Cryptids

Cryptids.
Bards & Sages Publishing. USA.
June 2015. Buy it here.

I am not young, pretty or skinny. What I am is a midlife mom with ample attitude. I love wonky characters and farfetched plots. Much to the chagrin of editors, who read manuscripts blind, I'm not, as accused, either a clone of Russell Kirk or of Edmund Burke. I don't live in North America and I'm not possessed of an MFA.

More to the point, I spend long tracks of time in my housecoat. Additionally, I openly yearn for fresh water fish with which to engage in experiments and for vials full of concentrated tea tree oil with which to measure the potential energy in my family's reactions to my aquatic research. I believe that "mass times acceleration squared" brings results. You see, I'm wonky, except for bad days when I'm full out weird.

Accordingly, my writing is topped off with reminders about childhood viscidities when it is not otherwise redolent with adolescent angst. "Wet" and "sticky" work for me. It continues on, in my humble view, that grownup perspectives on truth remain lacking.

So, I package my far flying ideas and market them to all varieties of literary salons. "Bizarro" sits cheek to check with "fine fiction" on my bibliography. What's more, I retain a sweet spot for venues that encourage readers to gawk at two-headed wildebeests, imaginary, but ever so visible, hedgehogs sporting snow glasses, and the occasional gelatinous monster. Reading a page of my expanded text means finding one's self in blackberry fields featuring candy cane trees or in highlands where chimeras nest.

For those reasons, settle in, enjoy an ambulance's warmth, a strange citizen's defeated attempts to bake a soufflé, and the gluey texture of love, which is manifested by a man, in turn, besotted with a woman, who resists complying with "pre-emptive, harm-reducing," federal laws on flawlessness. If you relax just a tad, you'll be entertained by the tales found in Cryptids.

Preface

1. Childhood
1.1 A Thing for Small Fish and Bendy Invertebrates
1.2 Dratted Cat
1.3 Sudden Exposure
1.4 Susan-A-Rama's Brother
1.5 Harmatton
1.6 Booting the Baby's Buggy
1.7 Steps to Knowledge
1.8 Tournament
1.9 He Eats Anything
1.10 Dumpster Blues
1.11 Child Study
1.12 Dalliance on an Egged Bus
1.13 Raising Literary Critics in Vain
1.14 The Lemur Cage

2. Emerging Adulthood
2.1 A Reluctant Ecology
2.2 A Time of No Heroes
2.3 The Boy Next Door
2.4 Inviting in the Cat
2.5 A Little Old Man with an Abacus
2.6 TJ Buttercup
2.7 Their Aquarium Full of Millipedes
2.8 The Koala Bear's Dilemma
2.9 The Wrong Side of the Gurney
2.10 Mini Might
2.11 Social Security
2.12 Ways Atypical
2.13 Made a Blue
2.14 A Street-Crossed Lover

3. Maturity
3.1 The Chickweed or the Egg
3.2 Finer Reclamations
3.3 Medicancy
3.4 Preamble
3.5 Haphazard Tidying Up
3.6 Parsimony Plagued Racheli
3.7 Impending Incursion
3.8 Rogue
3.9 Ode to a Cockroach
3.10 Therapy's Over
3.11 I'm Thinking of a Number between 1 and 1000: An Unsung Hero
3.12 Matilda's Morning
3.13 A Little Information Sharing
3.14 Takes Guts

4. Midlife
4.1 Unlike Her Children
4.2 Calico Mirabelle
4.3 Boxes
4.4 Amazing Deterrents
4.5 Mama Noodle
4.6 Fat Fish
4.7 Fancy Tea, Fancy Box
4.8 Here's a Check, There's a Check, Everywhere a Check, Check
4.9 Elementary
4.10 Yesterday's Plumbing
4.11 Defense
4.12 Beyond Her Hotel's Threshold
4.13 It is Brain Science
4.14 A Little off the Top

5. Wisdom
5.1 Lacy's Toe
5.2 McCragherty and the Livestock Exchange
5.3 Mail Order Bride
5.4 Old-Fashioned Heroes and New-Fangled Beasts
5.5 From the Diary of a Sleep Disordered Undercover Agent
5.6 Elizabeth Steppe and the Observation Car
5.7 Turncoat
5.8 Indigestion
5.9 City Man
5.10 Practicing this Side of Death
5.11 Assistance with Quickly Becoming Unbearable
5.12 She Liked Dandelion Tea, Too
5.13 Webberg's Guaranteed Sleep Aids
5.14 The Hands Free Rejuvenator
Credits
Acknowledgements
About the Author