I was invited to write an essay about my hobbies and how they influence my writing. I said YES before realizing that I don’t have any hobbies, unless you count watching television and sitting, which no one does. So I wrote a couple of different versions that I ultimately didn’t use, including the one below, which is about my unease with owning pets and its affect on my writing.

Raising Wild Animals

At first it was a blind iguana. I found her in a corner of a crowded cage at a pet store; the adult iguanas inside had bitten off several of her toes and chewed out her eyes. I was in college and living at my parents’ house and took her home with me. She recovered under heat lamps and a diet of freshly wet vegetables and, when I graduated, the iguana moved with me to my first tiny apartment. I bought a blue-carpeted cat toy and dragged it over to my bedroom window. The blind iguana would bask in sunlight and tell me what she imagined was happening outside as I wrote my first novel. And that first novel had a similar excitement to it, of peering into something I could see so clearly, almost touch.

The woman I was dating fell in love with a rabbit. He was chubby, fawn-colored, droopy-eared. When that woman and I bought a home together, we gave him his own bedroom with a canopy bed, oak desk, bookcases with sagging shelves. At night while I wrote a new novel, painstakingly teaching myself from the mistakes of the first, the rabbit would cuddle next to my wife. He would lie flat as she read to him, her nails stroking his back, his body firmly pressed against her leg.

The fish belonged to my son but I changed its water, fed it flakes, put my finger to the glass whenever the fish swam near. I kept the small tank in my office, the humming filter reminding me of working inside a factory. By that time something had changed with the novels; I could peer into the beginning and clearly see the end. But the opposite happened with the tank. The water turned greenish and thickened, regardless of how often I attempted to clean it, and the fish could barely swim through the sludge. One time I saw its head poke above the surface, the tiny mouth gasping.

The novels I sold were written with a bird perched on my shoulder. He was happy when he was outside of his cage, and would wander over my shoulders and shake dander off his wings and whisper secrets in my ears. The novels were published and read by people I’d never met, and I wrote more and faster and the bird became a distraction; I left him in his cage for months. He would pace unhappily and nervously talk to himself, and tear feathers from his skin and throw them to the soiled newspaper below. His chest was bare and pink when I found his body.

The snail slides across my desk as I write a new novel, still slowly learning from the mistakes of my past. Sometimes the snail climbs across the monitor, his eyestalks wavering as the cursor blinks in front of him. His trail blurs words, and I have to wipe the monitor clean to read what I have just written. The snail’s body seems too large for his shell, and yet he recoils completely inside whenever I try to touch him. I’ve never felt his skin. He reminds me of the start of a new novel, when the idea is trapped inside its own cage and slowly emerges, eyes widening as you build new bars.

EA 

Reminder that, this Saturday, I’ll be interviewing Aggie Blum Thompson for the launch of her fantastic novel, The Neighbors are Watching! Aggie is a powerful writer and her book touches on so many rich themes, but she’s also wickedly funny and, if you don’t laugh during the interview, you get a FREE BOOK! I can’t believe she made that offer. Join us at Politics and Prose on Saturday, June 27!

It's giveaway time! The winner of Aggie Blum Thompson’s upcoming novel, The Neighbors are Watching, is:

ty___.__ody@outlook.com

Congrats, and I'll send you an email soon!