Although it may seem odd, I’m offering as a teaser the last paragraph of the 1st draft of “Bloggers.” I was writing this, the end of the epilogue, yesterday afternoon. I had become a character assassin; ie., the character I had so carefully and lovingly created over the preceding 190 pages of times 12 point, with her acid wit, her literary gifts, and her pluck and luck, has her luck run out. She is killed by her ex, fighting for her life. As I opened myself up to write this ending, I began to cry. Del asked me why I what I was upset about. I am at a loss to explain, even to myself, what happens in one’s mind as one creates and then kills off a character. They become so real, like people you’ve known all your life. I don’t know any other way to do it. So when terrible things happen to them, and these are the things that must happen, not just because you wrote it in an outline a few months back, but because the whole story leads up to it, and there is no other way for it to plausibly turn out, you really feel the loss. To write about the consequence of such loss, and the irony of a poet who composes her own epitaph, requires that, as a writer, you feel it. Totally. So here it is, the ending of “Bloggers.” To read the rest of the story, you’ll have to buy the ebook. To buy the ebook, I have to revise (maybe), to edit (certainly), and to proofread (obviously), and then publish it. So, until then:

In a cemetery in Parkersburg, not far from the Bald Eagle Airstrip, there is a simple stone that marks the grave of Lana Marietta Andersen. The seasons are there for her. In winter, she is smothered. In spring, her optimism blossoms and she lives on. In summer she flies, high among the hollows, free as a bird. Then comes the fall, and the fallen angel flutters to the ground like so many colored leaves, and in those fragrant piles she mourns for the life that might have been. Her stone bears a simple verse, a million copies sold, memorized by school kids as a doggerel about life, nature and its implication for survival or extinction:


“ I am a bird among the cats.
A single swat and I am toast. That’s that!
That thin red line is mine, my life.
The paw lashed out as knife.
Let me speak once more undead.
I ate. I waited. Bled.”

Stay tuned for the short story series.
“Short, self-contained, and good.”