A to Z Challenge: A is for Ailurophilia

by Lillian Csernica on April 1, 2022

THE FINE ART OF AILUROPHILIA

Most people think a Crazy Cat Lady is someone who gets fixated on cats, loses all sense of smell thanks to all the litter boxes, and sits around all day in their bathrobe and jammies. The truth is, Crazy Cat Lady Disorder (CCLD) is a spectrum disorder. The popular image of the Crazy Cat Lady is an example of someone at the extreme end of the spectrum. CCLD can manifest in milder forms, such as a compulsive need to collect Hello Kitty items or the tendency to wear cat ears and a tail when attending certain social events. Some of us are born with CCLD, some of us achieve CCLD, and some of us have CCLD thrust upon us. I fall into the third category. I was born a cat magnet.

The night I met Spice: I came home late from work. That meant I had to park on the street and cross the lawn to my front door. Out of nowhere this little marmalade tabby cat came zooming up to me and wrapped himself around my leg. I was still living with my mother at that time. Spice would sleep inside my car at night, then I’d let him out in the morning. After I got married, I took Spice with me when I moved to Northern California. He lived with friends of ours for two years until we moved into an apartment where we could have a cat. Spice lived to be eighteen years old.

The feral tabby: I’d been at a writer’s group meeting hosted by Jerry, a member of the group. Outside I saw this calico cat who looked rather thin and skittish. After a few minutes of coaxing, the cat came over to me and let me pet her. The poor creature hadn’t been eating well. Some fur was missing due to mange. Jerry and my husband stood at a distance down the sidewalk. Jerry looked perplexed while my husband stood there grinning. Jerry said he’d been trying to get the cat to accept food from him, but all he could do was put the dish down and go away. My husband explained my “cat magnet” powersmuch to Jerry’s chagrin. Jerry considered himself good with animals. When it comes to feral cats, the relationship is entirely on their terms.

The calico at the Cloisters: On our honeymoon, my husband and I went to the East Coast so I could meet all the in-laws who couldn’t make it to California for the wedding. We spent some time in New York seeing the museums and a Broadway show. At the Cloisters, it was a quiet day and the parking lot wasn’t very full. We parked around back by the kitchen door of the museum’s restaurant. I noticed a little calico cat hanging out by the kitchen door, clearly hoping for some food. As soon as I got out of the car, the cat spotted me and came running across the parking lot, meowing up a storm. The cat ran right up to me and just kept meowing away. Whatever the message was, it was urgent. (I now make a habit of carrying cat treats. At that time, I had no such thing so it’s not like the cat could smell food on me.) I felt so bad that I couldn’t understand what the cat was trying to tell me! All I could do was thank the cat for the message and tell her I’d be sure to pass it along. The cat meowed once more then ran back to the bushes near the kitchen door. During the rest of our honeymoon, my husband kept telling his family about this incident. That cat definitely wanted to talk to me!

The gorgeous cat in Japan: On my first trip to Japan I visited Yokohama for Nippon 2007, I the first World Science Fiction Convention in Asia. I took a side trip to Kamakura to see the temple of the Daibutsu, the fifty foot bronze Buddha. On my way back to the bus stop, I met a most unusual cat. Its outer coat was the color of mahogany, its undercoat creamy white, and its eyes were the green of Midori liqueur. The cat lounged in the sunshine of a residential driveway.

“Konnichiwa, Neko-san,” I said. “Daijobu desu ka?”

(“Hello, Mr. Cat. How are you?”)

The cat meowed in reply. I regret to say I couldn’t understand his comment. Being a proper Japanese cat, he wouldn’t allow me to pet him in public. He retreated to a branch in a nearby tree.

Crazy Cat Ladies are known for owning really impressive numbers of cats. My all-time high is fourteen. At that time I lived on an acre of land in a rural area. I had two cats of my own. The lady next door moved out, taking her mama cat with her and leaving the four kittens behind. Three of them adopted me. Two of those three were female and went into heat before I could catch them and have them spayed. And so I ended up with a total of fourteen cats. I did not cherish the vet bills, but I did have lot of fun watching the two mama cats with their eight kittens playing in the grass while the uncle cat looked on.

