Merly on Monday

I think it's telling that I am often unsure how to spell this cat's name. It was named by my husband's sister. It has something to do with the wizard Merlin, and I think it was originally Merlyn, but got shortened to Merly. His family often has issues with pet names. They evolve and change. He tends to call all the male cats "Buddy" anyway.

The surgery has been postponed for now. They found fluid in her stomach they tapped to run more tests, but the third vet to look at her suspects several masses in her intestines. I'm thinking there is also some bad reason she tilts her head all the way to the side to drink water now.

I knew something bad was coming a couple of months ago when she was dancing on the table when I was trying to do my weekly bills, just like always, and when she left, my bills were flecked with tiny brown spots. That was probably the beginning of the blockage.

Merly on Sunday

My prayer today was that Merly would die on the deck while she was stretching out in the warm sun, really enjoying all the things she likes about the backyard. The prayer was that God would let her go peacefully in a favorite place. That didn't happen, and tomorrow morning we have to keep the appointment for exploratory surgery, so I am hoping that this means the second part of my prayer will be answered, that if she has to go through it, she'll survive it and thrive again.

Distractions

Michael Jackson and Farah Fawcett died today, which totally took my mind off the possibility one of my cats is also dying. She is down to 9 pounds from 14, and we don't have much evidence she is eating or using the litter box. We drove back to our old vet across town because he's the best, and I think he's mentally preparing us for intestinal tumors, even though he gave a range of possibilities.

Even though I have had this cat for almost 14 years, I seem to have just four photos of her. Merly was never the cutest, just the heaviest and the hungriest and sometimes the most emotionally needy. Otherwise, she kept to herself. It is sad seeing her get so thin.

Five Books Sold!

I received a 1099-Misc in the mail today for royalty income and I could not figure out what it was, until it dawned on me maybe someone actually bought my book (same name as this blog) on Amazon Kindle. Apparently I sold five copies last summer. The royalty deposit was so small, $11.20, I didn't notice it had gone into my checking account.

Anyway, thank you if you were one of the buyers.

All My Hopes are Kindled

I put the manuscript of the book on Amazon's Kindle for a $7.99 download. I only have to sell 6,258 downloads of it and all my problems are solved, although I don't know the cut Amazon takes, so maybe I'll have to sell 7,000 downloads.

That's going to be quite a job. I know J.K. Rowling didn't start like this.

The Original Preface to the Book

This is the original preface to my cat book, which doesn't seem to be going over very well with the agents. I thought I had to start with a dramatic scene, and then follow with some research explaining where I was going with the book. I guess this is a bad idea. I tried rewriting it, but then decided I didn't need it at all. So I post the rewritten preface here, and abandon it.


A Life in Cats
Preface

Going to the pet store is always hard. This evening it was harder because I’d been rebuffed trying to overmother my son and the cats in the store cages this evening were particularly pathetic. They seemed to all need a mother, and I was willing to serve.

(The original preface is actually a couple of pages of the overmothering incident. My son will be glad I chose to dump this.)

A cat rescue lifts me into another realm where I am noble and sacrificing. All my travails fall away, at least temporarily, as I pour out love and succor to yet another cat. I’m a nurturer, a problem-solver, a fixer, always wanting to wade in and right every disorder. It’s the classic breeding ground for cat hoarding. When things are broken – relationships, people, contraptions, hearts -- I can’t stand it until they’re fixed or replaced.

An older kitten in the rescue society’s cages caught my eye. Well, he’s cute. He’ll find a home soon, I smiled, but then….in the cage next to him was a huge, sleeping white cat, her shaved belly facing the glass, a gruesome surgical scar across it. Oh. my gosh, what happened to her?

The card on the cage said she had been rescued from the shelter – probably on execution day, which was the rescue club’s modus operandi. She had recently had kittens, but they all died. How could that happen? Why the scar? The urge to grab her out of the cage was enveloping me like a fog, so I quickly turned away, but there was another cat with a surgical scar. “Found injured and wandering loose at the Taco Bell,” his card said. Who is going to adopt these cats? Who has the heart for such cursed cats except me?

All the while, my husband stood at the counter, offering his credit card for the weekly $100 worth of supplies we couldn’t afford for the eight cats we already have.

It’ll be hours, maybe days before I can shake off the need to get all the cats I saw at the store. I have to be strong. But when everything else around me is falling apart, strong too often translates into what is easy, and that’s getting another cat.

This is how it begins. I am on the way. The typical animal hoarder is a middle-aged to elderly white female. They have a problem letting go of anything and cannot face the thought that an unwanted animal might be euthanized, or in my case, even adopted by people who won’t take proper care of them. Psychologists suspect many hoarders had chaotic childhoods and unstable parents. They look to animals for the unconditional love they still desire.
That would be me.

