2014: A Pet Odyssey

Susan Emerson is the lucky winner of a copy of C. L. Pauwels FORTY & OUT! Susan, please contact Cyndi with your maiing address. Cyndi is at cynpauw “at” gmail dot com.


JULIA SPENCER-FLEMING: I'm going to be perfectly upfront with you, dear readers - this post exists solely for the purpose of showing off pictures of my pets. If you don't care for dogs and cats, I suggest you head over to Wikipedia and delve into their article on Hegelian dialectics. Because honestly, if you don't like dogs and cats, what are you doing on the internet? Isn't it like 99% comprised of cute pet pics and videos?(1)

Our story starts with Marvin, our beloved Big Dog. (2) We adopted Marvin from the Kennebec Humane Society back in 2008, after a lengthy on-line search and a terrifying two-hour car ride wherein we discovered our learning-to-drive Smithie was not ready for the Maine Turnpike Experience. (3) Marvin was and is a sweet, placid beast who was probably abandoned in the early months of the Great Recession by owners who could no longer afford his Lyme Disease treatment. (4)

Marvin was our sole pet for a couple years, until our family got hit with a one-two punch in August of '10. We packed The Smithie off to college for the first time, and Ross was diagnosed with melanoma. (5) Youngest and I, feeling a bit overwhelmed, did the most cliche thing imaginable: we got a half-grown kitten. Neko was on display at our local hardware store as part of the loan-out program of the Maine Animal Refuge League. We went in to buy energy-efficient light bulbs and some potting soil and came out with an adoption application. (6)

We always intended to have a companion for Neko, but as kids came and went from college and high school, life seemed too busy to actually invest the time into finding another cat. Until this summer. With the whole family home, my two daughters, drunk with power, began  concerted lobbying campaign my 20-year-old son dubbed "Operation Get Pussy." (7)

When Youngest found out the Coastal Humane Society was having a Christmas in July event - with free cat adoptions - I weakened enough to agree we could "go take a look." (8) Those of you who are parents can see where this is going. We came home with a scraggly, forlorn looking young cat who had been found knocking about the mean streets of Brunswick, ME. The joke was on us - once out of the constraints of the shelter, Juno spent approximately two days creeping about out house before declaring herself Queen Goddess of the Home: stealing Neko and Marvin's food (9), jumping on the counter to eat half a stick of butter, demanding affection and then biting the hand that scritches her. (10)

Neko, a year older and much wider, would still be giving Juno the stink-eye, if we hadn't done something to unite them in mutual disapproval. Yes, dear readers, last Sunday we adopted a second dog. (11) Not just a second dog, but a small dog, after decades of exclusively large dogs. Not a young dog to contrast with Marvin's aged dignity, but  dog that was nine years old. Louis (12) is a pure-bred shih tzu who was obviously well-loved by his owners until some trouble - losing jobs? medical bills? - left them homeless and unable to care for the little guy. It was a pleasure to be able to pick up the responsibility, despite what will be extra food costs; Louis' mouth was in such bad shape he needed dental surgery, and he comes to us with a happy heart but only three teeth. (13)

The upshot of our animal kingdom? For now, the girls are taking equal responsibility for feeding, walking and brushing (although guess who shovels out the litter box? Go ahead, guess!) (14) Now that everyone is back at school or work, I can write at home again, and do so surrounded by up to four animals at a time. (15) We have a nice balance of personalities and roles; the calm, remote cat and the lawless, slutty cat (16), the giant economy-sized dog and the single-serving dog.

And I urge you all, dear readers, to consider adoption from a shelter or rescue organization when it's time for you to expand your family. There are so many great cats and dogs out there - many of whom will not eat your butter and who have teeth! - who need homes. If you can't adopt, consider supporting your local shelter as a donor or volunteer.  I'm sure I'll be back to one of our wonderful no-kill shelters in Maine in four years... after all, we'll need to replace Youngest when she heads off to college!


