How I Know I'm a Real Writer

I am not ashamed to say I have a "Google Alert" set for my name. Not only does that allow me to keep up with the activities of Katherine Tomlinson of Manchester, England (pediatric nurse and music lover) and the Katherine Tomlinson who works in Vermont politics, but it also lets me know when I am mentioned somewhere.

The nature of the Internet being what it is, these mentions are sometimes very far away from their original source and like messages in the kids' game of telephone, sometimes you're surprised at what the final result is.

Tonight an alert showed up that sent me to a site that was offering a free e-book download of my story "Proof of Life," originally published on ThugLit. The story link was in with a bunch of links to articles about bathroom drains. My story had somehow come to their attention because of the phrase "bathroom drain" in my narrative.

Two years after the story appeared in ThugLit and a month after it was reprinted on A Twist of Noir, some unknown entity liked it enough to scoop it up and ... pass it around. They're not charging a fee for the download, so I'm inclined to view it as free publicity.

You're no one 'til somebody steals your work.

Earthquake Thoughts

I live on the edge of apocalypse. Floods. Fires. Plagues. Earthquakes. We get them all in Southern California.

In 1994 when the Northridge Quake struck, I was living on the third floor of an apartment facing west toward the Pacific Ocean. My living room had a floor-to-ceiling window that took up most of the wall. In the evening, I could watch the pollution-fueled sunsets and revel in the beauty.

The quake struck at 4:31 a.m. California time. I sleep like the dead, but at 4:29 that morning, I'd suddenly sat up in my bed, awakened by my two cats who were racing around my bedroom in what I thought was an unusually exuberant example of normal nocturnal cat craziness.

It was cold in my bedroom. I always sleep with the window open, even in chill January.

The quake struck the blink of a sleepy eye later. It lasted 20 seconds. You have no idea how long 20 seconds can be until you've counted it off in the dark in a room with the floor shaking under you. And if my window hadn't been open, the stress of the building flexing in a 6.7 quake would have shattered it.

In the kitchen, cabinets were shaking open and cans of dried spices were launching themselves across the room. A cut-glass vase that had belonged to my great-aunt shattered as it hit the floor. So did a ruby red punch bowl I'd inherited from my mother.

My roommate, a native Californian, freaked out and came running out of her room in her bare feet, just as a heavy framed poster swung free of the wall. It clipped her on the forehead. There was a LOT of blood. I didn't hear her scream, though, because of the thundering roar that drowned out everything. I'd been through earthquakes before but I had never heard the grinding noise the earth makes as it shears on a fault. It's been described as sounding like a massive freight train roaring down a track. That description does not do it justice.

The Northridge quake was 6.7. It lasted for 20 seconds. Seventy-two people died, nine thousand were injured. Damages ran into the double-digit billions. There was no water for several days. There was no electricity for a couple of hours. My phone never stopped working. When the lights came back on, my roommate washed her face and bandaged the small cuts. We found blood spatter on the walls for months, along with chunks of red glass embedded inthe floor from the destroyed red punch bowl. A friend who didn't want to sleep alone came over and stayed on our couch for almost a month. It got so we could predict the magnitude of aftershocks with precision. What people forget is that if you have an earthquake that massive, the aftershocks are huge too.

The closest I've ever been to Haiti was editing a cookbook for Haitian caterer Nadege Fleurimond. It hit bookstores late last month. She's in the middle of a celebratory round of reviews and interviews. I have not talked to her yet. I do not know if her people are safe. So many are not. The death toll is being projected in the hundreds of thousands.

Yesterday's quake in Haiti was a 7.0. Port au Prince has been flattened. The magnitude of the disaster is off the human scale. The American Red Cross is already running out of supplies to send to the victims. There's a donation program in place that makes it easy and quick to help. Text "Haiti" to 90999. The $10 donation to the American Red Cross will appear on your next phone bill.

Or click on the button above to donate to Doctors Without Borders.

Technical Difficulties

Well, the first Kattomic Energy podcast isn't here. Stay tuned.

Audible Pulp Available

The first Kattomic Energy Podcast is here!

This is Canadian actress Nika Farahani reading my story "Pulp Christmas." It was recorded by Trent Radio CFFF 92.7 in Peterborough, Ontario. It was scheduled for broadcast on Christmas Day but program director James Kerr decided it didn't really fit in with Dylan Thomas' "A Child's Christmas in Wales." He is however, planning on recording a companion piece with the story being read in a male voice. It'll be fun to compare.

I'm thrilled because it's always exciting to hear your words come alive off the page. Listen and tell me what you think.

