Logorrhetoric

http://www.joshilynjackson.com/ftk/?p=2630

Last day to enter to win Trisha Slay’s debut YA!

Author perks exist. They are a true thing. Most of the time they are just little niceties, such as, you go to a lit conference, and they have a hospitality suite, and it is stocked with FREE FOOD and FREE WINE (free is my favorite vintage) and they often have BROWNIES, sometimes the amazing fudgy two bite ones that you have to eat nine of because they are so good they deserve your undivided attention for a solid eighteen bites.

My fave author perk is that whenever your publishing house flies you somewhere to work, you get to keep the frequent flier miles, and if you save them up, you can fly your whole family to Orlando for THIRTEEN DOLLARS A PERSON. This is a good, good perk. (Scott works in the trade show industry, and so he racks up MAAAAAAD hotel reward points—we stayed free. Lord that was the cheapest trip in the history of vacationing.)

I am not knocking the perks, ya’ll. I am just saying that author perks are not, like, say, politician perks, which often include hookers, blow, and fat cat trips to golf resorts for different hookers and more blow.

But then every now and again, the stars align, and you get some huge unbelievable author perk that feels like a MISTAKE, it is so nice. Like when gods in Alabama came out, and my SUPER COOL PUBLICIST really liked me, so he slipped my name in the hat when New Yorker Magazine was picking a couple of debut authors to send on a transatlantic cruise on the QE2, London to New York.

I dumped Beautiful Maisy Who Was Barely Two and seven year old Sam at my mom and dad’s house, and Scott and I went to London for a few days, then rode home on a boat so nice it had art auctions with real Picasso sketches and AN ACTUAL PLANETARIUM. Staffed by Oxford dons.

That boat was chock full of Belgians with SO MUCH MONEY, smoking Gauloises (which I can’t even PRONOUNCE) and gambling, losing enough chips to pay off my mortgage with TOTAL insouciance. It felt less like a visit to another country as to another PLANET.

It was on that trip that we realized: We do not PICK to take vacations.

Because of our jobs. We both travel SO much. We do not think of travel as a leisure activity.

When we have days off, we think, HEY YOU KNOW WHAT WOULD BE FUN? TO WEAR PAJAMAS AND EAT WAFFLES IN OUR OWN BED WHILE WATCHING AN 80’s SCI FI MOVIE MARATHON!

Our family vacation every year is a week with the grandparents in the beach town where Scott and I grew up, and we once went to Disney World because it was so very very FREE it would have been stupid not to go.

Yikes. I want to see this exhibit. Except without having to travel. So really I want the Texas Prison Museum to bring this exhibit to my hammock.

After Scott and I got home from London, I wondered if we weren’t cheating our kids, a little. Cheating them out of some really great memories. And yet my desire to NEVER NEVER rent an RV and sing about how many bottles of beer are currently on some wall for 19 straight hours, all the way to Big Sky country, remained flatline level dead. My idea of the perfect vacay is a hammock, my cat, no shoes, and a fantastic book.

SO we compromised. We decided that instead of the yearly trip, we would save up, and in ten years, when the kid were old enough, we would take them on ONE ten-vacations-worth of trip. A trip they would remember FOREVER.

I cleverly hid money for it. Hid it from MYSELF even, because I REALLY like shoes. Every time a significant amount accrued in my secret pot, I put it into short term revolving CDs, so I couldn’t get at it easily. When THINGS HAPPENED like, oh the roof caved in, the van died, the air conditioning system began bellowing black smoke and making a screaming whine sound like a dying rhino, we pretended that money was already spent.

I remember when one particularly challenging financial thing happened, I caught Scott EYEBALLING the SECRET TRIP money. I was like, NO WAY, BUDDY. GO SELL YOUR PLASMA.

The trip ten years in the making starts a week from today.

