I drive up to the house and watch the windows for tiger-striped orange fur; I enter the house and wait for a sleepy Gilgamesh to stumble into the kitchen; I have to keep subconsciously reminding myself not to get up to check whether or not he is at the door, waiting to come inside from his adventures around the yard and the woods out back.

He's gone, dead, and I keep repeating that like a mantra, hoping it'll make sense eventually, but it still doesn't. I keep seeing him curled up in his grave, like he is just sleeping.

The other day, I broke down in front of my mom, which is a thing we try to avoid on both sides of my family. Maybe be do this as a subconscious hope that if we don't let anyone see that anything's wrong, then maybe nothing is. She said to me, “Oh look, you're making me cry,” and she was, a little.

Only a month ago, my mom and aunt lost their only brother, my Uncle Phil. My cousin Laurelie lost him as her father. At the wake, or whatever it was that we held for him, at the church in Gloucester where my mom used to come to AA meetings, I tried to remember him. There are pictures of us everywhere—on the couch in my mom's house in Gloucester, at birthday parties and elsewhere. Someone at the wake said to me, “You guys were really close.” But the last time I saw him might have been when I was 13, and that was 12 years ago. I remember almost nothing about my uncle, except his thick Gloucester accent, and that he was fun and smiled a lot. He told jokes, and everyone loved him.

It was my mom and Aunt's tears that made me feel like crying; and it was Lauralie, who is only 13, crying alone, that made me move over next to her and rub her back because I felt bad and didn't know what else to do. My mom's friend lost a son and his mother. Someone connected to my work lost a kid he'd known for years—best friend to his own son.

My mom lost her mother when she was only 25, and her boyfriend several months before or after that; she lost a ton of people. I hardly remember anyone.

But Gilgamesh I saw every day. I talked to him every day. You know, that weird thing that some people do, where we talk to our pet like he's our conscience, our notebook, our audience. I told him about my day, and whenever he was on the table about to knock over my water glass, I'd demand to know what the hell he was doing, and when I got home he'd let me pick him up and pet him, and he'd rub his head under my chin like he loved me.

For years I've joked that Merlin (from the TV show) was my boyfriend, or else I was in love with Ted Conover (the great literary journalist) or the guy who wrote Eragon. But when I found Gilgamesh, I realized that I really didn't need a guy, and he'd be the perfect way to keep myself at home instead of out dancing every night, because I finally had something to look forward to at home, away from free food and drinks and other things.
And now he's gone. I come home to make dinner, and sleep in a bed, and wonder why I bother having an apartment at all when I don't have anyone else to take care of. It always seems to come back to that: taking care of someone. When I wrote my memoirs, there was tons of boy-obsession, and boyfriends, and love stories. But the guy's memoir I've been reading lately is all about bands, and guy friends, and barely mentions love at all. Maybe love can be a form of responsibility? A thing that we think we have to do, and we take it on as a career of sorts, and as soon as we lose it...like a retiree, we lose all sense of who we are? Who I am? I was a cat-owner, and now I'm not?

Back in my mom's living room, my mom looked at me, and I looked at the floor and wiped my eyes. “I think this is the first real loss you've had,” she told me, and I wanted to argue (because that's my usual gut-reaction), but I think she was right.

When I think of something lost, the loss is reaching for it, hoping it's still there, imagining for just a second that everything is as it was, and then touching nothing, and wishing you hadn't tried to find it at all.

I want to see small businesses thrive. I wander the streets of Georgetown, Ma., reading the stenciled names on big buildings that are shedding paint like annual fur, and I wonder how many of them are still actual businesses. The engineering place--”B&B Engineering Corp: Alarm Engineering”--across the street from the library is in a huge white building that is overflowing with what looks like junk in the form of old-school fire alarms—like a hoarder's closet, or something that has been lost and fallen into shadows.


There are plenty of small businesses around—the ice cream shop “Udderly Divine”, and the local breakfast place with its giant mug out front “Theo's.” And there are upscale places too, like “The Spot” which gleams like the chrome on a new motorcycle and has menu prices that would make a Bostonian feel right at home.

​One day, when the library was closed on a day that I'd forgotten about I decided to walk about and see if there was a cafe nearby that I hadn't noticed.

