Author
Bring me foodz and I will cute for you.
Who needs treats when there’s STRING!
Who needs treats when there’s ZZZZZzzzzz…
Who needs treats when I can be in your drawers grabin your clothes?
Cat vest crumpled up on the lap before being worn.
What is that thing that’s about you eat you?
I’m too sexy for my stairs, too sexy for…oh hell, just give me some treats.
Because CUTE, that’s why.
Hey there, good looking!
Go ‘way!
Yeah, tha’s the spot, oooh!
Wrong end! Or, leaf shadows on cat butt.
You put a close up of my butt on the internet! I keel you.
Raindrops keep falling on my head…
You, sir, look like you might have some delicious treats about you…
Ooh Shiny!
My friend, the fantastic photographer Kyle Cassidy tweeted about a men reading women in comics tumblr designed to dispel the myth that men aren’t interested in reading comics by and about strong, diverse, interesting women. As an author who feels it’s very important to have strong smart women characters in my books I decided this was a project that I wanted to support. I thought it would be fun to send in a picture of me reading Birds of Prey since I was recently drawn back into reading comics in part by the work of the wonderful writing and stories of the Gail Simone run on Birds of Prey. So I called up another fabulous photographer friend Matthew A Kuchta who did my most recent couple of author photos as well as The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe shoot with my wife and I at Neil Gaiman’s lamppost, and I asked him if he’d be interested. We decided that since I did a lot of my comics reading while inverting after a workout it would be fun to play off that. This picture, which I love, is the result of that call.
I spent nearly three weeks in Iceland and Scotland over the end of May. It was fab. For anyone who’s interested, here are links to the pics. They’re on facebook, but in completely public galleries:
Iceland 2012 #1
Iceland 2012 #2
Iceland 2012 #3
I have a fuzzy little cat
Who always wonders where I’m at
Up and down the stairs she goes
Following me with eyes and nose
Content only when she sees
Herself lying on my knees
Some things you don’t want to write because you know you won’t do them justice. Some things you don’t want to write because writing about it will make it true. Some things you don’t to want write because they will cut to the bone. Sometimes you write anyway, because you have to try, because the truth is owed and the blood and bone. This is one of those times.
I haven’t seen as much of Mike in the past few years as I would have liked. Our paths diverged some time ago, but he was one of my oldest friends and knowing he was in the world was always a comfort, and seeing him a pleasure. That comfort is gone now and the pleasure will live on only in memory and all of us who loved him are diminished by his loss.
For many the first thing Mike will bring to mind is his music. He was a great musician and I always loved to hear him play. For others it will be his sense of humor, or his gentleness, or a thousand other things. I can’t fix my own memories to any one thing, though his sense of mischief runs deep in my own memories of Mike, perhaps because I knew him first when we were young.
We met the summer I turned fifteen, at Renaissance Festival school, though we didn’t grow close until the year after when I started driving with Mike and Sean as my most frequent passengers. We spent a lot of time together over the next seven or eight years.
The memories are so many and varied it’s hard to know where to start. Driving aimlessly around Minneapolis in the middle of the night, drinking endless gallons of Mountain Dew at Davanni’s and Pizza Hut or sitting in Mike’s room or Sean’s. Warhammer, listening to him first playing around with a guitar, wandering around Festival together. Arriving at the Colorado Festival after a sixteen hour drive and leaping straight into the back of another car to drive to Boulder. Sitting across a coffin shaped coffee table at my first apartment tossing black cat firecrackers at each other and giggling. Co-writing the opening of a fantasy novel by plugging two keyboards into one Mac and trying to outdo each other. Him talking me into my first ear piercing…and on and on. A thousand memories and all of them precious. But if finding a starting place is hard, coming to the end is infinitely harder.