I have entered the demographic where owning several cats and wearing a bathrobe and slippers all day makes me one of two things: a Crazy Cat Lady or a writer. In my case, I’m both. Whenever gift-giving occasions arise, I often receive something that involves cats. One year my family threw me a surprise birthday party. The theme? Crazy Cat Lady. On a cake done in pink and lavender icing sat the Crazy Cat Lady action figure available from Archie McPhee. The figure has blonde hair. Somebody had colored it to become brunette like me. The cake also feature fancy candles that said “Birthday Girl,” along with various plastic toy cats and even a cardboard cat tree scratching post! On the table sat clusters of plastic toy cats in a variety of breeds and colors, enough to add up to my exact age. Somebody even went to the trouble of wrapping up a birthday present inside the box for a case of Friskies wet food.

My presents included a bathrobe, pajamas, and slippers that match the action figure. Granted, the figure already existed, but I can now say that as a Crazy Cat Lady, I have my own action figure. A purple zebra-striped birthday crown and a brand new pooper scooper scepter completed my royal birthday regalia. Having Crazy Cat Lady Disorder is a mixed blessing, but if it means people throwing me parties like this, I’m all for it.

#atozchallenge X is for Xenophilia

by Lillian Csernica on April 27, 2019

Welcome to one of the more unusual days in the A to Z Blog Challenge. X is a tricky letter.

My apologies for this post going up a bit later than the others. My in-laws from back east have been visiting and I got a bit behind.

birdgei.com

I have a confession to make: I am a Xenophile. This will come as no surprise to folks who have read this far in my A to Z. I love foreign people, places, and things.

When did this start? I was in first grade. A family from Japan moved into the apartment across the big grassy yard from where I lived. Hiro Takahashi joined my class. Getting to know him, his sisters, and his parents gave me my first glimpse into a whole new world.

 

From age 16 to 18, I worked as a professional Turkish-Moroccan belly dancer. My teacher, a marvelous lady from Saragossa, Spain, taught me so much about her part of the world. I still have the coin belt made for me by a Turkish man. 144 diamond-shaped silver coins, all stamped with the Venus di Milo.

http://www.royalcaribbean.com

As my high school graduation gift, my father sent me to the Netherlands. I spent the summer with the family of the girl who had been my Physics lab partner on a student exchange program. While I was there I took a weekend bus tour to Paris, France. I am now all the more grateful for that trip, given that it allowed me to see Our Lady of Notre Dame cathedral in its full glory.

amazon.com

My fiction has been translated into German and Italian. (Ship of Dreams became In the Spell of the Pirate.) I’m looking for someone to translate a novella into Japanese. If you know anybody, drop me a line, won’t you?

And of course I’ve had some adventures in Yokohama and Kyoto.

theconversation.com

Why am I so attracted to the Other? People fascinate me. How they think, what they think, and why they think it. Just the single concept of life after death has given rise to so many different schools of thought. The pursuit of happiness involves such a broad spectrum of effort depending on how one defines happiness.

Writing allows me to take apart some aspect of life and put the pieces back together in a new way. Am I trying to make some sense of what I’ve experienced? Probably. Am I trying to bring order to a chaos that leaves me frightened and bewildered? Probably. It’s not all one-for-one, of course. By the time I get to the final edit of a story, the pieces of me I’ve used undergo quite a process of transformation.

adrienneasher.com

#NaNoWriMo 2018 Begins!

by Lillian Csernica on November 1, 2018

Oh my stars and garters. I’ve been going like a maniac for days now. Friday–Halloween party. Saturday–trip through a Haunted House. Sunday–groceries, laundry, pizza, as well as prepping for the Kick Off Party. Monday–the Kick Off party! Tuesday–taking John to tae kwon do. And of course Wednesday was Halloween!

People ask me how I get any writing done. It’s simple. I do it whenever I get the chance. On Tuesday I was sitting there with my notebook on my knee writing while John was out on the mat with his tae kwon do class. At this point I’m busy typing in everything I wrote during #nanoprep in October. Still, I must keep writing every day. That’s the deal.

