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Muffins and Mayhem, Recipes for a Happy (if disorderly) Life
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Dear Reader,
Author Bob Tarte and his wife Linda live on the edge of a shoe-sucking, mink-infested swamp near the West Michigan village of Lowell. When not fending off mosquitoes during temperate months and chipping ice out of plastic wading pools in the depths of winter, Bob writes books about his pets.
Welcome today's Guest Author, Bob Tarte. Send him an email (you'll receive a reply) and your email will enter you in a 10-book giveaway. Ten lucky readers will receive a copy of his April upcoming release, Kitty Cornered (which will also be featured in our Nonfiction Book Club in May). Enjoy Bob's column, and send him a great big book club welcome, email: tarte.robert@gmail.com
Welcome to the book clubs, Bob...
Clawing My Way to the Top (of the page)
Our animals don't make it easy for me to write about them. One afternoon last fall when I was trying to finish my book Kitty Cornered, I trudged upstairs and found our black cat Agnes curled up on my chair. Instead of teetering on the edge of my seat as usual, I wanted to settle back for some deep thinking. So I scooped her up and set her down on the floor. Before I had a chance to switch on my Mac, she jumped up onto my lap and buried her head in a hand that had been in transit to the keyboard.
When I figured we had both enjoyed enough petting, I gently whisked her off and was rewarded with a disapproving stare of such befuddling intensity that I decided to duck downstairs and fortify myself with coffee. Just as I hit the landing, our parrots erupted in screams. In the dining room/bird room, Dusty and Bella plus our doves and parakeets cowered as a sharp-shinned hawk eyed them hungrily from the unlikely perch of our birdbath. When I ran out and chased him away, I also succeeded in scaring off the neatly formed sentence that had been rattling around in my head in search of a roost.
"He's gone," I told Bella. I punched holes in two paper cups and hung them in her cage as toys while my coffee cup revolved in the microwave.
I was unable to relocate the brilliant sentence that had taken wing, but I had arrived at an acceptable alternative just as Frannie intercepted me in the front hall. The skittish former stray would only allow me to pet her if a precise set of legalistic conditions had been met, and these were generally known only to her. I recognized the standing-in-front-of-the-bowl behavior, though. It meant that she wanted me to stroke her tail while she munched on kibbles. I didn't dare disappoint her out of fear that she would snub me later, so I held onto my carefully crafted phrases as she crunched away. Then I raced upstairs to put them into Word.
Agnes had retaken my chair and had curled herself up into such a contented looking donut that I didn't have the heart to move her. Balanced on the last three inches of the seat pan, I began typing my sentence at last when our massive tabby Maynard lumbered out from the upstairs bedroom whining for attention. He seemed too massive to ever become airborne. But before I knew it he had bounded up onto my lap, enveloping my lap and spilling over onto the keyboard.
It was impossible getting anything done like this. Hardening my heart, I plopped first Maynard then Agnes to the floor, waited for Agnes to chase her rival down the steps, and then shooed her into the bedroom and settled in to begin writing in earnest.
I heard a zee-zee-zee-zoe-zee song coming from our hackberry tree. A black-throated green warbler had dropped by our woods on his way south. Figuring that other warblers might be hanging out with him, I raced downstairs and out the door, binoculars in hand. After all, I seldom got the chance to see warblers--and I could write anytime.
Bob Tarte http://www.bobtarte.com/
Bob's Books: Kitty Cornered, Enslaved by Ducks, and Fowl Weather. To enter the book drawing and to say hello to Bob, email: tarte.robert@gmail.com
Thanks for reading with me. It's so good to read with friends.
Suzanne Beecher
Suzanne@DearReader.com
www.muffinsandmayhem.com
* This month's Penguin Classics book is THE LIFE OF JOHN THOMPSON, A FUGITIVE SLAVE by John Thompson. Start reading now and enter to win a Penguin totebag. Go to: http://tinyurl.com/March12Classics
AUTHORBUZZ: THE GIRL WHO WOULD SPEAK FOR THE DEAD (Fiction) by Paul Elwork
Inspired by a true story, a twin brother and sister pretend to contact the dead through phantom knocking noises during the summer and fall of 1925. Emily and Michael Stewart practice their trick on neighborhood children interested in encountering the mystery of death and adults with much deeper emotional drives. Along the way, the twins must confront the ghosts of their own family history and navigate a present shadowed by the past. The game of contacting the dead truly becomes a matter of life and death.
Go to: http://authorbuzz.com/dearreader click on THE GIRL WHO WOULD SPEAK FOR THE DEAD to read more and to email author Paul Elwork, you'll get a reply.
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