(1) The other 1% consists of pr*n, theories about chemtrails, and authors shilling their books.

(2) Marvin is part yellow lab, part Husky, and part cow.

(3) She felt uncomfortable driving faster than the posted on-ramp speed, so she merged into busy 70mph traffic going 35 mph. That was the reason my hair turned silver.




 
(4) He's doing fine now. Sometimes he needs aspirin for his joints, but then again, so do I.

(5) He's doing fine, now, too. Ask him to show you his "shark bite" at Bouchercon!

(6) That's some fiendishly clever marketing right there. What else beside a kitten is interesting at a hardware store?

(7) I know. You don't have to say it. I know.

(8) Let's face it, free is a good price for a cat.

(9) and then barfing it up. Which is no deterrent to Marvin, who will take another shot at it  if I don't get it cleaned up asap.

(10) The squirt bottle is getting a workout.

(11) Coastal Humane Society was still having the adoption special, so it was a steal at $50. What right-thinking penny-pincher could resist?

(12) My grandfather Greuling was also called Louis. Mom, if you're reading this, his former owners gave him the name. Sorry.

(13) All this happened after The Boy had gone back to Trinity, leading to the following telephone conversation:
The Boy: Why did you get another dog?
Me: Well, honey, we missed you. We had to fill the void somehow.
The Boy: Is it true he only has three teeth?
Me: Yes. We've replaced you with  tiny, fluffy toothless old dog. It just seemed right somehow.

(14) Me.

(15) It feels kind of like that scene in the dwarves' kitchen in SNOW WHITE,  except instead of cleaning the room, my pets demand affection and fart.

(16) I'm using that word in an ironic, third-wave feminist way, of course.

C. L. Pauwels on revving up to write Forty & Out

HALLIE EPHRON: Yes, you all know her! C.L. (Cyndi) Pauwels has been a frequent contributor to comments on Jungle Red. And now her first mystery novel FORTY & OUT has just been published and we are so happy to have her here on the front page taking a bow!
Like so many of us, Cyndi got serious about writing after working and raising her kids, but all along, she was revving up to write. I'll let her tell it.

CYNDI PAUWELS: Thanks so much for inviting me, Hallie! I’m all aflutter being in the company of the Reds. You gals rock!

I don’t remember when I first tried writing a story, but I wrote a play in the third grade that was performed on stage in the auditorium for the whole school – and parents! Something about astronauts teaching Martians to speak English (due to JFK and the moon landing program – you do the math), and we had a song about vowels. Even then I was writing intrigue because I remember something about sabotage.

Other than a juvenile fascination with Nellie Bly, I couldn’t imagine anyone actually making a living as a writer, but writing has been a huge part of nearly every job I’ve held – except for that unfortunate stint as a waitress in college. I’ve written classified ads and employee manuals, designed in-house newsletters, and yes, eventually did some newspaper reporting.

It wasn’t until much later that I ventured into fiction. My first published short story was in 1989, in the NATSO Truckers News Mark Twain Essay Contest – I won the $250 third prize. The story was loosely based on my mother, who at age 40 put herself through truck driving school and hit the road to support her kids.

HALLIE: Ooooh I'd LOVE to read that story!

CYNDI: Finally in 2004, after both kids were both off to college, I was able to take my writing seriously. I started freelancing, wrote as a stringer for Cox Ohio - Dayton Daily News and The Western Star. I wrote fiction on the side.

HALLIE: Were there experiences or colleagues you had during your years a dispatcher that found their way into your writing?

CYNDI: Working as a police and fire dispatcher, and then as a federal court deputy clerk for a combined fifteen-plus years gave me such a unique insight into the criminal justice world. My time on the job brings an authenticity to my stories, and as for colleagues, well, let’s just say the names have been changed to protect the innocent.

HALLIE: You can do something I can't imagine doing: Write fast. Can you tell us about your experience with NaNoWriMo? Was it the magic bullet?

