Sasha, my ghost cat

I’m hopeful my ghost cat has moved in again.

I suppose I should explain my ghost cat. Some thirty-two years ago, when I was a graduate student, I owned a small, feisty black cat named Sasha.

I lived in a second floor, one-room apartment in an old house, with the porch roof just outside one window and access to the wooden fire escape out the side window. In the Illinois summers I had no air conditioning, so I tried to keep cool with a box fan and open windows.

I wanted to keep Sasha an indoor cat because I lived on a relatively busy thoroughfare in Champaign. Sasha had her own agenda. She found a way to pop the screen out of the front window, stroll across the porch roof to the fire escape, then bound down the stairs. She would eventually sneak upstairs with one of the other residents and sit outside my apartment door until I returned home.

Until the time she didn’t. Tommy, the alcoholic hippie down the hall, strolled upstairs that evening to announce that he put a dead cat in the dumpster and figured it was mine. My friend down the hall and I actually raided that dumpster at 10:30 at night to find the reeking garbage bag that contained the remains of my Sasha, and buried her on university farm property.

Soon, another cat found me, a grey and white polydactyl I named Kismet, who followed me halfway across town to become my cat. It was fall by then, and I no longer needed to keep my windows open. Kismet, like all young cats, would go into a chasing-nothing sort of frenzy, running around the small apartment, bouncing off the walls.

Except. Except that he would stop at the window, the window that Sasha used to break out of, and peer around the corner to the side of the porch, then run around to the side window as if watching something go down the stairs. And then friends would come and ask me if I had a cat, and I explained that Kismet was out somewhere, and they would ask, “What about the black cat?”

Eventually I moved, and moved again, and moved halfway across the country and back again, and I forgot about Sasha. But then, day before yesterday, my cat Chuckie started chasing around the living room. I thought nothing of it because cats do that. But then he turned a hard right and slammed into the French doors to the dining room. He stared into the dark room as if he saw something we didn’t, something that crept away from him.

If Sasha has found me again, I welcome her with open arms.

Thinking of chocolate.

Today in Maryville,MO, the First Presbyterian Church holds its Nth annual Chocolate Festival. Consisting of two parts — the chocolate dessert bar and the take-home chocolatey cookie and candy bazaar — it’s an opportunity to treat oneself to a pre-Valentine’s Day indulgence.

Chocolate has become synonymous with Valentine’s Day in the US (So has Halloween, but Halloween candy isn’t GOOD chocolate). Probably because in the lab, chocolate consumption has been linked to oxytocin secretion by the body, and oxytocin is the cuddle chemical. The jury is out on whether you can bribe someone to love you by giving them chocolate, however. (Note, you can also get oxytocin by hugging a friend, an animal, or even a stuffed sloth.)

I prefer my chocolates at the extremes — very bittersweet dark chocolate and white “chocolate”, that cocoa butter confection that just melts. Mass-produced American chocolate leaves me cold; Belgian and Swiss chocolate make me very happy. Chocolate caramel, chocolate truffles, chocolate-coated marzipan … but not chocolate-covered raisins or gummies. My favorite chocolatier in the US is L. A. Burdick, but I can’t afford their chocolate (well, I could, for a treat. However, I can’t afford their shipping.) They produce their chocolates with imaginative fillings that vary with the seasons and holidays. They just got done producing their Lunar New Year Asian-inspired chocolate palette; now they’re in the middle of Valentine’s season now.

I’m looking forward to the Chocolate Festival today. Don’t tell anyone, but I actually like caramel better than chocolate, and my favorite dessert at the festival tends to be the chocolate pecan pie bars. This doesn’t mean that I won’t eat good chocolate when it’s shown to me.

Making Peace with Winter

I’m definitely dealing with the winter blahs.

I’m not depressed-depressed, just feeling bleak. My life matches the outdoors — icy gray, devoid of new growth. I have no new ideas for writing right now, no inspirations, no breakthroughs in getting published.

I need to make peace with this winter. Do I always need to be productive, always striving toward something, always trying to make something blossom in my life? I don’t know; I feel best when I’ve just sent out queries, in love with the potential of my work being brought to a wider audience. I feel worst when I get a rejection — I got another one last night. Thus is the way of winter.

How does one weather winter? By sheltering oneself against the chill and waiting. Maybe this is what I need to do — take a break from writing, from editing, from sending out queries, from calling myself a writer. Maybe I need time to figure out how to reinvent myself again, as that’s been a big part of writing for me — trying to reinvent myself.

Maybe I will become something new come spring, when the ice melts and seeds come bursting out of their shells.

