How I Became A Famous Writer

(A True Story)

Megan Lindholm

Copyright 2006

One of the advantages to renting a house with a backyard is that you have a bit of privacy in the city. One of the drawbacks is that you can hear everything that goes on in your neighbor's backyard, from the sexy splashing in the hot tub at 2 a.m. to the smacking of their wayward children at 4 p.m. I live next door to a dysfunctional family with a barking dog and a predilection for rap music. It does not make my life any easier.

They had a cat, once. The first time I knew of it was when I heard screaming from the adjacent yard, and cries of "No, Spunky, no! Bad, bad kitty! Oh my god, it was a chipmunk. Gerald, it was a chipmunk. Oh, my god, it's still alive. Gerald, it's still alive. Do something, do something!"

I won't describe the dialogue of the next fifteen minutes. Screams of the missus, followed by hunting yowls and growls of the possessive cat, interspersed with male cursing and roars, punctuated by shrieked observations from their three children. That's as much as you need to know. It all culminated with an announcement from Gerald. "That does it! My kids shouldn't have to see this kind of thing. Violence is no damn good for kids. I'm killing that damn cat. I'm taking it out in the alley and shooting it right now."

I live in the sort of neighborhood where such threats are actually carried out. I set down my bag of birdseed and went out the tall wooden gate into the cluttered alley behind our homes. I met Gerald there. He had a cheap shiny handgun in one fist and a large orange cat dangling from the other. There was blood around the cat's mouth, probably the chipmunk's. The blood on Gerald's freckled forearms and neck was clearly his own. The cat growled as it dangled.

"What do you want?" he demanded sullenly as I stepped out of the gate.

Gerald and I have history with each other. The first day I moved in, he told me that he'd always used the parking spot right in front of my door and he wasn't going to stop now. A sagging Buick that hasn't moved in two years occupies the parking spot in front of his house. Because he doesn't seem to work, the parking spot in front of my house is always full of his car when I get home. I end up cruising the neighborhood looking for a parking spot every evening. It's funny how small things like that can rankle and burn. As I result, I never pass up the opportunity for a little confrontation with the man. I spoke firmly. "What I don't want is you letting off that gun right behind my house."

"Or?" he sneered.

"Or I'll call the cops," I sneered back. "It's against the law to fire a gun inside city limits." I showed him my cell phone. They'd cancelled my service last month for non-payment, but he didn't know that.

The orange cat twisted suddenly in his grip. Its wide yellow eyes locked with mine. "Save me!" he commanded me.

"Fine," Gerald assured me. He didn't even glance down at his talking cat. He shoved the pistol into the waistband of his shorts. "You won't let me shoot him quick, I'll just have to strangle the frigging cat."

I stared as he set his freed hand to the cat's throat. The cat struggled frantically in his grip. "Save me, and I'll make you a writer!" the cat offered desperately.

"Wait," I heard myself say. "You don't have to kill him. I'll take the cat."

"Yeah, right. And he'll be right back through the hedge, shitting in my kids' sandbox and tracking cat prints on my car. No way. I've had it with this cat. He's dead."

"A famous writer," gasped the dangling, struggling cat.

"I'll give you ten bucks for him," I heard myself say.

Gerald goggled at me. A moment later his little blue eyes squinted with indecision. Which was worth more to him, ten bucks or the chance to thwart his annoying neighbor? "What you want him for?" he demanded, suddenly suspicious.

"I got rats in my basement," I extemporized. "I figure I could lock him in there, he'd clean them out for me. Cheaper than an exterminator."

"Oh, yeah?" He considered, his hands still around the cat's throat. "Exterminator costs a lot more than ten bucks."

"Maybe. But rat traps are cheap." I turned as if to go.

"Gimme the ten bucks, and the cat's yours. But if I ever see him in my yard again, I'll damn well shoot both of you."

"Yeah. Right."

I was skeptical only in that he'd succeed. I didn't doubt he'd try. I actually had a ten spot in my pocket, my coffee money for the week. It saved me the awkwardness of going back into my house and grubbing under the couch cushions and in the backs of drawers for money. I held the bill out to him, and he snatched it with one hand as he thrust the cat at me with the other. He intended the cat to claw me, and he did. For an animal that had been begging me to save his life, he seemed none too grateful as he shredded his way up my chest. I immobilized it in a bear hug, and had to endure Gerald's wheezing laughter as I carried the beast back into my yard and shut the gate. I took him all the way into my house and shut the door before I released him. He immediately darted behind the refrigerator.