We are going to France, ya’ll. To Paris and Provence. I won’t be blogging much for the first half of June, but I will post pics if I can figure out how—- if you follow me on Twitter, I will absolutely be posting all kinds of blurry, crazy cell phone photos of whatever they have in France.

I am not sure, really, what all they have because my LORD, Google translator is an odd duck. Look here – here is a village we are visiting on a day trip because I HAVE TO SEE WHATEVER TERRIFYING THING THIS IS HAPPEN TO THE FRUITS:

Ever been to PROVENCE or PARIS? Tell us the thing to NOT miss. Also, recs for any good CHEAP authentic local places to eat near Avignon or in Paris are deeply appreciated.
If you have not been to Paris, what is your dream trip? (Or what was it, if you already went)

http://www.joshilynjackson.com/ftk/?p=2616

HEY! Remember 3Q’s? Where a writer would drop by for a visit, answer 3 questions, and if the book sounded like something up your alley, you could leave a comment to be entered in a contest to win a FREE SIGNED COPY?

Well—looks like we are doing that again. Cool, eh?

I first met Trisha Slay 3 or 4 years ago. Maybe more. I am not all that grounded in time and space….but I DO know Where. We were at a writer’s conference in Dahlonega. I’ve been to that conference twice now, and I hung out with her and her then-boyfriend-now-fiance both times. She’s just cool.

I remember her telling me about this book then—it was nowhere near finished, but her eyes lit up when she talked about it, and now, look, here it is a real and actual thing, out in the world…Congrats, Trisha!

Her publisher has set up a blog tour, and we are her first stop. Huzzah!

What’s it about, you ask.

It’s a terrible thing to live under a question mark…. When Erika’s best friend, teen beauty queen Cassandra Abbott, disappears during the early hours of Memorial Day 1977, Erika isn’t exactly surprised. After all, they’ve been plotting and planning Cassie’s escape for months. But then Cassie’s departure unleashes a whirlwind of questions, suspicions and accusations that Erika never expected. She’s lying to the police. She’s being bullied by older students. Worst of all, she’s starting to doubt she ever REALLY knew Cassie Abbott at all.

As the summer wears on, tensions escalate over the unsolved mystery surrounding Cassie’s disappearance. Someone seems to think Erika knows too many of Cassie’s secrets. Eventually, Erika must step out of the shadows and, armed only with her Super 8 camera and the lessons she’s learned from Star Wars, fight to save herself and the theater that has become her second home. Not So Long Ago, Not So Far Away is a quirky, contemporary, coming-of-age novel set during the earliest days of the Star Wars fan phenomenon.

JJ: What do you think of the cover and how does it compare to the cover you imagined when you were writing the book?

TL: Thank the Maker for Mark Babcock and Matt King! They saved this cover from my delusions of grandeur. I absolutely love the cover they created…even though it is not what I suggested at all.

This is a book about 1977 STAR WARS geekery, so I had a magnificent vision of my main character poised like Luke Skywalker in the original movie posters. Instead of a lightsaber, Erika would be holding a Super 8 camera above her head with the power of the Force emanating from the lens. In the starry sky around her would be the shadow of a “Missing” poster for Cassie Abbott (instead of Darth Vader). Oh, in my imagination, it was glorious! In reality, the art I commissioned to realize my vision was cute…but not really marketable as a YA novel cover.

When Mark told me they were going to work with photographic images, I thought he was crazy. But look at what they created! I could not be happier with my cover.

JJ: I know you blog yourself over at SLAY THE WRITER and CREATIVITY DIET.
Why do you blog, and does it feed you or take energy from you?

TS: I used to be four-square against blogging. Now I have two blogs. How did that happen? It’s a funny story, and I swear I am not trying to pander to you in any way. This is just the plain, ugly truth.

Back in 2005, I decided to get really serious about writing for publication, so I enrolled in classes and went to very expensive conferences and took a lot of notes. Between 2005 – 2008, I attended more writing seminars and conferences than I care to admit. All of the speakers preached the same message…over and over and over: “Blogging is a useful tool if you do it perfectly and follow all of the rules, but do not venture into these scary, shark-infested blogging waters unless you are really, truly committed to the blogging gospel. It is better not to blog, than to blog imperfectly.”

