I dragged Geoff to see In Bruge tonight. I'd been trying to see it ever since it was released, and it finally appeared in a theater we could get to in less than an hour. As it was, we were alone in the theater.

Geoff says it started slow;, but I was drawn in right away by the visual interest and the fine acting. I was delighted with Jordan Prentice, who in his haughty characterization was always doing something new and wacky, and Clémence Poésy's mobile, beautiful face was wonderful to watch. Of course I was taken from the first by Colin Ferrill's expressive eyebrows. (Eyebrows to die for!)

I had expected a dark comedy, based on the previews. But it was really much more: the characters changed and showed depth as the action unfolded. (Spoiler warning) The pregnant inn-keeper (I'm not sure who played her), for example, surprised us at the end by her quixotic effort to block the stairs and protect her guest. Harry, the murderous king-pin, surprised me by his adherence to a code of protection of children. But the relationship between Ken and Ray was the real drawing point of the movie. All in all, the acting was a perfect interpretation of a complex script by director-writer Martin McDonogh.

So go see it. I have no idea why it didn't get wider distribution. The story-telling, the acting, the visual effects, and even the sound track are just superb.

So I didn't win.

I can only retreat to infantile behavior, thus:


see more crazy cat pics

I have discovered a game which one blogger calls a “virtual petting zoo.” It is Animal Paradise, which uses images from the wildly popular cat photographer, Yoneo Morita and his Hanadeka (“bignose”) style of photography. You’ll recognize the style when you see it; he uses a fisheye lens, which makes the animals much cuter than you could ever imagine mere two dimensional portrayal could achieve. It's somehow like touching them.

The player of this -- what? -- it’s not exactly a game, but a “product” -- meets and befriends a variety of animals, not just cats, but a miniature dachshund, hamsters, horses, and lop-eared bunnies. If I understand correctly, the animals all eventually die. One blogger says this is supposed to teach children about mortality. I’m not sure we need to teach children about mortality; they will encounter instances of it soon enough.

But I thoroughly admire Morita’s openly sentimental but luxuriant images:




(image from www.postercheckout.com/PictureFull.asp?PrintID=278289

I’m reading Francine Prose’s Reading Like a Writer. As some of you know, I am personally a plot slut, and I find style sluts enormously annoying. They speak as if somehow imagination is irrelevant, if you massage a dull story about boring characters enough it will somehow achieve the status of art. They imply that if, as a reader, you find a story tedious if well written, there’s something wrong with you as a reader. I disagree, vociferously at times.

Surely others are in my camp. In fact, I almost wonder if Jonathan Lethem’s recent brilliantly witty New Yorker story, “The King of Sentences,” was a sly send-up of Prose’s chapter on sentences.

Nonetheless.

Right now I’m doing rewrites on a story about cats (what else do I have to write about these days?) and about people who love cats way too much. That’s what it’s about. The protagonist is a woman with a personality disorder which I am afraid readers will find annoying, but for good or evil, that’s where my material has led me.

And the thing is, I’m massaging the damn thing sentence by sentence, word by word, shining and polishing -- and wondering, what could be worth this amount of work?

Gene Wolfe, from whom I have been lucky enough to take a workshop, once took a manuscript of mine and copyedited the hell out of it. For me, this was a watershed experience. All the flab and blab gone from my little story, which ultimately sold to Interzone under the title “The Sleel.”

(Yes, your jaw is dropping. Can you imagine a style lesson from Gene Wolfe? Would you give your right arm? How about both your arms?)

What I learned from Gene Wolfe I will not summarize here. I was immensely flattered that he thought I was smart enough to understand what he was doing, crossing out this phrase, moving that word to the front, etc. Writers learn this stuff by doing it, just as you learn to cook with the materials you have, in the kitchen as it is, rather than just from a cookbook.

My own worst affliction is prolixity. Certain words infest my first drafts like the marbling saturated fat in corn-fed steers, words like very and somehow. And I tell the same thing five times, and then can’t figure out which four times it should be excised.

I’ve been doing that for the last four days with this obsessed cat-woman story. I’ve cut almost a thousand words out of it.

But why does it have take so long?

Francine Prose does talk about more than word by word style, of course. She does admit that talking about Isaac Babel’s style implies reading across translation, and that she may as much taken with Constance Garnett’s word choice as with Chekhov’s. She talks about gesture, and she talks about looking, really looking at how the masters do things.

I feel a flash of recognition, for example, when she talks about excising the clichéed gesture (“Her heart beat faster.”) and finding something authentic and fresh. This is a lesson I learned from Maureen McHiugh when she told me that my point of view character in a story was too unimaginative, that he needed to make the occasional sarcastic little jab.

