welcome!
This is all the neighborhood cats i've known and loved and I’m Suzy Eynon.
Lately, I’ve felt this urge to create something outside of my literary fiction and cnf writing, and outside of the knitting I do for fun. I let the idea of starting an online literary mag roll around in my thoughts as I went about my workday. I thought it’d be fun to create a very tiny mag that only publishes animal stories. I love writing and reading stories about cats and dogs and rats. But then I started thinking about the logistics. I’m a people pleaser and the thought of sending all those rejections…not sure I can do it. I do it as a fiction editor at another journal but in that case, I’m doing it in name of the journal…not as Suzy from Suzy’s Weird Animal Magazine. I felt bogged down and less creative before I’d started.
A few years ago, I saw stories about a person who had created a blog or twtter “reviewing” various cats they saw around the neighborhood, and I thought, damnit, because I had a similar idea. I’m actually not a big ideas person. But before I heard others had done it first, I wanted to call my blog or web site or journal All the Neighborhood Cats I’ve Known and Loved, because I’ve met many random cats, and animals in general, in my life: friends giving me their cats when they moved, taking cats into my room as a kid because I thought they were lost and my mom telling me to put it back! And I wouldn’t review the cats, I just wanted to tell the story of my encounters. Maybe that’s the same thing as reviewing them. So I’m creating this newsletter so I can write about animals, or animal-adjacent experiences, and maybe reading or books I like too.
When I was a kid, I made this terrible series of zines, before I knew the word, constructed from computer paper and stapled together, called Suzy’s Guide to Christmas Smarts. I made a new edition or two each year, and they contained tips essential to 8-year-olds for celebrating Christmas, back when that was something I took very seriously. They were supposed to be humorous. I illustrated them using Crayola markers. But I was the only reader. I never made copies or gave them to anyone, not even to my parents, iirc, and then they sat in a box in my closet. I had a household newsletter, which I created using clipart and printed on the dot-matrix printer, then distributed to my little sister and parents. I never tried to go bigger, to share outside of the house. Who was I was writing for? Definitely myself. Later, I had a geocities blog under a name like ELuSiVe_DoLL or something where I posted stolen movie screenshots from, like, Dazed and Confused. For an audience of ME. This go-round, I’ll try to keep the audience in mind…a little.
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