If you read my blog post from August 16th, you know I have started sharing snippets (unedited, first draft snippets!) from my new WIP, a novel with the working title of “Masks and Stories.” It is my hope that sharing these snippets will encourage me to keep writing this new book, and not let it go dormant again.

So here’s another passage:

“Long ago, or maybe only yesterday, there was a young girl who didn’t belong where she was born. She did not look like anyone in her family, or even in her town. They had blue eyes or green eyes, but no one else had dark eyes the color of mink, like she did. They had smooth pink and white skins, but her skin was a freckled goldy-brown. Their noses were short and broad, but hers was narrow and crooked. Their fingers were wide and stubby, as were their toes, but hers were long and thin. Their hair was brown and straight as plank boards, but her burnt orange locks grew in curls that were painful to comb in the mornings. In short, everyone else was beautiful, and she was not.”

Comments are welcome.

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A fat squirrel came onto my porch and ate MY cookie that the UPS man left for me!

I howled and howled through the glass door and no one did anything and the fat squirrel went right on eating my cookie.

I believe the world is ending.

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When I left corporate America and became a full-time writer, I thought, “Wow how cool, all my time just for writing!” Ideas for stories, novels, essays, and poems jumped around in my mind like caffeinated fleas.

And then I began ghostwriting. I write for other people, and I love it. However, there is a downside. I’m often so busy writing for others that my own work takes second place. Ghostwriting earns me reliable money. Making money from my own work is more of a crap shoot. Ghostwriting means I have made commitments and promises to other people. With my own writing, the commitments and promises are made only to myself, who I find easier to negotiate with.

The upshot is that many of my fleas have stopped jumping and gone back to sleep.

So what to do? One day I had a brainwave. One of the commitments to myself that I do keep steadfastly is to write this blog. I’m not writing for others here, this is my own work. So what if I shared here, on this blog, pieces from my current “for-me” WIP?

Right now I’m working on a novel with the working title of “Masks & Stories”. It’s about the masks we wear and the stories we tell, and how they make us who we are. I like it. I like it very much. When I work on it, I get excited. And when I share it, it becomes real.

So every now and again I’m going to share snippets of this WIP here on my blog. Maybe just a sentence or a paragraph at a time. This is kind of scary, since these will be first draft snippets; they are unedited, will probably change, or may even be eliminated from the final product. But I believe that sharing these snippets will keep me trucking along on this book that is crying out to be written. I think it will keep my fleas hopping.

I’ll start at the beginning, with the first paragraph of the book (as it is now). If you want to comment, I’d love to hear what you think.

“We opened the door and trooped eagerly into the house, just like we always had before. But we stopped in the entry way, the four of us bunched together as if uncertain of where to go, since Grandma wasn’t here to show us. Only a moment, but a long one, while her absence shouted from the walls and echoed in the empty air.”

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A huge Crow haunts my lawn. He struts like he owns it. Who does he think he is – an Eagle?

This Crow took up with a girl Crow almost as big as he is, and now there are baby Crows who are growing way too fast for comfort. Even The Cat is afraid of them. They are sure not afraid of her, or of me either.

I think this upsets the Natural Plan, don’t you?

Perhaps these Crows are Alien Crows from another planet. Be Very Afraid.

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A Chinese writer once said "Patriotism is the memory of foods eaten in childhood." A good definition, and one that points out that every country has patriots, not just us. We love what we are used to, and every place is someone's country. But that doesn't mean we shouldn't love our own place with all the fiber of our being.

To me, being American means participating in and contributing to the world/universe via the culture into which I was born. We share traits and outlook that Senegalese and Tibetan and Spanish people don't. They’re not better traits and outlook; just that I share these particular ones with other Americans. It means I don't have to explain American things to other Americans, which contributes to the feeling of home and comfort and taking off my shoes. It means that the evergreen trees and gray skies of the Pacific Northwest, and the sheer beauty of where I have lived most of my life, is a place I want passionately to protect, simply because it is so beautiful and I feel it is my responsibility.

Being American means the Creator spirit, whoever you conceive her to be, has placed me here. So in gratitude I feel I should try to live my life so that I add to its goodness and beauty and wisdom, or at the least do no harm. There is a poem I am fond of, by Mary de la Valette. It goes "I do not have to go / to Sacred Places/ in far-off lands / the ground I stand on/ is holy." I interpret that to mean that ALL places on the earth are sacred and worthy of love. None more that any other.

And that's how I feel about America. It's a sacred bit of earth. It's my country because I was born here and raised in its culture. It's like any other attribute — brown eyes, arthritic knees, artistic talent. It's up to me what I do with these attributes. I look on them — all of them, even the ones that are "negative" (such as arthritis) as gifts, and I see it as my responsibility as a thinking, feeling being to do the best I can with what I've been given. If I choose to live in America, then I want to help make it a good place for people to live. If it is failing in that, then I want to fight to make it better. If it has things to be proud of, then I want to celebrate them.