We’re going to EuCon again this month. John is once again in charge of the Art Bus. This means five days on the road. It will be a real challenge making sure I hit the daily quota when my brain is fried from driving for hours or working the con. I’ve already proven I can write in my sleep, so I might need that skill again and soon!

Then there’s John’s birthday and Thanksgiving! The excitement never stops!

I’m going to write. Every day. A whole new book.

To all my fellow WriMos out there, I wish you all the best as you embark on your journeys of creativity.

The Writer’s Spellbook

by Lillian Csernica on August 1, 2017

AVAILABLE NOW ON SMASHWORDS!

One of the most important elements of a fantasy novel or a game world is the magic system. A logical and consistent magic system will do a lot to help improve the quality of the story… A better magic system means a better story, and a better story means more readers!

PLENTY OF FORMATS TO CHOOSE FROM!

EPUB MOBI PDF IRL PDB TXT HTML

Whether you’re a writer or a gamer, a graphic novelist or an historical reenactor, The Writer’s Spellbook will give you step by step guidance in making the crucial decisions that will bring your fantasy world to life.

 

The Perils of Writing Short Fiction

by Lillian Csernica on February 21, 2017

Opportunity cost. Cost/benefit analysis. Return on investment.

I remember these terms from my Economics and Accounting classes. Little did I know I would one day be applying them to which writing projects I chose to pursue.

So far, the Flower Maiden Saga has inspired me to write three consecutive novels. The farther I go in editing and polishing Book One for the big agent pitch, the more of the causes and consequences of the main storyline I see. The core plots for Books Four and Five have already presented themselves.

This is wonderful. I’m excited about all of it. The thing is, my first love is writing short stories. Reading short stories in Asimov’s and Weird Tales and my English Lit. classes made me want to become a writer. The first time I walked into a bookstore and picked up a copy of The Year’s Best Horror Stories XXI and saw my name on the table of contents right there with Ramsey Campbell and Ed Gorman, I very nearly exploded with happiness.

Short stories are great, but novels are where the money is. I’ve heard that many times. Novels take a while to write and a while to polish and package for publication. Not so with short stories. Short stories will get your name out there and keep it out there.

These are the five main perils of writing short fiction:

1. Why waste a good idea on a short story? These days it’s all about writing novels. Give the readers what they want, over and over again. Build that brand. Make more money. Fine. If that’s what you want, go for it. Bear in mind there is much to be said for the art and craft of the short story. Hemingway’s “The Killers” and “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” remain vivid in my mind thirty-five years after I read them in high school.
2. Short stories are often just one shots. That one shot might be brilliant, but then you have to go write another story. Is that one brilliant story continuing to earn royalties or selling well as a Kindle Single? I visit various writers’ groups online, and I find the emphasis on money to be disheartening. Short stories can be built into a novel. One of my favorite fantasy novels, A Bait of Dreams by Jo Clayton, started out as three short stories that appeared in Asimov’s.
3. It can be difficult to pack a complex story idea into a limited word count. On the other hand, doing so can result in a stronger story. When I wrote “Fallen Idol,” my first short story sale, I got so caught up in all the research and characters and how-to books’ advice I thought I could rise to the challenge of writing a real novel. Fortunately, I had an attack of reality. All the research and ideas imploded, resulting in a much stronger short story.
4. Unless you’re selling to the top professional markets, short fiction doesn’t pay much. If you’re sending out enough stories to generate an acceptable amount of sales, way to go! That’s not easy to do, even for the Big Names. I will say that anthologies that pay up front then give you a cut of the royalties can provide some worthwhile income.
5. Here’s the Peril that cuts to the heart of what it means to be a writer. Are you going to write about what you want to write about, or are you going to write what you think will sell to the markets where you want your work to appear? The Digital Age has opened up a whole lot of  markets. They may not pay much. They may not pay at all. Still, you can get your words out there. Targeting a particular market is a perfectly reasonable career strategy. My first sale to Weird Tales was another day for joyful explosion.

