Can I be Rare, Too?

Can I Be Rare, Too?
Bards & Sages Publishing. USA. 
April 2017. Buy it here.

My role was that of marshmallow fluff chief extraordinaire. I sourced sugar, corn syrup, and salt, blended them in the correct amounts, and stewed them at the right temperature. I even used detergent, in combination with water, to remove that desirable, messy goop from paw pads, from quills, and from soft, belly fur. I was lost, however, when it came to ascertaining whether or not those behaviors could make my imaginary friends more corporeal.

For that reason, I wrote about my muses and their associates. I generated many stories, into which I stuffed luminescent fairy wings, tortoise teeth, and the bunkum snatched from drunken chimeras¬. In addition, I sprinkled my narratives with glittery gold coils and with alabaster chips.

Some of my tales hammered against their confinements with their puny fists. Others, which anyway explored the crevices of their c¬ages, gave little regard to their imprisonment. Still others sat and waited for a chance to escape. None absconded, though as I managed to wrap the lot of them in words pretty and otherwise.

Can I be Rare, Too is a collection of those strange and wonderful beasts. It contains things that sneeze at night, fly skyward in the morning, and drift into lazy repose ¬when the sun is at its highest. While Can I be Rare, Too might seem like an expose' on anthropomorphized life, it is actually the opposite. This assemblage is an exploration of peoples' brutish tendencies, tentacles, tails, and all.

Accordingly, any illegal or immoral illusions found in this book are not my concern. Rather, they are the province of the folks who identify with: my pretend hedgehogs, my handful of not-yet-palpable, polka dotted Komodo dragons, and my many manners of eccentric seafaring organisms. The tosh generated by those critters notwithstanding, further stories were needed, by me and by my readers, to bear out my imagination's small, mollusk-eating brutes as well as their partners, the larger cryptids.

Fortunately, not only do strange yarns distract us from naughty children's deeds and from reinterpreting eggplant as a dessert food, but such tales likewise help us to understand why it's good to hesitate to paint masterpieces directly onto our walls and why it's beneficial to make believe that being nice is all we call for when solving interpersonal and international problems. Whether or not we: go crazy over computer-assisted physics games, insist that our real, human friends join us on midnight slug walks, or get persnickety when linking together clover crowns, what matters is how we interact with monsters.

It's not only writers whom require creative accounts or an ability to connect discordant events, but most of the rest of everyone else, too wants to sort fiends into parsimonious piles. In view of those desires, Can I be Rare, Too's sixty-four tales are one part canard, one part forced teleology, and several parts enthusiastic furze pig. They are, also, one hundred per cent fun.

 

Contents:

Preface
1. Transparent Activities
1.1 A Knight's Round, Table Vegetable
1.2 Milk Thistle and Fenugreek
1.3 It Depends
1.4 Evermore Blossoming
1.5 Didn't Kill ‘em
1.6 Agent 5764's Soured Mission
1.7 Rehab
1.8 At Cinema City
1.9 Marvelous Millions' Associate, Thug Thousand
1.10 Ain't So
1.11 Dull, Scaly, Grey Love
1.12 Just a Bite
1.13 Geraniums
1.14 Junior High Crush
1.15 Serendipity
1.16 Games
1.17 Yoheved's Celebration
1.18 Trust
1.19 On a Need to Know Basis
1.20 Balayage
1.21 Miserable at What the Fluff

2. Tenebrous Activities
2.1 Not Even the Waiting List
2.2 Family Spycraft 1: Of Fingerprints and Drinking Glasses
2.3 Family Spycraft 2: Right-Sided
2.4 Family Spycraft 3: Mrs. Morrison
2.5 Family Spycraft 4: Dead as David
2.6 Many, Many Hedgehogs, Maybe Gumdrops
2.7 A Golden Hair
2.8 Chipmunk Pastures
2.9 Not Anticipating
2.10 Plump and Succulent
2.11 Children's Games
2.12 Dealing with Decaying Architecture
2.13 In Relationship to another Son of My Parents
2.14 Urtication
2.15 Again, on an Egged Bus
2.16 Mislaid: A Hedgehog's Nightmare
2.17 Shredded Paper
2.18 Common Halloween Tricks
2.19 The Routes They Use
2.20 Cosigned to Nothingness
2.21 Steering Wheels
2.22 Earthly Hosts

3. Translucent Activities
3.1 In Gotham
3.2 Stupid
3.3 And Tentacles
3.4 Signs of Willingness
3.5 Knife-Edge
3.6 Haunted by the Ghosts of Hedgehogs
3.7 A Husband's Duties
3.8 Trouble with GobbledUp
3.9 Ring-a-Round the Birthday
3.10 Office Ardor
3.11 Leftovers
3.12 Provisos
3.13 Reverse Aging
3.14 Straddling: One Woman's Diyu
3.15 Ott Toby
3.16 Exchange Rate
3.17 Tourist Problems
3.18 The Juice of Kumquats
3.19 Paragraphs Trump Pizza
3.20 Dr. Whitfield's Dream of Recycling
3.21 Dating and Mating in the Company of Alien Hedgehogs
Credits
Acknowledgements
About the Author