Tonight I had to take my cat to the vet, and we made the choice to spare him more of the agony he was hiding from us so doggedly so we could love him another day.

The choice to give him peace was so hard, and I feel empty and numb right now. I want nothing more than to just turn the corner and see him waiting there, flitting his tail and meowing at me to go to bed so he could lay on top of me and knead.

We got 3 weeks with him thanks to the meds we might not have had, and he loved me for every moment he could during it all. He would try his best to sleep with me every night of the last week, and he would wake me up early so he could get some snuggles. And he would purr for me. He always had a purr.

6 and a 1/2 years is too short a time for a cat, but we loved him every day of it... even the days we were less than patient with him.

He was loved... and that is the best thing you can do for any one of our fuzzy friends.

At the end of April, my cat, who had been having a persistent but otherwise non-critical cough, began having it more often than I was comfortable with. So I took him to the vet.

He was diagnosed with having either asthma or heart issues. I was given a medicine to give him and was told to watch his breathing and otherwise just be careful.

A week later I took him back for a followup X-ray, and after bringing him home, he began to have problems breathing and was not able to calm himself down. I did the best thing I could, and I took him to the ER.

My 6 year old Maine Coon Mix, Spartacus... was diagnosed with congestive heart failure.

I have been told that he has up to 2 years that he could potentially live, depending on medication, care, low stress, and just plain luck.

This is my life now. Twice a day I have to make sure he gets his pills, I need to watch him if he has a coughing fit in case it becomes worse... and most of all, I have to treat each day like it's the best day on earth for him... if I can.

It's painful, but I'm slowly beginning to recover from the panic and the heartache. I am trying to reach that point where I believe I can be at peace with him when the time comes... and if not... at least try and be happy I gave him as many good days as I could.

If you've read, thank you for listening. I'm not looking for money, I'm just trying to get my thoughts out on the page.

Just watched this, a short documentary on Fox Amoore's time at Abbey Road. Just the music alone is worth it. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FmAy.....ature=youtu.be

First off, a thanks to dorianvow for a copy of the access.

Anyways... this game is a particular kind of beast that has never existed before, and one that may change the nature of how MMORPGs run things. Or not. This game has some very innovative, but frustrating ideas to it, ones that make it both hard to play, but also make you want to come back.

You are alone.

Like a baby, you are born into the world with next to nothing. A shirt, a pair of pants, shoes, a flashlight, and a battery for it. Quite literally that is it.

The game keeps you as close to real life as you can get in a game like this. You have pockets, but their space is limited. There are weapons... but those can be hard to find, and sometimes they're so damaged it's not worth taking them for fear they might break. You have to worry about food and drink, keeping hydrated for the long hikes and runs.

There is no mini-map, there is no HUD, there is no targeting reticle. You are given only a single point as your reference of where you're looking. If you find a can of food, but there's nothing you have to open it with... you'll need to find something, eventually. Otherwise a can of beans becomes a horrid taunt as you sit there starving.

I am not joking. You are alone. There is no quick travel, there is no transport system.

All of this complete solitude before you run into the other two factors in this work. The Zombies, and the other Players.

The slight advantage of having someone you can trust with a bog-standard MMO or PVP takes on a whole new meaning in this game. The first person I met on my own who wasn't my friend called out he could hear me upstairs. Since I didn't know the controls, I didn't know how to turn on my mic, and thus couldn't tell him I would be willing to give up everything and walk. I didn't want trouble. He fed me something poisonous, and then shot me in the head.

The second person I met who wasn't my friend I never met. I just heard the chatter of automatic fire and was rendered unconscious and bleeding to death.

The third called out when he spotted me, armed with a shotgun and not taking chances that he didn't want any trouble. From what I've read of other blogs, most of the time people shoot first and second, and then ask questions to your corpse as they loot it. I pointed my gun at the door, and I told him I didn't want any trouble, and I was going to leave him free to scrounge.

The third guy told me good luck. I didn't chance his luck including a bullet in my skull. I hid, and got off the game.

Because of the fact that when you die you lose everything, followed by the fact that that everything is dependant on what you can find where you go... You find yourself feeling a visceral sense of fear and paranoia for your character. Is the next building a savior or a death sentence? You become almost scared to hear footsteps because it means someone else is there. Someone who you can't trust, and who might mean you have to pull the trigger. And realize when you end their life, you're ending their story for now. They begin again, and may never see you again... but you still ended it.