So…never interested in the PERFECT way of doing anything, I did not blog. I did not follow blogs. I did not understand the whole concept of blogs. To me, it was a frightening, weird, over-sharing world. Then, in 2010, I attended a writer’s conference where every publishing expert in attendance agreed that blogging was absolutely ESSENTIAL for every author – published or unpublished. Huh? Panic ensued. One brave writerly soul stood up at a Q & A session and asked, “Can you give me an example of a published author’s blog that really works?”

After much hemming and hawing and naming of names, every publishing professional on the stage agreed that Faster Than Kudzu was a terrific example of what works. Well, I already knew that I loved GODS IN ALABAMA and BETWEEN, GEORGIA, so I came here to read and read and read and laugh and learn. Then I took a Blogging 101 class. Finally, In March 2011, I felt brave enough to launch my own blog. To my everlasting surprise, launching a wanna-be writerly blog was not a terrible experience. However, most of the people who truly knew me and had been reading my writing for years, told me that they wanted me to post more about emotional eating, healthy recipes &/or weighty issues…or they wanted me to launch a separate blog.

So I launched my Creativity Diet blog…and promptly failed to live up to my own expectations. I keep stumbling with that experiment, but I keep getting up and trying again. Isn’t that the definition of success?

I blog because I am a weird, geeky, imperfect human and want to connect with other imperfect humans who might feel some empathy with my struggles. Creativity and connection is EVERYTHING to me. Sometimes blogging feeds my creative spirit and sometimes it sucks me dry. Either way, the act of blogging is better than sitting home alone with all of these fantastical dreams of writing buried under a mound of coulda, shoulda, woulda shame.

JJ: Tell us about being a closet Star Wars geek for over 30 years.

I STILL FREAKING LOVE THIS MOVIE!

Let’s get real. I was six-years-old in 1977. THE RESCUERS, CANDLESHOE, and CHARLIE’S ANGELS made a much bigger impression on me that summer. That said, I owned the original Kenner action figures and the Princess Leia Bubble Bath. I dreamed of owning my own R2-D2 to clean my room. Every empty cardboard wrapping paper roll would forever and always be a lightsaber to me. Perhaps that is the true power of the Force. But I am NOT an original 1977 STAR WARS geek.

Then, in March of 1980, my most perfectly comfortable world crumbled. Grandpa Eldon – my best friend, the light of my life and the man I knew as “Daddy” from my earliest memories – suffered a massive heart attack. He died a week later in the hospital, leaving a terrible, jagged hole in my soul. Three months later, stumbling around in a fog of grief and pretending everything was “fine, fine, just fine,” my grandmother and I went to see THE EMPIRE STRIKES BACK. Now that is the point where everything changed for me. Yoda changed everything. “I love you” and “I know” changed everything. “I am your father” changed EVERYTHING. For a few blissful years, I was comfortable and happy being a complete and total STAR WARS geek to the core.

But…that was the 80′s. Eventually, STAR WARS was a cliche. I got addicted to MTV, fell in love with Duran Duran, sprayed my hair into preposterous shapes and pretended that my heart was not yearning for a galaxy far, far away. Even in the early 90′s, when Timothy Zahn published his incredible Thrawn Trilogy, I read the novels while keeping my fangirl persona a secret. There were a few times when I would let my closest friends get a peek at my inner geek. I’ll never forget the time I simultaneously delighted and horrified my best friends by achieving national ranking in a Star Wars trivia contest (just before the release of the new trilogy).