"Hey, cat!" I called. "What about making me a famous writer?"

The cat didn't answer. It didn't even come out.

"Here, kitty, kitty," I tried. No good. I poured a saucer of milk. No luck. I opened a can of tuna. Nothing. I hadn't moved the frig since I'd rented the house, and I wasn't about to try it now. After a few more tries at coaxing him out, I gave up in disgust and went back into the yard to finish filling my bird feeders. I'd imagined the whole damn thing. That was the only possible explanation. The only thing more disturbing than that was that I'd given that stupid bastard my coffee money for the week in exchange for a cat I didn't want.

Don't get me wrong, cats are okay. I don't kick them on the streets, but I've never connected with them either. If I'd wanted a pet, I'd have chosen something affectionate and loyal like a dog; or something undemanding and enjoyable, like a canary. Not a cat. Yet now I had one.

Not that I saw much of it. When I went back into the house, the milk and tuna were gone. I hunted him through the house. "Here, kitty, kitty. Here, kitty, kitty, kitty." In that falsetto voice that is supposed to be irresistible to cats. Nothing. No sign of him. The house is an old one, storage under the stairs, broken covers on the return air vents. The damn cat could be anywhere and probably was. I gave it up. That night I left a window open and hoped it would just leave.

I lay in bed for a while before I slept. I listened for the cat moving around in the house but heard nothing. Stupid. It was probably already gone, along with my ten bucks. Well, that was a drop in the bucket compared to all I'd already sunk into my writing dream. Just how badly did I want to be a writer anyway? Nothing I'd tried had worked, not the writing workshops, not the on-line newsgroup advice, not even the manuscript critiquing service. I'd looked at self-publishing. Even I could tell it was a scam, and even if I'd been tempted, I couldn't afford it. No roads led to Rome. There was some secret to it that I just didn't know. I was beginning to suspect that it was all in whom you knew, and I didn't know anyone. Besides, I had to get up in the morning and get down to work early. The catalog sale began tomorrow and I had to put up all the rack headers for it. It was our big Ten Percent Off Storewide Sale. You'd think one sign on the door could explain it. Nope. I had to put a "Ten Percent Off!" sign on just about every rack in the store.

I was up at six, showered and dressed by seven, and heading out the door at seven-thirty before I remembered. I had a cat now. And no cat box. And I'd fed it yesterday. Garbage in, garbage out. Tuna in. Cat out. I made a quick search for him, disturbing generations of dust bunnies under my bed and discovering my umbrella behind the couch. The clock kept right on ticking while I didn't find him. If I left a window open for him, he might go out to do his little thing. Just as likely the neighborhood kids would come in and do theirs. I decided I'd rather take a chance on cat shit. I made a final attempt.

"Cat!" I yelled. "I hope you can hear me. Don't crap in my house until I get back. I'll bring home a cat box for you." And I left.

Retail sales that day were just as exciting as they always were. The high point was when a woman presented me with a pair of slacks for $22.99 and demanded to know how much they'd cost. "Well, ten percent would be $2.29, so they'd be $20.70," I told her. "That's all?" She was outraged. "Some ten percent off sale!" she huffed, dumped them by my register and stormed out. On the way home from work, I bought a cat box, litter, and six cans of Figaro cat food. My ten dollar cat was now closer to the thirty dollar range.

I got home, dumped a can of cat food onto a chipped plate and set it on the floor. When I went to put the cat box in the bathroom, I found the poop in the bathtub. Wonderful. I finished setting up the box, and then went through every room in the house going, "Here, kitty, kitty, kitty." When I got to kitchen, the cat food was gone. No sign of the cat.

I heated up some chunky soup and made a grilled cheese sandwich to go with it. I ate it, and then took my coffee upstairs to my office. It's the tiny second bedroom upstairs. It still had peeling nursery bunny wallpaper from the previous tenants. In my office I have a particle board desk, a chair with wheels, a lamp, and a computer with a 486 chip in it. I know. It's still faster than I am, and it was cheap. I figured an editor couldn't tell I'd written a story on a second-hand computer as long as I printed it out nicely. It's the story that counts, right? That's what they told me at all the weekend writers' workshops I'd ever attended. The story is what counts. I had a skinny file folder with a half-dozen rejection slips in it to show just how much the story counted. I was convinced there was some trick to getting published, some secret that I hadn't discovered yet, but I intended to keep trying until I did. I clicked my set-up on at the powerstrip and sat down in my chair. I started Word. Nice white screen. I typed my name, address, phone number and email in the upper right hand corner and scrolled down the page. I centered up the cursor, pondering a title.