The thought that I will have no more new memories of Michael hurts me. Knowing that I’ll never see the wicked smile he so often shared, or hear the soft chuckle, or simply know that he is out there somewhere smiling and laughing and making music–that is a truth I do not want to face. It costs in blood and bone and soul, and though I have written thousands of pages I find myself all but bereft of words at this loss, knowing I can never to do justice to the memory of an old and dear friend.
Michael Matheny was my friend, we helped each other grow up. I loved him, and he is gone, and the world will be a darker place with his light gone out of it.
Biggest problem of being fictional? Getting left in limbo for months at a time. Stupid writer. I’d toast him but it might go badly.
“A one L lama, he’s a priest. A two L llama, he’s a beast.” Both are delicious when breaded and fried, what a feast! (With apologies to Ogden Nash)
Finally put up the wonderful maps that Matt Kuchta did for me for the Fallen Blade series. Click on the links or the thumbnails to see full size.
Every year in April my wife and I throw a party for a jar of jelly.*
It all started when a young man (me) went walkabout to the Arizona Renaissance Festival and needed someone to see that his apartment didn’t explode and that his cats stayed well-fed. The year was 1989. Many adventures were had by the lad on his walkabout, but that is not what this story is about. This is about his or, should I say, my, refrigerator.
Since I lived a hundred yards from both my parents and my grandmother, I’d never seen much point in using the kitchen of my apartment for anything other than storage. The oven was a convenient place to put the cat food bag, as the cats couldn’t open it, and it kept it out of my way. The cabinets were largely filled with strange artifacts (later identified as dishes by my wife-to-be) supplied by my parents and grandmother when I moved out. Actually, when they moved out and to two separate houses, but again, that’s another story. The refrigerator was a mystical place into which I would occasionally stuff a twelve pack of Mountain Dew, or a candle that had been melting in the sun.
None of this was really front-brain knowledge however, and when I went on my way to live in a tent in the middle of the desert I didn’t give so much as a passing thought to the functioning of my kitchen. For the friend, “CD,” who moved into my place as caretaker for the two months that I was gone however, the kitchen was a vitally important place, necessary to his survival.
So, one of the first things CD did after I left for parts south, was to go to a grocery store and stock up on food, which he then brought home and proceeded to put away. This turned out to be an adventure in itself, beginning when he opened the crisper. At some point in the distant past, I had been given a dragon candle. Slightly after that, it ended up in direct sunlight, softened, and folded in half. That was when I stuffed it into the crisper. Of course, it was already too late at that point, and all that I managed to do was create a multi-colored blob of wax, heavy on the purples and greens, and with a very odd topology.
Needless to say, CD, still foolishly possessed of the idea that if it was in the fridge, it had probably at one time been food, was deeply disturbed by this discovery. (I was unavailable for comment at the time, being somewhere in transit.) But after a while, he worked up his nerve, prodded the alien life form with a fork, and discovered that it was harmless. However, this experience made him very cautious when he approached the rest of the contents of the fridge, which turned out to consist of one never-opened jar of Red Currant Jelly that had expired some two years before his arrival.
When I finally returned from my wanderjar, CD naturally enough wanted to share the tale of his adventures in my apartment, and to question me about the candle (tucked away in a box in a cabinet-but still unidentified by him) and the jelly. After some careful inspection of the items in question and dusting off of old memories, I was able to identify the candle. But the jelly defied my powers of memory.
Or, at least, that is one explanation. However, since I have never in my entire life eaten red currant jelly, nor to my knowledge has it ever been a staple in my family’s household, I have darker suspicions. I tend to believe that it condensed out of the mysterious cosmic stuff of missing hangers and lost socks, and that it happened some time between when I left the house on my trip and when CD arrived a day later — and that it is possessed of inhuman and sinister motivations.
And so I have never opened it or discarded it (for fear that someone else might open it) and once a year (near the expiration date listed on the jar) we bring it out and throw a festival to appease it. Today will be the 23rd annual red currant jelly party, marking the 25thd anniversary of its expiration.
The Jelly Wakes!
*reposted with edits from SFNovelists