Ich bin auf deutsch

Cat Scratch Fever is out in a German edition!

The title translates as "Sharp Claws," which isn't exactly the right idea, but isn't the cover pretty?

The only reason I know what the title means is because my lovely co-author either worked it out or asked Babel Fish. My German professors would have my head if they knew how much I'd forgotten! I read Goethe in the original once--but that was more than twenty years ago.

Fortunately Ursula "Kitten with a Whip" Beitter has long since forgotten me. Unfortunately Sydna "Bunny" Weiss passed away a few years after I graduated. Sad, that. Sydna was an inspiration in many ways. She taught me many valuable lessons, including that a grown-up could choose to have lousy furniture and an old car and save her pennies for travel and book-buying, and that smart women read erotica. The German lessons, though, didn't sink in so well.

(I realize, looking back, that Dr. Weiss, who seemed tremendously old way back then, was only a few years older when she died than I am now...and that Dr. Beitter, the "hot older woman" who lured all the frat boys to take German although she was one of the toughest professors on campus, was probably a decade younger than I am. How weird is that?)