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.
