” appears about halfway down this page. Interestingly, my initial blog post here when Loki first went missing has always been one of my most popular entries. Plenty of people have swung by it when they’ve also lost a cat, and I’d like to think they found some hope they’d find their pets again from it. Not quite as popular, but much more hopeful, was my post on finding Loki again, and the injuries he suffered and recovered from, getting back to the same crazy animal he always has been with a lessened sense of wanderlust, luckily.

Of course, all this is really an excuse to post a more recent picture of Loki—the cat, the monster, the trickster. This is him with his sisters on either side during a rainy January day.

 

Fiction Bragging — She Could Be Me

Time for the next entry in my self-promotion series! She Could Be Me is a short story published by Flashes in the Dark back in May of 2010. And it’s available online for free! It’s a horror story with a Twilight Zone feel to it. Interested? Here are the first few lines:

“I’m delayed,” Tom said over the phone. Celia could barely hear him with the thunder on her end of the line and the airport loudspeaker playing an endless stream of announcements in Spanish, a language she didn’t understand, on his. The announcer’s voice sounded ethereal and discordant at the same time, like a slightly off-tune harp being plucked.

“I’ll be home tomorrow,” he continued. “Don’t get bent out of shape, okay?”

What was a strange thing to say. She never complained when Tom was delayed.

You can read the rest at Flashes in the Dark here. Perhaps these photos will help you with the atmosphere for enjoying She Could Be Me.

The walk toward Chez Mer:

 Celia’s drink at Chez Mer:

Nonfiction Bragging–I Wish I Were A Packrat

Now that those pesky recent publications have stopped getting in the way (yes, yes, I wish I could complain about more of them!), I can return to my pattern of posting oldest to newest credits in this self-promotion series. Next up is a short little guest blog post I did back in the fall of 2009 on the Muffin Blog. It was written as a way to vent my frustration after losing years of creative writing due to a hard drive failure.More importantly, it was an ode to all the characters I lost from the crash. Here’s your lead-in:

I lost six years of my life. Okay, I’m being a tad dramatic. I lost six years’ worth of word processor documents. They’re gone. They left for the great recycling bin icon in the sky and some jerk emptied it. I’m the jerk.

A few years ago, I decided the old college laptop had to go. It had been wacky since my roommate borrowed it for a night of feverish essay typing and spilled a mug of coffee on it. The keys sank down like molasses when you pressed them and came up 1. . . 2 . . .3 seconds later with a loud click. The down arrow key would possess the cursor, sending it on a race down the monitor, which no control-alt-delete combination could halt.

If your interest is peaked, read the rest at the Muffin Blog! And for your visual pleasure, I give you kitten Verdandi expressing the same rage at dirty laundry as I felt when I realized the files were gone forever.