Helpful! And not all that hard to do, once I saw the possibilities.

Reading Like a Writer is a useful book, and like all opinionated works, it can be infuriating at times. Why this obsession with words, words, words?

(I should mention, by the way, that the book is also entertaining. Prose can tell an anecdote brilliantly, and her material -- the one-legged student with the black cat, for example -- is often delicious.)

But here I am, annoyed with the whole topic, the whole work-ethic of style. And maybe the reason I think substance is more important than style is that it’s so hard to clean that windowglass, polish that prose, so the style serves the substance.

I spend so much time cutting and pasting and testing and snipping and beating my head against the wall.

Trying to make it simple. Trying to make it read easy.

Sentence by sentence. Word by bloody word.

This is the 40th anniversary of the assassination of Martin Luther King. It was one of those watershed events after which people realized America had lost another shard of its innocence.

If you are old enough to remember, what were you doing when you heard?

So the deadline for voting for the Nebs is Monday. Am I nervous? I once roomed with a Nebula nominee (who shall remain nameless) who locked me and the other roommate out of our shared bathroom for three hours while she prepared herself for the banquet and awards ceremony. At the time, I thought, how silly.

Now I understand.

And I have absolutely no idea what my chances are.

The voting deadline is this Monday, March 31. If you are an active member of SFWA, whether you vote for my story “Pride” or not, I hope you vote.

The insanely generous Charlie Oberndorf, having far too much academic work to do, gave us his tickets to the opening gala of Cleveland International Film Festival on Thursday night, and it was fabulous. We saw Then She Found Me , which will open in May of this year. It stars Helen Hunt (who also directed it), Matthew Broderick, Colin Firth, and Bette Midler, who was splendidly comic. It also featured several adorable children, one of whom is first seen having a major tantrum screaming "I want my mommy!" and is so cute you just want to pick her up and be her mommy.

Best of all was a very convincing performance by Salman Rushdie. I'll let you spot him when you see the film.

After the film there was a huge noisy party with a lot of pretty people who must have been actors and film critics, and wonderful food. We had a nice wine I had never heard of, called Pensacal. It made me decide I'm going to give up on those little 6-ounce screw-top bottles and just open a bottle of real wine when I want, and if it goes bad before I finish it off (we don't drink very often), well, so be it. (Googling "Pensacal 2001 Red," I discover that it is in fact a very inexpensive wine. But I don't care; it was great!)

And then, despite a predicted blizzard, poet Michele Cooper, of whom I've spoken before, and her sweetie, playwright Art Kramer, invited Geoff and me to join them to see two more features at the Film Festival today. Alas, white-out driving conditions kept Art and Michele house-bound. Not just their drive, but their whole street was blocked with snow. But Geoff is a brave soul and off we went. Our first movie of the day was Beynelmilel (also called The Internationale . This is a Turkish film which motivates me to learn more about Turkish history. The premise is that a naive band-leader hears the melody of The Internationale, and innocent of its origin or intent, plays it to welcome minions of a military dictatorship opposed to socialism. The non-idiomatic subtitles made the film harder to understand, but it was thought-provoking, and exotic costumes and actors made it memorable.

The other film we saw was Canadian and lots of fun, with plot twists galore. This was Bluff. Never a dull moment, with infidelity, lost objects, mysteries under the floor boards, and most of all bluffs, bluffs, bluffs. Sadly, I couldn't understand much of the French, which made me feel quite inadequate, or maybe just a victim of multiple European-French teachers in my past, but the subtitles were quite okay. I think the sinister art collector looked like Isaac Asimov.

Between films, Geoff helped un-stick some poor guy who hadn't a clue how to get out of a huge snowbank he'd stuck his car in, this with the help of five teens. And, when their efforts weren't quite enough, feeling very foolish, I put my shoulder to it, and, as Geoff says, every newton counts, so my little addition got the guy out.

Our drive home was adventurous, but not catastrophic, and now perhaps we'll take a trudge in the snow and discuss our movies.

The final Nebula ballot is now public, and on it in the short story category is my story “Pride.” If you are a member of Denvention or were a member of Nippon2007, please consider it for Hugo nomination. The deadline is coming right up: Saturday, March 1.

Of course, you should buy a copy of Fast Forward 1. In addition to my story, you’ll love the mind-twisters by Kage Baker, Paolo Bacigalupi, Tony Ballantyne, Stephen Baxter, Elizabeth Bear, A. M. Dellamonica, Paul Di Filippo, Robyn Hitchcock, Louise Marley, Ken MacLeod, Ian McDonald, John Meaney, Larry Niven and Brenda Cooper, Mike Resnick and Nancy Kress, Justina Robson, Pamela Sargent, Mary A. Turzillo, Robert Charles Wilson, Gene Wolfe, and George Zebrowski. This anthology is mining territory for the Hugo gold, not to mention its brilliant editor, Lou Anders.

