A little pre-Halloween fun — green cats!

IO9 had a prompt that was too good to pass up.  I’ll admit I thought of the Addams family as I wrote The House of Green Cats, so enjoy!

And don’t forget to wander by and check out my article Balancing Writing and Blogging on Vision: A Resource for Writers.

 

Goals — What’s Them Things?

We did our quarterly writing goals at the Cat Vacuuming Society (a Northern VA critique group) this last week — always a hard task.  I’m always wondering what other people will think because my goals and reasoning sometimes doesn’t follow with the crowd.  For “homework,” we had to come up with three writing goals/habits, though I also added promotion habits:

Writing Goals/Habits:

1. Add more structure.  This results from researching my “Basic Training on Military Culture” class for Forward Motion.  The military is very structured because war is chaos.  My writing tends to be chaos, so I need to find ways to impose structure (and just to clarify, I’m not referring to structure within the story).
2. Listen to myself.  Another habit that I really need to pay attention to more than I have been.  Right now I’m embracing humor back into my book.  It’s one of the things I wanted to do with the omniscient viewpoint.  But after I got comments back from the agent that the voice was too strong, I took out all the humor.  When I attended a workshop with Allen Wold at Marscon, it crept in again, and the panelists there said, “No, don’t put the humor in the narrative.”  So I’ve been steering away from what I wanted to do because everyone else says to.  Then I read this article from Rebecca LuElla Miller and it reminded me that I needed to listen to myself.
3. Make an effort not to underdo things when I write.  If you tell me to dribble in backstory and not do backstory dumps, I will end up with none at all in the story.

Promotion Goal/Habits:

1. Do one blog post per week that’s more opinionated.  I’ve tended to back down on things where I do have an opinion and it doesn’t go along with the rest of the crowd.  It’s really kind of scary to be the only one saying, “Wait a minute, this is not right” and sticking to it, even people disagree.  So I’m making an effort to not back off.  My post on Unleaded, Writers Block is Not a Figment of Your Imagination is an example of my branching off into that area.
2. Make sure I put something out about me in my blog, like promoting my upcoming class or the article that’s coming out in Vision in October.  Half the time I forget, so I have to make extra effort.
3. Leave flyers and/or Moo cards at science fiction cons that I attend.

This is a flyer I made up for the con I’m going to in October:

Quarterly goals sound really nice because it is such a short term.  If I try to set them for a year or five years, I end up falling off the goal wagon very fast.  What are your goals for the next quarter? Share them below.

And meanwhile, some real cat vacuuming for your viewing pleasure:

 

Which is Better — Cats or Dogs?

At my critique group this last week, we got in a discussion about cats and dogs.

One member had cats and thought cats were better.

Another member had dogs and thought dogs were better.

I grew up with both.  We had a total of four dogs and four cats.

We’ll start with dogs.  They’re lovable doofuses.  They get into all kinds of trouble because they don’t think.  Their memories are both short and long.  They’re remember what time dinner is, but completely forget it’s a bad idea to run off down the street.  Running down the street was always what scared us the most, because it was Los Angeles, and I don’t think I went a day without seeing a dog or cat dead in the street.  Two of our dogs would out, and it was like, “Time to party!”  They didn’t have a brain between them, so when they went out roaming, they followed each other.  They were like a couple of drunks, who didn’t know where they were going.  Of course, we’d catch them eventually and yell at them.  They’d look guilty, and then a few weeks later, they were out partying again.  They were very lucky dogs because both survived to old age.  One was over 20!

Cats are royalty.  Or at least, that’s the way they act, particularly the Siamese we had.  Our cats were surprisingly well-mannered.  I’ve been amazed at photos on LOL Cats of cats shredding toilet paper.  None of ours did, though the Siamese could be vindictive.  After we got Dog #4, the cat let us know he was displeased with our decision: He turned the computer paper box into a litter box.  There was no doubt in ours minds he knew exactly what he was doing.  He was the worst when it came to food.  Because of the dogs, we had to put his food on a cat tree, unfortunately placed near the kitchen.  This cat would get up on the shelf and check his can of cat food. If it was empty — Whack!  He knocked it off the shelf and to the floor, where the dogs went for it.  Then he’d meow at anyone who passed by.  Since we were trying to diet him, we ignored the meows.  So he’d take to swatting people, claws extended.  He later died from hardening of the arteries.  According to my father, the dogs knew something was wrong and allowed the cat to sleep in one of the dog beds, where he died during the night.

Which is better?  No contest.  When we had to let both cats and dogs go to old age, it didn’t make it any easier.

Do you have any favorite cat or dog stories to share? Which are better?