April J. Asbury, Writer

Category: Personal

All the other stuff in life, including pets and loved ones. Especially pets.

Getting Better All the Time

November 8, 2021 / / 0 Comments

Well, that took longer than I thought . . . For the last three weeks, I’ve been updating the site, mostly through trial and error. It’s still a work in progress, but I’m always learning something new.

Now, if you check out apriljasbury@com, you’ll see new additions and upgrades:

Please take a minute to check it out. I hope you’ll sign up for the newsletter, too; this month the Author Spotlight will be turned on the legendary George Ella Lyon. You won’t want to miss it!

A black cat sitting with a large candy corn pillow and a quilt
Shadow is unimpressed by the lack of October content.

Writing with Cats 2: Our Purrsonal Mewses

June 14, 2021 / / 0 Comments

In my family, we never set out to get a cat. Our cats find us, for whatever reason, and grace our lives with their presence. Living with cats means writing with cats (see Writing with Cats 1: Famous Purrsonages). As even medieval monks can tell you, writing with cats presents challenges of its own.

These days we have two feline deities in our home. The first, Shadow, was a tiny feral ball of fuzz when Jack rescued her from a car engine. As a kitten, she hid in an engine for warmth, and the car owner couldn’t coax her out with tuna, treats, or countless entreaties. Then Jack peered under the hood, gleaming eyes peered back.

“Here, kitty,” he said, and plucked her from the darkness as easily as Arthur pulled the sword from the stone. Skittish kitty had chosen her human; who were we mere mortals to argue?

Shadow, an elegant black cat, regards the viewer as if judging their inadequacies.
Shadow is judging you (JE Hambly)

Shadow grew into an elegant mini-panther with a sleek black coat and long legs. As a writing partner, she seems pretty mellow. Occasionally she rubs her cheek on the corner of a notebook, but that’s all.

Jack claims she’s more aggressive, yowling at him for food, attention, or admittance to the basement—which may or may not be “Shadow’s Torture Dungeon.” When we haven’t seen our neighbors in a while, Jack gets suspicious. I haven’t heard screaming lately, so I’m sure it’s fine.

Josie, meanwhile, is her own kind of kitten. This tiny tuxedo literally “knocked” on our door one night, sprang inside, and hasn’t left since. She weighs only four and a half pounds, several ounces of which are curly white whiskers and twitchy tail.

Extreme closeup of small tuxedo cat with pink nose and white curly whiskers.
I’m sorry; were you trying to sleep?

She also loves sitting on open laptops and keyboards. Jack swears she’s going to start her own website. Her derriere is dangerously dexterous, so he may be right.

Maybe she’s drawn by the warmth of the keyboard, but I suspect something more nefarious is afoot. Josie’s tiny butt has renamed files, added tags, sent chat messages on Facebook, and taken a screenshot of herself on Zoom. She can even open iTunes all by herself, hitting play on songs from ABBA and heavy metal tracks.

I guess her tastes are diverse . . . I didn’t even know those songs were on my hard drive, much less that Josie was such a “dancing queen.” At least she hasn’t figured out how to order “Fancy Feast” on Amazon, although she’s probably working on it.

You know, we never have this kind of trouble with the dogs.

Screenshot of a Zoom screen showing fuzzy cat ears and back
Josie’s screenshot of herself using Zoom. One step closer to world domination . . .

Writing with Cats: Famous Purrsonages

June 10, 2021 / / 1 Comment
Black and white tuxedo cat caught on dining room table
Josie Cat says hello

A history of writers is also a history of the creature companions, furry familiars, and meowing mewses. (I’d better get this out of the way: I adore alliteration and no pun is too punishing. I won’t even apologize.) Let’s consider, for a moment, the long tradition of writing with cats.

Whatever damage the 2019 film Cats did to his feline-friendly legacy, T.S. Eliot’s Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats remains a poetic testament to the personality and mysterious secret lives of cats. If you spend time with cats, Eliot’s description rings perfectly true:

 When you notice a cat in profound meditation,
     The reason, I tell you, is always the same:
 His mind is engaged in a rapt contemplation
     Of the thought, of the thought, of the thought of his name:
         His ineffable effable
         Effanineffable
 Deep and inscrutable singular Name.

Some cat non-fanciers may argue kitty is meditating on treats or murder, but let’s indulge Eliot this time. The poor guy’s grave is still spinning from that CGI nightmare in 2019.

Eliot isn’t the only contribution to the kitty literary canon. Ernest Hemingway’s short story, “Cat in the Rain,” lingers in literature books like contagious loneliness.

Meanwhile, descendants of his famous six-toed cats still roam his former home in Key West. The Hemingway Home and Museum estimates the current population may be as high as 60, which means an extravagance of toe beans.

LitHub, among others, has featured great lists of cat-lit. I’m just thankful that Emily Temple, the LitHub author and editor, specified, “15 Great Cat Poems Not Written By Cats.” Thanks to Zoom and the pandemic, we know the lines between us can be a little . . . fuzzy. (I will not apologize for the puns, I will not apologize . . .)

Josie the tuxedo kitten stretches while standing on a laptop keyboard.
What? She’s helping!

Writing with cats isn’t all catnip and cuddles. Even medieval monks endured cats getting where cats shouldn’t be.

The next time a kitty settles on your laptop, renaming your files, sending cryptic “chat” messages with her butt? This story about inky prints on a manuscript may give you “paws” . . . And remember, it can always be worse.

No manuscript is safe from a curious kitten. Fortunately, no heart is safe, either.

Writing Daily Pages . . . Sort of

June 3, 2021 / / 0 Comments

It’s late afternoon now, but I just finished my “morning pages” an hour ago. While I try writing daily pages, I find they are not usually “morning” pages or even “daily.” That effort has helped me recover my voice and write my way through a bout of depression. I’m a believer . . .

Usually.

Julia Cameron, famous for The Artist’s Way, has built a self-help empire for the “artist in recovery.” Even her most recent work, The Listening Path, emphasizes her three basic steps. Write three “morning pages” every day, take yourself on an “artist’s date” once a week, and get out and walk as often as you can.

Morning pages are meant to be stream-of-consciousness pages written by hand on first awakening. If you’re familiar with the exercise of “Freewriting,” this is basically your plan here: write for yourself alone, uninterrupted and unedited.

Along the way, you should discover new things about yourself. You’ll wipe away the junk that clouds your perception. (I’m reminded of Bill Hicks, who joked about getting his “third eye squeegeed quite cleanly”–with daily writing, however, no hallucinogens need to be involved.)

During my first reading of The Artist’s Way, I did the three pages religiously. But I didn’t always do them first thing in the morning. I needed food, needed coffee, needed to take care of the dogs . . . While Cameron is very firm about the early-morning part, I met one writer who always does her pages at night. Instead of preparing for the day ahead, she used her pages to put the day to bed. For this writer, her adapted system works.

So sometimes I’m writing daily pages in the morning, afternoon, night . . . Whenever I need to break out that squeegee. Interestingly, I realized I didn’t write them when I was actively working on another creative project. When I had momentum on a big project, when my “spoons” were dedicated for something else, that was when I skipped the pages. When the momentum ebbed, when my last “spoon” was a plastic spork, that was a great time for pages.

In Finding Water, Cameron writes, “I am a writer and writers write. Every day that I write, I am keeping my side of the bargain.” Writing pages helps me fulfill that bargain. It doesn’t matter if they sit unread. I kept my promise, and I wrote something.

If I did that, even on days I felt like crap . . . What else can I do?

Pile of spiral notebooks, binders, and books on a quilt
Journals for daily pages, 2019-present: that is a LOT of spiral notebooks

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