And if you’re looking for additional great material for Hugo nomination, don’t neglect my novelette, "Zora and the Land Ethic Nomads , from George Mann's Solaris Book of New Science Fiction , not to speak of all the other great stories, by such as Jeffrey Thomas, Neal Asher, Jay Lake, Greg van Eekhout, James Lovegrove, Paul Di Filippo, Peter F Hamilton, Adam Roberts, Stephen Baxter, Ian Watson, Mike Resnick, David Gerrold, Brian Aldiss, Keith Brooke, Simon Ings, Tony Ballantyne, and Eric Brown.

Here is a pdf of my novelette from The Solaris Book of New Science Fiction, "Zora and the Land Ethic Nomads"

It took me an entire day to put five poems in the mail.

What is wrong with me?

Okay, I’m trying for a very high end market. I never saw The Sun before, but once I read as many issues as I could find, I really felt my poetry might resonate with their readers. The Sun is rated as an extremely competitive market. But I really liked it, and I thought I had a chance with the particular voice I have for non-genre poetry. So I chose three brand new poems and two reprints and I printed them up.

Then I noticed mistakes in them and printed them up again.

Well, not mistakes. Things I wanted to change. So I redid them. Uh, this happened several times.

Then I thought, these people at The Sun don’t have a clue who I am. But I noticed that they have recently published two poets that I have actually discussed my poetry with: Tim Seibles and Eric Anderson.

So I tore up my original letter and rewrote it with a paragraph about how I’d workshopped with one of these poets and the other had actually helped me with a poem I was submitting. But then I realized I couldn’t figure out just when I’d had a conference with Tim Seibles. I remembered where we were, remember his voice, what he said, I remember the sunlight streaming in through the window on the table we were sitting at, on our poems, and on our hands.

But not the actual date or the formal name of the course or was it a workshop?

So I proceeded to tear apart all the folders of workshop materials I’ve collected through the years, trying to find the date of that meeting.

I spent the dang afternoon on that. And I never found it, although I did fnd evidence that Tim Seibles is part of the faculty of the workshop where I remember conferring with him. But I can't discover the date I met with him. Maybe it was all a dream?

As always, rifling through old files brought some surprises

For example, I discovered that my chapbook Galileo’s Blindness had in fact been published not because my publisher had been casually looking for random material, but because it won a chapbook contest. I discovered addresses of people I used to know, who have undoubtedly moved. I discovered a poem I forgot I wrote, plus some stories I'm afraid to look at.

I spent a lot of time on this. The files were dusty and my handwriting is awful.

I could write novels in the time I spend in what my husband calls “search mode.”

Do other people have this problem?

I know, I know, there’s a drug for that.

Anyway, my excitement for the last couple days was: I didn’t get on the final Stoker ballot, but I am on the final Nebula ballot, plus I’ve also been nominated for the Cleveland Arts Prize and am on a map of 200 notable Ohio Authors from Ohioana. These facts should have given me courage and self-confidence, but in fact, I still haven't actually put the envelope in the mail, and I just thought of another change I want to make in the cover letter.

Please, please, tell me, does anybody else have this problem of taking a whole day to put one submission in the mail?

People in my writing group know that I’m a point of view slut.

I’ve been trying to understand why certain highly regarded contemporary literary works annoy me and why it’s a major struggle keeping my eyes on their pages. I keep having this horrible feeling that I have poor taste, or that my brains have liquified and are seeping out my ears, but now I think maybe not. I think I know what's happening.

This came as a result of reading work by two highly regarded writers whose work I can't stand: Roberto Bolaño and Jim Shepard .

Charlie Oberndorf, whose artistic taste, insight, and narrative skills I admire, suggested for our reading club a writer who fell into the category of Highly Respected Writer Whose Work Makes Me Want To Go Wash Dishes: Roberto Bolaño. I read only two of Bolaño's stories, plus some critical material about him. And I just don't want to read more. I just can't think that I'm ever going to fall in love with this guy's work. Sure, his prose (translated, I admit) is interesting. Sure, he doesn't commit clichés. So what is it?

The other writer whose work that makes me want to scream or shred paper is Jim Shepard. Again, I've only read three of the stories in Like You'd Understand Anyway, the shortest of which was almost bearable.

What is going on? Is this me? These guys have major creds: awards, critical praise, ABD's struggling to finish doctoral dissertations on them. So why am I not riveted to the page?

Is it that I don't like to spend a lot of time in the heads of people I consider not just evil, but also kind of stupid?

