In the worlds of 19-Infinity, we’re now up to 1954, the setting for And He Bought a Crooked Cat. I conceived the opening scene, or the initial draft of it, back in the late 1980s. After many dead ends and a final rewrite, it found print in the anthology Rejection back in 2015.
I’ve no idea what sparked the original idea but I came up with a scene in which a young man follows a grotesquely disfigured cat down a narrow, twisty street. At the end of it, a crooked old man informs the protagonist that having walked a crooked mile, he has to buy the crooked cat. Unfortunately, that was as far as I got with the concept. I tried reworking the lead to give him a character arc — he’d just gotten over a bad breakup, he’d poured out his heart to someone who didn’t even know he was into her — but none of it seemed relevant to the crooked cat appearing. Nor could I figure out what happened next.
IIRC, the idea of nursery rhyme characters as a chaotic, nonsensical power trapped in the rhymes manifested before my final protagonist, Paul took shape. Once that idea came to me, I started playing the chaos opposite an era that looked staid, nonchaotic, sober—the 1950s. Only underneath there was all this chaos and restlessness (civil rights, gay rights, etc.), and now the rhymes were breaking free …
Slowly Paul took shape as the counterweight. A writer/editor, serious, intelligent, and depressingly middle-aged at 25. Staid. Afraid to take a chance. Only now he’s dealing not only with the crooked cat but four and twenty blackbirds who just plucked off his friend’s nose. The kittens showing up and asking for pie. And then there’s his lost love, Mary, Mary quite contrary …
My initial ending drove home the subtext of the story rather explicitly. I wavered back and forth on that and eventually decided by best friend Cindy was right and cut the explicitness out. The story, which had bounced to multiple venues by this sort, still kept bouncing back. Finally last year I sent it to Rejected and … success! Here in 19-Infinity, it gets another chance to shine. Available on Amazon in paperback and available for ebook pre-order on some channels (more to follow).
Oh, in case you’re wondering, there’s no particular reason I jumped from the 1930s to the 1950s. If I’d known I’d be doing this collection I’d probably have written a story set in the 1940s, but I didn’t, so there you go.
#SFWApro. Cover by Kemp Ward, all rights to image remain with me.
