Our Cats are the Best

Tueessday, my favorite day of the week. I don't have work or school which means that I sit at home and play with our cats and sell stuff on Craigslist. If you want to see a video starring me my friends and most importantly our CAT go to this link:

Cat by Design Video

Mmmm on that note the Highways album is out! I'll put up a link for downloading once I get the go-ahead.


I started my second short school assignment. We were discussing minor characters and their function in a narrative. Ford Maddox Ford says that “If you’re going to have a character appear in a story long enough to sell a newspaper, he’d better
be real enough that you can smell his breath.” With that in mind the function of a minor character is in a sense extremely important. If you can bring a minor character to life in a quick sentence or two, then you're really nailing two of the most important aspects of good writing: economy and vivid, unique detail. The minor character also has the ability, within those one or two sentences, to further the plot or create depth, otherwise not achieved, in our reading of the protagonist. Our assignment was to write a scene where the protagonist engages a minor character. Using the narration of the protagonist we're supposed to reveal the minor character to the reader.

I wrote about a little girl who thinks her dad is probably Santa Claus but he's actually probably a drug dealer. I know, that sounds terrible. But the idea of parents who provide for their children in disreputable ways was on my mind and for some reason, that was the storyline that jumped out at me. So I started writing a first person narrative, where the little girl isn't really telling a story but offering "evidence" for why her father is Santa Claus. She imagines presenting this evidence to Amanda, a loner fifth grader who sometimes hangs out with the third graders. It was really cool, actually: when I introduced this minor character the story suddenly became three dimensional. Through the narrator's parenthetical notes addressed to Amanda you understand the little girl in a way not possible when she's just spewing off her list of evidence. Hoorrayyy, learning to write.


I've got to go drink coffee.