How Did I End Up Writing a Novella About Cats?

I have always been a writer, in the sense that I have always written. I have yet, however, to be a writer who earns money with his craft.

When my office job was becoming more than I could handle, I searched (desperately) for a way to use my writing to earn money. (I'm still searching for that, by the way.) I wasn't an immediate success, clearly. It could be that I'm not serious enough about a writing career; it could be that I'm picky about what I write. I'm working on loosening up the strangle hold on topics because it seems like I could learn to grow as a writer by expanding what I write about, even improving my art in my preferred subjects. Also, it could help attract more readers. I understand that it's important to develop a niche, but there's much to learn out there.

Then, there are novels. Writers write novels, so I decided to write a novel. I thought about what I wanted from this experience and what I wanted to accomplish. I wanted to write, to earn money, and I wanted to enjoy the process. I love mysteries, so I decided that would be my genre. I had a character in mind, even before I began. I had lived with this guy in my mind for a couple of years, in fact, so sitting down to give him life felt natural, and other characters came easily.

… but the cats kept calling me

The actual plot was something else altogether. I researched ways to develop this. There are many good resources out there, free and otherwise. I didn't mind paying for one or two of them because if I want to make money writing I shouldn't be shy about paying other people for theirs. Also, you usually get what you pay for. Free is free. I found "The Story Toolkit", by Susan Bischoff to be the most helpful.

It was slow going. Writing about what you know and experience is one thing; creating worlds and generating plots and scenes is a different thing altogether. I tried just writing whatever came out—AKA pantsing, or flying by the seat of your pants. I got nowhere. I used the Story Toolkit to help me organize it all, but that meant I had to have a plot in mind, and what I had were a bunch of people talking to and about each other in my head. They weren’t interested focusing; they were content just hanging out, drinking wine, and gossiping.

Then cats.

I live with cats. At one point there were 15 here, and before you gag know that we have two acres and that they were all in their own little areas. There were five cats in the house at one point and that's far too many for my taste. But I wasn't going to just throw any of them outside because of a personal preference. When a close friend died over a decade ago, we swooped in and adopted her six cats, which is what led to the surfeit. If we had put any of those cats outside, our friend's ghost would have wreaked havoc on our lives.

I, myself, had three cats to call my own. I'd sit in my room watching them interact, and for the most part they didn't like each other. Raku, the youngest—and a ginormous bundle of cuddliness—loved the other two, but it wasn't reciprocated. There was bickering, the occasional hiss, and a lot of pretending that the other cats weren't there. I'd also watch some of the other cats interact, and stories just generated themselves in my mind. Cats have their own personalities and my mind began evolving those into human personalities. Complete with conversations. In English.

At the time I was taking a workshop where we would be given a prompt to start us off. Using that, we wrote for anywhere from five to twenty minutes. Then we'd critique each other's work. During one of these workshops I decided to write about some of my cats, jotting down a few paragraphs about them.

I took those paragraphs home and they sat in a drawer. I had to pick them up periodically and write more stories, because stories were running around in my head. Then I'd put them aside again, because I was working on my mystery novel. That is a real novel in a real genre, and it is something that one does when one is a writer. I wanted to put my attention on the mystery, but the cats kept calling me.

Most people that I worked with encouraged the mystery. But, eventually I found myself three quarters of the way through a legitimate novella about my cats. I made the decision to work on that project, let it loose in the world, and then I could work on the mystery while the cat novella did what it could do. (Hopefully generate some money around here.) While it wasn't necessarily what everybody advised, once I made the decision they were all on board.

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Raku and Anastasia on the bed, inspiring me to write about them. Demanding it, even.

So, I picked up the Story Toolkit and began plotting out a continuous storyline that would take me from beginning to end. I crafted characters, which was easy because: one, they are my cats, and two, their anthropomorphized personalities had already established themselves in my mind. I observed the very first cat I ever owned, Carmela, walk around, ignoring the other cats, distancing herself, exploring the outdoors and being a loner. Situations created themselves from what I saw my cats doing, things like going under the house and getting too spooked to come out, or lying on the sofa, looking out the glass door. Jumping on the bed, sitting in the window seat. I learned to stitch these things together as I drafted the outline of a narrative arc.

I worked with a writing coach. This was key. He was the same man who gave the workshop that I mentioned earlier. He’s spent his life as a writer, and though it was not necessarily fiction, he knows how storytelling works. He guided me as I struggled. I can tell a good 4k word story, but a novella—and later a novel—takes a different kind of skill. He didn't tell me what to write, not at all. But, as I wrote he let me know which parts were interesting and which parts were flat, and he suggested ways to make it better. One never enjoys hearing that any piece of their art is not good, but we won't grow any other way. Anybody who is outside of your own head will be able to give you insights into things that you don't see, but a professional writer can do so much more.

Holding in my hands my little novella, which I printed from my computer, felt good. It wasn't the exhilarating experience that one might expect; it was a quiet, calm feeling of knowing that I could do it. I took a project from beginning to end despite doubts, fears and a lifetime of creating excellent excuses for not succeeding.