And I say all of that before getting to the zombies... because by comparison, the zombies are pretty much a blessing. You know what they are and what they do. They scream, they run at you, and they either die again or eat you. While they can make you panic, you quickly learn to pull your axe, whack them in the face, and get on with life.

Taking a page from Walking Dead... the dead become much easier to negotiate than the living. I'd rather deal with running from a dozen zombies than see if I really can pull the trigger. But then, that's something that's going to be forced on me eventually.

Tonight, I was shot at again, but this time I survived. I think I was just winged. My backup and I worked tactically and methodically to clear one building, and we went to the next on an airfield so that we could make sure we got everything valuable... only for me not to clear the stairs. I was lucky this time... two of us there together made it so that the other guy ran rather than die. My buddy took a parting shot, and then got me a saline bag to help with the blood loss. I was better, but the lesson was there.

Despite my buddy... I am alone.

Sitting back and taking a breath from the game, I can tell you that this game frustrates me, it challenges me, and it makes me realize how poor of an FPS player I am. But I am also engaged by the sheer and simple mechanic of the game. And as frustrating as every death becomes, it also becomes the challenge of whether or not you can recover from the loss. It's still in Alpha and you run into several small bugs with sound, with zombie detection, and with items spawning but not able to be used in the way they're supposed to. But what they have at the moment is beautiful. The world looks real, it feels real.

If you pick this up, good luck to you... I hope one day we meet and it won't be from behind the sights of a gun.

Sitting at my desk at work, staring at a start up screen. Again.

Not that it has any relevance on this, but I intend to sit down this weekend and start pounding down a couple pieces for submission. One for Rainfurrest's yearly Charity Anthology, and another for a submission piece for Penumbra's E-Magazine.

After that I have an expanded idea that came from that little blurb I posted here after watching Ender's game, and another short story concept that to me seems fun. But creepy.

I know I could offer up to do commissions here, I really could... but I see two issues with that. One is fanbase. The stuff I'm doing at the moment is predominantly not 'furry' writing... as in there are no anthromorphics present in most of it. Not even a thinking animal. So putting it out there on here seems a bit pointless. The second is time & cost. I don't know how much to charge for my time, and my time is precious. I have a husband. I do things like go to movies, go on short trips... heck, go to the gym when I can.

Speaking of which, I really need a better workout plan than 20 minutes on a bike playing Persona 3 Portable. >.> Yeah, yeah... I can't even go out without taking my Vita with me. I'm a dork and I know it, but you never know when you need a few minutes of video game time to clear your head.

So, for the few people who do more than read these... if I was to put something up, what would you like to see from me? Some side-project multi-chapter epic? Short stories? Flash Fiction?

If you do post, please understand that while I'll do Mature, I am not here to write porn. Yes, I can write smutty, steamy, naughty, nasty, wet, and lurid images... but there's already so many people out there who do it and do it well, I'd rather not get lost in the crowd.

Why am I cat brained?

Wellll... okay, here we go in no particular order.

I've submitted a piece of work for consideration by a publisher. I do not want to name names or anything like that for fear of jinxing it, but needless to say this has me rocking in my seat every time the email light flashes on my phone. It's almost as bad as auditions from back in high school... and the only thing I ever remembered from those was that I never got into anything. :P

So, to help kill the tension, I bought the Breakdown DLC for State of Decay. BIG MISTAKE.

State of Decay, for all it's bugs and occasional weirdness, has to be the second most addictive game to play I've ever gotten my hands on. The first being Xenogears. But I'll save my Xenogears rant for another time *FISTSHAKE AT MONOLITH!*

If you've ever played this game, I am sure that you are well aware of what I am talking about, but if not, I will give you a breakdown of the game.

State of Decay is the bastard child of GTA and Left 4 Dead. It is an open world zombie survival environment that uses a combination of inventive gameplay and minimalist storytelling to create a situation where you must be proactive to survive. In the main plot, you start off playing Marcus Campbell and his buddy Ed just back from a fishing trip... having spent 2 weeks in the middle of nowhere and oblivious to the fact that the world has collapsed into anarchy. Along the way you meet former military officer Maya Torres, who was hunting in the area, and watched her former army buddies get turned into Zed chow.