So, shouldering my backpack, I walked past the dilapidated engineering building, past Udderly Divine in the square, and down toward Town Hall, where Pomodori, a sandwich and sub place with too many options and a lot of available seating, stood. I went inside. If worst came to worst, I could sit in here and write...but I would feel guilty not buying anything. And although the menu is extravagant, it doesn't sell anything like tea or hot chocolate, and the walls are so bright it's almost an affront to taint the premises for too long. So I stopped to talk to the girls behind the register, who were milling about in mutual boredom as they waited for people to come in and order something in this town of 8,183 people.

“Do you know if there's a cafe around here?” I asked the girl closest to me. “I don't mean the Dunkin Donuts or Honey Dew--” I said, naming the chains on the other side of downtown, a five minute walk west, “--I'm talking a real cafe, where people can sit and write and stuff.”

She shook her head slowly, and the girl behind her, with a bit of bite to her words flipped her long hair back and said, “We have three ice cream shops, five pizza places, and a grocery store and that's it.” I could feel the venom in her words, the utter frustration that she and her friends must feel all the time, in their car-less, localized lives.

Another time, while shopping in the next town over at the Rowley Market Basket (it's the cheapest grocery store around) I asked the checkout girl, another teenager, if she would go to a Rowley cafe, and she said, “Oh my god, definitely.” She seemed so excited by the idea, that I wonder if she'd chosen to work at the grocery store for a bit of entertainment in this town of the elderly.

I can imagine older folks worrying that younger people won't stick around—they're already dying to hop in a car and go, go, go. This happened with me, even—I flew the coop as soon as I could, took my car and hightailed it to western mass, and then to the real west, out to Idaho and Wyoming and Colorado. What I saw there both scared and enlightened me. The rows upon rows of strip malls and chain restaurants was suffocating, a blemish on the otherwise magnificent horizon of mountains and Indian Paintbrush clouds. But in downtowns I became acquainted with easy-going bookstores and cafes and even restaurants—places I'd never heard of before, that let people linger.

Back home, in Massachusetts, I'd grown used to cramped quarters where diner waitresses glared at people who overstayed their welcome, and a plethora of businesses bare signs that read: “Bathrooms for customers only,” as though only those with a dollar were worth a potential plumbing issue. Almost everyone in my graduating class from Essex Aggie High School works for a major corporation in some way. My best friend adjuncts for colleges, and her husband works for the major engineering enterprise in Gloucester, once known as Varian, then bought out a few years ago by Applied Materials. My aunt works there too. It provides tons of jobs for those local and distant.

But I want to start something. I want to bring a little bit of Colorado home with me in the form of a late-night cafe that serves coffee and wine and pastries and sandwiches, and offers dancing and music on certain nights, family game nights and maybe even a D&D night. I don't know anyone personally who has tried such a thing. I know a woman who runs a doggie daycare, and another who started her own service dog project, and my dad started his own business selling cars years and years ago. But none of them ever began with the amount of overhead that I would need to start out.

My vision is thus explained, but not necessarily clear or achievable as yet.

But I keep coming back to the things I loved about Colorado: blues dancing, hiking, and house parties. Except for solo hikes, it all comes back to community. If I start community in a place where people are dying for one, then maybe it will work out. If nothing else, these teenagers who are trying to study and stay away from home for as long as possible might find a way to be able to afford a coffee and maybe a sandwich or cookie from the new cafe they've discovered just down the street from the library. But maybe I'm looking too close into it; maybe I need to veer away from the mentality that if I plant it, the rains will come.

Wasn't that how so many farmers lost their livelihoods out west? By believing that the rain follows the plow? Or maybe this is what need feels like--a gaping hole searching for closure. Aren't marketers always talking about how we need to find what customers want, and then show them why they need it? What if my cafe is the answer?

Once upon a time, there was a teenager who fell in love with a skinny guy who had black fingernails, a trench coat, and a mysterious gaze.
She was intrepid (she thought) and a romantic (who isn't?) and she had read the YA romances--Twilight and Bitten (sometimes classified as YA) and so many others that call for messed up people getting together and keeping each other sane through crazy plot action. Even the music that she grew up with--”You Drive me Crazy,” and “Vermillion,” and “Imaginary,” and boatloads of '90s band songs—told her that creepy stalker types are mysterious and fascinating.