It comes down to those basic questions we all ask our main characters:

What do you want?

How badly do you want it?

What are you willing to give up in order to get it?

When you’ve answered these three questions, you will be on your way to navigating through the perilous process of telling the stories only you can tell.

 

How to Mine Your Life for Stories

by Lillian Csernica on July 23, 2014

http://www.thecatholiccatalogue.com

Anybody who has survived his childhood has enough information about life to last him the rest of his days.

— Flannery O’Connor

You don’t have to be writing a memoir to take a look at your own life and see what might be useful in your stories.  We’re supposed to write what we know, right?  Who could possibly tell the stories we’ve lived through better than we can?  Let me offer a few highlights from my own adventures.

1.  I’ve been dead.  Yes, that’s right, D-E-A-D.  On August 29, 1987 I died in a car accident on Interstate 5 heading north.  I was driving my boss’ station wagon from Long Beach, CA to Black Point in Novato, CA, former site of the Northern Renaissance Faire.  The two right tires blew within seconds of each other.  The car went out of control and rolled two and half times, coming to rest on the roof.  My body was found on I-5 South, across a forty-five foot culvert.  Who found me?  A LVN and an Air Force Paramedic.  What they were doing driving south on I-5 in the middle of the night, I have no idea.  They called it in and tried to get an Air Ambulance, but the nearest ones were still too far away.  An ambulance from Bakersfield, CA came out, the paramedics scraped me up off the highway, and took me to Kaiser in Bakersfield.  I regained consciousness three days later in the ICU.  Do I remember being dead?  Yes I do.

2.  When I was in kindergarten, I was chosen to play Santa Claus because I was already taller than everybody else in my class with the exception of the teacher.  This was my first appearance on stage, and I liked it.  Costumes, theatrics, the performing arts, and Christmas have all played central roles in many of my more noteworthy adventures.  I trace it all back to cross-dressing as Kris Kringle when I was just six years old.

3.  I was in high school when my best friend Andrew decided somebody deserved his wrath in the form of toilet-papering his or her house.  I’d never done this particular prank before, so I was all for it.  That was my first mistake.  Neither of us had a car, so we contrived an elaborate plan that involved the two of us going to the movies and getting a ride from my mother.  We were within walking distance of our target.  How we got our hands on all the toilet paper we needed I can’t quite recall.  I remember walking out of a grocery store with my arms full of the big multi-roll packages.  I trusted Andrew to get us to our target.  That was my second mistake.  We had a high old time, festooning the trees and pitching rolls over the rooftop and draping the car in the driveway with much hygenic bunting.  The occasional car would drive by, forcing us to dive behind the nearest hedge or bush or bumper.  Now if we’d been really evil, we would have gone looking for the garden hose and soaked it all.  That makes toilet paper almost impossible to clean up.  We congratulated ourselves on a job well done and took off to meet our ride at the movie theater.  The next day at school, the story about the toilet papering was the hot topic of the day.  Everyone wanted to know who did it.  Everyone also wanted to know why that particular house was chosen.  Nobody who went to our school lived there.  Andrew had missed his target by a good two blocks.

4. From age sixteen to eighteen, I studied Turkish-Moroccan bellydancing.  My teacher was a wonderful lady from Saragossa, Spain.  As I improved and occasionally taught a class for her, my teacher would take me with her on what were then called “belly grams.”  These were singing telegrams, except of course they were delivered by belly dancers.  One night near Christmas my teacher called me up out of the blue and asked if I could come with her on  a party call.  (Nobody with any sense ever goes on these jobs alone.)  It was one of my father’s visitation weekends, so I was at his house, but it didn’t take long to get into my costume and jewelry.  My teacher had been hired for a bachelor party in an extremely high class neighborhood.  One piece of art on the walls there would have put me through college.  There were about ten men there in the game room, which featured a wet bar, a pool table, and one of those cone-shaped gas fireplaces in the corner.  It’s not easy to work a room when the best you can do is work your way around the pool table, but we had a good time.  The guest of honor and his friends were good tippers, I’ll say that for them.  At one point I was shimmying past a fellow who’d been holding a cold beer.  He chose that moment to tuck some folded money down the back of my coin belt.  I all but shot straight up to the ceiling!  When our time was up, my teacher and I made a graceful exit.  We heard later there were two more acts after us.  Those guys really were generous.  At home again, I was taking off my costume and money was spilling out all over the place.  I do not want to tell you where I found the ten dollar bill!