Here's where it gets interesting in my opinion... there is no main character. Yes, there are named characters that are there from your beginning of the regular game, but, you do not need them to complete the game. If they die... they're gone. People are as finite a resource as everything else in the game. So suddenly... NPC #1138 isn't just #1138, he or she is suddenly a person in your community with all the benefits and flaws that come with it. Sometimes they need to be taken out for a walk and talked to... sometimes they need a little training. And sometimes, they go out and never come back.

Breakdown takes this mechanic further.

Gone is the plot to the main game, gone are the starting characters and their slow build-up to being hip deep in the Apocalypse. You are given the chance to start with either 1 random character, or a series of special 'hero' characters you unlock by doing things during Breakdown. Some of them have special skills no one else gets, some of them are just unique looking, or start with cool stuff.

Meet Diana Archer.

For those that play... Diana started off with Accountant, Nimble, Played Golf, and Problem Solver. She was my random character for my second attempted playthrough after botching my first.

Diana is awesome. First off, unlike a lot of my guys who carry bladed weapons, she uses blunt objects. Specifically a police snap baton. Why? Because it's light, it's strong, and it's portable. Her pistol of choice is a .22LR pistol because it's quiet, carries a lot of ammo, and pops zombie heads. When she finds cool things, she says 'Winner winner, chicken dinner.'

In a game where everyone feels a little bit throwaway, she has stood out as my prime character. The one who always gets in trouble, but always comes back. The person who I think if I lost at this point I would stop playing. That's the emotional investment. In a way, the game forces you to choose favorites, and spend time on them, because you know the next time 'round is going to be much rougher on you, and you'll need people who are better prepared. They have unique looks, and they have personalities that are picked from a stock of a dozen or so, but they still come off as sounding a bit different for each of them.

Once Diana was built up, I ended up picking two other survivors. Ofelia and Myles. Ofelia is a bitchy former Army Medic and Mechanic who went from being the biggest pain in my butt to my number two. Myles was a daydreamer and caterer who I used to take out 3 Big 'Uns with some tactics and a little luck.

In a game where story is minimalized down to nearly nothing, except building up to get the heck outta dodge, you find yourself creating stories for everyone in your head, and hating any time they come into such danger that you're scared to lose them. To me, this is a brilliant thing to have for a game like this, and probably the reason why I've put off projects until the new year...

Cat brain is still Writer Brain.

Been a week since I've been able to put anything down. Kinda sucks, but it's a combination of work, and waiting for my stuff to come back from my friend who is trying to be my editor AND do his mid-terms.

Le-sigh, but what can you do? I'm not backing off from the writing thing, so to keep up I ended up writing up a couple characters. One is a sort of Supernatural-ish style character... but just my own spin on it. The other is for an online tabletop game I'll be in for a couple hours a week.

I've always found character design for games to be just as much fun as writing in general, because you're writing a story, but from a different point of view. For RPGs, you pick out skills, an occupation, and end up starting to ask yourself the big question of WHY.

WHY is one of the biggest motivators I know for stories... what and where are just part of the journey, and who is pretty much a given. How can be a pain in the butt, but you usually figure it out with the other stuff.

So once I get the why firmly in my head, I can write this other guy up, and start getting my head back into the writing I was doing, or maybe post up another part of what I was working on here.

In the meantime, for those who read these... ciao!

So it's November 2nd, and I missed the deadline for submitting for Kandrel's Dungeon Dweller's anthology. And I have two important reasons for this, both of which have a direct bearing on what I was writing.

He was asking for erotic stories, or stories with erotic components. This I failed on quite well, since my tale turned more into a parody of fantasy and fantasy RPGs, in a nicely Pratchett-ish fashion. That was the main stumbling block for for. The second part was more of a personal matter. I realized about half-way through finishing this piece, that I felt it was my first work that I was willing to start shopping around for a professional credit.

Now, I realize that trying to get a professional writing credit is one of the hardest things to do in the beginning. It's kind of like getting a job for experience, you sometimes need experience, a catch-22. I've got three published short stories under my belt for the Rainfurrest Anthology... but the third one I feel is a bit of a cheat, because I also helped edit and publish it. *lesigh*

But that being said... There was a group of 3 of us who judged all the submission works for the 2012 anthology, and we made sure that two votes had to go into each one before any final approval was done.

