New Publishing Contract! Yay!

Sorry I've dropped off the planet. Things in Alabama have been too happy to keep me up late at night writing my own stuff.

Actually, I have kept writing, just not for myself. I took a few years to ghostwrite, and still do, but looked into writing my own fiction again over the last few months.

Severed Press, an Australian publisher of horror/scifi, offered me a contract to write a sea monster horror tale. I started today. It doesn't have a title yet. Isn't that enticing?

Sea monsters! Isn't that fun?

I may still dust off the second short of Mate for Life, too, and just need to find the file in one of the many files in one of the many crash folders called "writing stuff." The good thing is I know more about computers now and it shouldn't be too hard to find...(search hard drive for the name Ari. See why it's good to give at least one character an odd name? There's method to the madness.)

Typewriter Poetry Collection free for Five Days

Scribblers and Ink Spillers published this in 2009. I wrote it on Chris Sabotini's typewriter in two or three days when I first moved to Phoenix, Arizona in 2001. It's free for five days on Amazon. I hope you enjoy!

Typewriter Poetry Collection

Here's a cute picture of a kitten.

My lil baby girl Ouija!

Mate for Life Book 2 Teaser

Mate for Life—Part Two

Diana felt the warm sun over every inch of her naked body and smiled. She rolled over in the dead leaves of the grove and murmured, “Ari?”

              He wasn’t there.

              Diana sat up and covered her breasts. Where was he? They had stopped here near sunrise to sleep. It had been the best night of her entire life and existence.

              But he was simply gone.

              “Ari?” Her throat was sore from howling so much the night before and her call was as quiet as a grasshopper’s spring.

              She stood and dropped her arms, looking around. Nothing seemed unusual. She stared at the sun a moment.

              She wasn’t cold. Why wasn’t she cold? Yesterday, she could see her breath. Now she blew a plume out, and saw nothing.

              Was it all a dream?

              A breeze blew a strand of silver hair onto her chest. She’d dyed it just the other day. Now it was completely silver. Diana pulled it every which way, and all over, shiny grey.

              She knew reality, that had never been too hard for her. It was individual humans she couldn’t quite get the knack of.

              Was she human? Was she a werewolf?

              Nothing happened out of her memory last night. Werewolves went on mad rampages. She and Ari frolicked, played. Yipped and howled. Here, in this grove, they’d made love a hundred different ways. Thinking of this, Diana felt silly to be embarrassed about being naked in the middle of nowhere and she relaxed.

              She was in control again. Ari probably went to get breakfast.

THIRTEEN FULL MOONS LATER

              Diana was almost at the cabin. She came every full moon, thinking he’d be there. Then she’d spend the night in wolf-form, roaming, smelling, calling out. No other wolves like her made themselves known, not even Pablo, the one she made pack leader so many months ago.

Kiss Me - Short Story

This short was published in 2008 and I put it in my shorts collection, 21 Lucky Shorts. I hope you enjoy.

Kiss Me

She’s got the whiskey bottle over her head and I’m worried she’s going to spill it.
I should know better. Kacey was a dancer in school, never lost that balance. She’s
spinning in a circle singing some song about California. It stopped playing out the car
windows five minutes ago and the only sound in the parking lot is her voice and the
clicking of her clogs on the pavement as she dances. 

She says, “Come on, Pinker, you’re not tired, are you?”

The bar closes soon and the go-home lights are on inside, which Kacey says makes everyone look like zombies. That’s why we’re out here. 

I say, “Sick of dancing. Let’s get out of here.”

“We have half a bottle. Let’s go out to the wildlife refuge.”

She’s carefree riding shotgun with the open whiskey balanced between her thighs
and we make it out to the spot on the gravel road in what feels like no time. She’s been
playing that same California song over and over, singing off-key now and grinning with
what I call her Kacey glaze-face. She’s got some plan. It will just take a few more tips of
the bottle and the sound of the woods and its night critters to get it out her lips.

“Let’s go down to the river tonight. I don’t want to sit in the car,” she says,
opening her door, feet crunching on the road.

“Thank you.”

“You think you can escape the song that way. But I can sing it all night, remember
that.” But she doesn’t sing it anymore.

We walk holding hands down the trail we know by heart. Don’t need flashlights.
We have the half-full moon and the light of memory to take us there. We stop on the
bridge over the river, a little red wooden thing with names and dates etched from
walkway to railings, and on one day-trip Kacey hung her head over the edge of it and
carved her name on the underside with a beer lid. She was disappointed the mark had
been claimed by someone else, but only one name. “Who is this 'Kiss Me?'” she’d
asked, and one of her games when we were out here and there wasn’t anything to talk
about was to try and figure out who’d had the same idea as she’d had and why they’d
signed with that tag.

Tonight she sticks her legs out through the railing posts and swigs the whiskey,
hands it to me. I hit it up too, feeling warm and happy. I sit next to her and she’s quiet,
unusually so. I don’t ask why. The silence is nice and I light up a smoke.

After a while, the glaze goes away and she’s sharp as ever, changed once more.
Like she always does. Her changing is so usual that were she to stay the same I’d be
worried. And, I admit, a little bored.

“California,” she starts. And on it goes. She talks about the West coast, L.A., San
Diego, wonders if the ocean is purple, even. I think she’s trying to get me to laugh with
that one, but I can tell there’s something behind all this and I’m waiting for it when she
says, “Let’s go. Let’s just go tonight. Let’s get back in the car and take all our money out
of the ATM and go.”

“To California?”

“Sure, to Cali.”

“Cali, now, is it?”

“You know you want to.”