Excerpt from Voyageurs

Here’s an excerpt from Voyageurs, the next book I will put through the query process:

(Wanda and Harold met me just outside the soup kitchen, on the cracked sidewalk, negative two years from my natural time —

“What now? I groused. “I was just about to eat lunch at the Mission.”

“Don’t be a bitch,” Harold said loftily, as Wanda looked down her nose at me as if I’d crawled out from under a rock. “We’ve got an experiment we need you to do.”

“Why me? I’m a Junior Birdman. You’re the King.” I knew, deep down, that I would do whatever Harold dared me to.

“You’re faster than I am. I need someone fast to do this. I bet you can’t do it, though.” Harold examined his hands, probably for invisible dirt specks, as I’d never seen him with his hands dirty.

“You bet I can’t do what?” I demanded.

“Change the outcome of that game over there.” Wanda interjected in her haughty voice.

“But that won’t work!” I groused. “The rock principle will keep it from changing. You can’t change time.”

“I’m going with you,” Harold reassured me. “We’re jumping a minute into the past to that shell game over there and you’re going to tip over the right cup so the mooch sees he’s getting conned.”

I protested. “By ‘we’, you mean me. How would I know where the ball landed?”

“You know,” Harold gritted his teeth. “You always know. I’ve seen you run that game.”

“You can’t change time. I try to change time and the cup won’t tip over. It always works that way.” I’d tried it — I could win the game with data I’d gleaned from the future, but I couldn’t change the outcome of the game itself.

“But what if I change one or two other things at the same time?” Harold smiled, and I felt his charm dissolve my reluctance. “How would the timeline know which event to change? With one or two other changes at once, I hope to confuse things so that you can tip the right cup and ruin the game.”

“But what about crossing ourselves?” I demanded. “I only get what — four minutes before crossing myself kills me?”

“You’ll have to do it quickly, I guess,” Harold shrugged. “Unless you don’t think you can — “

“Alright. I’ll do it.” I always knew I would.

We jumped to three minutes before the start of the round, and Wanda came with us as witness. She and Harold stepped back while I walked up to the game, which involved a mooch and a grifter as we called victims and fraudsters on the street.

I needed to reach in and tip the cup with the ball under it at the exact moment that the mooch would guess the whereabouts of the ball — and jump before the grifter caught my wrist and took me behind the nearest building to beat me to a pulp. I wondered why Harold would subject me to that risk, or the risk of crossing myself and being crushed. But he had faith in me …

One exhilarating moment later, I tipped the cup, revealing the ball to be in a different cup than it appeared to the mooch, and I jumped back to my present time without dying. I bent over, gasping and laughing.

“You’re the best,” Harold clapped me on the shoulder. “I knew you could do it. I think we should make a game of this. Call it — Voyageur. Like Traveller, but provocative.”

Then we blinked out of sight before the irate con artist reached us.)

Google First

A joke among writers is that, if law enforcement officials were to check their Internet search history, they would be booked for suspicion of murder.

There’s truth to that. Writers create all sorts of scenarios in their stories, gruesome as well as delightful, and some things don’t lend themselves well to the old adage “write what you know”. So you don’t need to shoot people or ballistic gelatin to find out how bullet wounds work, nor do you need to slice people to know the difference between arterial and venous bleeding. Thank goodness, because I’m a rather peace-loving person. (Note: I have searched both of the mentioned topics.)

Most of my internet searches don’t appear so gruesome. Google maps has allowed me to map a cross-country trip from Pickle Lake, Ontario (yes, it exists) to Wilson Sink Reservoir, NV (yes, it too exists) and inspect the terrain around the latter for Whose Hearts are Mountains. I have examined rooms in the Grand Hotel in Mackinaw Island and boarded the Strena Spirit in Gdynia, Poland for Prodigies.

Before the advent of the Internet, I would have had to do all of this research in libraries, by locating experts (without Googling them), or with hands on experience. I quit writing Whose Hearts are Mountains 30 plus years ago, because I couldn’t find good documentation on what a desert was like,. Now the Internet allows me to pick a spot of desert, find out what the flora and fauna are, figure out the temperatures at night in March, and investigate how one can raise food through greenhouses and dry land farming.

The important thing to note about getting details right is that, if the writer doesn’t get the details right, the readers will — and they will not let the writer live this down. “That’s not an AK-47, that’s an AR-15” is a common refrain of gun aficionados on the Internet, and each knowledge base has its experts and fans who will find the mistakes in the writer’s narrative. Usually, of course, by Googling.

So it’s best to Google first.

While My Garden Sleeps

While my garden sleeps, I make big plans for it. Each year I learn more about how to make it bigger and more interesting. I have always had what one calls a “green thumb”, although I’ve also had my share of mistakes.