Thanks to G. Wells Taylor who fiddled around with the file for me.

The Sin Eater is Live!

What a fantastic way to start the new decade. I woke up to an email message from the editors of Dark Fire telling me that the new issue was online and that my story "The Sin Eater" was up.

This is a dark story that was inspired by something that really happened. When I was a little girl I was out grocery shopping with my mother. We were in line and a woman behind me just leaned over and blurted out, "My son is gay." My mother, who had gone to art school and known gay men before it was cool, just looked at her and said, "Do you love him?" And the woman nodded and my mother said, "Then that's all right then."

I thought it was weird that a total stranger would just say something like that but my mother said it happened to her all the time. People tell me things.

And here's the weird thing. People tell me things too. They'll confess to things they won't tell thier priest. They'll share secrets they've kept close for years. It's unsettling and can be disturbing. And it's always strangers. My brother has people tell him things too but he's an attorney and they're paying him to listen.
I showed my brother this story and he shook his head and asked me if I ever wrote stories about people who aren't crazy. I think he worries about me.

Astonishing Adventures Magazine #8 is here

The special anniversary double issue of Astonishing Adventures Magazine is now available at Mediafire and issuu. The print version will be available from amazon.com early in January.

The issue is packed with goodies. Cormac Brown, one of the magazine's regular contributors and staunchest supporters offers up an interview with Kelli Stanley as well as a noir nod to Hammett's San Francisco in "The Tsar's Treasure." We have several debut stories--one from brothers V.J. and Justin Boyd and one from my good friend Berkeley Hunt.

The issue is our most international one featuring artists from Greece and writers from the US, the UK, Canada and Tenerife. (Our contributor Tony Thorne, whose wacky "Teething Pains" is a great example of pulp writing, is a Member in The Most Excellent Order of the British Empire so we call him "Sir Tony."

Christine Pope contributed a hilarious take on the vampire world, "High Noon at Hot Topic," illustrated by Jennifer Caro, a talented American artist now living in England.

There's seriously something for everyone in this issue--a dark take on Peter Pan, an even darker take on politics, a couple of fractured fairy tales, adventure stories from Brian Trent, Michael Patrick Sullivan, Mark Caldwell and Peter Mark May, a Black Spectre story from Roger Alford, and so on and so forth.

I am particularly proud of a story I wrote under my 'sudo Kat Parrish. Called "The Unclaimed," it was inspired by a news story about the plight of Detroit's citizens who are too poor to pay for the cremation of their loved ones and are simply abandoning them at the morgue. The news story haunted me.

Please check out the magazine and enjoy.

And Happy New Year to all.

He who has ears to hear, let him hear

When I was a little girl, my grandmother used to watch Queen for a Day, that reality show forerunner where four women vied to become "Queen for a Day" by telling their tragic stories. These tales would always make me cry, but the next time it was on, I'd be snuggled in my grandmother's lap watching with her. She never seemed to get upset, but her enjoyment of the show was always tinged with something a little more avid, more personal. It wasn't schadenfreude--it was more like a sense of sisterhood. My grandmother had a hard life, outlived her husband, her siblings, all three of her daughters and all three of her sons-in-law too. And she never complained. Never. Life was hard and well, life was hard. There was no real use whining about it.

I think she got a kick out of knowing that these poor women got something for their troubles. She didn't dwell on her problems but she was happy to discuss anyone else's. My mother (her youngest daughter) used to say that my grandmother enjoyed the role of "Job's comforter." But the point is that when her friends reached out, there was someone there to listen.

Now that I'm older, I'm inclined to think the fix was probably in at QFAD, and the winners were probably pre-determined.

I was thinking about Queen for a Day today as I read about the woman who tweeted as her little boy was dying in a hospital E.R. A lot of the comments are of the "Maybe he wouldn't have drowned if you hadn't been on the Internet" variety. They are what my grandmother would have called "hateful." (And actually, so would I. There's a lot of my grandmother in me.)

Sometimes you read stories online that stop your heart. (I make it a practice not to read news stories about babies on the Internet, they're rarely good news but I couldn't escape this one.) My heart goes out to this woman because I remember the long night of my mother's dying. We were alone in her hospital room and she did not know I was there. I would have given anything to have been able to reach out and connect with someone.

There are those who say that that the Internet has isolated people. I don't agree. No one should go through something as terrible as losing a child alone. I hope that she received some solace from reaching out like that. My grandmother did not believe in vulgar language but she would have summed the whole issue up with "Mean people suck."