Cats

Since the topic of the week here is pets, there shouldn't be any doubt what *I* will be discussing.

I did have a cat, briefly, when I was a little girl, but it wasn't until I became an adult that I truly became A Cat Person. From 1983-1999, I always had one cat or another: Willie White Paws and Tiger Tom, Spike the aquatic cat, Skook (named for the titled character of a book about a man who gets trapped underground and relies on the imagined Skook to keep alive) and Milo (named for James Crumley's noir-ish detective Milton Milodragovitch).

The last one to die was Skook. He died on a hot morning in July 1999 and later on that same day I heard my daughter's heartbeat for the first time. This has always left me convinced that there's a little bit of Skook's spirit in Jackie. (Please don't cart me away to the loony bin for saying that.) Skook was all white except for a small spot of gray on his forehead, which we referred to as his personality. Jackie was born with an odd beauty mark - not brown or black or even red, but gray. Are you with me on this now? And then there's the fact that both cat and girl (at least when she was a toddler), if I went to the bathroom and forgot to leave the door open, would hurl their little bodies at that closed door: "I just know you are doing something fascinating in there - let me in!"

Once I no longer had living cats, I began inserting fictional cats into many of my books: Punch the cat and Kick the cat in THE THIN PINK LINE/CROSSING THE LINE; Steinway, the black-and-white cat Charlotte finds living in the house she goes to work in in Iceland in HOW NANCY DREW SAVED MY LIFE. My characters always talk to the cats too. Well, of course they do! As for the cats, they always talk back, speaking in various emphases of "Meow!" and yet it's obvious that the heroine is hearing something far more involved than the reader is. Man, those cats are opinionated!

But I've never quite gone as crazy with using cats as I have in the forthcoming series for young readers, THE SISTERS EIGHT, a projected nine-book series I'm writing with my husband and daughter, the first two of which will be out this fall. TSE is about eight little girls, octuplets, whose parents disappear one New Year's Eve when Mom goes out to the kitchen for eggnog, Dad goes to the woodshed for firewood, and neither returns. The Eights must then endeavor to learn what happened to Mom and Dad by discovering their own powers and gifts - a mysterious note tells them to do this - while keeping the wider world from realizing eight little girls are living home alone. The girls' names are Annie, Durinda, Georgia, Jackie, Marcia, Petal, Rebecca and Zinnia. And, oh, would you look at that? There are eight gray-and-white puffball cats in the series too! One for each sister: Anthrax, Dandruff, Greatorex, Jaguar, Minx, Precious, Rambunctious and Zither. And what do you know? As each sister gets her power, the cats get powers too. Man, those are some cats!

Friday, I saw the covers for the first two books, ANNIE'S ADVENTURE'S and DURINDA'S DANGERS, and it may have been the single greatest moment of my writing career. Seeing those amazing covers, realizing the series will in no small part be defined by the illustrator's work both outside and in, knowing how my girl would be bouncing off the walls here when she got home and saw them, and seeing that on each cover, along with showcasing the girl at the center of each story, the illustrator also featured each girl's cat in full power-yielding mode. She got the cats right. Thank you, Universe!

Wow. All this talk about cats. I think maybe it's time I broke down and finally got myself another one. Or two. You know, so they can have companionship and stage kitty coups when I'm gone too long, doing things like knocking over fully stocked dressers and heavy TV sets with their powerful back paws.

So, tell me your experiences with cats or about your favorite pets. Really, even if it's not about a cat, even if it's about - *gasp*! - a dog, I'll listen.

Be well. Don't forget to write.

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