This week was chock full of Busy. Next week I’ll be able to post more, but for now, please check out my latest NY Times True-Life Tale, which is about what an awful person I am. (Remember Bootsy? And how he wasn’t doing so well about a year ago? The moral of this tale is “don’t get veterinary advice from the internet.”)Â
Author and Professional Obsessive.
Recent Press and Links
- Essay: A Little House Adulthood For the American Masters documentary on Laura Ingalls Wilder, I contributed a piece to the PBS website about revisiting the Little House books.
- Essay: The Christmas Tape (At Longreads.com) How an old audio tape of holiday music became a record of family history, unspoken rituals, and grief.
- Q & A With Wendy McClure Publishers Weekly interview about editing, Wanderville and more.
Connect with me
Where else to find Wendy
- Candyboots Home of the Weight Watcher recipe cards
- Malcolm Jameson Site (in progress) about my great-grandfather, a Golden Age sci-fi writer.
- That Side of the Family My semi-secret family history blog
when i was about 17 i decided that the “no pets” household rule needed to be broken, and rebelliously brought home a goldfish. i figured this was easy to take care of and cheap. well garth the fish did fine for about a week. then i noticed he was doing that float sideways thing that fish do before they die. i started freaking out and showed my dad before he was leaving for work. he told me that the fish wasnt getting enough oxygen in the water. so i got out a straw and decided to help garth. i did the only thing i thought made sense to me: i put the straw in the water and started blowing bubbles. lo and behold, that helped garth immediately. after a few minutes i realised if i stopped blowing that garth would do that side floaty thing again. so i kept blowing bubbles while i tried to make a fresh bowl of water for him. needless to say, i wasnt great at multitasking with these given tasks. i stopped blowing bubbles for only like a minute, i swear. and that’s all it took to send garth to his demise.
Very entertaining article!
Poor Bootsy.
I’m going to start referring to bourbon as ‘Phinquel’.
If it makes you feel any better, over two years is actually a very long life for a Betta fish. They generally don’t live much over a year or so.
I once rescued two goldfish from a fraternity party where they where dropping them in beer and SWALLOWING them. I named them Bert and Ernie. They only lived a year or so, but it had to have been a better ending than as frat boy vomit.
I went with the good old toilet flush. You don’t have to watch them suffer that way, and I always found it oddly fitting that they return to the watery depths of the ocean from whence their little fishy bodies came.
I love your New York Times pieces Wendy, they rock 🙂
Poor fish 🙁
RIP, Bootsy, pickled like an onion.
I appreciate your desire to give Bootsy a proper send-off – I’m sure I flushed my dead, neglected goldfish to his watery Valhalla when I was in elementary school. Poor Goldie.
Wendy, your NY Times essay was brilliant. Keep it coming!
wow is he really dead? sorry to hear that