CYNDI: In 2005, I discovered National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo), and what at the time seemed like an impossible masochistic event (writing 50,000 words in 30 days) showed me I was capable of producing a novel-length manuscript.

That first NaNo effort – with much revision – became my creative writing master’s thesis in 2010. My second NaNo effort became my debut novel, FORTY & OUT.

It started out as a short story, “Happy Birthday to You” (so creative!), in 1990, in Toledo’s now-defunct Ohio-Michigan Line magazine. After 39 rejections from agents and publishers in the past four years (yes, I keep count!), Deadly Writes Publishing released FORTY & OUT in August 2014.

When I told the story about the rejections to some friends over dinner just before the book was released, someone noted, “Thirty-nine? If you’d have called the book Twenty & Out it could have been published two years ago!”  *Sigh*.

HALLIE: Love your book title, but I've got to ask: Forty what and out??

CYNDI: Forty years old and pfft! A serial killer is targeting single women in Toledo, Ohio, as they reach that milestone, turning birthday greetings into obituaries. Renegade Detective Veronica Jadzinski (Jadz) has to figure out where the killer finds his victims and how all the deaths are staged as suicides – and why – before her drama queen sister is the next unfortunate celebrant. Toss in a by-the-book new partner, a lieutenant who thinks Jadz is out of her league, a needy widowed mother, and an almost-ex-husband who doesn’t want to let go…Jadz’s first official case in Homicide isn’t the only thing that keeps her up at night.

HALLIE: Love it! Will we see more of Jadz?

CYNDI: Absolutely! Her next case is underway with more murder (of course!), high-tech thievery, and a few more family squabbles along the way.

HALLIE: And the perennial writer’s question: plotter or pantser?

CYNDI: Pantser, all the way! I have just enough OCD in me that if I try to work off an outline, I don’t dare deviate from I, II, III. And I’ve learned my characters have a much better idea of how the story should unfold than anything I could ever come up with. 

HALLIE: Cyndi is giving away a signed copy of FORTY & OUT for a randomly-selected commenter, so let us know... 

This is making me remember MY first writing success, third grade, a poem that was published in our local paper. Eight lines of doggerel about my sister flying back to college with her cat. My sister didn't ahve a cat. Already I was writing fiction.   

First writing efforts anyone?

FORTY & OUT is available from Deadly Writes Publishing, Barnes & Noble, Amazon, and  bookstores. Find C. L. Pauwels the web at http://clpauwels.com, Twitter (@clpauwels), Facebook (https://www.facebook.com/clpauwels), Google+ (https://plus.google.com/+Clpauwels/posts), and Goodreads.

Whistle While You Work

JULIA SPENCER-FLEMING: Once again, it's Labor Day, the American holiday that honors workers by giving them the day off their jobs (unless you're in retail, in which case you're punching in on Labor Day and at 3pm on Thanksgiving, too. Maybe we should bring back Blue Laws?) Two years ago, we wrote about the worst jobs we ever had. Lucy won that one hands down, with her college job feeding chunks of raw liver to axelotls.

This Labor Day, I thought we could dish on the best jobs we've ever had. For me, it was being a docent at The Dumbarton House, a beautiful Federal house museum in Georgetown in DC. I was working on my masters in museum studies at George Washington University, and this was literally the perfect job. I took visitors through the meticulously restored rooms, explaining the history of the house, furnishings and the family. Since Dumbarton House was one of the lesser-known gems in Washington, I had a lot of free time. I would hang out in the cozy kitchen, drinking tea or getting home-baked goodies from volunteers. The house is the headquarters of the Society of Colonial Dames, so they were all lovely older ladies who thought becoming a museum professional was about the best thing ever. Or, I would spread out my books and papers and work in the library. When my stint was done, I would walk through the leafy, cobblestone streets of Georgetown, admiring the restored house facades, and then do a bit of window shopping on Wisconsin Ave. before catching my bus to the Cathedral area, where I lived. It was the only job I've ever had where I ended the day more refreshed and energized than when I had started.