Hoarders need animals under their control, yet they don’t always have the best interests of the animals in mind when they can’t afford to medically care for every one of them.

There’s no cure for this. When cat hoarders are discovered, arrested, separated from their cats, treated and released, they start all over again. The recidivism rate is 100 percent, even with counseling!


(Here, thinking I had to justify the book's premise, I presented several case studies of cat hoarders. They were all pretty gruesome. Maybe that's why one of the agents who gave me the most attention ultimately said to come back when I had a funny book.)

One story that entranced me was about a professional woman in California who rented apartments and office space, and then filled them with cats. She had more than 600. She successfully argued her own case before the courts, and as soon as she was released, started hoarding again.

How do you end up with 600 cats? How does something like that begin? This is how.

(The next chapter was like a second first chapter, an overview of the madness we live in now with the cats. I've edited that chapter down, but now I'm wondering if I should just plunge in with the beginning of my life in cats and get on with it. In any case, by the time I finish this second editing of the entire book, I'm going to post it on Kindle.)

Another Close Call with Agents

I had the perfect storm going. I queried an agent with whom I had a remote connection. At the writer's conference we were told figuring out some kind of connection with an agent is vital if you want them to read past your first paragraph. She had sold a book in which I was a character. That got my foot in the door. Another person in the agency asked for the proposal by email. Door is staying open. A third person in the agency tells me he was given the proposal; that his mother has five cats, and he wants to see a sample. Door still open, even though I can tell I've been bounced down to the junior agent, but I heard at the conference that they're the ones who'll try the hardest.

I never know what to send. It's not like one chapter is stronger than another. It's all one big story. A few parts can stand alone, and I usually send them, but it's hard to get a grasp of the book's scope when you read about one cat, when the book is really about a long chain of cat encounters that somehow make the bridge of my life's journey.

Usually I send Neelix's chapters, but this time I went with Arbee. Two days later, I got the not-for-us email. And you know, I've been disappointed so much in life, it's pretty much what I expect (time to get another cat?!), but this time I cannot give up. This is all I have now. This is the last rescue attempt I can launch, so I have to keep trying. I just don't know where I'm going to find this miraculous agent that I miraculously connect with and who embraces the book.

My online buddy says I should self-publish, but it's not about getting published so much as making a small, temporary windfall that will put us back on a level playing field and give me an identity for my last years since I failed to get a career going early enough in my life to benefit from one. I can be the Crazy Cat Lady. I still have time to do that. I have to believe all these kitties were sent to save me, which would be ironic since I thought I was saving them.

Postscript: After I wrote this and went home, I found another rejection in my mail. Wow, bad day.

Make it Funny

I went to the James River Writer's Conference this year. I sold stuff on eBay to raise the money for the admission fee. Part of the package was five minutes with an agent. Of the three agents taking appointments, I had already been rejected by two via mail last year.

The third was immediately encouraging, telling me a book proposal about an Iowa library cat who had just died sold for $1.25 million dollars. (I'm sorry, but that book is not going to sell that well. It's one cat that lives in a library.) She gave me her card and said I could send the proposal. I imagine she does that with all 20 people who interviewed with her during the conference. How do you say no when you're face to face?

I sent the proposal; they asked for three chapters. My first two chapters are not the strongest since they have to set up the whole book. I do open with a family story, but then it's on to the set-up. I never know which chapter to pick after the first, since they all seem equally balanced.

Anyway, Mollie, the "reader" for this agent, wanted a funnier book. My book is funny, just not hilarious from the very first word. It alternates funny and tragic, as all lives with pets do. I can think of a different way to approach the book opening and I'll work on it. And I've changed the name of the book from The Evolution of a Crazy Cat Lady to the less serious Confessions of a Crazy Cat Lady.

The Cat Turns On Me

Maybe I engage in risky behaviors when my husband is away playing a gig hoping something bad will happen to me and he'll feel bad that he wasn't there to save me and never leave me again. I swim alone in the dark. I let the cats out. And I am determined to bring them all back in before he comes home, even though it would be easier to leave the problem cases out until he came home and let him deal with it. They come right to him when he calls anyway. And by 3 in the morning, they're more than ready to come in. At midnight, the party is just getting started.

Saturday night I swam in the dark alone. Only Arbee was out, and I held the downstairs door open for her to come in. Unless she's spooked by something, she takes a very long time to decide whether or not to come in. Outside she has the whole backyard and no one to bother her. Inside, she usually has to spend her time under the bed or crouched behind the litter boxes to keep from getting into unprovoked spats with other cats. She doesn't care for cats or people.