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Carmela, the first to give me inspiration. My muse, my baby, my cat.

And along the way I gained insight into the mystery novel, which I'm tackling again. What I enjoy most about that piece are the characters, the people. I'm the boring guy at the coffee shop who watches people. I enjoy having a good conversation, but I am more fond of watching others have them. Back in its heyday writers of mystery novels would focus on plot. It was a game with their readers, leading them to guess whodunit, and packing a surprise at the end. The writer succeeded if their readers did not guess, and if their ending was believable. I enjoy that, but it's probably not what people are looking for these days, not like they did in the early to mid-Twentieth Century. I'm adding it to my work, but less in the plot, and more in the development of the people populating my novels—their minds and the way they interact.

I've deepened my natural appreciation for characters. I've learned that it is a strength in my writing and one that I need to continue to develop. While I work on learning to create novel-length plots, narrative arcs and consistency in style, I'll focus on learning to have my characters drive the whole thing.

That's what I learned from writing about my cats.

P.S. The writing coach I worked with is Ron Seybold and you can find him at The Writer’s Workshop website.

The Dance of Writing and Painting

I have been writing in one form or another since I was a child. And, as most kids, I've been drawing/painting my whole life. Both have come and gone as I’ve grown, but they’re always back there, in a corner of my mind. The child in me knows that the corner where writing and drawing reside is a park where I can always go to play. Sometimes I forget it’s there for months or years, but I always go back and find it eventually.

I began to take the visual arts more seriously in high school when I had a teacher who encouraged me and made me feel good about my work. This was a very new experience for me, and it changed my life quite a bit at the time. Art was something that I was good at, as it turned out, and I enjoyed exploring different mediums. Drawing, especially, takes me to another plane of consciousness. When I’m drawing, music is more exciting and food tastes better. Life in general is better when my pencil is dancing on the paper. Of course, I’ve studied color theory and painting as well, but drawing is a special experience for me.

Notebook, pen and drawing

I began looking into writing as a more serious endeavor a few years ago. I was in one of those jobs that suck the soul out of you. For my mental health I had to do something else and I had no idea what something else was. For years I had written in a blog where I would write for fun, and where I could recapture a writing skill that had atrophied. When I needed to break away from the soul-sucking job, I began to make a more concerted effort to write regularly, and to learn to do it better.

For me, writing and visual arts feed off of each other. Typically, in my blog, I learned to write posts around a photo or series of photos that I had taken. There are many ways of getting images and illustrations from the internet, but when I've tried to do that it always felt flat to me. When I use my own photos—though they may not be as professionally rendered as ones I could purchase—they are more ME.

Scene from a pocket cemetery in Kimbro Texas

I was walking around a small graveyard in Kimbro Texas one day and I saw a church a few miles away in the background. I was taking pictures of the gravestones, and I captured a few of the church as well, for the heck of it. That experience led to a post about the concept of needing a home, of having a home and about those of us who feel like leaves in the wind. The article revolves around the cemetery pictures, but the feature image is the church. I love that picture, with the clouds seeming to spin around the steeple. It is a Swedish Lutheran church in a town called New Sweden, inasmuch as there is a town called that. New Sweden is an unincorporated community with 60 residents, per Wikipedia, and it’s vaguely near Kimbro, another town that seems to be only a sign on the side of the rode. To me the church looks like it’s in the middle of nowhere, which is why I love it. Walking around the pocket cemetery that day made me a little melancholy, which is how that post came to be, and the church gave me a feeling of comfort and hope, which also found its way into the article. One friend, after reading it, asked if I needed a hug. (Of course I do. I always need a hug.)

I recently finished writing a novelette (Carmela’s Outside) about some of my cats. Writing it, and working on publishing it, inspired me to paint a picture of the main character, Carmela. It illustrates the story perfectly: a curmudgeonly cat on her sofa who learns to enjoy life again outside. And while painting makes me feel happy in its own right—I love the colors and the way it came out—knowing how it represents Carmela as she is in my book transcends the canvas for me. I didn’t set out to illustrate my story, per se. I wanted to paint a picture that captured the same feeling as the story, which came into being from watching my cats in candid moments.

What I love about this relationship between writing and visual art is that they are both in me. My love of photography, drawing and painting produces the pictures, and my writing captures feelings and situations. Both of those come from outside inspiration, but they are filtered in my mind and that is where they interact. I do write as a solo effort. Carmela’s Outside did not have any photos or drawings to inspire me, though several painting ideas did come out of it. And I do draw and paint alone, for the love of doing those activities. But when I find myself stuck with either writing or painting, I know I can lean on the other to get me going. Sometimes in the end, a story I write does not include the photo or picture I used for inspiration; sometimes it doesn’t even seem to be related to it. But in those cases, it was the picture that set the writing in motion. It works both ways, and the best part is that both of them came from me.

Tom Cat

Meet Tom Cat. He plays a rather important role in my novelette Carmela’s Outside, which is due to be published this year by Notebook Publishing.

