Monday, September 17, 2012

Hello Darkness My Old Friend

This is how I know it's really Fall: when the 8:00 pm kennel hours roll around and I walk to work in the orange-yellow glow of the barn lights.  


 I didn't even notice the days when it was almost dark; it sort of snuck up on me, like it didn't want to give me time to prepare, then one day I'd go out and the transition would be complete.

We used to have two sets of three 150 watt floods, which drew a lot of juice and tended to burn out frequently and one at a time. I tried long lasting bulbs and I tried replaceing them all at once and I still lost the battle. So I decided to get those tungsten halogen fixtures figuring I'd have to change bulbs every five years or so. Nice thought except that the starters or whatever keep going out and I've had to have to have someone out here twice a year fussing with them. Every penny we've saved in electricity has been spent thrice fold on service calls. And by way of jinxing myself I'll say here that I believe they finally solved it for good. Until they fail again.

One theory is that the barn is haunted and they keep messing with the lights. If that's the case I give up. But I do avoid the barn at night. It's creepy.



Tuesday, September 4, 2012

How Many Cats Does One Novel Need?

A terrific writer friend of mine has written a novel and has asked me to help her publicize it. "But my blog is mainly a pet blog," I said. "It's got cats," she said. She also pointed out that I once had a post titled How to Play the Cymbals.

Here's Kristen Tsetsi






And here are her cats: Hoser is the brown & white, Simon is the black & white.




Her book is titled 'Pretty Much True' and I will let her tell you all about it.


Most blog posts, articles, or interviews about new novel releases focus on the author, the novel, or the human characters in the story. But what about the story’s animal(s)?  

My novel Pretty Much True…, released today by Missouri Breaks Press, has an oft-overlooked animal character in Chancey, the cat belonging to (or living with) Mia, the protagonist, and in two additional cats who live one floor below Mia with her hippie neighbor, Safia (one of whom suffers what has to be the ultimate cat humiliation when his owner/mother waves his paw for him while holding him in her arms).

 It’s safe to say that if Pretty Much True… were about cats, Chancey would be the protagonist. While not described in much physical detail, Chancey is a gray and brown cat who coincidentally resembles my cat Hoser. While his appearances are relatively few, his presence is always felt, even when he’s hiding in another room to avoid cigarette smoke and/or Mia or just sleeping in another room because that’s where the sun happens to be coming through the window. 

Because John’s readers come here for his animal-related posts, it made perfect sense when he agreed to allow me some space on his site that I would talk about Pretty Much True…’s animal characters. This is the first opportunity I’ve had to do that, so I’m pretty excited.

The questions below are questions I imagine readers would ask about Pretty Much True…’s cats.

Q: Why is there what might be called “the protagonist of cats” in Pretty Much True…?

A: It started out as a natural decision to make. I’m almost 40, and I’ve never not lived with a cat (or more than one cat). So it’s difficult for me to imagine a character, a house, an apartment, an existence absent of a cat. He just showed up.
After a while, though, Chancey became a helpful little character, providing yet another way to illustrate the change in his mother/owner (who really does love him) after her soul mate leaves for Iraq. For example, she feeds him absentmindedly, or she forgets to feed him. And when she smokes after having quit several months before, he’s there to communicate, as he runs out of the room after smelling the white stream, “What the hell’s the matter with you?”

Q: Why does the neighbor have cats, too? How many cats does one novel need?

A: It depends on the novel. This novel apparently needed exactly three cats. One for Mia, and two for her neighbor, Safia.
If Mia had more than one cat, there would be too much cat activity distracting from the story (one cat is normal, but two protagonist cats is a bit intentional).  
On the other hand, if secondary character Safia had just one cat, it wouldn’t suit her personality, nor that of her cheery, loving husband. They have a happy home down there, under Mia’s linoleum floor, with “two cats in the yard.”
Safia’s cats, who frequently escape from the apartment and wind up in the stairwell, also gradually bring Mia and Safia together. In one early scene, Frankie the cat is sitting outside Safia’s closed door, and Mia finds (what I think is) a funny way to let Safia know her cat is in the hallway. This is the first interaction, of sorts, between Mia and Safia and sets up their later acquaintanceship.

Q:  Why is the cat named Chancey?

A: I honestly don’t know. It’s a strange name, and I’m not sure why it came to me. If I think about it now, it makes sense and seems appropriate considering the novel’s subject matter, but I didn’t give his name a lot of thought before assigning it to him.

Q: Does Mia ever mistreat Chancey? I don’t like reading books (and will in fact often refuse to read books) in which animals are mistreated or killed.

A: I refuse, also. No, she never truly mistreats Chancey, but they do have an argument, and he’s in danger of being burned in a fire, at one point.
When you live alone (as Mia does after Jake leaves for Iraq in 2003), and when you have emotional needs (simple affection), sometimes the cat becomes the target of too many expectations. In one scene, when Mia is feeling particularly vulnerable and sees Chancey on the other side of the bathroom door through the small crack near the floor, she reaches through the space with her finger to try to touch his paw. When he immediately backs away, she’s, I think, understandably (and very vocally) angry, even if it’s not Chancey’s fault.

The fire is best left a mystery, here.

Q: Does Chancey ever meet the downstairs cats?

A: No. They never meet.

Q: Does Chancey get to have any fun in the novel?

A: He does. Mia brings home a sucker-dart gun (originally intended as an addition to a care package for Jake, but she decides, after a hellish few days with Jake’s mother, to keep it), and when she uses it to shoot at pundits and politicians on her TV screen, Chancey bats them down. It’s a great cat toy.

If you have any of your own questions about Chancey and the downstairs cats (anyone need a band name?), I’ll be happy to answer them. For more information about Pretty Much True…, please visit my website. You can also purchase the just-released-today(!) novel on Amazon, either in paperback or for your Kindle. (It’s also available through most other book retailers.)



Thank you Kristen. I cannot wait to read it. (Note to readers--I've read much of her work over the years and the girl can write.)

Lastly, the correct answer to the blog post title question is: All of them.