These stories and songs envisioned lonely girls made better by morbid guys with weird haircuts. They preached that real love is the kind you can't explain—the kind that makes no sense, but you feel a pull, and you want it even though everyone you know tells you to leave it in the dirt and move on.

She flirted with her romantic anti-hero for a decade. Off and on they went, like spring and winter in New England. Sometimes they were deep, and she knew, she just knew that they would be together forever (he would take her last name, and she could wear a purple wedding dress), and at other times being around him made her feel dusty and creaky, like gnarled trees in Jericho.

She fled her homeland to escape him, and everyone else. She sought her own way, and her own people. She wanted to know that she could be loved by strangers. She met many idiot guys before finding the Bio-Engineer. They met at a blues dance, and started talking, and when he moved closer to her town, she invited him out. He got her drunk, but behaved himself, and they went on walks after that. They strolled along a pond with stone painted frogs the size of miniature horses, and sat down on a swinging bench to talk some more.

It was here that he told her that she could be an engineer if she wanted, and for some reason this made her feel good. It was the kind of good that she used to feel with Black Fingernails, when he looked at her like he liked her. It made her think that she could love Bio-Engineer. She did. He was smart. He could fix cars and motorcycles and stuff in his house; he could write long, humorous letters; he brought her out to eat, and was sweet, and there were boxes of books on his bedroom floor. They could sit in the same room for hours, each doing their own thing, and it didn't bother her. It didn't bother her.

It was obvious why she loved him. And it was easy to explain to others.

But there was still that creeping need for something more. So when she moved away from Bio-Engineer (unhappily, but necessarily for family) she returned to Black Fingernails, who was a little different from how he used to be, but not much. He still didn't read, or write, or ask questions. He still acted like he knew everything, and like he was better than everyone else. But she tried, because he was exactly what she'd pictured in a husband: someone with whom she could be near at night, and stay away from during the day, while she was writing. A solely-romantic relationship.

But he kept talking. He preached hate and Trump-isms, and everything he said was a mere belch of what someone in his family had clearly repeated to him again and again. He refused to work more than 20 hours a week, and she didn't like how he spent his money. Every practical sign told her that this was a lost cause, and she would eventually be brought down if she stuck with him.

So she let go. And now she waits for the next one, if he comes, although she still likes Bio-Engineer and wishes they could live closer. In the meantime she sees her sisters and her brother and her parents; she spends time with friends that she grew up with, but hasn't hung around in years. She hikes alone, as in meditation

​She is rediscovering her East Coast self, and her single self, one story at a time. 

I went out into the mist, dim as a British mystery, into forest whose ferns and moss were a brighter green because of the darkness of the day. The swamp, which seems to cross all of the Georgetown trails in the state forest, was still and clear as glass, reflecting the sky. Sun-bleached trees stood like sentries in the wet, saturating themselves with water.

I hike to drench myself in things outside of me; to push my body to extremes so that I can stop thinking and just feel. This must be what my mother means whenever she tells me to be present. On some of my favorite trails, the ground is cushioned with dead pine needles, like down in the softest blanket. Our east coast climate is wet and wild, and yesterday was no different.

This water is life itself—a nurturing, dangerous mother, sending hydration and plant life, and also ticks and floods.

All I could hear over the sound of my breathing and footsteps was birdsong. Their singing echoes throughout as in a high-domed theater, reaching every corner. 

I was on this trail to make up for the 40 hours I spend at my desk job, and the 10 hours I spend driving to and from work every week. I was here to hike until I hurt—to cross still waters over a medley of carefully placed sticks, and to walk as quickly as possible over and down the sides of hills, and to hear birdsong, and if I did this long enough, I thought that thinking would stop; wanting something other than what I have would stop. Longing and loneliness would cease to matter.

A guy in my nonfiction graduate class a few years ago—Mickey—wrote an essay about he and a friend in the mountains, hiking and getting lost and scared, and trying to find their way out. It was a poetic story, and one I think back to often. Because he focused so intently on the body, on how their bodies ached, and the anxiety in their minds, that everything else fell away, like concerns about tomorrow's classes or frustrations with dumb things once said. What I took away from the piece was this: Sometimes, only pushing your body to extremes can get you out of your head.

