Welcome, I hope you enjoyed my book, The Apocalyptic House Cats. I wrote this over a three and a half year time period. Plowed through many versions, all for my little girl, Ainsley. She was born with FASD and has suffered greatly. Friends were especially hard to come by. Except for her cats, always with her, a blessing beyond measure.
When she was 15 one of her friends left us and went to cat heaven, a place I'm sure is much more populated then people heaven. Seeing her suffer this loss inspired me to write a story to help her deal with her kitty's passing. I had a 40 page short story ready for her 16th birthday.
As time went on I added to the story. Not being a trained writer I'm sure the trolls out there can point out many many many many many many many (comma anyone?) flaws, but that's okay, it was all for her. Off and on, throughout my adult life, I've spent time writing. This is my first attempt at publishing. (I'm sure it shows, ha ha).
This book ended up at around 75000 words, a little short of an average 90000 for adult novels, but well past my capabilities. It's hard to work full time, care for a special needs family, and find a few moments to write. (typically the only time I found to write was during the middle of the night when I couldn't sleep for some reason or another)
I surely didn't want anyone to know I was attempting to complete novel, there would have been endless teasing and other nonsense. A short clip from the show 'Family Guy' continually haunted me throughout the writing process, forever instilling a fear of being discovered. In the scene Stewey harasses Brian, asking again and again, in ever changing voice inflection, 'how's the book coming?'. This would never do, being a private person I'd never be able to handle this kind of torment.
So, I developed a defense mechanism. No one ever knew I was trying to put together a book. I would have a video game running in the background and if anyone walked up behind me I would quickly alt-tab away from my writing over to the game. I would suffer some gentle ribbing here and there, playing games and all. This was much preferred to the 'how's the book coming' taunt.
Finally I finished, put it on Amazon, and would probably be the only one to ever read it. That was also fine, it felt good to finish it. The main reason for putting this on Amazon is that they have a print on demand feature so that I was able to cheaply get a paperback copy for Ainsley. The proof feature also came in handy. My process went like this, rough draft, huge re-write to a second draft, proof the draft to a final version, then complete 2 read throughs to clean up the errors. Then I ordered a proof and went through it with a highlighter and was amazed to find numerous errors I'd missed on my 2 read throughs. I went through the proof 3 times with different colored highlighters and fixed all of the errors I found. I can understand why real authors hire people to do this. I think I could do 100 proofs and still find errors. (note: as of 3-11-18 I completed a final proof, found several errors, fixed them and put a final version on Amazon so that I could get the paperback copy in time for my daughters birthday in April)
If, per chance, someone out in that wide world happens to read the book, feel free to share your comments on this blog, or in the Amazon comments section. Eventually I'd like to write a follow up to The Apocalyptic House Cats but probably would only venture down that road if Ainsley were to want me to.