When I was seven years old, my mom’s cousin Dale Hollenbeck brought me all the spindly, sickly plants on his shelves to try to bring back to life. By some mystery, it turned out that I could actually keep them alive. I may not have brought them back to vigor, but I could at least give them a fighting chance at a couple more years.

I didn’t know a lot about gardening, as was evidenced by the time I planted a kidney bean in a peanut butter jar in the pure clay soil of our backyard. By some miracle, the bean came up — well, the stem came up, but the bean itself with its seed leaves remained in the clay. I was left with a botanical mystery — the headless chicken of the plant world, which persisted in its barely animate form.

Perhaps the most important childhood moment for me as a gardener was the discussion I had at age 14 with my neighbor and almost-grandfather, Johnny Belletini. Johnny taught me a small but extremely important lesson — all plants had names, even weeds, and even the weeds could be useful. Most importantly, he taught me about dandelion wine. This led to a very enthusiastic me running back to my house with a dandelion wine recipe in hand and forbidding my parents from mowing the lawn until I picked all the dandelion flowers for wine. (Note: there is nothing forbidding a fourteen-year-old from making dandelion wine in US statute. They just can’t drink it.) My parents and I spent four good years making wine as a result, until I left for college. But I digress.

I didn’t get back into growing plants (or winemaking, for that matter) until after I got my Ph.D., mostly because I had neither the time nor the place to garden. I dabbled in landscaping my wee rental house in Oneonta NY with shade plants because that’s all I had to work with. When I moved to Maryville and bought a house, however, my dreams of gardening blossomed (ahem) again. My taste in gardening developed.

At my first house, I had no basement, no sunny windowsills — and a taste for cottage flowers that would frame my cute little acquisition. I couldn’t find the plants I wanted at the local greenhouse. My father and I built me the world’s smallest greenhouse out of four wooden-framed storm windows, and I started seeds there every year for a while., running a cord out the back door to the chicken house heater that kept it warm. If the electricity went out, an entire crop could be ruined, and that happened at least once.

I live in a bigger house now with my husband, and this house has a full basement. In the room that used to be the coal room, the previous owner fitted it with shelves. We fitted it with shop fluorescents and grow bulbs, and I now have a grow room big enough to handle 12 seed flats.

The gardening theme at this house: Everything I plant needs to have something edible about it except for the moon garden, whose plants tend to be white-flowered, strongly scented, and toxic. Right now, I have the seed flats waiting for seeds at the right planting time. I have some seeds cold-stratifying in the basement refrigerator with some roots that I will plant in the spring. I have a piece of ginger which I hope will sprout so I can plant it for a bigger yield later this year.

As always, I have big plans for the garden as it slumbers in its February torpor.

Ready to Quit?

My tarot reading for today (Deck: The Good Tarot, a positive psychology/affirmations deck) says it’s time to decide whether I want to continue writing or not.

For all my threats of giving up, I’m not sure I’m ready. The problem is that when I want to quit, I’m running on feelings and moods, which in my case can run rather intense. What’s worse, I’m running on that primordial soup of past hurts that it’s easy to fixate on:

I thrive on recognition.Recognition is the positive attention that kept me going through a rather negative childhood.

I don’t deal well with rejection. (Who does?) As an overweight, highly intelligent, awkward child, I received a lot of rejection so I tend to overreact to it.

I don’t like being made a fool of, having been the butt of jokes much of my life. I’m afraid I’m being a fool by continuing to hope.

On the other hand:

I see myself as a hopeful person

I highly admire perseverance

I like the image of being a writer (although I wrestle with whether I need traditional publishing to feel like a writer)

I like writing. A lot. Editing, not so much. Querying — I love the optimism I feel when I send out a new query. I hate rejections.

I love to have people discover my writing.

The key, though, is that if I quit only to find that someone picks up Prodigies, I would un-quit in a second. If I had readers, especially ones I could communicate with, I would write with and for a community.

Quitting won’t get me what I need. So, how do I get what I need out of writing?

The Winter Doldrums

I’m fighting the winter doldrums.

The polar vortex with its -40 F (-40 C) wind chill has passed, and the warmer temperatures have melted some of the snow, but we’re now shrouded in grey skies and thick fog. There is nothing romantic in February fog and muddied snow.

My life looks like the terrain outside — isolated and isolating, with no shiny stars left over from Christmas to focus on. No bad news, but no good news either. Nothing other than the occasional rejection on the query front. No new life in my basement grow room, although the good news is that I will be starting some seeds in a couple weeks — tomatoes and peppers and eggplant; white flowers for the moon garden (aka the non-edible portion of my garden).

