​I didn’t have cats growing up, just chickens and guppies. The guppies ate their babies, and the chickens eventually met sad ends. My first pet chicken, Peachy, died when his nighttime cage came down on his neck—he was trying to get out for a little more petting which he got every evening at the dinner table. The others, a pair named by my dad Egg (Eager Eagle) and Fuff (fearless Falcon) had to be given away. They caused disturbances in our suburban California neighborhood, crowing and flying over the fence into the neighbors’ yards, and the rooster sometimes attacked guests who came into the back yard wearing bright clothing. Or maybe it was because my dad died and we had to move far away. Egg and Fuff were sent to a nice farm nearby, or at least that’s what I was told. Anyway, that was the last of my pets until I met my future husband, Jim, in college.

Jim and his roommate Larry lived in an upstairs room in Baker college at Rice University. Right before I got involved with Jim, a pregnant cat (named Mama Kitty) moved into their dorm room. Her pregnancy was likely the result of an encounter with Mr. Baker, the un-neutered male cat who wandered around the dorm and the grounds. Mr. Baker had a jowly face, the result of many skirmishes defended his territory as the feline master of the most historic and beautiful of the residential colleges on campus.
We enjoyed Mama Kitty and those kittens while we fell in love, and a year or two afterwards, we moved to Santa Fe, New Mexico and got the first of our own series of cats, a black male we named Kitty. Kitty enjoyed the same free masculine status as Mr. Baker. He had nightly catfights on Johnson Lane where we slept with the screenless windows open in the summer. Often the catfights came inside. I was not too far past the birth of our son, so I when the cats set up a howl in our living room I was jolted awake from much needed sleep. Eventually, Gabe, our newly mobile baby, started crawling after Kitty, catching his tail, lying on top of him, pinning him to the ground, squealing with delight. Kitty didn’t make a fuss about it. I suppose he had accepted his diminished status from Kitty Baby, to just plain bothersome cat.

After we moved to West Manhattan Ave., we adopted Pepper and Mittens. We didn't yet believe in spaying and neutering, so Mittens was impregnated by her brother. Poor Mittens was so hungry during her pregnancy that she once jumped up on the table and licked the frosting off the Easter Cake. Their  kittens were born in  our bedroom closet. Missy, the runt of the litter, stayed with us too. She enjoyed nursing, long after her kittenhood, mainly on Mittens, her mother, but sometimes on Pepper.
When we moved to a new house on Gonzales Rd, Pepper got caught in a car engine and had his leg burned and mangled. He had to go to the vet for some expensive and extensive kitty surgery and a long recovery before he came home again. Mittens ran away that same night, obviously scared off by the trauma in a new and terrifying neighborhood. She showed up two month’s later on West Manhattan Ave., skinny and purring. She had crossed several miles of city, hunting, and finding water where she could, navigating by some magical kitty radar. 

When adopting a cat, we believe in the interview process. We go down to the local animal shelter and take them to the special room to see how they behave. I have been known to respond to cats choosing me, as well. Our smaller cat, Rufus, definitely made a pitch to me every time I walked past his cage.
We got two black cats this time for safety sake. If out at night they are less visible to predators. Our friend, Barbara, Aamodt, a very special nonagenarian, says if she can keep a cat two years, she can keep him twenty. I hope that will be true with our beloved two.
Dexter is big, strong, lithe, and likeable. His companion, though not litter mate, step-brother, Rufus, is easily spooked, runs from most people, except me, whom he adores. He hunts quite well, but is definitely the submissive, and Dexter, the dominant cat. If Rufus is on my lap and Dexter comes anywhere near, Rufus will jump down and slide under the couch. Then Dexter jumps up for his petting.
 We have erected a very nice cat fence around a portion of the back yard with small openings in several places, so the cats can run in and out. I call them in at night to feed them a treat--wet cat food from a can--and lock the kitty door. Then I feel safe to go to sleep, even if I hear a pack of coyotes howling.
However, Jim has confessed that Dexter asks to go out every night, and Jim usually lets him. Dexter is his favorite, after all.
 
You got to love a man who loves a cat.

​Is it real?
 
