I’m busy working on a short story, so I’m going to let one of my characters post for me today. Okay, guys, duke it out and the winner does the post.

Guess who? Like I would let anybody else do this.

Yeah, it’s me, Bud Blossom. “MomGoth” is writing a story with ME in it, finally, but she always has somebody else narrate it, so she doesn’t need me to be there, just Cosmo’s perception of me. She thinks I’m always wanting to be in her stories, but what I really want is for the stories to be about me. Less work, more glory.

If you don’t know me yet, I’m kinda-sorta Chinese-American. Own a restaurant on a houseboat on Cherokee Creek in a little midwestern town she made up. Indiana, I think it’s supposed to be. Yeah, Indiana. I talk all “no savvy Eengree” — you know, pidgin — when I want to irritate my servers, but really I talk just like everybody around me.

She made me up for “Blossom on the Water”, which sounds a helluva lot prettier than it is, since I’m the Blossom in the title. Then Cosmo’s mother needed a job in “Tara Incognita” and it turned out she worked for me. After that, MA stuck me into a story here and there. She thinks she’s wrestling me to keep me out of them, but the truth is, she’s the one who keeps bringing me up. That’s because she’s bone-lazy, and a strong character is easier to write about.

After she had a few stories about me, some of my employees, their friends and relatives, she collected them into THE KING OF CHEROKEE CREEK and self-published it. Some of the stories she had sold here and there and some of them were new. She could have used one of those for the anthology she’s writing for this weekend, but she gets a kick out of me, whether she admits it or not, and she wanted to write a new story. She gets a kick out of Cosmo, too, so he’s doing the grunt work and narrating the damn thing. Better him than me.

Well, I gotta get back to work. The staff should be coming in to do their side work for the lunch crowd, and Lonnie’s already in the kitchen. No, not that Lonnie. I’m imaginary, not stupid.

WRITING PROMPT: Let one of your characters write a blog post on the subject most on his or her mind at the moment. Him- or herself, for instance.

MA