Rambling aside, I'm glad this happened. It was the kick in the pants I needed. To be a writer, you have to write. It's a skill, that needs practice to refine and to keep in shape. I've let it go a bit too long in the last year, not a mistake I intend to repeat.

Unless I'm videogaming... or tabletopping... or going out with my husband... or working. So much time, and so little to do.

Wait.

Strike that, reverse it.

I have been trying for 2 months to write a piece of Kandrel's upcoming anthology called 'Dungeon Grind'. Which is due in November. I'm trying to make 11/1 my goal. So far, it's been a bit of a pitched battle in my head.

Take 1, I managed to get 4k words in, and it's got good flow, it's a decent story, and it's got a nice twist coming up... but then it seems to fall apart as my beta readers end up telling me that they really don't identify with the adventurer characters, and love the little kobold who ended up being the story vehicle. After all, this supposed to be a story about Dungeon Dwellers. By the time I'd shoehorned the beginnings of a sex scene in... I was beginning to feel like I was taking the wrong direction.

Take 2. Just barely starting this up, I've established the adventurer characters firmly, and it's solid work... but ends up being completely unusable for this. And once again, I get the feedback of 'More Kobold!'

*Insert sounds of cow bell here*

Welcome to Take 3. I've scrapped the idea of making it dark and broody and let my mind loose into something quite Pratchett-esque and satirical. I'm going to take the life of a kobold and turn it loose on the world.

His name is Tatch.

Tatch lives in a world where more than likely he is going to die from his own stupidity. His life is measured in the events that matter. Like when his village is sacked... or when it has to move because something more dangerous comes along... or even when it's destroyed. For the sake of the anthology, I don't know if I'll post any of this right away, but I am getting the sneaking suspicion that when I do, you'll all enjoy the hell out of it.

Bob willing, I will not end up on a Take 4. *SIGH*

I had one of those mornings where I just wake up, know I'm awake, and despite any need for caffeine or other such things, I'm stuck with this urge to do something.

Since I am supposed to be a writer (I say supposed because I have these ungodly high standards of what I think a writer should BE...) I am writing.

I have so many influences now that happened just before the con to try and get me back and going on the inevitable goal of my life. To see my name on a book, on a shelf, where people can go 'Hey, I know that guy!' and sometimes doing stupid things like taking pictures of said book on shelf.

There are so many people I know now inside and outside the furry fandom that I have so much respect for, and feel like are part of that seemingly unattainable bar in life. Kyell Gold, Mary Lowd, and Phil Geusz to name a few. They've all done it, and they've all shown themselves to be not only professional, but also very likeable people. Phil especially gives me the kind of feeling like I'm not sitting with a stranger, but like a relative you're always looking forwards to seeing.

For those that don't know, I help build and craft the writing track for Rainfurrest. I also occasionally panel for it, when I'm not running around with the typical feline ADD you get with more cat furres. Yeah, I used that word, but what can you do? This is furaffinity, this is my stream of consciousness... ya'll can read and groan at your own peril.

ANYWAYS...

One of the perks of being on staff as the person who crafts the writing track is I get to meet all these authors. People who've gotten stuff published small and large. People who really show that writing can be just like any other job, except it's one that you really have to put your passion into. Sometimes I feel a bit jealous and out of place with them. I only have 3 published short stories to my name, a couple years worth of fanfic, and whatever gods live among us sooooo many story ideas on the back burner that I start to wonder why I consider this my art/hobby when I do so little.

Truth is, I write all the time. Character design for games... on MUCKs... I work application staff for one game, I do design and flavor texts for the combat system on another... so I pour my art out in more subtle ways. Thanks to working with Rainfurrest's charity anthology and writing competition, I've been learning the art of how to be something like a slush reader. Going through the pile to find those bits of gold we think the world wants to see.

The single biggest shot in my arm this year was doing Flash Fiction. I kid you not, if you want an exercise in sheer bravery... let people tell you what to write, give you an hour to do it in, and then read it in front of them? I was nervous the whole time, but the applause at the end, and the positive comments from the other panelists really made me feel like I can make this goal of mine.

So... thanks everyone. Not just the people who I've come to admire, but the people who came to see us all.