Welcome!

I've finally decided that I am a writer - all the other things I do just pay the bills. Someone eloquent once said that if you do what you love, the money will follow. Well, let's just see about that.

RIP Aggie

RIP Aggie
Aggie was my fifteen-year-old cairn terrier - or maybe I should say I was her 55-year-old person! She was my faithful companion, spoiled rotten and I am still trying to figure out what to do without her.

Peter the Cat...

Peter the Cat...
This is Peter the gingersnap tabby! He's seven years old and has just been promoted to Peter the Very, Very Good. He is working his way up to Peter the Great...

Bee - the Cat Who Came From Somewhere Else...

Bee - the Cat Who Came From Somewhere Else...
Bee is Peter's buddy. He's eight years old and has made himself right at home. I guess cats really do come in pairs or sets of three!

And Jasper makes three!

And Jasper makes three!
Jasper is our new guy - the Cat From Another Place. He's four years old and we think he likes it here - so far, so good!

Buzz about...

Saturday, June 25, 2011

This guy is a storyteller extraordinaire...

and the first two books in his new series are no exception.  I'm talking about Alexander McCall Smith, author of the No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency Series, among others.  Like Maeve Binchy, he takes a diverse, seemingly unrelated group of characters and weaves their lives together in the most charming way.  Several years ago, he apparently wrote a serialized novel in an Edinburgh newspaper about the tenants of an apartment building at 44 Scotland Street.  I haven't read those books yet, but Corduroy Mansions follows a similar plot with a group of Londoners living in a neighborhood called Pimlico.  The main character, a wine merchant named William French adopts a vegetarian dog with the unlikely name of Freddie de la Hay - it's fun to say, isn't it?  Freddie is a retired airport sniffer who is, accordingly to his previous owner, a Pimlico terrier.  The story follows both William's fellow tenants at Corduroy Mansions as well as a literary agent, Barbara Ragg, who is considering publishing the autobiography of a yeti; an obnoxious member of Parliament named Oedipus Snark who is heartily detested by his own psychoanalyst mum, Berthea; Berthea's brother Terence Moongrove, a single man given to pondering matters of the metaphysical who nearly electrocutes himself when he tries to charge the battery in his Morris by plugging it directly into the wall; and Marcia the caterer who fancies William and believes that the way to a man's heart is through his stomach.  In The Dog Who Came in from the Cold, William lends Freddie to MI6 for an important mission and Berthea rescues Terence from those nefarious individuals who would steal his house and his fortune.  These books are fun, fast-paced weekend reading - and I can't wait for the next installment.
Now don't you just want this cute man in his kilt to tell you a story?

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