Tom Cat has been nominated for Best Supporting Character in a Work of Fiction, and he is one of People Magazine’s 50 Most Beautiful Felines for 2018.*

I have lived with the cats Carmela, Anastasia, Raku, Tom Cat, Mozart, and Magritte—among other cats—for years. I watch them as they interact, and I can’t help but develop stories in my head about their lives. I hear their voices talking to each other in a Southern accent. At some point I began writing those stories down. Eventually they led to a short story that would not be content with that short-story status. So, I have a novelette. It will be the first of many works featuring the cats that I have known and loved.

With cats, just as with people, if I sit and watch I don’t know what is truly going on between them, so I take the body language and facial expressions and create lives for them myself. People watching isn’t just for people, and it’s the only way I can imagine writing fiction.

Stay tuned for more details about Carmela’s Outside. In the meantime, you can check out my Society 6 page for related artwork.

Thank you for stopping by.

*The second sentence is a work of fiction, in and of itself.

Looking Forward to 2020

As I've written here before, I, along with a small group of friends, have been pushing each other to expand creatively. Most recently we tasked each other with coming up with five paintings for a studio show in December. I, personally, managed three... well, two and a half. One wasn't quite done, but the day and hour had arrived so I hung it up. It felt good to have work hanging and shown.

All three pictures I painted were of cats. One was Carmela, whom I've written about here in Bemol Ardiente. The second painting, the one that wasn't quite finished, was of PumKin, a beautiful orange cat that lives in the back yard. (The Cat in the Grass from a few posts ago.) But, the real star of the show was Clarice. Clarice is a black cat who is getting up there in age and who has a lot more white in her fur than she used to. The most prominent examples are two white whiskers that stand out on her face. In the painting (and the picture that I used as a guide) she is looking at the person who is holding the camera and letting them know that taking a picture is not an acceptable alternative to actually giving her attention.

A lot of people, as it turns out, have needy black cats. I knew that people would relate to cats, and I've always been fond of the picture that I used as a model. (Have you ever tried to get a cat to sit for a painting? Just save yourself the tears and trouble and use a picture.) But, I was a little blown away by the response to this particular painting. Looking back, I shouldn't have been surprised. In Carmela's painting, she's sitting on a quilt, in profile with the sunlight gently falling on her face. I find it lovely, and people told me that as well. But Clarice is facing the camera, her body language and facial expression clearly say, "Give me attention.” It’s a much stronger image.

People actually requested to be able to buy prints of the Clarice painting. This is new for me, and I don't quite know what to do with it. Of course I want to sell prints; that's why I painted it. But, that part of me who's not used to selling his artwork is screaming that my art isn't worth it yet, that I should be giving it away until I have developed more of a style, a following and a body of work. I gently shut that part of my mind up by putting a chocolate chip cookie in its mouth. That done, I began to make plans on how to sell prints of Clarice, and create a system that can be used for future paintings as well.

Carmela the cat, who is featured in the second painting, is the main character of a novelette that I wrote, "Carmela's Outside", which is due to be published this year. I've mentioned to the publisher that I have a painting, and they are interested. That is doubly exciting for me, and makes me think that I should focus my attention on painting the cats that are in the novelette. Mozart, Tom Cat, Anastasia and Raku are all quite beautiful, each in their own way. I'm working on finishing up the PumKin painting and starting one on Anastasia.

At the moment I'm having the Clarice and Carmela paintings professionally imaged. That is a logical next step. People have also asked me about buying the original of Clarice, but I’m not willing to part with it for a small amount. I can use the digital image to make limited edition giclée prints, which could be sold for a reasonable price. And, I can send a digital image of Carmela to the publisher for their consideration for use on the cover of the novelette. To get the digital images I am using a photography service here in Austin. I had considered taking the picture myself, but there are other people with years of experience and studios set up specifically for that, so I decided that my time would be better spent painting and I'll let the professionals do a better job at photographing the art than I could possibly do on my own.

Now I'm preparing for the May studio tour. And I'm writing on a mystery novel, until I begin working with an editor on Carmela's book. 2020 is stacking up to be a very successful year. I like to think that I laid a good foundation for it during the atrocity that was 2019. As I fought to retain my life and my sanity, I also made plans for what to do once the storm had passed and I found myself still alive. I don't know how I had the presence of mind during all of that, but I'm thankful that I did.

Check out a few related websites: davincibox.com is Tamara Talamantes' page. She is a graphic designer, among other things, and she is one of the friends who painted and showed work. barryperez.com is, not surprisingly, Barry Perez's page. He's the other friend in the group. Barry is a master jeweler who has been making hand-fabricated jewelry for over 30 years. Lastly, a work-in-progress page is elginstudio621.com. This is the studio where it all happens, a place with great energy and where we plan to have many more events—not just visual arts but yoga and writing and ceramics. Keep an eye on it.

Let's here it for new years, new decades, and new beginnings. Make 2020 a great year.

Poor Hungry Cat

How can this poor creature expect to survive if the owners of the house only put out kibble? And canned food? But, won't refill the canned food bowl when she has consumed all of the gravy and is left only with chunks of meat? Starvation is imminent.