Writing does the opposite. It pulls me into my mind, where I never suffer from writer's block, but always from writer's overload, where there are too many ideas to sift through. Sometimes I stress out over trying to decide whether to write a blog post or a story or just a journal entry. It's completely ridiculous, I know—but I want to do all these things so much that it really is a hard decision to make. Like a kid trying to decide between Chuck E. Cheese or the go-carts in Salisbury, where they used to have the most amazing course I've ever seen.

My work schedule has warped life itself. Sitting has become a punishment, making it so that whenever I am not at work, I don't want to sit. This is dangerous for a writer, because writing sort of generally involves sitting. If I need to get up and walk around every five minutes, then not a lot of writing is getting done. My employer is receiving the best hours of my day, and I am getting none.

On weekends, the first order of business is to make up for lost movement: Exercise, hike, jog, climb. Exhaust the body, while allowing ideas to sift. Then, sit down and let the subconscious flow. Work on organizing that flow the following day—directing energy toward a specific goal. What do you do to get focused (as a writer, or for other things)?

Once upon a time there was a woman in her late twenties who went to a porncamp. Porncamp is another word for the Circlet Editor's Retreat, where editors of Circlet (a scifi-erotica publishing company) gather to discuss all things publishing, writing, and erotic.

She had forgotten who she was amidst the hustle of finding an apartment and a "real job," but when she remembered the retreat that she had attended once four years ago, she knew that she had to go this year. 

There were bagels and quiche and delicious teas and sandwiches, and even an exceptionally strong punch, and she heard too many quotes to recall accurately. She discovered that Corwin had worked at a medievel faire, and that Annabeth was a self-supported writer.

​She listened to conversations about music as different colors, and watched a game of slash, which is played a little like apples to apples, pairing famous characters up with other famous characters, a game of story-telling and persuasion. A game of writerly marketing, in its way.

She slept in the Circlet office surrounded by books about romance and erotica, baseball and Latin, Harry Potter and much much more. There were cats in the house, creeping about late at night and leaving thick tufts of fur in their wake. She wondered about the dichotomy of erotic writer and children's writer, and parent and activist, and whether she'd ever have time to write if she had children. She thought about troubling, important things that she'd somehow forgotten about, so far from other writers: time to write and market and keep up with social media without making readers gag.

About a quarter of the way through Saturday presentations, this woman grabbed her over-the-head headphones (the ear parts shredded from use) and escaped the full house for solitude in a finicky-cat, people-overwhelmed, writerly sort of way. She clomped down sidewalks looking at houses that she would never afford. These houses had many floors and rooms and sharp ornate fences, but no driveways. She found Harvard down the street, and studied a water pump that looked historic but didn't work. She watched tourists pointing fingers and cameras at the red brick buildings and telling each other what a great place this was.

It made her think of Cecilia Tan's book The Siren and the Sword, because the Magic University is somewhat based on Harvard. It made her want to read those books again, and all of Circlet's books, and many more. And? It made her want to write and work with other editors on keeping in touch.

So she did.

The End

Why is the sky blue?
Why do high heels exist?
Why get married?

Smart people ask questions.

A friend of mine worked in aerospace engineering for five years, and whenever the CEO passed through the shop, he would ask the engineers all sorts of questions. In order to find solutions, a person needs to identify problems first. But how to find the right questions to ask? My answer is to write down anything that you question or feel strongly about.

In her book The Artist's Way, Julia Cameron suggests that artists write three "Morning Pages," every day, which can be about anything. It can be about all the junk that we think about all the time: What to make for dinner, how we feel about our jobs, or just what a nice day it is outside. While I don't write three pages every morning, allowing myself the freedom to journal has helped me. Writing morning pages is like gathering all the ingredients in your house without really knowing what you're going to make for lunch. Then, when you get them all in one place, you choose what you think will work and start putting pieces together. You put away the spices you don’t use later.

