Everyone loves cat pictures, right? Below is a picture of my Manx cat, Lucy. What? You can’t see her? You can see her grey tiger-striped head at the right base of the clay pot. She is the oddest cat I have ever had. I adopted her one April during one of those kitten surges from the local human society. She was ten days old, and they handed me a bottle and kitten formula, a kennel, and a gelatinous pad that you could microwave to provide her heat for hours. I had to set my alarm to wake up every 3 hours and give her a bottle and rub her rear to make her pee. I was told there was a 25% chance that she would die overnight as she was so young. She survived and now four years later she is queen of her private jungle. She loves to cuddle with my ninety-pound dog as she’s convinced they’re related. That worked when she was younger, but when she got to her full size of nine and a half pounds, she inadvertently caused some minor harm to the dog’s manly parts and so he’s not interested in cuddling anymore. They do hunt mice and lizards together—mostly he watches while she does the hard work of catching and killing.
Lucy is a stumpy rump Manx meaning she has a bony rise at her rear. Apparently, she is one of the oldest breeds of cats to be shown in Great Britain. The breed developed from the Isle of Man but has spread around the world. There are a few things she doesn’t do which I attribute to the lack of being around an adult cat as she was growing. Lucy doesn’t purr or hiss. She will meow the house down to get outside, so it’s not a vocal cord injury. She rarely tolerates me and hates to be held or picked up. As opposed to most writers, she is not my writing partner and I haven’t written her into any stories. I have a cat named Arthur in my Damian Green series, but he is a regular grey cat.
Speaking of writing, I’m working on HOW DID SHE GET THERE?, the third and final book in the Michelle Watson series. While I’ve enjoyed writing Michelle and I love how she can rescue people with her teleportation skill, the series will be ending with this book. HOW DID SHE GET THERE? is available for preorder and will be released on December 26, 2022. I’m working on putting that series on Google Play and in an audio format.
In my next newsletter, I’ll talk about a new Jill Quint series book, Jill Quint Audio, and a concept for a new series. I hope everyone is having a nice October!
Cheers,
Alec
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