I still remember the moment when the basic concept for this novel came knocking on my brain. I did not want to write it. I shoved it aside and continued to write silly little short stories about Egyptian Gods toying with modern teens. And yet, despite by best intentions, I found myself pitching this unformed, unwritten concept to an editor at an SCBWI writing conference in Los Angeles. Her reaction was electric. I knew immediately that I had to write this book. And as I was writing, I fell in love with my inner Star Wars fangirl all over again. So now I am out of the closet, proudly flying my geek flag. I dig droids. I really do believe that anger, fear and aggression lead to the Dark Side. But I won’t camp out in front of movie theaters and I will never wear a metal bikini. There are limits to my devotion.

REMEMBER toleave a comment…preferably your best STAR WARS MEMORY, but you can just say BEEP BOP BOOP, R2D2 style, and that will count too! Post it before FRIDAY at Midnight, EST, and you could win a SIGNED COPY.

http://www.joshilynjackson.com/ftk/?p=2602

Is the orange girl supposed to be the titular pal?

Remember that? When I ALMOST DIED? I certainly remember it. It looms OH SO VERY large in my personal history. I ALMOST DIED is the reason I now love Yoga, and is also the reason I sometimes engage in both INTROSPECTION and GROWING AS A PERSON. Right here in terrible public.

I cannot recommend it, the ALMOST DYING. Better to be feckless and immortal, as long, as long, as ever one can. But anyway, for a long time after the surgeries, my body simply did not want to lose weight and I guess my mind was not able to be grinding and it is not something you can do until you CAN DO IT. People who have never struggled with their weight do not get this. That you can’t lose weight sometimes. That you just…can’t. Not because you are lazy or dumb or bad, but…you cannot, right then, the end. Then at some point, sometimes, you can.

I think it is like quitting smoking. I had to quit smoking 1,000 times before one time it worked. I had a hard time with it, and I have had a very hard time with my body these last couple fo years. A war. Yoga has been my detente. Can you relate? But now I am on my thousandth quit-being-fat and it is working…at a grindingly slow pace. I can take off half a pound or so a week, if I eat a LOT more fruit than I think is reasonable, given that I hate fruit.

Not ALL fruit. Just most of it. I actively love blackberries, which cost the earth, and I love those pears that come in gold foil and cost the same as a new Buick

AND YET! I am unmotivated to work out today which…I am NEVER unmotivated to exercise. I LOVE to exercise and I take maybe 2 days off a month…But today. It is gonna be one of them.

I think I am just TIRED. Yesterday I did a really BRUTAL hour at the YMCA,—I pushed myself right to my edge and then bought furniture and LIVED there. Then, the second I got home Scott and I suited up the dogs and went walking.

IN SEARCH OF CAKE, may I say, so not exactly a virtue soaked walk of HEALTH, but every place we walked, the cake displeased me. There was NO CAKE I would waste the calories on. Cakes and Ale was getting ready to close, and they had hardly anything in the case, Green’s candies were categorically NOT cake, TED’s MONTANA GRILL was out of those snickerdoodle cookies that I SWEAR have cocaine in them because once you HAVE one you want more and more and get hyper and run around in circles. But they were out…so we kept walking.

This image is a link to the piece of cake website, because YUM

ANYWAY, if you are MY FITNESS PALLING, we can be friends, if you want the same kind of friend I want.

I am looking for 2 or 3 friends who—-1) Use MFP every day. 2) Have your food diary set so your friends can see your food. 3) Interact with your friends every day. 4) Have a VERY small number of friends, so that you can actually keep up with their stuff.

I do all of these 4 things, so I will be a GOOD friend to you. I promise to be HUGELY overinterested in your business. I will never cupcake shame you. Sometimes you HAVE to eat a cupcake. Some days? You may have to eat 6. IT HAPPENS. I won;t be mean about it, but I will TOTALLY look at your food, and my food diary is open.

The first 2 or 3 people who E-Mail me, let’s chat — maybe we can friend up. I will tell you my SECRET MFP NAME, which is Very French and Mysterious!

http://katrinastonoff.wordpress.com/2013/05/18/milking-the-cash-cow/

http://katrinastonoff.wordpress.com/?p=9213

I got a speeding ticket today. In the mail. For doing twenty-five miles per hour.

