The ‘twins’ are driving me crazy! I’m so used to cats falling in love with me that I’m flummoxed by the efforts needed to become a member of their clan. Although they are individuals—Viola is more outgoing and sillier, Sebastian is shyer, but when I do manage to pet him he dissolves into a purring machine—they often operate as a collective. I see her looking at him and asking “what do we do next?” I see him relying on her to nudge me toward the kitchen in the morning. They wrestle. They play tag. They jump. They edge each other
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I met “Harry Clarke” last week. He’s the central character in an Off-Broadway play. The character is one of those compelling and intriguing personalities that draw the reader/viewer down a rabbit hole and away from conventional ethics and morality. Harry was not as overt as Patricia Highsmith’s “Talented Mr. Ripley;” doesn’t rack up a body count of Jeff Lindsay’s serial killer, Dexter; isn’t as unreliable as Nabokov’s Humbert Humbert (‘Lolita’); nor does he create a reign of terror like any number of fictional super villains. But, he does engender a special brand of havoc, shattering a few lives as he
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Happy Thanksgiving! I’m taking today off to celebrate being thankful for friends who are like family, opportunities to write, stories that fall out of the sky & land in my head, for two crazy kittens, and for so many other wonderful things.   Back to Monster Meditations on Monday and new stories on the Timeless Tales page coming soon…  
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Did you ever “write” a story in your head? I often come up with an idea shortly before I fall asleep or while I’m walking somewhere. Sometimes these inspirations produce my best stories. I manage to put it down on paper or, better yet, plant the idea like a seed and grow a story around it—one that goes in directions I didn’t anticipate. I’ve gotten novellas and even entire novel length works of fiction from that kind of golden kernel. But there are many other instances where the story idea evaporates or simply turns out to be less than worthy
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I’m kind of obsessed with my healing process. My late mom would describe this as “necessary narcissism.” I’m not sure if she coined the term or found it in psychological literature, but she used it when talking about the focus she needed while recovering from major surgery. She said that being selfish while healing was important. This was the one time that putting your own needs first was critical, and much more than merely justified. We also discussed “hospital psychosis” in which normally sane people experience psychotic episodes or irrational feelings of paranoia while in the hospital. If you have
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I sent one of my rejected novel length manuscripts to a trusted editor and I received a very encouraging reader report. Encouraging, in that the editor enjoyed the book, saw merit in me going forward with working on the manuscript, and she had some concrete suggestions for improving the novel. Now I’m trying to figure out how and when I should try to work on a new draft. This is one of those stories I’ve tried to tell many times. The current manuscript represents my third completed attempt at a full-length treatment over a period of many years. It’s very
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Parents often struggle to pick the right name their child. A good friend recently told me that in Denmark parents are not required to pick a name for more than a year. In the US if you leave the hospital without a name on the birth certificate you’re in for a rocky road of bureaucratic bumps. Animal lovers like me, put a lot of effort into figuring out the right name for a cat or dog. I’m fostering two rescue kittens with the intent to officially adopt them in two weeks. On the original paperwork their names are Benjamin and
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It pays to do what the doctors tell you to do. I had two interesting examples of compliant/noncompliant patients in my late parents. My mother had an extraordinary capacity to tolerate pain. This is not to say she wasn’t miserable after she broke her hip or after she had her knee replaced, but she was able to push through because she focused on what was necessary to achieve a positive outcome. That’s why the doctors agreed to give her the knee replacement when she was over the age of 80. She sailed through the horrific physical therapy because she knew
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