Tag, I'm it!

[Writers Plot]

Posted by Sheila Connolly

This seems to be a new cyber-form of the old chain letter, and, lucky me, I've been tagged by a writer buddy.Lorraine Bartlett

Here are the rules:

1. Link to the person that tagged you (that's you, Cathy) , and post the rules on your blog (presto, here they are!)

2. Share seven facts about yourself.

3. Tag seven random people at the end of your post, and include links to their blog.

4. Let each person know that they have been tagged by leaving a comment on their blog.

Well, my first reaction is to whine, "but all the good people have already been picked!" as though this were some third-grade form of dodgeball, but I'll do my best.

Seven facts:

1. When I was in high school, a friend and I wrote a script for The Man from U.N.C.L.E. Remember, this was back in the day when you used typewriters (gasp!), and the nearest copy machine was usually two towns over and cost a lot. But we wrote it, copied it, tracked down an address and mailed it. And in time, predictably, received a polite rejection, which I still have stashed in a trunk somewhere. My very first rejection as a writer.

2. I take pictures of dead animals. No, not my own pets, and not any with which I have had a personal acquaintance. But dead ones that I stumble over, that aren't too gruesomely rotten. Herewith is my dead cockatoo in a tree, from Australia, where I also "collected" a large bat, a cow skeleton, and a few sheep skulls.

3. I am a cat magnet. It's not just that I like cats, which I do, but I can go anywhere, sit down, and cats will appear and make themselves at home on my lap. I was sitting on a bench outside the Cathedral of Dublin (Ireland) a few years ago, on a chilly April day, and the resident cat climbed under my coat and went to sleep. BTW, that's the same cathedral wherein was found a mummified cat chasing a mummified rat, both preserved within the walls and now visible behind glass.

4. Do we have to do the name-dropping thing? Nobody important graduated from my high school, as far as I know, although it is rumored that Meryl Streep lived the next town over, but who knew her then? When I worked in a department store in London one summer long ago, I watched Ingrid Bergman buy what was possibly the ugliest shirt in the shop. She was an imposing woman.

5. Am I done yet (grumble, grumble)? My mother and my grandmother in the course of their lives each developed a "Gracious Lady" manner that used to drive me nuts. I hope I never follow in those footsteps.

6. When I was eleven, I pocketed a tip from the counter at a soda shop–I think it amounted to fifty cents–and I've felt guilty ever since.

7. I would really like to meet John Updike, but I have no idea what I would say to him.

Sigh of relief. Now I just have to figure out who to send this to. So far the lucky winners are:

Lonnie Cruse and ...