A little while later, I opened up a game of solitaire on top of it just to loosen up my mouse hand.

After a while, I got up and walked through the house again, going, "Here, kitty, kitty, kitty." Then I went into my bedroom and watched short pieces of twenty-six different television programs. At ten, I went back into my office, shut down Word, clicked off the powerstrip, and went to bed. I watched short pieces of about seven more television shows, then turned off the TV and went to sleep. At six the next morning I got up.

Cut to the chase. After three days of feeding the invisible cat, I went nuts one night. I went through the house, room by room, looking in every space that was conceivably large enough to hold a cat. I found nothing. But the cat food dish in the kitchen was still empty when I went in there the next morning.

Okay. Fourth day. It was so obvious. I left the can and the plate and the can opener on the counter. I didn't open it. I went upstairs and turned on my set up. I sat in my chair and looked at the screen. About ten minutes later, the orange cat came and sat in my office door. "Meow," he said.

"Nothing doing," I told him. "You promised you'd make me a writer. A famous writer. And you've done squat for me. No help, no food."

"Meow," he said.

I ignored him. I pretended I was writing. I put a header on the paper, and spaced down to the middle. I wrote a title. My Stupid Cat

"Okay," said the cat, a bit sulkily. "I suppose I have to point it out to you. Lesson One. If you want to be a writer, expect to do the writing yourself. Alone. No one does it for you; no one tells you what to write. It's you and the keyboard. Get used to it. Lesson Two you figured out on your own: Don't just hand it to them right away. Give them time to want it. Works for readers as well as it does for cats."

I stared at the screen. "Some lessons. Big help."

"Meow."

I ignored him. I ignored him for about seventeen minutes. He sat in the door and said 'meow' at random intervals. I think if the sound had been regular, I could have stood it. But after a while, I realized that I was waiting, fingers poised, for the next meow. When I stood up, the cat whisked away. I went downstairs to the kitchen. No cat. I opened the food and dumped it in his dish. No cat. Good. As I went back up the stairs, he spoke from somewhere in the dim room. "My cat box stinks. Better take the crap out soon."

"If you're so damn smart, fix it yourself," I muttered. I went back into my office and looked at the screen for awhile. Then I shut down Word, saving my title page. TV. Bed. Six Ayem. Real life.

When I got home, I found cat poop in the bathtub. I stamped through the house, yelling for a while. Then I cleaned it up, and scooped all the crap out of the cat box. I hadn't opened the can of cat food and I didn't intend to. I went into my office and turned on my set-up. I opened my file and under the title I wrote, 'I hate my stupid cat. He poops in my bathtub and won't help me be a famous writer even through he promised me he would.'

"Meow."

"Go away. Go starve."

"Meow."

"Why should I feed you? You don't care if I never become a famous writer."

"Meow."

> "No help, no food."

The cat sat in the doorway for a while longer. Then he licked his butt in a way that was clearly intended to be insulting. I ignored him. After a while he stood up. "All right. I don't know why you need it put into words. I'm teaching you all the time. Think about it." He looked at his paw and extended his claws one at a time, counting on them. "Writing anything every day is better than writing nothing. Writing makes you a writer, not just thinking about it. Take editorial suggestions. When they tell you the crap stinks, take it out." He stood up and started down the staircase, tail high. "Meet expectations. Keep your end of the deal even when it seems editors are not holding up theirs."

I gritted my teeth and followed him. In the kitchen, I opened his food and watched him eat it. Afterwards, he sat and washed his face. "I'm going upstairs to write," I said. I was sort of hoping he'd say he'd go with me and tell me what to write.
Instead he just looked at me. "Meow."

"Fine." I snapped. "I'll do it myself."

I left the kitchen and started to walk through the dim living room. As I reached the bottom of the stairs, his voice followed me. "That's right. And you owe me cat food for that one tomorrow."

I wrote eight more sentences that night. TV. Bed. Six.

I was fair. I opened the cat food when I got home and set it out. While I was heating the Cheez-Whiz and chili in the microwave, the cat came in and ate his food. Then he watched me eat mine. His eyes were fixed on my dish. "Want some?" I asked him at last.

He looked at me greenly for a time. Then he said carefully, "Anything that goes together that easily is not likely to be worth consuming." He stood up and walked out of the kitchen.

"I suppose that's another writing lesson," I sneered.

In the door of the kitchen, he paused to quirk his tail at me. Then he vanished.

