I recently adopted a kitten. Usually I’m a fan of bringing the pet home, observing his/her personality and proclivities (my family once had a dog named Sneakers), and then naming him/her. But I decided about a year ago that when I went to grad school, I was going to get a black & white cat and name it Moxie (as in, “Ya got Moxie, kid!”). And that’s exactly what I did.

This post is really just an excuse to show you pictures of my kitten.

I started calling him Moxie before I’d even decided to adopt him, when I wasn’t even sure what his gender was. At first he seemed relatively calm for a kitten, but now that I’ve let him loose in my apartment and called him all variations of his name (Moxicillin, Moxers, Mox Pox, etc.), he has started to grow into it. He’s already figured out a way to climb up my couch with his little kitten claws, and he’s figured out that he can just fit if he walks along the tops of the books on my lower bookshelf, and he’s gotten stuck behind the refrigerator—twice.

All this to say: I should have known better. I put a lot of stock in names. I had a whole list going of potential future cat names before I ever had a cat. (The other top possibilities were Gatsby and Bo, short for Bogart.) And I’ve gone through several phases when naming my hypothetical, someday kids. At first it was plants: Holly, Ivy, Rosemary. At some point I turned to multisyllabic names: Julianna, Isabella, Josephina. There has always been a suspicious lack of male names, which I can only assume hinted at some deep-seated rejection of the notion of brothers, which I’d never had. Besides, there’s enough to worry about just trying to name girls.

Kids are mean. You can’t name your child anything that rhymes with a dirty word or anything that can easily be turned into a joke. You have to be careful about initials too because what if you finally settle on a name and their initials turn out to be LOL? I long ago vowed to never brand my child with a unisex name. (My parents thought they were being progressive, or anti-sexist, or something, but they didn’t realize that pairing a unisex first name—Casey—with a last name that is also a men’s first name—Patrick—would result in endless mail addressed to Mr. Patrick Casey and of course the requests for “Patrick? Patrick?” at the doctor’s office. Even the gynecologist.)

In that case, maybe an interesting name would be best, something that would never be confused with a last name. But nothing that ends in –i. Nothing too specific like Autumn or Summer. Not Montana or Dakota or Berlin, lest people think they were conceived there. Nothing too literary, though I’ve always been partial to Scarlett, and I once met a girl named Arwen. Most names of ex-boyfriends and their new girlfriends are off-limits, to avoid acid reflux. Nothing boring like Sarah or Laura or Joe, since that requires them to use their last initial to differentiate from the Sarah or Laura or Joe sitting next to them in kindgarten and the whole point is to make your child feel “special.” Nothing too old-fashioned. No Mildreds or Muriels or Waynes. Something with spunk but not too much spunk, like Roxanne. But not Roxanne because “names that are used in famous songs” are also off-limits. The list goes on and on.

Even more than my hypothetical children, I worry about what to name my characters. Read more »

Everything Must Go, starring Will Ferrell, is based on the story “Why Don’t You Dance” by Raymond Carver. It comes out this month.

Often, when movies are based on short stories, it  reminds me of the use of samples in hip-hop. The screenwriter take a memorable nugget, the hook of the story, and builds up around it.

In honor of Short Story Month, here are some more movies based on short stories:

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I Bet It's Not As Scary As It May Seem

Raymond Carver liked to get a draft of a story down in one go, “I write the first draft of a story as quickly as possible, preferably at one sitting. Then I revise it, and revise it yet again” (Conversations with Raymond Carver 80). Janet Burroway agrees this is a good method because, “you are more likely to produce a coherent draft when you come to the desk in a single frame of mind with a single vision of the whole than when you write piecemeal, having altered ideas and moods” and “fast writing tends to make for fast pace in the story” (Writing Fiction 16).

I am not a fan of being required to write a complete first draft in one day or even two, let alone one sitting. It was during a writing binge last week (for a deadline for my writing group) that I was so miserable I began seriously questioning why I even bother (see all the negative comments I left on blogs last week for evidence to support this claim).

I asked my mom on the phone why humans bother exerting so much time, energy, and thought to write stories that no one wants to read or publish anyway. She told me that even if one person gains insight from something another person wrote then it’s worth it. I liked that idea. She also said the self expression that occurs through writing must be useful to the writer in some way. I insisted that what I’m doing is far more complex than self-expression. Read more »