Scaredy-Cat

Our youngest pet, Fred, is a most satisfactory cat. She’s got spunk. She has a wicked sense of humor—or at least she does things that make me laugh, like settling next to one of the other cats while they’re napping, waiting until they’ve been lulled into a false sense of security, and then hauling off and clocking them. She’s sweet and purry at night, and a lap cat during the winter. She’s a chatterbox who’ll carry on entire conversations at the drop of the hat. She’s photogenic. She is a top-notch squirrel monitor at the back windows. And best of all, she always seems grateful to be living here.

As I said, most satisfactory.

However, she’s the archetypal scaredy-cat. The slightest disturbance and she’s off like a shot to hide somewhere. If she can’t hide beneath the den sofa, she’ll cower beneath the bed upstairs, or huddle beneath the staircase in the basement, shivering, until I go down there to find her. I’ll point a flashlight in her direction and see two tiny, frightened headlights for eyes shining back at me.

Fred is frightened of the following:

- Thunderstorms. The slightest bass roll in the distance will have her scurrying for the safety of a dark enclosure, from which she won’t emerge until two or three hours after the storm has passed.

- Rain. Because it accompanies thunderstorms, I imagine.

- Trucks. Because they sound like thunder.

- Construction. When our neighbor had a new driveway poured, poor Fred spent the entire day in the basement.

- The vacuum.

- The sound of the door opening to the closet where we store the vacuum.

- The doorbell. I don’t really know what the doorbell has ever done to her, but apparently they have a dicey relationship.

- People who enter the house after they ring the doorbell. If we have a party, Fred will stay upstairs all evening with big, alarmed eyes. Then halfway through the party she’ll decide to venture down, see what’s happening, and will discover that everyone pays her so much attention that she sticks around and looks adorable so people will fawn over her. Then we have to repeat the entire process for the next party.

- Branches falling from the trees.

- Raccoons.

- The sound of the smoke detector going off.

- When I turn on the vent fan over the stove. Because usually it’s a hasty precursor to the smoke detector going off.

- The sound of people crunching through leaves on the deck.

In some ways, Fred’s little phobia make it easier to deal with her. She’s the only cat I will take outdoors, accompanied, because I know that if she gets out of hand, all I have to do is stomp on the deck a few times or brandish a broom and there she is, scurrying back to the back door and cowering to be let in. In others, it’s a little bothersome. Finding her after a scare can be a pain, since she has a tendency to find the most out-of-the-way places in the house. We’ve taken to trying to anticipate the frightening moments and to put her beneath the blankets on our bed, where she feels safe, stays warm, and where we can find her easily.

I keep hoping she’ll outgrow some of her fears. So far, though, we’ve just become accustomed to the sight of a brown and black fuzzy streak zooming by.

Conversations with My Father: Fancy Food Edition

THE SCENE: An uncrowded Denny’s on Broad Street.