Yes. I am serious.

This is the fifth speeding ticket I’ve received in the thirty-five years I’ve been driving. That averages one ticket every seven years. Not a bad record, right?

Except that four of the five tickets were issued since we moved to Canada less than two years ago.

Think about that. In twenty-five years of driving, I got one speeding ticket. And in fact, when I got that ticket, I was clocked doing seventy, but my speedometer said I was doing fifty-eight in a fifty-five zone (which is speeding, granted, but not by much). Later we had the speedometer checked, and sure enough, it was off by exactly that amount due to oversized, after-market tires.

Then I moved to Canada. And I’ve gotten four tickets since then.

No doubt the RCMP thinks I’ve suddenly begun driving at crazy-mad speeds, but the truth is: I never speed. In fact, I’m a bit obsessive about the speed limit. Unless the road is icy, I set the cruise control to make sure I don’t speed. And if it is icy, I drive much slower (this might, coincidentally, have something to do with the fact that I have never, not once, not for one second, lost control of my vehicle here).

Actually, my tendency to drive the speed limit has gotten me into trouble because probably three-quarters* of the drivers around me speed, and they get seriously annoyed when I slow them down. I get honked at, brights flashed at, flipped off, and (most notably) twice run off the road precisely for driving the speed limit.

The tickets I’ve gotten in Canada are as follows:

Ticket #1: issued by The Town of Stony Plain via photo radar. Mars was driving this time when my van was zapped by photo radar, but since I’m the first listed driver on the title, the ticket was in my name. They assured me that since I was charged “as a registered owner” and not as a driver, it would not result in points against my license. No doubt that statement was supposed to make feel better about having to give the city $140 and get treated by the court clerk as a sleazeball for doing so.

Ticket #2: also issued by Stony Plain via photo radar. This one really was mine, and it’s a legitimate ticket. It was very soon after we arrived, and I wasn’t yet familiar with the roads and speed limits (much less the places the photo radar van is regularly parked). I was a little disoriented and thought I was north of Yellowhead, where the speed limit is eighty kph, but I was still in the town limits where the limit is fifty. I remember driving past a van parked on a bike path and wondering what the heck it was doing there. I even felt sorry for the guy since he had obviously broken down (yeah, joke’s on me). $120.

Mars said it was just my luck that the one time I sped within the Town of Stony Plain, the photo radar happened to be set up right there.

Ticket #3: issued by the City of Calgary via photo radar. I had literally just merged onto an expressway I had never been on before. This was my first visit to Calgary, but by Day 3, I’d  figured out that there is virtually no merging lane at the end of entrance ramps and Calgarians almost never move over for you. The only way to merge onto an expressway is to be going with the flow of traffic when you hit the end of the ramp.

Virtually all the limited access freeways I’ve been on have an eighty kph limit. The Yellowhead (a major cross-country freeway) has a seventy kph limit going through Edmonton, and it’s not limited access. So I planned my speed accordingly, and as soon as I was safely merged into traffic (traveling roughly the same speed I was), I began looking for a speed limit sign.

I saw the flash of the photo radar seconds before I got to the speed limit sign: fifty kph. Yes, fifty kph.

For my friends in the U.S., that’s thirty-one miles an hour. On a limited access highway. Absolutely nutty.

And the photo radar was set up between the entrance ramp from downtown and the first speed limit sign.

Yes, it felt like a trap. But what d’ya do? I paid the fine. $119.45.

Ticket #4: issued by the City of Spruce Grove via photo radar and received via Canada Post today. I have been charged with going forty-one kph in a thirty kph zone. For my friends in the US, apparently I was going twenty-five mph in a eighteen-mph zone.

