Just a suggestion....

Nathan Fillion

James REad

Every once in a while, the writers on Castle will tease viewers with the topic of Castle's unnamed/unknown father. The show's now in its fifth season and I think it's time they address it. (I mean, they ran that over-the-top conspiracy subplot involving Kate's mother through four seasons but it looks like it's finally been put to bed.) The actor I nominate to play Castle's dad:  James Read.  Doesn't he look like Nathan Fillion? They even have the same smirk/smile.

Looking for Jobs on CL

I saw this "Looking for a freelance writer" ad on CraigsList today. I don't know about you, but I think they're setting the bar too high:  Looking for a writer who can perform simple writing tasks. Must be able to read/write in English, have a keyboard and an internet connection.

Book Review Debt by Rachel Carey

Debt

by Rachel Carey

In Rachel Carey's debut novel, Debt, money (or lack thereof) and class hold roughly the same importance they do in a 19th century novel of manners. She has taken the conventions of chic lit (all the fancy restaurants and mindless consumption you see in books like Bergdorf Blondes) and mixed them with a subtly snarky style that evokes a 21st century Jane Austen.

She is keenly observant, pricking her characters' pretensions with subtle gibes that are so sharp you almost don't notice them until they draw blood.

The characters--and there are a lot of them--are all fully realized. There's the entitled Nadya--it's her world, you just live in it--and the totally adorable Clyde. Our narrator is would-be novelist Lillian whose work in progress is so downbeat it even depresses her and who is beginning to regret the way her student debt is piling up without her having much to show for it. That would depress anyone.

But this is a comedy, a multi-layered farce that treats money the way Sex and the City treated sex. Carey has a good time tweaking pop culture--there's a hilarious running gag involving a blog called "shopacovery"--and everything about Lillian's pretentious writing teachers will resonate with anyone who's ever taken a writing class.

This book is subversive and sly and extremely entertaining. If you liked books like Confessions of a Shopaholic and The Devil Wears Prada, you will love Debt.

Foodie Friday Blogs to Look Out For

I discovered Big Girls/Small Kitchen through a link on a newsletter I get every day. The article that caught my eye was "Homemade Fixes for French Fry Cravings."   As someone who has never met a French Fry (or even a potato dish) I didn't like (except for scalloped potatoes), I was all over that article.  The roasted chickpeas looked especially yummy.
You can never  have too many food blogs bookmarked.

Jan Perry for Mayor of Los Angeles

Jan Perry is a woman who gets it. The daughter of Civil Rights pioneers, she's for jobs and affordable housing. She's not playing catch up with the new financial realities, she's already been working that game, working for her constituents, working for Los Angeles.
I think she's what the city needs. Check out her website. Decide for yourself.
Election Day is March 5.
Get out and vote!!

Free Fiction Friday The Ugly One

When I first moved to Los Angeles, I took myself to Disneyland to see what all the fuss was about. I rode all the rides except for "Mr. Toad's Wild Ride." In the middle of  "It's a Small World," something went wrong and the little boats stopped dead in the water. It took about half an hour to fix and the whole time "It's a Small World After All" played around us.  Forget water boarding, playing that song more than a couple times in a row would qualifiy as an "enhanced interrogation" method. But the kids were delighted. You know how really little kids like to repeat things?  To this day even a few bars of "It's a Small World" will make me shudder.
And oddly, because there was no trauma associated with seeing Disney's The Little Mermaid, I feel the same way about Sebastian's sprightly "Under the Sea."  I read the original "Little Mermaid" when I was a kid and have always preferred the tragic version. When reading fairy tales I always knew when some bowdlerizing hand had been at work--forced happy endings, unexpected upturns in the hero or heroine's fortunes, a birth instead of a death. (I also noticed that blondes had more fun in fairy tales and that Snow White was the only princess with dark hair like mine. Years later, when I first encountered the literary criticism of Leslie Fiedler, I discovered that wasn't an accident.  Blondes are of the light, the human equivalent of "the shining ones." And then there are the others, those less favored. And those were the ones I was interested in.
(Fiedler is famous for his book Love and Death in the American Novel and  infamous for his commentary on homoeroticism in Huckleberry Finn--the essay is called something like "Come Back to the Raft Ag'in Huck Honey." He was a lit crit with all the right creds, but he was also a champion of genre fiction. Thank you Dr. Buford Jones for introducing me to him!  But I digress.)
It seemed to me, reading fairy tales that the ugly ones got a raw deal. Cinderella's stepsisters weren't just mean, they were ugly and not in the sense my grandmother meant when she would say, "Now don't be ugly."
Yes, they got to wear the pretty dresses and eat the good food but maybe they were mean because they were ugly and then, as now, "pretty" is often the only currency a woman has to spend. And then one day the idea for this story swam into my mind and I knew I had to write it.

                                   THE UGLY ONE
                                                   By Katherine Tomlinson

Liia was very young when she first realized she was different.