ME: I haven’t been to a Denny’s in forever.
MY FATHER: This will be a treat for you, then!
ME: Mmm. Denny’s. That’s a real treat, all right.
MY FATHER: Now. Let me explain the menu to you. I like the Build Your Own Grand Slam breakfast. It’s only $4.99. You get to choose four out of the ten items. I choose eggs, pancakes, hash browns, and sausage. You could choose eggs, pancakes, biscuits, and bacon. Or you could choose pancakes, bacon, sausage, and grits. Or you could pick an English muffin, eggs, ham, and. . . .
ME (my voice raised): I get it! Thank you!
MY FATHER: Are you always this grumpy in the mornings?
ME: So basically, when I’m in town, my role is to escort you to crappy chain restaurants?
MY FATHER (offended): Denny’s is not a crappy chain restaurant!
ME: Let me rephrase. My role is to escort you to every restaurant in town that has photos in the menus? We’ve been to IHOP, and Outback Steakhouse, and Golden Corral, and you were threatening the Olive Garden again.
MY FATHER: Well, when the Barramundis and I go out to dinner, they refuse to go to chain restaurants. They think it’s ‘important’ to support ‘local’ restaurants.
ME: I can’t say I disagree with them.
MY FATHER: They make me go to fancy breakfast places where I will get two eggs and a slice of toast for eight dollars. Eight dollars. At Denny’s, you can get a Build Your Own Grand Slam for $4.99, and you can get eggs, pancakes, hash browns, and sausage. Or eggs, wheat pancakes, ham. . . .
ME: I think we've covered this territory, thanks.
MY FATHER: Even at a fancy place like Appleby’s, you can get a better value for your money.
ME: To you, there’s basically Denny’s and Golden Corral, and then everything else is just fancy, isn’t there?
MY FATHER: What do you mean?
ME: Fancy or unfancy: Appleby’s.
MY FATHER: Fancy.
ME: Fancy or unfancy: Chili’s.
MY FATHER: Fancy!
ME: Bennigan’s?
MY FATHER: Oh gawrsh, Fancy.
ME: Ruth Chris Steak House?
MY FATHER: So fancy.
ME: So to you, a Ruth Chris Steak House is on the same level of fanciness as an Appleby’s?
MY FATHER: Listen. Jon Stewart. You know Jon Stewart. You went to school with him.
ME: Yes, and he slept next to me in sweatpants for two semesters of abnormal psychology.
MY FATHER: Well Jon Stewart has a British sidekick and Jon Stewart was joking with him about how once his sidekick came to America and ate at Denny’s, the sidekick never wanted to go back.
ME: You don’t think Stewart was being ironic?
MY FATHER: No.
ME: Did I ever tell you about Cafe Muse back home? No? It’s one of those breakfast and lunch-only places. It was featured on Oprah because they have some kind of amazing grilled cheese sandwich and it gave Oprah’s girlfriend Gayle an orgasm.
MY FATHER: You’ve eaten there? Is it fancy?
ME: Oh, it’s very fancy. They have French toast there that’s slices of chocolate bred stuffed with vanilla-and-liqueur-laced cream cheese, then drizzled with chocolate sauce. I always get these amazing whole wheat pancakes with berries and homemade granola.
MY FATHER (with suspicion): How much?
ME: Twelve dollars.
MY FATHER: Oh gawrsh. Twelve dollars.
ME: And if you want bacon, it’s three dollars extra.
MY FATHER: Gawrsh. Gawrsh!
ME: It’s fancy and delicious.
MY FATHER: Well what’s good enough for Jon Stewart is good enough for me and that includes Denny’s.
ME: Next time you come visit we’ll go to Cafe Muse.
MY FATHER: Gawrsh. You are trying to kill me.

The Epigraphs of Cassaforte

During the editorial process of The Glass Maker’s Daughter, my original editor at Flux had a vision of prefixing the chapters with little quotations from fictional sources. The epigraphs could illuminate the chapter at hand, he said, or simply give color to the world I’d created.

Although for two or three minutes my reaction was grumpy (more work?! Dangit!), I threw myself into the project with enthusiasm. I’m the child of two historians. I know my source materials. So it was easy and fun for me to make up all manner of pretend source materials with a renaissance flavor—travelogues, letters, secret documents, journals, guide books. When I carried on the tradition with the two sequels, I wove in all manner of other types of imaginary source materials. Nursery rhymes. Broadsides. Popular sayings. With the chapter quotations in The Buccaneer’s Apprentice I was able to explain Cassaforte’s unique theatrical traditions without interrupting the flow of the narrative, for example.

Theatre is important in the novel, because it’s Nick’s experience with Armand Arturo’s Theatre of Marvels that gives him the acting chops necessary to masquerade as a dread privateer. Staged performances in Cassaforte are similar to commedia dell’arte, but who wants to interrupt the nonstop action gripping pirate tale to explain what commedia dell’arte might be? Not I. A few brushstrokes at the beginning of a chapter, however, from a fully-imaginary expert, and there it is.

What I don’t think most people realize when they read the chapter epigraphs is that they really tell a story unto themselves. I didn’t make up trivial facts, or irrelevant material. The epigraphs of The Glass Maker’s Daughter introduce characters and countries that appear in The Buccaneer’s Apprentice and set up an arc of action that carries on into The Nascenza Conspiracy. There are letters from a spy known as Gustophe Werner, for example, who doesn’t feature in the first book of the series, but is quite prominent by the third; it’s a long-range form of foreshadowing. I intended to clue in the reader that Cassaforte is not merely a country unto itself, but part of a vast world. And it’s a world that might not be completely enamored with the Cassaforteans and their magical blessings.

The epigraphs of The Buccaneer’s Apprentice are similarly forward-looking, but not quite as much so. They’re a little more self-contained, and if one reads between the sea shanties, the theatrical reviews, and the travelogues, they provide a lot of information that might otherwise go unnoticed. There are hints at relationships between the characters—where they’ve been and where they might be going in the future. Sometimes the epigraphs are wry commentary on the action that follows, or has immediately preceded.

Every quotation is there for a reason, though. They shouldn’t be overlooked.

In the department of cool things, I received a mockup for the cover of The Nascenza Conspiracy this week.