Of course values such as integrity, generosity, kindness, etc., are of primary importance to me, way more important than simple patriotism. I think the saying "my country right or wrong" is the height of idiocy. I've never really thought of myself as patriotic — the word itself is sexist and it only serves to divide us. Some day, if the earth endures that long, our species will probably think of ourselves only as earthlings, and instead of patriotism we'll talk of planetism or something. Which will be just as meaningless and sectarian as the word patriotism has come to mean.

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It rains a lot here. Good thing I am a Seattle native or else I would go crackerdog. But sometimes I like the rain. Walks in the rain are especially fun because when I get back home I roll on the carpet and it feels so so good.

This rolling has been called the Wet Beagle Dance. One of my Twitter dog friends advised me to do rubbing as well as rolling – if you rub up against the couch it hits the hard-to-reach places. I tried this, and it is true.

Now I Rub N Roll.

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The other day I was listening to my iPod as I wrote, swaying in my chair as I typed to songs such as “All Night Long” by Lionel Ritchie, “Beat It” and “Billie Jean” by Michael Jackson, “Down Under” by Men at Work, “Flashdance” by Irene Cara, and “Girls Just Wanna Have Fun” by Cyndi Lauper. I felt free and confident and together.

Suddenly I realized that all those songs were released around the same time. When I looked them up, I saw they had all been released in 1983. Well, no wonder I felt together. 1983 was a great year for me. I had been promoted at work, and was making more money than I’d ever made before. I was in the midst of a new romantic relationship. I had just bought a new car – a sleek dark blue Z28 Camaro.

So it makes sense that when I listen to the popular songs of 1983, I feel damn good … even if I no longer have that high-paying job, the romantic relationship has long since bit the dust, and I drive a 10-year-old sedate sedan that gets good gas mileage.

You gotta love the power of music.

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That big fat bunny was back one night, eating MY lawn. My human wouldn’t let me out to kill him. She just doesn’t understand me. She says it’s not nice to kill bunnies, even if they are destructive little varmints when it comes to gardens. But I say they are cheeky devils who deserve to die!

I tweeted about this bunny and said right up front that I wanted to kill him – and then another tweeter named @BuddyRabbit followed me – and he is a rabbit! I figure he must be an advanced soul.

Or else he is out for revenge. You cannot trust those bunnies.

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Here is a little story that might mean much. My great-grandmother was born in the county of Lincolnshire in England, as were numerous generations of her family. Her last name was Johnson, and her Johnsons going back to the 1500s are buried in an old church in Spalding, Lincolnshire. And more – there are Johnsons mentioned in the Domesday book in the 12th century, pig farmers living in the very same place as “my” Johnsons live today. Same Johnson family? Probably. They still have a pig farm, too.

Whether this means little or much, I don’t know. Lincolnshire is the smallest of the English counties. It’s slogan is “Multum in Parvo,” Latin for “much in little.” I’m not sure this slogan refers to the size of the county, though. It could refer to other things.

When the Romans ruled Britain, they ran up against a pissed-off queen who lived in what is now Lincolnshire, in the country of the fens (or wetlands). She was pissed off because the Romans didn’t respect her authority. A Roman official made snide remarks about what a silly little woman she was, which irritated her enough to make a snide remark back. So the Romans proved their disrespect by raping her daughters in front of her, and then flogging the queen herself. Now that would make anyone mad. The queen’s name was Boudicca and she is still renowned as the woman who nearly brought down the Roman Empire. She and her army burned many of the towns the Romans had established in England, including what is now Colchester. She was on her way to London (then Londinium) when she was finally stopped. The Romans thought she was little, but they were wrong. She was much.

Later on, many legends place Robin Hood in these same Lincolnshire fens (where ospreys breed today), perhaps because the place was associated with those like Boudicca who were really really mad at the authority of the times. Robin Hood first appears in the ballads of the 14th century, and although for 700 years historians have been searching for some historical facts that would prove his actual existence, they have come up empty. Most of them have concluded that he was made up by some now-unknown balladeer. This view is bolstered by the fact that the word “robin” is a colloquial version of “robber”. But true to Lincolnshire’s motto, Robin Hood’s origins may have been little, but his story has been made much of.

Multum in Parvo describes an actual phenomenon. We human beings are capable of taking a tiny snippet of something – a Roman making a nasty remark, an itinerant poet creating a story to amuse his audience – and enlarging it until we have started a war or began a legend that lasts seven hundred years.

I think all our stories are Multum in Parvo. They may be little, but they mean much.

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Goody Beagle here. You know how some humans are prejudiced against Pitbulls? They think they are dangerous. But I know a Pitbull personally, and she’s not dangerous at all. Her name is Nutmeg and her human is my human’s daughter and Nutmeg and I played together when we were puppies and since she’s about six months older than me she showed me how to wrestle and play tug and I love her.

I have a Twitter follower whose name is PibbleLvr. This stands for Pitbull Lover – the tweeter is a Pit Bull. When I met PibbleLvr I suddenly knew the solution to the wrongheaded Pitbull Bias. We can change the Pitbull’s reputation just by changing their name! Call them Pibbles. It’s easy to be scared of a Pit Bull. I mean, would you like to be in a pit with no way out, and in comes a Bull intent on goring you? Scary, right? But how can you be scared of something called a Pibble?

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