My writing often begins with bitching. I bitch about my job, about what a waste of time writing is, and then I start watching my cat. He's a tiger kitty named Gilgamesh, and he has a neurological disorder, so he walks a bit funny and falls over easily. I used to feel bad for him, but now he makes me laugh, and he seems so happy that it's hard to feel bad for him anymore. He likes to sit on the windowsill in my room and look out at the birds: His tail twitches and his ears fold back; he does that chirping sound that I've taken to mean he is prepared to attack. He even paws at the window as though that will open it for him. Does he really think that pawing at the window will get him outside? What does he think of this cold, clear substance that separates him from his prey?

Usually, I start with a list of questions, and then set out to find answers through writing.  But I also want my readers to ask questions. I've found that some of the best writing is the kind that makes me ask more questions. Every idea I share came about because I wanted to know or understand something. What are you waiting for? Write down all the dumb questions you've ever been afraid to ask and start looking for answers. Curiosity didn't kill the cat; it made the cat smarter.

Cecilia Tan reads her short stories in her stage voice, hands brushing through air, to show us her dominatrix narrator running a hand along the shoulders of her pet stranger. She holds the invisible cane that Lucius Malfoy carries like a prop in this story, while trying through stage whispers and reminisces, and poignant eye contact, to pull Professor Snape into his intoxicating orbit.

No matter how readers feel about erotica, scifi, or fanfic, they cannot deny the passion behind each sentence that Tan has written nor can they deny the strength of her voice. And when she says hello, it is not as a stranger, but as a friend, and her demeanor is genuine, without hint of judgement or fear. Her confidence is contagious. We are at the 2016 Arisia Convention in Boston, and it is past midnight, and these stories are worth staying up late for. Tan is a writer and the founder of Circlet Press and she is driven.

I interned in the Circlet office five years ago, and that was when I met Tan. In her natural habitat (ie: home and work) she is a mostly quiet tea-drinker and the mother of more than one cat. She lives in a many-floored house in Cambridge with her husband. She teaches her interns and friends many things, but the most powerful advice she ever gave me was this:

Write what you are on fire to write.

As writers, we can learn anything that we put our minds to--through Google searches or interviews, taking classes or even doing a job that will teach us what we need to know for a story we're dying to write. Writing isn't about what you know, it's about learning what you need to know.

For instance, I told myself that I began waitressing because I wanted to write about it, when what I really wanted was to get away from everything I'd ever known. I planned to go out and live these wild adventures, and I would put them down in articles, and sell these to big-name magazines and make a fortune as a travel writer. But waitressing turned into a good way to make money and I learned about frustrations and injustices that made me want to write about my experiences even more.

There was a man at Cracker Barrel, who asked for unsweetened tea. When I brought it to him, he said, "Now stick your finger in it and sweeten it up for me." I smiled at him, thinking fast about how to break his irritating flirtatiousness without destroying my tip.
"I'm sorry, Sir." I said. "But I've been working so hard, that I'd probably just make it salty." And with that, I opened my notebook and said, "Can I take your order?"

Or while I was working at a bar, and this man asked me to take my glasses off. "What?"
"Just take them off."
"Why?"
"Just for a second. I just want to see your eyes."
"Okay..."
And a $60 bill later, he left me a $30 cash tip. I was beside myself with confusion. Had I just sold my eyes, like some women sell other parts of their bodies?

Or when I'd been working at this new, huge restaurant/entertainment center, and one of the teenagers who had been hired at the same time as me, asked if I'd received my first paycheck yet. It'd been about month, and I realized that I hadn't. Upon confronting the managers and the accounting department face-to-face and receiving no results, I finally sent a message to everyone on HotSchedules, where the boss replied to everyone and called me a liar. I got my check the following week. These stories infuriated me, and I wasn't sure what to do. I felt the fury of someone who feels completely incapable at helping new workers, and even myself.

I was so focused on the workplace that I had no thoughts of fiction. Like love, passion can make you lose your appetite and any thoughts about sleep. It can keep you going for months without any other friends or activities to keep you satiated. If you let it go for too long, you'll start to feel a longing deep in your soul.

What are your passions? If you are someone who struggles with coming up with ideas, think about all the things that you love to do, discuss, or dream. Make a list of all these joys (and perhaps miseries) and choose just one. Set an alarm and write about that subject for a full ten minutes without stopping to think; writing is your thinking. If you get bored of your interests, then pick up the newspaper or ask a friend what they do for fun. Research. Read.

​Whatever you do, remember to write what you are on fire to write.