The narrator of Jim Shepard's " The First South Central Australian Expedition " is R. M. Beadle," an explorer who hauls a whaleboat into the interior of the Australian continent on the belief that there was a huge inland sea there. The narrator is really annoying. He was emotionally abused by his father and has spent the rest of his life trying to prove how brave he is by subjecting other men to his obsessive self-punishing. When the list of horrible diseases, masochistic proverbs, and impossibly high temperatures got to be actually funny, my impulse what to research whether R. M. Beadle was real. He may have been, but I can't find this out without more research than I really think the story deserves. If it's supposed to be a parody of explorer's diaries (and I'm pretty sure it's not) it goes on way too long. I just got tired of being in this jerk's head.

The next story I picked out was "Eros 7," about Valentina Valdimirovna Tereshkova. I have to admit, this story at least taught me once and for all how to spell this heroic woman's name. However, the story has a grim quality I found repellent. The premise is that she was in love with the cosmonaut in the other orbiter and that she really didn't have much interest in the space program, just wanted to get it on with him. Actually, I was able to track down some of Shephard's meticulous research, and he's got a lot of good detail on Valentina. Maybe she really was this stolid and, except for the obsession with a married man, unimaginative farm-girl/bureaucrat, but maybe she wasn't. I really can't understand why none of the incredible glory of the early space program didn't shine out in this story. Valentina did compete for the position; she wasn't plucked off the farm. Surely she would have been excited, exalted -- but no. The only grand passion she feels is for the other cosmonaut. Ho hum. I get the feeling that if I'd had the honor of meeting Shephard's Valentina (as opposed to the real one) that she would have been more interested in lipstick than in Mars.

The third story was "Proto-Scorpions of the Silurian," which I picked out for its title. It was about a dysfunctional family where the narrator and his damaged brother are quite gifted but spend their time fighting. This one was short. It was short enough that I didn't feel that I had to slog through pages and pages of these nasty people destroying one another. Thank you!

Oh, and none of these stories had cats.

Do I think Jim Shepard is a great writer? Possibly. My taste for likable characters is perhaps a character flaw on my part. And God knows, Shepard knows how to do research. I have a sneaking suspicion that all that stuff about R. M. Beadle is true, and the reason the story goes on and on is that Shepard wanted to include all his little weird discoveries.

So anyway, unfairly, I'm judging him by three stories. Maybe I'm judging myself. Maybe I'll read another story, maybe even one of his novels, which sound interesting. (But then the stories sounded interesting.)

And maybe I still don't have the insight. I'm reminded of the fact that I love Nabokov's Pale Fire, and that has just as repellent a point of view character as Humbert Humbert in Lolita. I could invite Kinbote into my home and snicker at him behind my fan, but then he'd probably kill me.

(Someday I'd like to see somebody discuss homophobia in Nabokov -- )

As to Bolaño, well, I'm not going to read The Savage Detective until I work my way through that hundred-foot wall of classics.

Maybe if I get very very old and run out of anything else to read.

Just a quick note: I discovered a writer friend of mine has been blogging, very entertainingly, about sundry writing issues, both in romance and in other genres. She's at My Romance Story Blog. I don't know if she wants to reveal her real name, but she blogs under the byline Poison Ivy, which may suggest the flavor.

Stupid plagiarists, weird titles, and Really Bad Writing have been recent topics that gave me a giggle.

Take a look. She's lots of fun.

I'm using pneumonia as a strategy for getting nothing done but thinking deep thoughts, and here are the deep thoughts I have concerning movies I've seen in the last three weeks:

THE DIVING BELL AND THE BUTTERFLY: I saw this less than two weeks after my mother-in-law died, and my best friend said, oh, it's supposed to be quite uplifting. Yeah, sure. But yes, I liked it. I liked that Jean-Dom, the suddenly paralyzed journalist/editor of Elle, which my mother used to subscribe to, continued to have a sense of humor, and was a writer right up to the end. That he died having his positive reviews read to him, yes, that was a good death for a writer. Cat quotient, alas, zero, unless I'm missing something

JUNO: What a hoot is Diablo Cody! I think her clever dialog is a bit contrived, but it isn't wedded to a particular time and place, as is much adolescent movie-dialog. Juno (Ellen Page) is simply a lovely human; the New Yorker review described her as impulsive, but you know, a) she's a kid and b) we don't know that she omitted birth control in the fateful armchair; we just know she was unlucky and fruitful. And is it unlucky? She got to transmit her great genes and made another woman happy. And had a more interesting high school career than most to talk about the rest of her life.