It’s hard to feel optimistic right now. It’s hard to believe that beneath the snow and ice of my life, plants slumber waiting for their time to reach for the sky.

are was were have had has — the inaction verbs

The words in the title — are was were have had has — are (see what I did there) too often substituted for action words that can make writing lively and immediate.

Let me try to write that first sentence again: Using “are”, “was”, “were”, “have”, “had”, and “has” instead of action verbs such as “need”, “possess”, “describe”, “denote” and others makes writing passive and unconvincing.

Or: Using more active verbs such as “need”, “possess”, “describe”, “denote” and others rather than “are”, “was”, “were”, “have”, “had”, and “has” makes writing more convincing and engaging.

I wish I remembered this during the writing stage rather than having to go back and edit out most of those passive verbs for more active ones.

That’s what I’m doing right now — editing Whose Hearts are Mountains, which consists mostly of making my verbs more active. I’m afraid I’m going to have to add more words to it to market it, I’m having to rewrite so much. Getting rid of the passive verbs causes me to get rid of passive, weak sentence fragments, so fewer words.

I try for not more than one “are”, “was”, “were”, “have”, “had”, and “has” per paragraph and only if I can’t find another way to write it. I wish I had the “pre” writeup for this, but this is post-edit. Just for you to read:

I crossed the border to Wyoming with little fanfare. Just on the other side of the border I saw a highway sign at the entrance for the town of Pine Bluffs. I parked the car at the shoulder of the ramp and consulted my doctored map. Soon, I would be at the border of No Man’s Land, a place without cities, gasoline, or food. A temperate desert, scathingly hot in the days and chilly in the evenings. I would need a city to stock up at, get my last refueling before I would need to rely on pressing castor beans and precipitating out the glycerin to make the biodiesel. I hoped I knew how to do that; Back at my last stop — I still felt gut-wrenching horror to remember it — I had written down the proportions of ethanol and lye to castor oil with a pencil stub I found in my coat pocket.

I drove toward Pine Bluffs, and the small gas station at the exit looked closed and shuttered. This didn’t surprise me — I suspected many proprietors would shun a gas station on the eerily deserted interstate. As I drove into town, I saw a wooden sign for the town with the carved letters painted over in black.

As I drove to the downtown, I noticed the skies darkening, and trees whipped in the wind around me. Looking at the stores, I saw nothing — houses shuttered and sagging. Buildings in the small Main Street stood deserted with furniture and goods still displayed in windows. Christmas decorations twisted in the wind on the light poles downtown. I parked my truck and stepped out to survey the streets, hearing only the wind howling.

At that moment, the wind died and the sky darkened almost to night. The most frightening silence surrounded me, most frightening in its completeness. I looked up and saw the funnel of the tornado in the near distance, and I kicked in the window and rolled through it, hoping the glass would not cut me fatally.

I turned and saw Christmas garlands ripped from their guy wires and realized blood may not be the worst of my problems. I ran through the aisles of what I recognized as an old-school hardware store. Near the antique counter of walnut and mellow gold wainscoting, I saw a door sagging open. I ran through it and down the stairs as the roaring demon coursed down the street.

Downstairs, I sat on the floor, wishing I’d thought to grab a hand-crank flashlight before I retreated. Eventually, however, my eyes adjusted to the dark broken only by the tiny window at the top.
I realized that I sat on a dessicated body.

I stood up quickly, shrieking, to survey the situation. A flannel shirt and pair of coveralls shrouded the bone and sinew. He had fallen face-down; I turned the corpse over carefully, and saw steel-rim glasses and a few scraps of silver hair adhered to his skull by leather-dried skin. Next to him, I noticed a stenographer’s pad, the pen by which he documented the tragedy of the town lying by his skeletal hand:

“Buried thirty people today with the backhoe; that’s all I could manage without help. There’s no one to help; I may be the only one left. The CDC said they can’t spare anyone, but the National Guard has posted people at all exits. Anyone who tries to get out is shot on sight.

“The streets remain empty of life, except for the random dog or cat, which seem immune to the disease. The bodies lie inside houses, where my neighbors succumbed to the fever and the rash and the despair. The despair doesn’t last long, because it takes only six hours from the rash to death.

“I will not be able to bury everyone, because my hands now carry the rash, and my armpits and neck swell and bruise. My hands burn and itch; soon my whole body will be on fire. I feel numb — even though I expected to die, I didn’t expect to be taken by the sickness, but by eventual hunger.

“If anyone finds this, I hope my corpse doesn’t carry the infection. I am not sure how long I’ve carried the virus, but the rumor is that it takes only hours from contamination to death; at least my suffering will not last long.

“Mayweather Gleason, 64, Pine Bluffs WY Nov. 2, 2030.”