It’s a nifty concept, and I like the fact that it’ll have both protagonists, Petro Divetri and Emilia Fossi, on the cover. I did ask that in the final realization, which like the first two covers will be done by the totally awesome Blake Morrow, that Emilia be given an outfit that was a little more military-like, given that she’s supposed to be a palace guard in the book. “She’s looking a little bit like she’s on the way to a Young Republicans meeting,” I told my editor.

He wrote back, puzzled. “Does that mean she’s not a Young Republican?”

The Buccaneer's Apprentice

I'm happy to announce that The Buccaneer's Apprentice, the second novel of the Cassaforte Chronicles, is available for your reading pleasure.

It's a tale of nautical intrigue. It's a story about crooked card games. And it's a novel about an acting company so bad that it can only get engagements in foreign countries that haven't heard how terrible they are.

But mostly it's the story of a cursed seventeen-year-old who bluffs his way from lowly apprentice to the pirate master of the Azure Sea, in the days when an enemy armada is sailing for the shores of Cassaforte with deadly intent.

Here are a couple of places to purchase the book online:

The Buccaneer's Apprentice at Amazon

The Buccaneer's Apprentice at Barnes & Noble

As always, I appreciate it when those of you who've read and enjoyed my books review them on Amazon or other sites.

One special note: I know some of you like to run down to your local bookstore, look for my novels, and then inform me that the bookstore doesn't have any copies left on their shelves. I'd like to gently remind my readers that I don't have control over the distribution of my novels. If your favorite bookstore doesn't have it in stock, ask them to restock and to order a copy for you from their warehouse. They'll be happy to help you, I'll be happy you bought a copy, and it'll arrive in a mere couple of days. Also, if your budget is low, don't be shy about asking your local public library to get a copy!

In Hartford, Hereford, & Hampshire, Hurricanes Hardly Happen

The British Empire is not dead. It has merely conquered Hollywood, with a vengeance.

Last night the Mont and I went out to see How to Train Your Dragon, which was all very well for a movie like that. The dragons were awfully cute, anyway. But it wasn’t more than two or three minutes into the proceedings when I realized that, oh gawrsh, this was going to be one of those movies in which the kids spoke with streetwise American cadences and the adults were all going to be growling out disapproval in the lilting tones of the British isles. Scotland, specifically. Never mind that in my head, ancient Vikings sound more like . . . I don’t know. More Scandanavian. Like ABBA. Hell, like the Muppets’ Swedish Chef.

One thing I know for certain, though is that Vikings very likely did not at all sound like weak imitations of Mike “I Know Only One Accent Other Than Canadian And You’re Going To Hear Me Do It Dammit” Myers doing Shrek.

Now, it’s not that I’m anti-British accents in films. In films like the Lord of the Rings trilogy when all the hobbitses are running around with hairy bare feet and talking to elves in Cockney, I’m fine. The original author was English. Ditto with the Narnia films. Harry Potter? The wizardly intonations of this updating of Tom Brown’s Schooldays is fine with me. I may even have harbored a few secret fantasies of Emma Watson’s Hermione telling me in a soft whisper that I was a very naughty lad who richly deserved a thrashing. And trust me, it’s all about the accent, in that particular scenario.

But that is neither here nor there. Those characters are rooted in the traditions of the Great Britain. Dragon-training Vikings are not. Nor, I would like to point out, is the pantheon of Greek gods. From what I saw in the Clash of the Titans trailer, the august collection of deities hanging around Mount Olympus could have been cast from the leftovers of some Merchant/Ivory period piece. And the female lead in the upcoming Prince of Persia? Wench sounds like Julie Andrews in Camelot.

It seems as if the movie industry uses patrician upper-class English aristo-modulations as shorthand for gods, wizards, nobility in any European non-English-speaking country, and other all-powerful creatures. The comic relief and the ogres get plucked from Scotland, Wales, Ireland, and London’s East End. Ah well. I shouldn’t complain. At least the cliche keeps dozens of refugees from BBC Television employed, and lets a lot of people like Jake Gyllenhaal who shouldn’t be attempting accents, strut their stuff. But when the day comes that some barely-an-actor like Keanu Reeves is conscripted to adopt some plummy British accent so that audience are forced to sit through . . . oh. Sorry, Bram Stoker’s Dracula and Dangerous Liaisons.

Forgot about you. Poor things.

Ninjas vs. Pirates!

In honor of the April release of my novel, The Buccaneer’s Apprentice, as well as Ed Briant’s Choppy Socky Blues, my publisher, Flux, is giving away copies of both books to one lucky entrant with social networking savvy.

All you have to do is visit their Facebook page answers the age-old question: when it comes to pirates vs. ninjas, who’ll be the winner? I’m partial to pirates, myself, but I have to admit. Ninjas are pretty awesome.