I loved the way we got seduced by Mark's enthusiasms and likable quirks, right up until the time he started dancing -- well, I won't commit a spoiler. And Juno's father and stepmother were terrific portrayals, not just as the actors portrayed them, but as Diablo Cody wrote them: real, empathic human beings. The scene where Juno's stepmom goes after the sonogram tech for dissing Juno is a treasure.

But the cat quotient on this one was zero, although there were puppies (cute), a rabbit, and a dog harnessed to a wagon. Nice thought, but not memorable enough for cat points.

CHARLIE WILSON'S WAR: My husband reminds me that those nice villagers that Charlie and his Jesus-loving tart were helping turned out to be the Taliban, who do awful things to women and blow up Buddhas. But I liked the script; it didn't gloss over Charlie's womanizing, drinking, or cultural ignorance. And it pointed out that we coulda shoulda given the Afghanis some money for education after they got their country back.

Cat quotient was a three, both for the beautiful fat presumably male orange cat sleeping on Charlie's desk, and also for his story about defeating a politician because he killed his dog. "And that's when I fell in love with America." (I give cat points for nice dogs.) There were also a couple of greyhounds, and mules, horses, camels, crows, etc., but none cool enough to give points for.

THE ORPHANAGE: You know, I wouldn't have noticed if there was a cat in this movie, because I was quivering an inch above my seat throughout the entire movie. My friend was embarrassed for me. She had to put a hand on my arm to stop me from screaming "Oh my Jesus!" after an ugly traffic accident. And at one point I screamed so loud that the entire rest of the movie audience giggled at me. I think this is the scariest movie I ever saw. The second, third, fourth, and fifth scariest were: Alien, The Exorcist, Wait until Dark, Scanners, and there's probably a sixth, but I forgot.

Cat quotient zero.

One reviewer says there were a lot of black cats jumping out of the shadows, but I think these were metaphorical black cats. A wonderful movie, real black cats or no.

I AM LEGEND: Geoff refuses to see this, but he's wrong. I liked the ending, which I regard as heroic, not sappy -- I won't spoil it, but it's different from the book. The monsters were startling, but not all that scary. Which is funny, because rabies is a scary disease, and I understand people worldwide are getting it as a result of unvaccinated animals. Will Smith's acting was better than the script needed. When he got stabbed in this leg, he acted like a guy who'd been stabbed in the leg, darn it, not all hissy and theatrical like most action heroes. SPOILER WARNING: When that happened with Sam the dog, Smith's face was a whole poem of grief.

What an actor. I'd love to see him do Hamlet. Unless he already has. And when he gets old and weather-beaten, Lear.

Cat quotient: four. Major points for the lion family early in the film. Very nice shots of lioness tearing into deer, with papa and cubs watching with feline interest at a distance. They are computer generated, of course, but I still like them. The zombie dogs are also computer generated. I would have liked some zombie cats, too, but I guess you can't have everything. And the movie also gets points for those two non-computer-generated adorable German Shepherds, especially the puppy.

THERE WILL BE BLOOD: Holy Joe, what a movie. Paul Dano as Eli Sunday is brilliant, and who can avoid swooning over any Daniel Day-Lewis performance. Lagged a bit even while oil wells were blowing up, but the ending was terrifying and satisfying. The New Yorker said the ending was "over the top" and a wrong judgment call on the part of the director, but I thought it was a powerful consummation to the life of a man who'd been ruined by his own isolation and greed. "I'm finished." Indeed!

Cat quotient: No cats, but I did notice the handsome dog (what breed? Anybody know? Not a dalmatian, although spotted). The Humane Society web site about treatmentof animal movie actors reminds me that there were plenty more animals in the film. They didn't monitor the well being of the quails supposedly shot by Daniel and HW, however. Possibly these weren't under contract. I'm pretty sure they weren't really shot, although their fictive fate portended that of several other characters.

Oh, and The New Yorker (always quite cat friendly) gets a few extra cat points for their running cartoon (by Jacques de Loustal?), which shows a lithe cat attempting in all sorts of subtle ways to get a sleeping man's attention. See pages 36, 44, 51, 56, 59, 63, 79, 81, January 21, 2008 .

Tigers have played prominent in news recently, culminating in the horrific Christmas Day death of a young man killed by a female tiger at the San Francisco Zoo, an incident that bore an eery resemblance to the events at the end of my story “Pride.”

In addtion to the Christmas tiger tragedy, tigers have been themselves victims of predation. In China, a rare Siberian tiger was found beheaded in a freezer,
along with two stillborn cubs.

In another incident -- you have to wonder if it’s an exotic pet-owners response to the SF zoo death --
a declawed tiger, leashed with a bicycle chain and shot five times in the head and chest, was found by sanitation crews in a wooded area off Rte 35E. She was only a year old.