Her mother had suckled her but not nurtured her in any way and she found out that if it had not been for the intervention of her father, she would have been abandoned when her family and the school they swam with, moved on to warmer waters.

Liia’s difference was not her fault. Her mother had been exposed to toxic waste in the water and when she gave birth to 23 fry, all of them but Liia were dead. Liia’s mother tried to eat the dead fry but they were too toxic.

Her father had named her Liia, which means “miracle” and had protected her from predators until she was old enough to fend for herself.

Some months later, there was another batch of fry and from that came Liia’s seven sisters.

Seven lovely sisters with silver hair like their mother and beautiful, silver-blue tails.

Lia’s hair was moss-green and patchy. It had no luster, even in the sun, and her tail was the color of the boats they found on the bottom of the north sea before the rust took them. A dull, gun-metal gray that was often cloudy with “ick.”

She had lumpy tumors on her tail as well, tumors that disfigured.

She was a strong swimmer.

Then her father died, in a battle with the monster dog fish and after that her mother and sisters ignored her.

 She began reaching out to the lesser fishes, the ones that her kind dominated and fed on and used as slaves.

She gathered an army of electric eels and sea-going snakes and sharks. The sharks especially were on board with her plans and agenda.

Unlike many of her kind, she had taken pains to learn the language of the lesser fishes and so she could communicate with them and let them know that she would share the spoils with them.

Most of her school were pleasure-loving swim-abouts who weren’t really ready to defend themselves against a coordinated attack.

For there had never been such a coordinated attack in the history of the sea.

Liia’s school lived in the abandoned and coral-calcified remains of what had once been a Spanish galleon plying the lucrative route between spain and the new world, filled with looted Incan/Aztec gold. As a child, Liia had enjoyed playing with the golden fruits that had been plucked from a palace treasure garden and carried away, only to bloom on in the salty earth of the sea bed. She had loved the jewelry too, the pretty necklaces but her mother had taken them from her and told her she was so ugly she took the shine away.

And that was when Liia began to hate.

She planned her campaign on the treasure ship with military precision. She had the fishes scavenge whalebone and shark cartilage and she constructed massive cages.

She would lead the charge on a marlin, its spiny fin fully elongated.

First she would take a treasure bath.

Then she would supervise the executions. Her sisters and mother would be last, but they would be made to watch as the sharks and the ate the others.

Liia had no illusion about the loyalty of her allies. They were what they were and at some point they would likely fall upon her.

She would taste bitter she knew.

Bitter and ugly.

But her final thoughts would be of sweet revenge. And that would be enough.

Fever Dreams

I have spent most of the last week in bed, which would be great if the rest of that sentence involved a tall dark stranger and a hotel room in the South of France. Alas it has more to do with waking up at midnight with an atrophied tongue, a lump of fleshy stone as scaly as the bottom of fishing boat at the end of a season. Pretty much the only time I've left my cave of sheets and blankets is to rehydrate--chicken noodle soup has lost any appeal it ever had--and to make more slippery elm tea. If ever there was a substance that made you glad you've lost your sense of taste, it's slippery elm tea.
Orange Cat is delighted.
His goal in life is to sleep 23 and a half hours out of every day and the only reason he doesn't pursue this goal more fervently is that he gets lonely. There's no one to pet you while you sleep, or play with the laser pointer or tell you you're a good boy.
The only good thing about this whole cold/flu thing is the dreams.
I have been having big, huge, technicolor dreams.
Which is unusual.
I rarely remember my dreams.
I was not a kid who had nightmares. I can remember only one nightmare in my whole childhood and it was more a series of images that caused me anxiety than anything else.
Those anxiety dreams everyone has in college?
I had one.
Once.
And even as the dream was unspooling in the Cineplex of my mind--a narrative involving signing up for an advanced math class and never going and having to take a final in it--I was saying to myself, "You would never sign up for an advanced math class."
About a decade ago, following some event--probably 9/11--I had a series of truly awful dreams involving earthquakes and blood. In one I was roaming the halls of what I knew to be my high school in Richmond but it was in Burbank. Classes were in session and my mother turned a corner and told me I needed to tell everyone to get out, there was going to be a quake and the building was going to collapse. "They're not going to listen to me," I protested. "Tell them your mother said so," she said. "Tell them your mother is dead." Which at that point she had been for 15 years or so.
There was also a dream involving me asking my best friend to kill our two cats because they were hungry and we couldn't feed them.
I am mostly glad I don't remember my dreams.
But this week my dreams are so bizarre that they're notable. I was Brad Pitt and Anjelina Jolie's nanny in one. In another, I dreamt the whole plot of a story I've been working on. I remembered everything when I woke, but the distance from the bed to the nearest pencil was just too far. By the time I woke again, the story was long gone.
I'm about one day away from feeling completely human again and I hope to have a dream I can turn into a story like some of my friends do. But in the meantime, I am rereading George R. R. Martin's wonderful vampire novel, Fevre Dream. It's the first book of his I ever read.