I finished eating. Have you ever been eating something you've eaten a lot of times, and then stopped and actually thought about what it tasted like? Like when you realize that most 'chocolate-flavored' stuff actually just tastes 'brown'? And 'chicken flavor' is garlic and salt? I decided to remove Cheez-Whiz and chili from my menu rotation.

Then I went upstairs and turned on my set-up. I looked at what I had written about the cat. It was childish. Scatological. Funny in a twisted sort of way. I imagined it as a nasty child's book and liked it even better. I wrote six more pages that night. 'I hate my cat because he licks his butt at me.' 'I hate my cat because he looks at my food the way I look at his food.' When I looked up, it was eleven. I printed out what I had, not because it was perfect, but because I hadn't written that much in one sitting for a long time. Maybe never before. So I printed it out and I stacked the clean white sheets with their black type on the corner of my desk and looked at them. It felt like I'd done something. Then I went to bed.

Six.

> I came home and fed the cat. Then I had to go to the laundromat. I didn't want to. I actually wanted to go upstairs and write. That was something I thought about as I watched my laundry wrestling in the dryer. I'd never wanted to hurry home and write before. I mean, I'd always wanted to be a writer, but this was the first time I'd actually wanted to write.

When I got home, I put my basket of laundry in my bedroom and went straight across to my office. When I turned on the light, I saw my clean white sheets. They were all over the floor. They had cat prints on them. "Cat!" I roared, but of course he didn't come. His dry voice floated up to me from somewhere in the house.

"Not my fault. They were unbalanced. They fell over on their own."

I gathered them up. They were ruined. I'd have to print them out all over again. But when I opened the file to reprint it, I noticed a spelling error on the first page. Then I changed a passive sentence to active. I dropped half of the stuff on the second page-too much potty talk. I threw away the third page, too. The fourth, fifth, and sixth were pretty good, but putting the sixth page as the first one made it funnier. But that meant I had no ending.

I spent two hours sitting there. I wrote twelve endings. None of them were funny, none of them were good. At eleven, I gave up and went to bed. At two, I got up and went back into my office. I turned on my set-up. Balance. That was the whole problem, it had no balance. You can't have continuously funny, or it isn't funny. Not even poop can be funny all the time. I tried alternating text. I hate my cat because he poops in my bathtub. I love my cat because he washes his face with sunshine. An hour later, I had paired sentences about a love/ hate relationship with an orange cat. I went back and changed the title to 'My Cat Poops In My Bathtub." I was grinning. My nephew would love this. I saved the file on my hard drive and onto a disk and went to bed.

Seven.

Late to work.

I got chewed out by the boss, but it bothered me far less than it should have. The whole time I was hanging clothing and ringing sales, there was a part of me that was going over and over the story. I was amazed how much of it was so clear in my mind. I knew which words I had to change on which pages, and shortly after lunch I was hit by a sudden revelation . . . that the story should not end up on upbeat, sappy, nice thing the cat does but on a horrid thing that still doesn't change how the owner or the reader feels about him. I cranked blank register tape out of the top of my machine to make a note to myself, and added a second note to buy a pocket notebook and never be without it again.

I left work whistling, after turning down two extra hours of overtime. Money be damned. I had to write. I got home, set out the cat's food, and went straight upstairs. I could eat later. Right now, I needed to finish the story, add that final touch that would make it a shining gem. It was going to be so easy.

I sat down at my desk and turned on my set up, fairly tingling with writing energy.

Four hours later I left the mutilated mess that had been my story on my computer screen. As I went out of my office, I turned off the lights, leaving my words luminescing like swamp gas in the dark room. I went slowly down the stairs, trying to understand what had gone wrong. Each simple cut and addition had necessitated other tiny cuts and additions, and subsequent discoveries of repetitions and contradictions, and more cuts and pastes and fix-ups and patches until my pristine story now had more seams than Frankenstein's monster. I felt queasy at what I had done. It seemed impossible to go back and restore it. Why had I ever thought I wanted to be a writer anyway?

I didn't usually drink, but tonight I needed a good stiff drink, I decided. I put on my windbreaker and left my house headed toward the corner tavern in the Proctor district. There was a misting rain and the temperature was dropping. Perfect weather for my mood. I'd walked about a block and a half when I became aware of a little orange shadow padding alongside me. As I walked under a street-lamp, he suddenly shot past me and up a tree over-hanging my path. I stopped under it. "Go home." I told him sourly. "You can't go to a bar with me."