I think about that. My gut pulls on me to jump in the driver’s seat, but there’s
something different to her moonlit eyes tonight. She’s asking something for real and I’m
not sure what it is.

“What about our jobs?”

“My job is shit. Your job is, too. We could just go. Come on, Pinker.”

My job isn’t shit, although I might complain about it to her sometimes. But that’s
what people do. We complain. We talk about stuff that doesn’t really matter just to fill
air. I’m talking to Kacey, though, I have to remember, and maybe Kacey doesn’t do that
much like other people. She means what she says and it’s what she’s thinking one
hundred percent. It’s something she doesn’t get about other people, how we are all fine.
We complain and it’s as simple as that. I tell her so here on the bridge and she spits in
the river.

“Come on,” she says. “Don’t you want to be somewhere where things happen
differently?”

“I’d like to visit,” I tell her. And that’s the truth. I don’t think much more about it
and we split the rest of the bottle talking about people we know. Gossiping. We gossip,
sure, and it’s nice. I’ve never gossiped with anyone else and probably never will. Still,
she keeps staring out at the water and it’s like her heart’s not in it.

Soon we take off back up the path, but she’s not holding my hand on the way up.
She plays the California song again and again on the way back to her apartment. I pull
into a parking spot and kiss her neck and wonder if this will be one of the nights we
mess around, but it isn’t. I’m a little frustrated, but amused. That’s just Kacey. You never
know.

She says, "Pinker, remember that cat you used to have?"

"Moses?"

"Remember how he would ignore you then you'd wake up with him on your chest
every morning?"

"Yeah."

"Why do you think he didn't pay any attention to you when you were awake?"

"I thought he was a typical cat. That's the kind of thing cats do."

"No," she says, "That was him. That was his personality. I think he was afraid you
wouldn't want to pet him so he never came up to you when you were aware of him.
Wouldn't it suck to be ignored?"

"He was just a cat."

"Kiss," she says, smiling slightly, and leaves the car. I watch her walk away.

The next morning I’m tired and the whiskey’s made my mouth taste like I licked
the inside of a cheap bottle of bathroom cleaner. I get ready for work and go out to my
car. I feel pretty good and under the wiper on my windshield I see a CD. It’s got to be
from Kacey. She does stuff like this.

I pull out of my parking lot and pop in the CD. It’s the California song and I have
to grin, thinking of her flat singing. Then the song ends and I don’t know how she did it
- she knows about computers pretty well - but there’s her voice and she says, “I’m
blowing this town, just like I said I was. You know I’ll miss you most, Pinker. I’ll call
you from Cali.”

Has she really gone? Kacey’s impulsive, but I guess it’s some kind of joke.

I call her after work and her roommate answers. Kacey’s really gone. Took off
with a suitcase and a wad of cash. Her roommate’s pissed. Left all the bills and a vacant
room and can I tell Kacey to go to hell when I hear from her?

It's a week later when she calls and I'm so mad at her that I hang up when I hear
her voice. She calls back and I listen this time and she says I was the only one who
would understand, and why was I being so cold, and I was supposed to go with her,
didn't I get it?

I tell her, "This is your home."

"That's it?" she says. "That's all you've got for me? That's not my home. I have no
home."

Kacey has family and friends here, and I point all that out to her, but she's a hard
wall now. I have become one of the enemies that made her want to go off and find some
new world. Soon she hangs up with a distant, "Call you again, and don't be so mad at
me, okay? You'll get over it."

It's been months and I haven't heard from her. I know she's okay because her sister
is in touch with her and tells me what she's up to. She's working at some club and doing
free art work for one of those local entertainment magazines. Maybe Kacey found
whatever it is she's looking for, but I can't know until she comes back here and tells me
about it. She says this isn't her home, but what am I?

I keep thinking about the time we met in art class in high school. We were paired
together to do a model of the city bridge. She wanted to do it with toothpicks and I said
it would take too long, that I just wanted a grade the easiest way possible. She said I was
lazy, but she grinned and looked like a little devil. Those pretty lips and those crooked
teeth. There was always something about her.

We built our bridge out of toothpicks and it was a disaster. The whole time we
worked on it I hinted I wanted to take her to prom, but whenever I brought it up she'd
say prom was for dorks. Now I think she didn't get what I was saying, but that's for the
best. We wouldn't have become such good friends if we'd gone that way. It's weird how
different I felt about her when I first met her and then it changed. I guess I changed, but
she never did.

Tonight I'm going out to the wildlife refuge alone. It's late and there's a full moon
and I just want to get out of town for an hour or so.

Out at the bridge, I smoke and sip a beer and watch the stars, wondering about
Kacey. I fiddle with the lighter in my pocket, then hang upside down on the bridge and
light the flame to read where she wrote her name. Yet instead of finding 'Kacey' carved
beneath the bridge, I see the infamous 'Kiss me' with my name following it and a date
from ten years ago. 'Kiss me, Pinker...' It's the first time I ever actually bothered to look
under the bridge. The blood rushes to my head as my body is suspended and it seems
that the entire world is upside down with me. Now I get it and she's gone. The flame is
out.

Special Thanks to the editors of The Write Place at the Write Time for help with this
story.

Bad Memory.

I forgot everything about my other blog I created. Email address, password...even the URL for a moment or two. So ta-da! Here's a new one! I hope to be writing plenty more in the eons to come. Thanks for stopping by!

This is our new kitten, Ouija. She's a lover! She is Spooky and Osho's grandcat, and Morgana and Poof's niece. We have generations!

I like to blog a lot about cats and plan on posting short stories on the blog. Hope you enjoy your visits.