I thought I was safe because the whole time I was floating in the pool, I could see all the other cats in upstairs windows staring at me, wondering why I was out with the crickets in the dark and they weren't. Arbee was still contemplating whether or not to come in when out of nowhere Seven and Chatter made the trip downstairs and shot out the door. I chased after Seven because once out, he's gone or at least I can't catch him. He won't come to me. Chatter answers to his name and docilely lets you pick him up.

As Seven shot by, I reached down and grabbed his tail. He didn't like that and let me know it, but I didn't want to let him go into the night. I held on. Big mistake. He flipped around and sunk his teeth into my lower leg and grabbed the rest of my leg with all his claws and gave me a good rake. Then, for good measure, he nipped my wrist and slapped Chatter in the face a few times just for standing too close.

I let go of his tail. He took off over the fence. Damn. That hurt. And now I'm gushing blood. I bleed all over the bathroom floor. In the bathtub, it looks like "Psycho" going down the drain. It won't stop bleeding. Now I'm sitting on the floor with the bandages box, slapping them on. One, two, gauze pad, tape, more gauze, more tape. It takes a wad to finally contain the blood. My flip flops are soaked through.

Now I have an inner debate for the next 30 minutes to an hour. Should I go to the emergency room? Do I need stitches? Will I get infected and have to have my leg amputated? That decides it. I balance spending $100 on the co-payment or losing a leg and the $100 wins. But first I still have to get the cats in. Chatter and Arbee now come in easily. I guess the commotion convinced Arbee. Seven is nowhere to be found, even though I hobble up and down the street a couple of times with a flashlight.

I take a book and go to St. Mary's, enjoying the idea that I'll be sitting in an emergency room all night and meanwhile Bobby will come home and find the bathroom and hallway covered in blood, me gone, and he'll decide to give up music and never leave me again. Only St. Mary's busy night is Monday, not Saturday. This hospital doesn't get the gunshots or car accidents. I'm in and out in an hour with new bandages and a tetanus shot. I didn't even need stitches. It isn't even bleeding anymore.

By the time Bobby comes home, I'm in bed asleep. Because I left the backyard lights on, he knows someone is still out. He wakes me up. "Who's out?"

"Seven." I am too tired to tell my story, and I figure he'll see all the blood and wake me up anyway, vowing never to leave me alone again.

He doesn't wake me up again. In the morning, I find myself alone in the bed. He never came to bed, never even saw the upstairs bathroom. I find him asleep on the sofa downstairs. I wake him up. "Seven didn't come back until 5:30," he complains.

"Look what he did to my leg!" Somehow, my story isn't as powerful now, balanced against the fact he sat up all night waiting for Seven to come back. He'll probably keep leaving me alone.

While I type this, Seven, as huge as a dog, sits on my lap as if he never tried to kill me. I guess he doesn't know it was me who grabbed him by the tail when he was escaping into the night.

Rhapsody in Cats

Seven vs. Bird

Wrestling with Neelix

Baby Neelix

Neelix was a sick kitten. We didn't know from day-to-day if he was going to live.

Neelix Helps in the Office

Sulu Plays the Windchimes

Seven and Kira, Son and Mother

Just a Nub

The hair has grown back on Chatter's nub of a tail. (See older entries about why he lost his tail.) When a neighbor cat jumped over our fence, he puffed the hair on his tail out in defensive mode. My husband said it looked like a little rabbit tail.

A Little More Chill

Letting Arbee have more outdoor time has made her a happier cat. And she doesn't freak out anymore. It's easier to get her to come back inside. She has let go of another one of her feral instincts, but you still can't pick her up.

Merly Needs to Lose Weight

The Brothers Run a Vet Bill on Routine Stuff!

I tried a new vet, Allied, which is the second closest to our house, and it wasn't particularly a warm and friendly place. They have great hours, all day Saturday and Sunday evening, but now I suspect the vets may not be there then. It may just be for pick up and dropping off at the attached kennel.

I got the usual chilly response when I confessed to having eight cats. Why do I keep doing that? I turned down the fecal exams and ear cleanings, but caved in to the FELV shots when all I wanted was rabies. Got distemper shots, too, and they say Sulu has a tapeworm. You'd never know it by his size. So that meant two courses of tapeworm medication for both him and Seven and a flea and parasite medication, and the warning that all the cats need it. Just the flea part would be $100 for all of them. As it was, the bill was $315.

After we came into a small inheritance before Christmas that paid off Chatter's vet bills, now I find myself back in the hole. This is definitely the problem with too many cats. If I had one, I could indulge it with everything the vet had to offer. With eight, I have to pick and choose.