Daily Archives: April 10, 2015

Writing, [A-Z]

[A-Z] B is for “Bride Price, The”

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I just put my short story “The Bride Price” online for the world to see. I wrote it in 2008, and it was published by Shimmer magazine in Issue #10. Shimmer is one of my favorite magazines, and not just because they published two of my stories. They’re also chock-full of splendid stories and thought-provoking prose.

And the story was relatively well-received. SFRevu wrote this summary of the story:

Richard S. Crawford weighs in with “The Bride Price”, a wonderfully bizarre tale of teenage angst, but this one involves a girl named Signe who tries out to be a cheerleader. This is especially difficult because she is dead and that’s not her only problem.

Of course, not everyone liked it. As I recall, the reviewer at Tangent Online didn’t care for the voice, saying something like it got wearisome after awhile. But I can’t be annoyed at them, because they did post a lovely review of my story “An Interrupted Nap”, where they said:

Crawford writes with a certain ease, showing a world where the strange is considered normal…

…which is such a great quote I use it everywhere, even if it is ten years old.

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But I feel like this post should be about something other than promoting my own writing, which I think I already do too much. What about you? Do you have anything that needs promoting?

The letter B is brought to you by the A-Z Blogging Challenge. This post will be reposted via time warp on April 2, 2015.

Cats, [A-Z]

[A-Z] C is for Cats

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tangerinecloseup

This post is a day late, and for that I apologize. I’ll catch up tonight.

Currently, we have six: Rosemary, Azzie (which is short for Azrael), Nutmeg, Ingrid, Rupert, and Sherman. Originally, we had seven when we got married. They were all Jennifer’s, which, I suppose, made them my step-cats. That particular pack consisted of Allegra, Azzie, Rosie, Sebastian, Zucchini, Rebecca, and, of course, Tangerine (pictured here). Over the years, our feline family has changed and reshaped and mutated and so on. Of the original pack of seven, only Azzie and Rosie are left.

And, sadly, Rosie isn’t doing well right now. She’s an old lady cat at sixteen years old, and we don’t really long how much longer she’ll be with us.

Azzie, on the other hand, is also sixteen, and is still going strong. He whines a lot (and I mean a LOT), but he appears healthy and happy. Mostly happy, at least. He’s certainly the dumbest cat (Jennifer says we should say he’s “dim”, not “dumb”, because “dim” sounds cuter). He’s the cat who got lost behind a see-through shower curtain once. It was kind of pathetic.

At any rate, when Azzie and Rosie are both gone, it will be the end of a particular era: the era of the marriage cats. It won’t be the end of the marriage, because all the cats we have acquired since then are cats we’ve chosen together. How can the choosing of new cats NOT strengthen the bond between a couple?

This post brought to you by the letter C, a bunch of nearly normal cats, and the Blogging from A-Z Challenge.