At MileHiCon on a recent panel on animal characters in fiction, I inadvertently caused an uproar when I speculated that human beings can’t really tell if animals have the same emotions that we do: love, tenderness, envy, etc. I said the animals have emotions, that we can observe that they react in seemingly human ways, but that we don’t really know what is going on in their minds.

One panelist became irate and accused me of being chauvinistic about being human. The word arrogant was bandied about. I’m not sure if she had read “Pride,” where one of my characters (the hard-bitten Dr. Betty Hartley, who is not really the villain of the piece) says of the smilodon, “Her definition of love is different from yours and mine.” But the panelist emphatically felt I was denying the humanity of animals.

Humanity of animals? So, do they experience the same range of emotions we do? In the recent San Francisco zoo tragedy, one reporter suggested that the tiger, Tatiana, may have tracked down the particular youth who had teased her, or insulted her, or just looked at her funny, with the idea of revenging herself on him. This is an interesting speculation, though one with absolutely no potential for verification. The boy is dead, his life ended horribly and way too young: the tiger is also dead and anyway, tigers communicate in more dramatic terms than mere English.

You would think nobody is dumb enough to think tigers, or other predator cats, regard human beings as equals or have respect for human life. And yet we’re tricked into thinking this again and again. You almost wonder if their beauty isn’t a type of lure, that if they looked like giant squid, for example, or sewer rats, we’d exterminate them instead of keeping them in zoos and sometimes getting just a tad too close. You don’t see a lot of people clamoring to protect endangered species like Variola Major.

Pretty, yes. The cubs are cute and cuddly-looking. You could easily decide to adopt one. It looks and maybe feels like a baby. Intellectually most of us know it doesn't think like a human child, all trusting and loving. But we forget, don’t we?

I suspect big cats have intelligence equal to, but different from, the humans who trap and fear them. We’ll never know how tigers choose one victim over others, why they choose one moment rather than another to strike. We’re only guessing why Tatiana struck: annoyance at being teased with a laser pointer? instinct to “mouse”? boredom?

When I taught at Kent State Trumbull, I used to do a logic exercise that involved family pets. Usually when I asked for descriptions of pets, students would tell me of dogs, cats, fish, and the occasional cow or bantam hen. Two sisters in one of my classes revealed that they had owned a pair of lion cubs. They kept the young lions running loose in their house and yard, and the cubs sometimes blocked traffic by plopping down to sun themselves in the middle of their street. When one of the sisters (the humans, not the tigers) got pregnant, they were forced to rehome the cubs with a local dentist.

This wasn’t a unique incident in Trumbull county. There are in fact too many “exotic” animals in private homes. So many so, that in fact over the country, it is not easy to find zoos that will take on a “pet” lion when it is no longer amenable to human habitaiton.

I really don’t know if lions are less dangerous than tigers, or if big cats raised among humans are less likely to suddenly decide that a toddler is lunch instead of its brother. I do know that humans can’t resist the fascination with big, dangerous, gorgeous beasts. Think of Born Free. Think of the scene in Red Dragon (the book upon which Manhunter was based) where a serial killed takes a plucky blind lab tech to pet an anesthetized tiger. (Wouldn’t you take that opportunity, were it offered?) Think of Ruby, the leashed domesticated puma in Elizabeth Marshall Thomas's Tribe of Tiger which insists upon using a human toilet in a lady’s room on the way to appearing during a lecture by Thomas.

"Pride" gets some interesting reactions when I read it. First, people say Kevin was stupid to keep the smilodon. Second, people identify the story as some sort of animal rights parable.

Wrong. Neither. I put Kevin in a position of making a moral choice: he can risk human lives by keeping the smilodon, or he can turn it in and have it killed, thereby destroying something as unique as Mount Everest or the moon.

I have a so-far unpublished story about the space program, called "Risk Assessment," part of my Mars colonization series. I pose the same dilemma: how can we balance risk to human life against the attainment of great knowledge, such as travel to the stars, or human values against the preservation of a great work of art, such as the Bamiyan Buddhas or the Elgin Marbles.

In "Pride," I deliberately muddy the waters, just as the choices in real life are never simple. Kevin’s choices are complicated by his own human feelings of love: love for the sabertooth, and love for a woman. If your child had robbed a liquor store, would you lie and give the girl a alibi? Don’t answer too quickly: you might be surprised at what you’d do. Still further complexities: if Kevin gives the sabertooth back to Dr. Betty Hartley, will the scientist kill it? And does Kevin guess that the smilodon is capable of killing humans, even a human it "loves"?