How about you, Reds? Have you ever had a dream job?

HANK PHILLIPPI RYAN: Oh, I love my job right now! And I almost always have, ever since my first real job as a radio reporter, then for Rolling Stone Magazine, then a US Senate staffer, then a TV reporter. All wonderful! But as a teenager, I did have a dream job. I worked in a record store.
Records. You know records, right?

It was called Lyric Records, and it was a tiny one-room store in downtown Indianapolis. (It also had those little booths where people could take records and listen.) Part of my job was to select the record that would be on the store's sound system. To make it more fun, I would suss out each customer who came in, and see if I could pick a new record they would love. Everything sounded so good on the store's speakers! And it was really interesting to see if my intuition clicked  You'd see the customer's head come up, and they'd stop, and listen, and then come up to me and say--what's that playing right now?

And I knew I had scored.. (Malcolm Gladwell would love this, right?)

I sold a LOT of Harry Nilsson.

LUCY BURDETTE: I truly enjoyed my work as a psychologist, but I can't think of any jobs I love more than being a writer. I certainly don't love every minute (like now, for example, when I know I need to be getting four-five pages done every day for the next few months and I'm not sure where the plot is headed...) But I love so much about it--an idea that comes out of nowhere and makes your hair tingle...seeing the book cover or the page proofs for the first time...hearing from readers...and most of all, the dear friends I've made. I consider myself beyond lucky to have this job!

HALLIE EPHRON: Most challenging, most rewarding job I ever had was my first year teaching. Fresh out of NYU with an MA in education, I was hired to teach a sixth-grade class of "non-English-speaking" kids at PS 189 on 189th Street and Amsterdam in Manhattan. I had no idea what I was doing (I was not trained to teach non-English) and there were NO materials. Zip zero zilch, other than first-grade readers which were so inappropriate for 12-year-olds and 6th-grade textbooks  that they couldn't read in other subjects.
So I winged it. I remember Roberto who was just off the boat from Cuba. Evaristo and Evangelina from Greece. An adorable Latvian kid and his twin sister. Poor Xiomara from the Dominican Republic who was so confused that by the end of the year she barely still spoke Spanish. Solemn-faced Roxanna who was so bright and I hope turned out to be a writer. I can remember almost every child in that class, and to say I learned as much as they did that year would be an understatement. I hope the NYC public schools now have materials for kids like mine - they deserved better.

RHYS BOWEN: I've been a writer for most of my life and that seems to be the perfect job for me--especially since they invented laptop computers. I can sit and write under a palm tree on a beach or a mountain top. I get to live in a pretend world. However my first real job after college was in the BBC drama department and sometimes that seemed like a dream job. I got to work with the biggest names in British stage and cinema. Imagine me as as twenty two year old telling Sir John Guilgud where to stand! When we had the perfect cast, a wonderful script and on the day we were recording we sometimes went on until midnight. Then we'd all go out to a pub to celebrate and when I came in the next morning there would be flowers on my desk from the producer. I remember telling my parents I couldn't believe I was being paid for it!

DEBORAH CROMBIE: Oh, you are all so glamorous!  Before I sold my first book, I had a couple of either dull or really awful jobs. Other than those, I worked off and on in my family's business for more than a decade. My parents were manufacturer's reps in the theater concession business. I liked the business but was never passionate about it, unlike my dad, who had built it up from scratch. I think if I hadn't become a writer, my dad would have been heart broken that I didn't want to carry on his legacy. As it was, he was hugely proud of my achievements. And the business taught me a lot about people skills--invaluable for a writer.

So I think I can safely say that writing is THE BEST job I've ever had, or ever dreamed of having, even with those nasty deadlines...






How about you, dear readers? What were your best jobs?