Cowgirl Contemporary Fantasy

I recently heard one of my heros give a speech.  Chief Joseph Medicine Crow is the story keeper, or storyteller, of his family in the Crow tribe.  He was the first of his people to go to college, and the last war chief, having counted coup on the Germans in WWII.  He's well into his nineties, and I was thrilled to hear him speak again. A self-deprecating man, he began by saying, "The wind has whistled and stolen my memory, but I have many more stories to tell." Boy, did he ever.

My latest review for The Portal is up.  Check out what I had to say about Clarkesworld .  

My sister had to have a very unexpected gall bladder surgery this week.  Good thing she had it out.  Apparently it had welded to her small intestine, which I thought was pretty gross, yet cool.  My mom has been watching my sister's two girls so she can recover.  I'm going to head down and spell my mom so she can recover from my nieces. The day of the surgery, the oldest girl had been smarting off pretty much from the moment she got up.  My mom, exasperated, threatened to do something about her smart mouth, to which my niece replied, "Grandma, God made me in his image, and if he didn't want me to have a smart mouth, He wouldn't have given me one." Somewhere in Glendive, her future kindergarten teacher sleeps soundly, completely unaware of the mayhem in store for the fall of 2012. UPDATE:  Not long after the little darling popped off to Grandma, she said the following: My Niece: Mom, I can't stay at home by myself, can I? Her Mom: No, but when you...

Just before Christmas in 1947, my grandfather boarded a small private plane bound for Seward, Alaska.  He had finished treating the ailments of the Natives on the Aleutian Islands, and he radioed my grandmother to pick him up from the tiny airport.  His plane was last seen banking over Resurrection Bay, but it never landed.  Alone with four children, my grandmother later remarried a rancher in eastern Montana, a brilliant, but troubled man that struggled with severe depression. What would our lives be like had Daddy B. not disappeared? Grandma would not have needed to come back down to the lower 48, nor would she have needed to marry Art.  My parents wouldn't have met in Glendive, Montana.  I would never have been born, much less raised on my step-grandfather's ranch.  Daddy B. was a warm and gregarious man, Art very stern and critical.  Would my dad and his siblings turned out differently?  Would Grandma have still refused ...