Deviant

I wasted two hours of my life this weekend, making a page on deviantart.com.

I've always avoided it before as it seemed full of people displaying their below average art (like mine!) but I discovered people can also display their below average prose there too. So I thought I'd join in.

Here's my deviantart page LauraGomez

I've also linked to it in my About Me section on the right hand side of this page.

There are only three of my short stories there at the moment, all three of which I wrote quite a long time ago. I may add more later. Then again I may realise the futility of the act, and not.

Stuffing Beavers

I've come across a lot of strange things while researching for writing projects – cannibals, sleepwalkers, people who fall in love with trees, prostitutes, and macabre Victorian circus freaks.

But I think the world of taxidermy has been the most wonderful and disturbing.

Most of us instinctively find taxidermy quite weird – Wanting your beloved pet skinned and stuffed in order to fool yourself they're still with you is a discomfiting concept.

But the professional world of the taxidermist goes much further and into much more fantastical worlds than that.

In competition taxidermy especially, the practice of creating an imaginary creature from the parts of two or more animals has become popular, combining the parts of many to create something new.

Some create an existent animal which is endangered, and thus not available to kill and stuff - for example they might use a white (or polar) bear and a black bear to produce their approximation of a panda. Or they might utilise the method to revive an extinct animal, like the quagga, a mixture of horse and zebra. Or they might even create an imaginary creature - perhaps using a white horse and a horned animal to create a unicorn.

Some taxidermists use only roadkill, animals that have died of natural causes, donations from veterinarians, or unused animal remains from museums. And fairly or unfairly, it is much easier to find the beauty or humour in these artists' work.

Jason Thomas combined chick and crocodile to make a baby dragon

Fiendish Curiosities

Sarina Brewer created a flying squirrel

Custom Creature

Taking an animal and putting it in a ridiculous pose, or even into clothes, could be taken as the ultimate in disrespect. Like circuses dressing up monkeys and dogs and making them dance.

A white pigeon dyed pale pink in a taffeta gown

A Case of Curiosities

But if the craft is done with some style and mischief it can be fantastic. Executed without style however, and with no sense of camp or humour, it really can leave me cold.

This for example may be taking it a little too far.

The Prize Fight' by Edward Hart b. 1847 – d. 1928

However, as this quotation eloquently expresses ~

"Strive to put your mounted animals in easy natural poses unless you are making a grotesque, in which case go the length."

- A.B. Farnum 1944

New Romantics

I've just been informed that one of my short stories may be appearing in an anthology: a collection of short stories with a theme of male/male romantic (and erotic) fiction, which would be published some time in 2007. More news if it goes ahead.

I'm trying to work on two new books at the moment. One is a novel about a celebrity juror, a taxidermy convention, and a pack of wild timberwolves in the woods outside Greater London.


The second is an offbeat romance about an artist named Beatrice, her acrobat ex-lover, and a scandal involving a 15 year old boy life-model.


I'm editing the first and have just started writing the second. Romance is a brand new genre to me and it's a lot harder than it looks. You really have to immerse yourself in a genre in order to write it, and it can't really be done tongue in cheek. So I'm having to find romances to read which I can respect and admire, and try to live up to.

As I said, harder than it looks.

Nitric Acid

I am descended from violent criminals and circus folk.
Further research (I love research – such a great time waster) on the Gomez family genealogy has uncovered an 1880s London family business of Bow & Arrow Makers.

I also found out that scores of my ancestors are buried in the same Islington cemetery. I can't wait to visit and try to find a grave bearing the Gomez name. Throughout my childhood in the Buckinghamshire countryside, I would search for my name any time I passed a list on a War Memorial or found myself in the grounds of a church. Search in vain.

There is also evidence of a court appearance starring my favourite ancestor : Signor Cayetano Gomez, the professional lasso artist. Which details a judge cheerfully letting him off a near knife attack on a man who'd been sleeping with his wife. The judge was quite vehemently on Cayetano's side, and even gave the other man a severe telling off. How times have changed.

I once went to see one of my ancestor's London homes. It was right in the middle of China Town, just off Leicester Square. If they'd kept it in the family I'd be worth millions by now.

It's not the ones who had happy and stable family lives that get me excited. When there's a sufficient gap between us, when a hundred years separates us from them (and reality) the things I was thrilled to discover were the scandals.

Scandals such as babies born out of wedlock, intriguing careers of musician and coffin maker, strange old fashioned deaths from mysterious causes like brain softening, and one of my favourites (in a suitably macabre way) : suicide by nitric acid.

Design Jobs

I was recently asked to design twelve staff portraits for a new writing website. The big man in charge had seen my artwork elsewhere and thought it was right for his site.

He wanted them to look like comic book characters, and he gave me each staff member's profile to work from.

TQR Stories is a conceptually bizarre literary journal combining highbrow and low. Its staff have cartoon-like personas (designed by me), and visitors to the site, readers, and the contributing authors themselves can all read the staff's real life arguments and in-house fights over the inclusion or otherwise of each story submitted to the journal.

I've posted my Staff Portraits below for you to take a look at.