Profile

My name's Benita Sutherland, and I'm the youngest of a family of fifteen girls.

Yeah, you heard me. Fifteen. My parents were convinced that if they kept trying they'd get a boy.

Anyway.

I like horses, the ocean, quiet time. I'm a writer, and I live in the soggy part of Florida in a treehouse I built in some live oaks. I do my writing on a manual typewriter that my friend Shirley says should be in a museum. And I own two cats, a swimming pool full of cichlids (there used to be bettas too, but the bettas were having a rough time, so we fished them out and found them a new home), an onager, and a zorse. The house is also inhabited by whatever Shirley brought over and set free because he didn't have space at his own place. Mostly big bugs and little lizards. I sleep in a hammock which I sometimes share with my little son, Gus.

Yes, Shirley's a guy. He's also my husband. He lives just down the road.

As a kid I lived in Argentina, out on a big hacienda. We had horses, and there was one I really loved, but that I wasn't allowed to get near because I was the only person he'd LET get near him. He got sold, and I got rebellious. Then my dad died, and a big mess rose up over the will, because my older sisters all swore that I wasn't Mom's daughter (when I look just like her :p). I had a guy cousin who was a friend of mine, and he was sticking up for me, but they were dead certain that I was some stray our parents had dragged in. In the end, I can't remember how it started, some sister bet me that I couldn't go to the Amazon and live in the jungle for a month.

Well, when someone finally came across me happily running around in my birthday suit it'd been over a year, my cousin had crashed his plane looking for me, and I'd decided that life away from other people was really the best life. I'd lived in a tree there in the jungle, so when I moved to Florida I made my house up in trees. I'm not part of my sisters' lives, and they still say I'm not a legal Sutherland. But my cousin and his wife come to visit sometimes.

Oh yeah, and I'm the author of the '***** Book'. I confess. But I still don't know why some people call it the kitty toy book.


((Yes, this is a work of fiction. Ben's an original character from a normal reality. She and her entire story are my property. Her PB is Missy... somebody. She doesn't belong to me and I'll have her name up as soon as I remember it. No profit is being made by using her likeness.))