I can’t figure out for sure where this is. The citation only gives an approximate location, and I know my route, and the speed limit there is sixty. The only thing I can figure is that either it was a pedestrian crosswalk that was flashing or a school zone.

Given the photo radar, it was probably the latter, and there are a couple of schools in the area. School zones are problematic for me here: they are marked with only one sign, and I’ve never figured out whether the limit applies only to the crosswalk or to some unmarked zone before and after the crosswalk.

Go ahead: check the website. It describes when the school zone ends, but not when it begins. And in my experience, most school zones do not have a sign at all noting the end.

To make it even more confusing, the school designation comes in two types. A school zone implies a speed limit, while a school area (exactly the same sign but without the listed speed limit) is only a caution, to let drivers know a school is nearby. You can be ticketed for driving forty in a school zone but not in a school area.

Most Alberta drivers don’t even know there’s a difference. I only know because it was a big issue for the school council I sat on.

So I probably was going forty-one, and if it was a school zone, that is speeding. I’ll pay the fine. $80.

My Puzzle

The thing I can’t figure out is … given that I never speed and probably three-fourths* of the drivers around me speed constantly, how is this possible?

Is everyone getting several tickets a year, and just paying them without telling anyone? It seems unlikely that people are forking over hundreds of dollars to the Town of Stony Plain without complaining about it.

Maybe there’s an ancient Greek God with his nose out of joint against me for some reason (probably for letting my daughter read Athena the Brain instead of appropriately snooty Greek Mythology).

So … what do you notice in common about the four tickets I’ve gotten in less than two years?

Yep. Photo radar. And all but one came from either Stony Plain or Spruce Grove.

Photo Radar

In the old days, given my proclivity to obey the law, odds are a police officer wouldn’t happen to be right there with his radar gun the one or two times I was driving over the posted limit.

But even if he was, and he pulled me over (rather than the SUV in the next lane that was doing 130 in 110, or sixty in a thirty), he might have heard my explanation and realized that my speeding was unusual and due to ignorance rather than blatant disobedience.

Odds are, he would have reminded me to be careful (or more aware of school zones), and sent me on my way sans citation.

More to the point: in the old days, when it would have been a clearly marked police car by the side of the road instead of an unremarkable SUV among the ubiquitous others? All of us would have slowed down.

Think about it: with a marked car parked by the side of the road, traffic in general slows down.

With an unmarked incognito SUV parked by the side of the road, nobody slows down, but everybody gets ticketed. And the town rakes in the money.

Makes me wonder what the goal is: to make our roads safer, or to line the city’s coffers?

Stony Plain and Spruce Grove

Before we moved here, we were warned about Stony and Spruce, warned about their infatuation with photo radar. Frankly, I wasn’t too worried about it because (go ahead, laugh at me), I virtually never speed.

It never occurred to me that on those very rare instances when I did (never on purpose), I’d be issued a citation every time.

Every. Flipping. Time.

But then, I underestimated Stony Plain.

According to this article, the town issued thirteen hundred citations via photo radar between Sept. 16 and Dec. 31, 2011.

That means, by extrapolation over an entire year, the city issued nine tickets (roughly) for every ten residents. 

Nine tickets for every resident, not every driver. 

Compare those statistics to Edmonton, where photo radar nailed 113,000 people in 2011. That’s 1.3 tickets per resident.

One-point-three. A far cry from nine!

In sum, if you drive in Stony Plain, your odds of getting a speeding ticket are six hundred percent higher than if you drive in Edmonton.

I couldn’t find stats for Spruce Grove, but I suspect it’s comparable.

My Rant

I found a couple of quotes in the Stony Plain Reporter article particularly … well, amusing, for lack of a polite word.

The first was a comment by councilmember Pat Hansard in response to a vehicle that was clocked doing 147 in a fifty-kph zone but whose license plate was obscured, hence no citation was issued.

“I’m appalled at the high rate of speed where there was no ticket issued,” Hansard said. “If there was a question in the mind of people for the need of photo radar, this would certainly provide proof of its necessity.”

