She was always here, and it seemed like a thread wasn't really a thread until she'd posted. Over the years we share so many "Oh, my God, am I here all alone?" moments, interspersed with thoughts about painting kitchens, and such things. Old friends who never actually met...

Very early on, she taught me something very important about writing online--and as I, and others, learned it, Mudcat and the internet, and the world changed a lot.

As a writer, she was very conscious of her voice. In the early days of the internet, most people either wrote in a kind of "Hey, Good Buddy!"voice that was heavy on jargon and short on substance, or they wrote long, meandering discourses. She wrote her posts as if they were letters from home-brief but complete thoughts, ideas, stories, advice, but always putting a picture of herself in everything she posted.

It often occurred to me that she wrote with the idea that she'd be reading it later--which is to say, she knew that you had to live with what you've put on the page.

Whether you liked what she said, or didn't, you always knew who she was. She wasn't an internet persona, or a troll, or a cyber-anything--she really was the person that you saw in her posts, and she showed us that if we to do it, too, then Mudcat could be a place just like the living room or the back porch.

So for the better part of 15 years, she was a friend, companion, sounding board, and constant presence. It's hard to imagine Mudcat without her.

As the song says, "Weep all you little rains, wail, winds, wail." We're going to miss you a lot, Kat.