You can tweet a reply @fluxbooks on Twitter, too!

The day I was forgotten

April first is the anniversary of my mom’s death. The day always makes me mopey.

This year I was trying to sift through my brain and find a memory I could focus upon that would best honor her. The one that kept coming to mind seemed so negative that I kept pushing it aside. I’ve learned the hard way, though, that ignoring my bossy brain only causes me trouble later down the road, so here it is:

After the sex education scandal that caused the great Cathy Smiley carpool debacle early in the second grade, I started taking the bus home from school. My dad would drive me to Brook Hill Elementary in the mornings, but when school would let out I’d board the smelly yellow school bus and take the half-hour ride back to my neighborhood. The bus stop was a good walk from my house for someone with little legs. By myself I’d take the sidewalk south, turn the corner, and then travel a very very long half-block east until I was across the street from my house.

Now, I lived on a busy thoroughfare. It was stately and green and lined with trees and crepe myrtle, yes, but it was essentially a four-lane artery that cars and trucks would take to cut between major roads. In the middle lay a broad median covered with grass and more crepe myrtle. To a second-grader who was still only six years old, that street was intimidatingly broad. More to the point, I wasn’t allowed to cross it by myself.

When I reached the spot across the street from my house, afternoons, I was supposed to stand on the sidewalk and wait for my mother. She would have been watching from the front windows, waiting for me. When I’d appear between the banks of shrubbery, she’d dash out, cross the street, take my hand, and lead me home. Day after day we followed this routine without fail.

Until one day in winter, that is. It had been snowing, I remember. As was typical in Richmond, it wasn’t really enough snow to cause a problem, but enough to give the air a certain winter crispness. As I did every day, I followed the sidewalk, turned the corner, and walked the long half-block to the spot where I always stood. Then I waited.

And waited. And waited.

I don’t know exactly what it was that kept my mom that afternoon—whether she was reading a book and got wrapped up in the plot, or whether she’d become absorbed in a crossword puzzle or a phone call or some task around the house—but she simply forgot to look out for me. I stood on the sidewalk, getting colder by the minute, waiting and waiting, but she never came. I was too good a boy to disobey the parental command that I was never to cross the street by myself. So I stood there, more and more impatient by the second, waiting for her to emerge, while the cars and trucks roared by.

The snow continued to fall. To me it seemed to get colder and colder. I began to contemplate crossing the road by myself, but couldn’t bring myself to attempt it. There were rules to it I hadn’t learned. I remember wondering what would happen if no one ever remembered me. Would it get dark? Would anyone be able to see me in the dark? Would I have to stand there forever?

It’s at this point in the story that I can hear my mother’s voice, wry and annoyed, saying, Oh, great, you came up a story of my failure. Thanks very much. But I suppose that the reason my brain kept forcing this story up to the surface is because of what happened afterward.

By the time my mother finally remembered me, I’d been standing there for perhaps forty minutes (though it seemed like hours to me). Hot tears were streaming down my face. I had to pee. My mother, appalled at herself, rushed out of the front door in nothing more than her housecoat and slippers, dashed through the mild late-afternoon traffic, knelt down in the snow next to me, and gave me an enormous hug. Then, half-carrying and half-guiding me, she rushed me back across the parkway, up the sidewalk, and into the warm house. All the way she uttered reproaches to herself and comforting words for me. Once she’d unbundled me from my wet clothing, she began boiling water. When I returned from the bathroom, my bladder emptied, I had a steaming cup of Swiss Miss in front of me, studded with miniature marshmallows. The television was on to whatever show I liked watching in the afternoons, and she wrapped me in my grandmother’s crocheted afghan. While she dried my hair with a dish towel, she promised over and over that she’d never forget me again.

I remember clearly feeling more badly for my mother that afternoon than I really did for myself. I never truly believed that I would’ve been stranded across the street in the dark, much less forever. That specter had been created only by my dramatic brain in overdrive. For the first time ever, though, I’d seen my mother as a fallible creature instead of the all-powerful, eyes-in-the-back-of-her-head omniscience she’d always been. The new knowledge that she had her failings and oversights didn’t frighten me, or make me feel as if I had an upper hand. For a fearful six-year-old who was too acutely aware of his faults, it merely comforted me to know that my mother made her own missteps as well.

And the very next day, once I was safely home, she and I walked down to the nearest busy street corner so that I could learn how to cross the street on my own, if something similar ever happened again. She still came out to meet me for the rest of the school year, but by the end of the week, I could perform the drill of looking both ways and crossing at the light to her total satisfaction.

It was my first baby step toward independence. Though it came at the price of a few tears on a snowy day, I don’t think there are many better memories to honor my mother than that.