A friend of mine, J. E Stanley, wrote a poem about being in a museum fire and forced to choose between saving the Mona Lisa or an old woman. Me, I’d probably save the old woman, but that isn’t saying I’m right.

It’s a moral choice, friends. There isn’t any right answer. That’s what my story is about.

And some say we shouldn’t keep tigers in zoos. After the tragedy on Christmas, there are probably even some who think tigers should be exterminated.

Geoff's mom died today about 8:15 PM.

I am so glad I went down two weeks ago. Before I left, I told her that I loved her. I told her too that I knew how much she loved Geoff, that he was the apple of her eye, and that I would always love him just as much as she did, and always stand by him. I don't know if she understood, but I think maybe she did.

Even if she didn't, I knew I'd said it.

Geoff said a few days ago she was singing, as weak as she was, poor dear lady. I remember she always used to sing The Battle Hymn of the Republic, very soft, when she was puttering around the house.

My sister says my mom sang a week before she died, too. I never heard of this, but it must be something that happens.

She was a good woman, a woman of righteousness, smart and funny and full of good stories. She raised her children well and was proud of them. She stood by both her husbands like a trooper.

I knew this was happening, but I am devastated.

My publisher has quite rightly suggested that if you want to order a copy of Your Cat & Other Space Aliens or Dragon Soup, you might just as well do it from vanZeno Press.

You can also order from me --

Merry Christmas to you.

This is the season of frenetic shopping, and driving through parking lots as if our cars were cursors in a game of Space Invader, of baking cookies that everybody says are delicious, but are mainly delicious because we’ve been on a sugar high for three weeks, of running up really awful credit cards debts, of wondering how we’ll survive Ohio winters, of fighting airlines and highways and ice and blizzards, and -- well you get the idea.

But sometimes before Christmas and almost certainly on Christmas Eve or Christmas Day, we sometimes take time we stop and appreciate beauty.

It can be stupid shlocky beauty, as for instance a really huge display of twinkly lights and blowup Santas and illuminated crèche scenes in front of a house three blocks away.

Or it can be the season’s movies. I don’t know why all the best movies are released at Christmas time, as if we don’t have enough to do. And I’m not sure I regard Sweeney Todd as beautiful, although it certainly was noteworthy. The Golden Compass certainly met minimum standards for Christmas celebratory beauty.

Or it can be music.

I have an eccentric way of spending Christmas, a tradition that arose when I first started seeing Geoffrey. We celebrate the winter solstice together. He then goes to see his family in Florida for Christmas Eve and Christmas.

While my mother was alive, she would have gone ballistic had I not spent Christmas with her, so I lingered in Ohio and then went to Florida and joined Geoffrey for New Years. In fact, it was at a New Years party that Geoffrey and I first publicly held hands. We’ve kept this custom for years.

Since my son usually spends Christmas Eve and Christmas morning with his father, this means I have a nice little alone time on Christmas morning. In fact, this year I thought I might be alone the whole day, which in fact had its appeal. I had this idea I would write a Christmas story. Turns out my son and his girlfriend will come up and we’ll have a nice dinner, but I still have some time to myself, to contemplate, to appreciate, to listen to music.

If I find myself driving somewhere on Christmas, magically The Messiah pops up on public radio. My ritual is to listen to it, but it seems I don’t even have to seek it out. And this Christmas was no different. I went to my sister’s house for a nice Christmas Eve spaghetti dinner, and lo, when I got in the car to drive home, there was the “Fabulous Philadelphians” joined by Philadelphia Singers Chorale, and conducted by Richard Hickox , and they were singing The Messiah.

The universe always provides the right thing at the right time. So I listened to the first part while driving, and got home in time to run into the house and turn on my home radio, and stand up for the Hallelujah Chorus, something impossible for me usually because I can’t stand up while driving.

By the way, this year I found out that Jonathan Swift (yes, him! the Gulliver/Modest Proposal guy!) tried to block the first performance of The Messiah because -- well, I still don’t understand why. Swift was in fact quite crazy.

Anyway, this performance of The Messiah was splendid. The Messiah always is. Tears ran down my cheeks, as they always do. My sister sang the Messiah with the Akron Symphony one year and said it is possible to sing and cry at the same time. Apparently the singers had to be taught how to sing while weeping.

It always takes me out of myself. It puts me in a different world.

Once a long time ago, when I was in a completely desperate frame of mind, unable to think clearly and tormented by a personal crisis I won’t go into, I picked up a copy of Robert Silverberg’s Born with the Dead. It took me away from my grief and fear and depression. It was amazing. Of course I’ve loved science fiction from early youth, but I suddenly found that it did more than just amuse me and make me want to plot my way to being an astronaut (which I didn’t, alas, being very nearsighted and also lazy). This time, reading, I found here was this other world and by being there I had a short vacation for the desperate mess I’d gotten myself into. That’s one of the things art is for: to put us in a different world.