He suddenly dropped out of the tree onto my back and then shawled himself around my neck. I'd never even petted him before, and now he was draped across my shoulders like a friend's arm and purring. "I don't know what to do," I said.
"Back up," he suggested quietly.

"I will. But only to take you home." I walked slowly back up the street to my house. Most of the windows were lit with the blue glow of a television presiding over its captive audience. I counted the TV windows, proving to myself that no one sat up at night and read anymore, that I was pursuing a career in a dying medium. All today's kids did was play video and computer games. The only way My Stupid Cat was going to sell was if I converted it into a game where you got points for killing the cat before it could poop in the bathtub.

> I opened the door to my house and set the cat inside, intending to shut the door behind him and head for the bar. The moment his feet touched the floor, he streaked up the stairs. An instant later, I heard the unmistakable sound of cat feet on a computer keyboard. I was suddenly fiercely protective of my work. "Don't!" I yelled and raced up the stairs and into my office. I had a split-second view of my story, completely highlighted on the screen. Then an orange foot came down on the delete key. It vanished.

I threw my coat on the floor and flung myself into my chair. "You stupid cat!" I bellowed, and he leaped out of reach and raced out the door. I sat in the chair, panting and looking at the blank screen. There was a way to undo that last action. I knew there was, I'd read about it on some help screen once. I pulled down the help menu and typed in 'undo'. Nothing helpful there, big surprise, that. I pulled down menus at random, looking for an 'undo your last big mistake' option. I found a way to do something I thought would work and tried it. It didn't. I tried three other things, none of which worked. And by now, I wasn't trying to undo my last action, I was trying to undo an action about six actions back. By the time I gave up and admitted my story was gone, it was too late to walk to a bar and I was too heartsick. I turned off my machine and went to bed.

I was having to code in the sale prices by hand the next day because the store computer system was glitching when I suddenly realized the obvious. I'd saved the story to disk. It wasn't gone. I'd lost a day's work, not a month's. It was fixable: all was not lost. I was so cheerful the rest of the afternoon that my boss told me that if I kept up my improved attitude, I might get a raise.

After work, I raced home, pausing only to pick up a burger, shake and fries. I ate standing in my kitchen, dumped food in the worthless cat's dish, and headed up to my machine. After a heart-stopping search, I found my disk, cleverly concealed in the a-drive of my computer. I navigated to my story and opened it up, prepared to start my editing process again.

But as I read through it, I realized it didn't need that much. Yesterday, I'd been over-editing myself. Tonight, I made only surgical cuts, a word here, a sentence there. I had been right about the ending, and I changed that. But all the rest of it was fine. It was smooth, it flowed transparently, carrying the reader along into the story. It was fine. I printed it out and held the pages in my lap. My story was done. "Now what?" I asked the quiet room.

"You submit it," the cat said quietly from his corner. "With a self-addressed stamped envelope."

"Isn't that a bit old fashioned?" I asked reluctantly. "I could e-mail this off to a dozen editors tonight. I might hear something back by tomorrow."

"Or you might not," the cat said. His slit eyes met mine unwaveringly. "Trust me," he said. "Use paper. Paper is real."

"Right," I said skeptically. But I took out the brown envelopes and postage stamps and big paperclips that I'd bought almost two years ago when I had believed that by acquiring the trappings of a writer, I could become a writer. My copy of Writer's Market was a year out of date and dusty. It still had the yellow Post-Its sticking out of the pages from when I had spent several months ardently studying the markets, thinking that if I knew the markets, I'd turn into a writer. It seemed kind of dumb now. Studying the markets was important, but only writing made you a writer. This book was just a tool to use after you'd done the real work. I leafed through it, debating where to send my story. The cat's paw shot out suddenly, trapping a yellow Post-It.

"That one?" I asked.

He made no reply. I glanced at the muddy paw print by an editorial address and recalled what I knew of them. Yes. That one.

I prepared my return envelope, put stamps on it, folded it, and addressed the outer envelope. I reached for my pristine manuscript. The cat was sitting on it.

"Do you mind?" I asked him, and he leisurely stood, stretched and then stepped off it. The damp outline of a cat's feet, butt, and tail was clearly visible on the front page. "Oh, great!" I snarled at him. "Now I've got to print it out again."
"Not really," he assured me. "Just send it like that."

"With a cat butt print on it? Well, what editor wouldn't be impressed with that?" I asked sarcastically.
He lifted a paw to his mouth, but I could not tell if it was to lick it or to hide a cat smile. "It's not the editor you have to worry about," he told me around his paw. "It's the editor's cat."