It seems people fall into several camps on this one. One: Writer’s Block is an excuse for being lazy, so just get busy. Two: Everyone gets to a tough, stuck point once in awhile, so give yourself a little slack, take a break, think about it, then … just get busy. Three: Something real and hidden is going on, like you need a career change or a divorce. Figure it out, change your life, then get busy. Four: You can’t write, because you don’t have anything to say, because you’re not a real writer, or maybe you just plain suck. Advice: Hire a real writer to do the dirty work. Or better yet, just stop writing.
 
The causes are listed as “fear”, “perfectionism”, “bad-timing”, “distractions”, “depression”, “no talent.” I think the problem is often too much self-criticism and self-editing while trying to write a first draft, famously called “a shitty first draft” by Anne Lamott.
 
I fall into the camp of “just get busy.” I know some people, some very good writers, who struggle at times, and some for complicated reasons. My struggle gets closer to the “you just plain suck,” when it’s time to submit to publishers, read aloud, send a draft to a critic or editor. However, in the meantime, I write as much as I can, as fast as I can, as often as I can. Here’s what helps me.
 
Free Writing
 
I’ve done a ton of “Free writing” of one sort or another, and find it, well, freeing. The idea is to just keep scribbling for a set period of time or length, say Julia Cameron’s Morning Pages. Three Pages first thing in the morning, no stopping, no editing. Or Natalie Goldberg’s Writing Practice. Usually done in a café in pairs, scribbling in notebooks for 20 minutes without stopping. Then there’s Tom Bird’s Divine Writer Within. I went to a seminar called “Write Your Bestseller in a Weekend.” This was the ultimate Free Writing exercise. We were crammed together in a room with the special music playing (coyotes howling, subliminal messages beneath the subtle piano) and wrote as fast as we could. We counted our words every twenty minutes, whether in a notebook, or on computer, so before long, we were driven by the desire to write more and more words in an hour. After a two minute counting break, the bell would ding, and we’d be back at it. I regularly wrote 2000 + words an hour, hour after hour, compared to a goal of 1000 words a day, to which I’ve sometimes adhered. Granted, of the 2000 words many were not always in sentences, or did not follow what came before the bell. The tenses and voice changed and shifted, the story jumped around, but what I got was a beginning, a middle, and an end, in short, a 30K word draft of a novel.
 
I believe in free-writing, the editor is mostly left in the dust, and the muse has a chance to shine through.
 
The first time I did free writing was in college, though I didn’t have a name for it then. At exam time, we were given a ruled notebook and a question or two, say comparing a work of Chaucer with one of Shakespeare. We had to hand-write an essay and turn it in to be graded an hour and a half later. I drank coffee back then, and sometimes took no-doz, so I was a little sped-up as I scribbled in my notebook. (Glad to be freed from the tortures of a pre-computerized typewriter, and my inability to type with any accuracy.) Somewhere in the middle, I would come to the nugget for which I’d been searching. There was still time to expand on my idea, tie it up into a final paragraph, and to seek that illusive A, which oddly, though I considered myself a bit of a dullard in those English classes, I earned more often than not.
 
This, I believe, is the essence of free-writing, even regular, on-the-computer writing that breaks through. If you go forward fast enough, without much editing or judging, without a plan or expectation, maybe driven by some kind of deadline or desperation, you eventually come to that nugget. The nugget can be a new plot twist, or a missing character, or a little bit of truth about the human condition, or even some insight into Chaucer. Some people call writing like that, “being in the zone.” I believe the zone is there, and can be accessed on a regular, though slightly unpredictable, basis.
 
One more thing about deadlines. I think often of all my unfinished novels or ideas for novels or novellas, or story collections, and I worry about the ultimate deadline: death. So, just like in English class, I am motivated to get the words and ideas down before that final bell rings.
 
Editing Later
 
Perhaps this post is more about the effectiveness of writing through the block in a free way, rather than the old-fashioned hunt and peck method, with lots of white-out and notes in the margins, or the computer equivalent. There’s plenty of time for editing later. If you have a chance to get something down, do it.
 
I do love editing and rewriting when the page is no longer blank, and I admit to editing while I go, as well, but there usually comes a point when I need to push out those pesky words and revise them later.
 
How good is it?
 
Just like hearing your own signing voice from inside your head, it is sometimes considered impossible to judge your own work. Can you let go of self-judgment? Can you go back and fix mistakes, improve your point-making without saying “I suck, I’d better quit?” My belief is that if you have a calling to do something, give it a go. A calling to creativity is a precious gift.
 