Without art, where would we be? We need music, fiction, poetry, art, to take us out of ourselves. Plato was wrong: we need the lies, we need to step into the mirror world, we need to believe what isn’t true, what is better than true. The Messiah. The Lord of the Rings. Picasso’s La Vie. King Lear.

In some tiny humble way, I hope to make stories that take people out of themselves.

Sometimes at Christmas we stop and go into a different world, a world created by art. That’s why I love Christmas.

I hope your Christmas is full of wonder.

If you are interested in some good reading in these last days of 2007, allow me to recommend that you acquire Bill Shunn's excellent novelette, "Not of This Fold," and his short story, "Objective Impermeability in a Closed System," both original stories from his recent chapbook, An Alternate History of the 21st Century. Although you should feel at liberty to actually purchase this chapbook, I believe if you are a SFWA member you can e-mail him at shunn [at] livejournal [dot] com for a free pdf.

Another engrossing read is Scott Edelman's story "“Almost The Last Story By Almost The Last Man” in Postscripts #12 Postscripts # 12.

And finally, I very much like Walter Jon Williams' work. He is a writer who is really powerful at the novella length. His "Womb of Every World" (Alien Crimes, edited by Mike Resnick, SFBC, June 2007) will certainly take your mind off the inadequate legroom available on your holiday flight.

Through an oversight which I'm sure the authors will strive to correct in future work, none of these fictions feature cats as point of view characters, although there is a nod to felinity in Walter Jon's, if I remember correctly.

I have tried to make up for the failings of less feline-positive authors in my story "Pride," published in Lou Anders' wonderful Fast Forward 1, February 2007, although come to think of it, the cat isn't a point of view character, since who would presume to know what is going on in the feline mind? I am willing to supply a copy of this story to any who need to fantasize a cat on the lap as a method of getting through the tribulations of airline snacks and big dude ahead of you who insists on reclining his seat into your lap. It might help.

Lurker was bitten by somebody (could possibly it have been Sam?) This was discovered by Geoff, who noticed she was licking a particularly ugly lesion on her hind quarter that I hadn't noticed. Bad cat mommy, me.

We took her to the vet, who gave us antibiotics (chicken-flavored, thank heaven) and an e-collar.

And e-collar is one of those lampshade things they put on dogs to stop them from licking themselves. The real name is Elizabethan collar, for obvious reasons.

Lurker was very puzzled and her first act, after staring at the back of the couch for ten minutes, was to scoot rapidly backward across our living room until she ran into the wall.

I wasn't at all sure about this. In fact, we took the collar off when we realized how upset she was. But last night before going to bed I looked again at her injury and it looked so much worse that I couldn't sleep, worrying about her. I went downstairs and brought her up to spend the remainder of the night with us, waking up every seven minutes to tell her to stop licking.

Is the damage like some sort of flesh-eating bacteria? Like the Pasteurella multocida that komodo dragons have in their mouths, and incidentally is also in cat saliva? Geoff has twice been almost hospitalized with Pasteurella multocida. It is a very evil bacterium.

I spent quite a bit of time on the phone trying to figure out how to make Lurker comfortable and more, allow her to eat and visit the litter box with this contraption. Long conversations with the veterinary assistant and finally with the vet have assured me that it will be okay. Cats experience something called "e-collar paralysis" for the first day or so. Then they are okay.

We hope.

You realize, these collars had to have been named after the ones the Elizabethans wore.

Here's a picture of Lurker in her collar, slightly cut down by my humane husband:

Lurker in her Elizabethan Collar

Isn't she stylish? If miserable?

You know that poem by John Donne, "The Flea," where the poet says he and his lady are united because their blood is mingled in the body of a flea that has sucked blood from both?

Maybe the original Elizabethan collars were invented to prevent flea-infested ladies and gentlemen of the court from licking their flea-bites.

You don't think?

We found a small mouse on the floor in front of Geoff's recliner. It was perfectly unharmed except for being dead. Quite a pretty little mousie, with long whiskers and tail. Perhaps Sam or Lurker played with it until it got tired of being alive.

It has the same markings as Sam.



From its placement and timing, I imagine it is an early Christmouse gift from Sam and Lurker. I thanked them very profusely, of course, and didn't let on that it wound up in the trash.

And the poor little mouse is dead! Died as a cat toy! And here I am amused and gratified by my cats murdering a mouse. They, of course, are just animals and not at all responsible for mousicide. But me, chuckling at their predations --

What kind of person am I?

Don't answer that --