Piano cat wants to play. (Click on photos for larger views.)

Let’s see, this note is … here …

Darn humans with cameras! I’m outta here.

My cat Emily likes to use an old dart board as a scratching post, a habit that doesn’t concern us, since a previous owner had her declawed, so it doesn’t damage the dart board at all. If I were a stiff old dart board that had had its share of pointy things thrown at it through the years, I wouldn’t mind a little cat paw massage now and then either.

We don’t play darts much anymore. It’s just leaning there against something else because when we moved into this smaller house from a larger one we couldn’t think where else to keep it.

Today I watched Emily lean up against it and give it the once over with her toes, and I wondered why she likes it so much. Then I noticed the brand name at the top. “Pub Master” has a part of the “b” in “Pub” worn out so that it almost looks like a crippled “h” — or an “r”. Do you suppose she thinks it says Pur Master and translates that as Purr Master?

A recent Washington Post column queried Bloggers on the Reasons Behind Their Daily Words. Reading it got me to thinking yet again about why I blog.

I started my website back in 2000, when Shadows Fall was first published, for the same reason most writers do, to promote my work. Four years later I started this blog as a way to provide up-to-date content on my website and let visitors know what I was working on—basically as a way to keep the website from stagnating when too much time passed between novels. Little did I know at the time that the blog would engage so much of my attention.

The immediacy of this format holds a certain attraction. Type, click a button, and what you’ve written is published. But that has its drawbacks. As easy as email, which carries its own risks, a blog can suck you out into public view in a way that’s scary and in some ways deceiving. It’s easy to forget you’re putting yourself “out there” to the degree we do online. After all, I’m seated here alone at my home computer as I type this into a little window on my screen. It doesn’t feel public at all, at the time I write. (more…)

Linking the past days together— It’s Super Bowl Sunday, and I didn’t know. Isn’t that usually in January? I don’t pay attention to professional sports, and some years my only clue about when that event occurs is the date they tell you the winner of the Publishers Clearinghouse Sweepstakes will be announced, which doesn’t apply to me, since I don’t enter. If Ed McMahon shows up at my door it’s more likely to be about Neighborhood Watch, or because he just spoke to Johnny Carson and he’s heard I have an interest in contact with the other side. (more…)

Once when I was seven years old, I wakened during the night for no apparent reason. I peered over the side of my bed, and I froze.

A hippopotamus loomed there in the dark, right between my bed and my sister’s. My heart nearly stopped, and I don’t think I breathed for a minute or so. I lay awake for a long time, afraid to move a muscle or make a sound, because surely if I made a noise the hippo would attack me or my sister. I was afraid to sleep, because then how could I warn anyone else, when they woke up or tried to enter our room, that the hippo was there? I was terrified. I didn’t know what to do. (more…)