I stared at him. "What do you mean?"

He dropped his paw and grinned openly at me. The sight was a bit unnerving. "Oh, come on. All neophyte writers know the questions. Now it's time for you to admit the answer was always right there in front of you." He made his voice whiny and pleading. "Why is it so hard to get published? Why does that jerk get published when his stuff is no better than mine? What is it he knows that makes editors buy from him? Is there a secret handshake? Do you have to know the editor personally?" He dropped his voice to his usual confidential tone. "Don't tell me you haven't wondered those things, as you lie in bed grinding your teeth over the unfairness of it all."

My heart suddenly dropped into my shoes. "There is a big secret then? At all the writers' workshops, they always say there is no Big Secret. They say it's all just hard work and market research and the willingness to make revisions and learn as you go and . . ."

My voice trailed away. The cat's grin had gone wider. Ah. I saw how a cat might disappear behind his grin. Did that mean that Lewis Carrol had known the Big Secret, too?

"Writers have cats," he explained to me smugly, as if I would have been too dim ever to grasp it on my own. "Treat your cat right, and he'll put in a good word for you with your editor's cat. That's how it's done, my friend. It's not who the writer knows. It's who the writer's cat knows."

And there it was. So simple and so obvious. I couldn't believe I hadn't figured it out for myself. All those book-jacket photos of writers and their cats: That was what they were about! It was the "Purloined Letter" all over again, the secret hidden in plain sight. He saw me accept it. He nodded at the cat-stamped manuscript. "Put it in the envelope," he said quietly, and I did. I mailed it off.

I wanted to spend the next evening prowling about the house, wondering where my manuscript was now, how long it would take to reach New York and then to land on an editor's desk. I didn't allow myself to do that. I set it out of my mind and sat down at my desk and went through my idea file. I found one that suddenly seemed as if it would work well with another idea in the file. When I put the two together, they clashed in an interesting way. In no time at all, I was typing away, wondering how, if at all, I was going to get my hero out of the pickle he was in, but content to write on in the certainty that my Muse would help me find the solution. I wrote it in a week, let it cool for a week, and then sent it off with a small tuft of cat hair attached to a tiny flea scab stuck to the back of the first page.

It was nine weeks before I heard anything on my first tale, but then, who expects any cat to act promptly on anything? One day I came home and there was a white envelope in my mailbox rather than the dreaded brown one addressed to me in my own hand-writing. Inside was a brief note from the editor and a contract. A smudge on one corner could have been a coffee-ring. Or the faint brush print of a damp tail. I raced through the house, shouting, "Cat! Cat! We sold a story!"

He didn't even bother to come out of wherever it is he goes. I think cats take these things with more equanimity than their writers do. So, by myself, I signed my first contract with shaking hands, put it in a fresh envelope and sent it back to my editor. My editor. I said it aloud, slowly. What a wonderful combination of words!

By the time the check actually came, four months later --- I think cats run the accounting offices at all major publishers, too --- I'd written five more stories and placed three of them. I was a real writer. The check was almost enough to pay a month's rent. Instead we bought one of those cat tree things to go in the office, a pound of shrimp treats, several baggies of Meowie-Wowie from ksmenterprises.com and upgraded our computer. A beginning writer has to be willing to re-invest the profits in necessary equipment.

It wasn't a magic charm. I still didn't sell every story I wrote. I well remember the one that came back with a form rejection slip clipped the first page, and the remnants of a hair-ball hacked onto my conclusion. My cat just shrugged it off. "You can't please everyone every time. Maybe he just had bad fish for breakfast." I re-printed the final page and let it fly again. The manuscript sold to the second editor.

And so it has gone. I'm not an over-night success. I don't think any writer truly is. I still have a day job, and there are still evenings when it's difficult to sit down at the machine and tap out the words. It has been several years since my cat came to me. He has grown a bit rotund and allows himself more time off. Recently he brought home an intern. She is small, shy, and calico, and so dedicated that she sleeps on the desk with her head on my Rolodex. Last week I sent off a story with her noseprint on the corner of the title page. We are all awaiting the response, a bit anxiously, I'll admit.

The day job continues to be annoying, but on most days I think of it as temporary and a source of idea and dialogue. It was never, I have discovered, about the money. It was about being heard and obtaining my own small measure of fame. Recently I did a reading and a signing in my local bookstore. On the way out to my car, two cats came from the darkness to rub against my ankles and mark me as one of their own.

Life is good.

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