5. The week I spent in Yokohama, Japan for the 2007 World Science Fiction Convention has supplied me with so many stories I could write a book with a story for every chapter.  There was the wonderful security guard who helped me and my best friend find the post office where the international ATMs were kept.  The reception held by the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of Japan was the most fabulous event I’ve ever attended, complete with the U.S. Ambassador from the Ministry of Trade and the Mayor of Yokohama.  I met my friend Massimo there, the gentleman from Torino, Italy who edits ALIA and translates Japanese into Italian.  I had a conversation in Japanese with a cat, who answered me.  When we were trying to find the Yokohama Hard Rock Cafe, a nice young man offered to show us where it was once his mother came back.  Sure enough, they led us all the way through the very extensive shopping mall to the very doorstep of the Cafe.  I love Japan.  I can’t wait to go back and see what further adventures await me.

So you see?  What might seem like a trivial incident to you can become the basis for a story.  I could take the Santa Claus moment and make it the reason my heroine feels safer when she’s inside a costume.  The toilet paper incident could become a case of mistaken identity that snowballs into a horrible climax of payback.  The bellydancing lends itself to all kinds of stories.  Humor, romance, espionage, woman in danger, cultural exchange!  All of those could also arise from my adventures in Japan.

Because I lived through all the above events, I know how it felt to wear the costumes, to live in fear of the police showing up, to trust my teacher to keep me safe in what could have become a dangerous situation.  Japan was wonderful, but there were moments when I was lost, and no one around me understood a word I said.  I walked into one restaurant and the waiter said, “No English.”  I knew he meant more than just the language.  That brings to mind the weekend bus tour I took to Paris when I spent the summer living in Holland.  The tour guide we picked up in Paris didn’t like Americans.  The Dutch ladies on the bus closed ranks around me and made it clear the tour guide had better mind her manners.  The negative experiences might have more power than the positive ones.  That’s up to each of us to decide.

We cannot approach our lives with a poverty mentality.  Every day we’ve been alive has been full of sound and color and emotion and meaning.  Look for the moments that stand out, for the memories still charged with emotion and intensity.  Take that raw material and reshape it into the inciting incident, the problem situation, the change in the status quo that launches your main character on his or her struggle to solve the problem.  Use those moments for complications, for crises, for climaxes.  You will be surprised to learn how much you really do know.

R is for Roller Rink

by Lillian Csernica on April 20, 2014

 

By now you’re thinking, “She’s got to be running out of ideas.  Soon she’ll have to just start making things up!”  Well, that day is NOT today!  There is in fact a chocolate roller rink, and it’s located in Canela, Brazil.

 

From http://daveswworld.blogspot.com/2011/09/cross-country-travel-day-5.html:

” We stop at a cute shop and I quickly fill boxes with chocolate of all kinds for my American friends.  The cashier tells us to make sure we head upstairs to see what is up there before retreating to our car.  Of course our curiosity is heightened and we head up past

the chocolate waterfall and life size chocolate figures.  We come to a room with music playing.  After further investigation,  we see two kids ice skating, but this is no regular rink – the kids are skating on chocolate.  Yes chocolate.  I watch a while and think of putting on a pair of skates myself,  but it is a small rink and we have more of Canela to see.”

Yes, folks, the Brazilians are so cool they have even created a skating rink for kids where the floor is pure chocolate.  I ask you, did you ever think you’d see something this cool?

castle_rock_chocolatier on eBay.

Now tell me this:  if you could build an entertainment location out of chocolate, what would it be?  Miniature golf?  Bowling?  The kind of games you play on the midway at the State Fair?  Come on!  Let’s hear some ideas!