Here’s a quote from one my favorite articles on the subject of writer’s block:
 
“In general, it's a good practice to initially treat all blocks as emotional noise, something you can work your way through. You can work under the assumption that Writer's Block is an imaginary beast, a beast you can banish by writing. At the same time, the rare work stoppages that you can't defeat with enthusiasm and discipline are almost certainly signals that something's amiss in your life, your work habits or your goals. In that case, you'd be wise to work under the assumption that Writer's Block is a real live monster that you ignore at your peril.”
 
By Bruce Holland Rogers, The Writer’s Store.

Back in 1975 it seemed like a good idea to get married in a mountain meadow, even though it was on Indian Land, and we were officially trespassing. We drove up in our open-topped TR4, with its psychedillic dash, followed by a caravan of friends and family. My mother and my Aunt Hellen Dagmar, Uncle Hal and Eleanor, who left my small cousins behind in Philadelphia, Jim’s parents, Anne and John, brother Jerry and his wife Renee, college friends, Lisa and Joe, Santa Fe friends, Bob and Tammy, our roommates, Pam and Larry standing up for us. A few others we’d met at the restaurants where we worked that summer. It was a sunny day, though easily could have rained. We stood under the aspens and our preacher, Jack Gilpin, married us.
 
Jack was nephew of the famous southwest photographer, Laura Gilpin, hence his interest in Santa Fe. Jack wore a beautiful white suit, which soothed my new mother-in-law a bit. She’d first met him on the porch of our communal living house, and he was drinking a beer, and that shook her confidence that we were really getting married after a couple years of sinful cohabitation and her gentle prodding. “When are you going to decide?” Jack was probably not a real minister in her eyes, had she known, but I don’t think we told her. He was an actor, and had a ministerial card from the Universal Life Church. Cost him a dollar. Later, we would see Jack in small roles in popular movies. He played a lawyer, a hostage, etc.
 
We had a carrot cake and vegetarian enchiladas catered by The Golden Temple, a Sikh-owned restaurant on Water Street, and a keg of beer, carried up in Fred’s jeep. After the party, we all camped out in the meadow. Perhaps there were guitars. The grown-ups (I suppose you could call us grown-ups at age 23, but I’m speaking now about the aunts, uncles, and parents) went out to dinner at the Compound, the fanciest restaurant in town.
 
The honeymoon continued via backpacking into the Pecos. Who came with us? I remember Jerry and Renee, Fred, who else? Hard ground, sleeping bags zipped together, friends snoring around us, frigid mountain lake for washing in the morning. Not the most romantic. But hey, those were the communal days, and you might have called us hippies.
 
Still in love after all these years. Happy Anniversary, my darling. 
 

​If I were a painter, I could capture the moment. A young woman, a mother perhaps, perhaps younger, slight, wearing a flowered shirtwaist dress. She is leaning against a fencepost and her feet are hidden by the dry grasses. The perspective is distant, the figure suggested, her dress and hair pulled hard to one side by the wind. She seems to be bracing against the fence, against the sudden gust. She has one hand in her hair, forgetting her skirt.
 
On the other side of the frame, a man sits on a concrete step in front of a dilapidated structure, perhaps an old tool shed. He is long-limbed, lean, wearing blue jeans, a leather jacket, and cowboy boots. He holds his hat, which he was wearing a moment ago, against his long slim legs, stretched out in front of him. A longish piece of his hair, dark with a slight wave, perhaps uncombed, perhaps mussed by the hat, lifts in the wind. He is darkly handsome, a Western man, concentrating, squinting, as he stares at the girl. His gaze is unflinching, razor sharp, penetrating her secrets. His lips part.
 
Enjoy this moment for it catches the essence, the seductive stare, the girl, conscious of being watched. Nothing more passes between them, just the acknowledgement of her prettiness, his desire, her thrill to be seen that way for one brief moment out of an ordinary day of work.
 
Now superimpose the Gas-a-mat on St. Francis Drive, a Subaru, not a fencepost, and Sam Shepard the actor, famous, handsome, knowing it, waiting on the step outside the carwash. The year? Possibly 1986, the windy month of March. I was that young mother holding my hair instead of my skirt while I pumped my gas. He got a glimpse of my stockinged legs, and his lips parted.
 
Sam Shepard, dead at 73 in the summer of 2017. Thanks for the thrill.