Ummm … Councilmember? Actually, no, that doesn’t provide proof of the necessarity for photo radar because … (wait for it) … the photo radar didn’t work!

If it had been a police officer that clocked the vehicle going almost a hundred clicks over the speed limit, he’d have chased the brute down and probably done more than just issue a speeding ticket. Unlike the photo radar which did nothing.

Nor is it surprising that a vehicle had an “obstructed” plate. I’ve seen a number of vehicles with a blurry sheet of plastic covering the plate number. You can still read the number, but it doesn’t show up on photos. And Mars tells me (after a little Googling) there’s a glossy spray you can use to obscure your number in photos.

Heck, for that matter, all you have to do is not wash your car much of the year. The roads tend to be filthy, and my plate is often obscured by mud or snow. The first ticket I got? I had literally just gone through the car wash, which was the only reason they could read my plate number.

So, no, Councilmember Hansard, the report does not, in fact, provide proof that we need photo radar.

The other “amusing” quote came from Councilmember Robert Twerdoclib.

“Photo radar has a perception of it being a kind of ‘cash cow,’” he said.

Umm … yeah! Maybe because you guys are issuing six hundred percent more tickets per capita than Edmonton? Maybe that’s why we have a perception of photo radar being a small town cash cow? You think?

Councilmember Twerodclib went on to say, “Hopefully those days are numbered.”

….

….

I have nothing to add. Absolutely nothing.

My Conclusion

Here’s the thing, Stony Plain and Spruce Grove: I don’t live in your town, and I drive to the city almost every day.

If my odds are getting a ticket in your town are six hundred times higher, then

… newsflash!! …

I won’t be shopping in your town. In fact, I’ll avoid it.

With the possible exception of Crooked Pot, there’s nothing I can purchase in Stony Plain that I can’t get in Edmonton. Without the ridiculous six-hundred-percent increase in the odds of getting nailed by photo radar.

And I’ll have more to spend because I won’t be shoveling hundreds of dollars into your coffers.

*Three-quarters is a rough estimate, based on an unscientific gut-feeling, but it’s probably not far off. After all, the Stony Plain photo radar showed that almost one-third of the cars were speeding as they drove past the photo radar van.

http://www.joshilynjackson.com/ftk/?p=2590

SO! I am turning in THE SECRET WRITING PROJECT this week. Last night I borrowed a whole writing group from Susan Rebecca White (Lookit her fancy new website!) to get fresh eyes on this thing before I turn it in.

I have FIVE FULL SETS of notes on TSWP, and this morning was all about reading and rereading them, and then sorting the marked up MSes into piles as I decided which threads I needed to follow up on and integrate.

Let me show you what is NOT HELPFUL when one is trying to sort and integrate the valuable input of five disparate readers into piles that will allow one to tighten up one’s MS in a single intense revision instead of five separate whole MS pass-throughs. THIS! THIS IS NOT HELPFUL:

He moved from pile to pile, too, sitting on whatever one would be the least convenient for me in the coming moment with the kind of catly prescience that makes you understand why the Egyptians thought of them as divine.

He made the job take a good half hour longer than it should have, and I am pretty sure I LOST a page I really need in the wrong pile. I will either have to dig and find that page or I will have to MANUALLY REMEMBER exactly what it said, which is like saying “I will either have to dig and find that page or I will have to shoot a moon rocket out of my butt and colonize Luna.”

SPEAKING OF BUTTS, note that MangoCat was not SIDE-LOLLING or LOUNGING on his belly. He SAT on the piles. SAT! Still speaking of butts, he was effectively placing HIS all over the pages of my MS. Like a pink and disapproving STAMP!

It reminds me of that scene in Impromptu—one of my ALL TIME favorite movies. Did you ever see that? It’s Judy Davis as the writer George Sands, all about her mad affair with Chopin, played by a VERY young Hugh Grant…

OH it is an EXCELLENT scene – do you remember it? I can’t find it to embed, BUT here it is. If you have never seen Impromptu, RUN to Netflix. It is a rompy delight, start to finish.

