Pet Names

After blogging about losing the skink with whom I shared my office for three years over on Lipstick Chronicles (and isn't "blogging" one truly ugly word?), many of you came to my Facebook site and told me wonderful stories about your own pets—stories both funny and touching, especially when it was time to say goodbye to those beloved animals. You also shared some interesting names you'd given to those pets.

It reminded me of a short story I wrote several years ago. It appears in my second anthology, Suitable for Hanging (Crippen and Landru, 2004).

Readers frequently ask me, "Where do you get your ideas?" I don't always know myself, but for this story, "What's In A Name?" I can remember the genesis quite clearly. A friend of mine who owns horses told me that she had renamed her last horse after acquiring it. The new name used an identical first syllable, but had a much prettier ending. "I had to keep the first part because horse are like dogs," she told me. "They recognize their names when you call them."

The story falls fairly early in the Deborah Knott series, back when she was still single and unattached; and can now be found in the Etcetera section of this website.