ANYWAY, even though Mango seemed to be doing a milder version of HORSE-CRITIQUE with his back end, did I unceremoniously DUMP HIM off and work on in relative peace? No. I did not.

Did I so much as gently pick his MEASLY ELEVEN POUND SELF up and kiss his dear-dear-dearest nose and set him aside on a clear part of the table? No, I did not.

As he sat on a pile, I ear scratched him and crooned at him and buried my face in his luxurious mane to smell all the GOODNESS of him until he was ready to shift to whatever pile I might need next.

I have it SO bad for this cat. I have only loved an animal with this kind of consuming PASSION once. That was Gompers, also a yellow Tom, and after Gompers died… Well.

That was more than fifteen years ago and it still hurts. If you have read SHINE SHINE SHINE (Have you not? GOOD GRIEF, go GET IT NOW!) you may have noticed the excellent stalwart Captain is named Gompers, because Lydia is the most beautiful human on the planet, and she GETS how much he mattered to me. She had an animal of her deepest heart, too, a horse. So she put Gompers in space for me, hung him up like a star, and he is there forever.

I have had many, many animal friends, and I have loved them in a petly way and liked them all SO much and deeply enjoyed their silly company. But MANGO! OH MANGO! OH! This cat. OH this cat.

Sometimes I call him Mangompers. Not because I believe in Feline Reincarnation, but Mango and Gompers were both born in metro Atlanta, both long haired yellow toms with the same kind of lion face, the same kind of small, pert ear. Not too big a stretch to think they MUST share some genes, mayhap even a common ancestor. I like to think so.

I have developed the habit of singing to him, a song I think of as OUR SONG, and whenever I do, Scott cocks an eyebrow and shakes his head and has to LOOK AWAY in shame for me. And yet I am shameless, I am shameless in my love! HERE IT IS! THE LOVE SONG OF ME AND MANGO! You may think it is someone else’s love song, but you are very silly. And wrong. My love is more epic.

I especially like the lines about “All my life, I believed, I WOULD FIND YOU, time has brought your heart to me” because it is TRUE that I have been looking for HIM, the exact right right rightful cat. I saw Mango on the internet while surfing cat pRon in an ongoing MANY YEARS WORTH of hunt for him. I saw three little pictures, and I began yelling for Scott because I KNEW. I knew the second I saw him.

He was in a kill shelter and I called immediately and they said he was gone. I thought they meant “GONE!” So I hung up and got oddly WEEPY. Then I could barely sleep all night because I KNEW he was not gone. I KNEW. I felt so strongly that he was my cat. I called again the next day and asked for clarity. They said GONE meant only that a lady from a no kill shelter had come by with room to save seven cats. Mango, slated for doom, was the only non kitten she took with her.

WE IMMEDIATELY leaped in the car and went after him at the no kill place. The lady there told us he had kept putting his foot out of the cage to get her arm, ASKING her to please take him. He knew, too, of course, is how I interpret this. BECAUSE I AM DANIEL DAY LEWIS AND HE IS MADELINE STOWE!

When we went to the rescue to get him, he had just had dental surgery and he was logy and dispirited and unprepossessing, and yet I INSISTED. IT WAS HIM! I KNEW. SO we took him home, and he hid behind the clothes drier for a week, terrified and exhausted from being in shelters.

I just lay down on the tile floor and put my hand behind the drier and sang to him multiple times every day, until one day he took a little step forward and rubbed his face into my hand and then he came out from behind the drier, and he is in my lap right now, hampering me as I type this. He pretty much lives here, on me, and his default setting is purr. Me and Mango, we are an US.

Have you ever had an animal who was THE ANIMAL OF YOUR DEEPEST HEART? Who was it—or, if you are very lucky, who IS it?