Some Thoughts on The Loudest Meow

 If all goes according to plan, my talking cat fantasy novel, The Loudest Meow, will be released on Kindle this week. The paperback version will be available in the following week. I'm excited to share this book with you.

Every time I write a book, I learn things. Here are some thoughts I picked up from writing The Loudest Meow:

1. Writing is a wonderful way to deal with grief. I embarked on this project because our calico cat died. She fell ill, and the vet gave us a last-hope remedy to try that weekend to see if we could turn it around. During those last days, when it was clear that she was not going to get better, I made a promise to her that I would write a book where she would be the star. It's been a way for me to keep her in my mind and my heart after her passing. It has helped a lot.

2. Creativity changes things. Many of the cats in the book are based on family cats that have passed on. But somehow, all of them, when they entered the story, changed. Their traits became exaggerated. The other day, I found an old photo of my dear orange cat, Pumpkin, and I had to laugh, comparing her to Marmalade in the book. The cats in the book all became characters with their own lives.

3. I am now more attentive to cats in the world. I have the great fortune to work at home, and so I get to watch our three cats go about their lives every day. But I now feel that I have an agreement with the Great Cat Tribe that any cat who wants to be in my book can make that known to me, and I will do my best to make it happen. I'm the type of person who always visits the shelter cats at our local pet food stores. I take walks in my neighborhood, and cats sometimes come up to me. I talk to my friends' cats. I have felt an affinity to cats ever since I was a young child. I want to celebrate their greatness and their importance in the world.

4. I thought more about the thin veil between death and life while I wrote this book. It made me more conscious and less afraid of passing away. I came out of it feeling very connected to my extended cat family. I believe in Rainbow Bridge. I know that one day I will have the joy of being with my beloved animals again.

5. This is the first time I've started a series, and I found it challenging. I had a hard time figuring out the ending. I originally had set it up as more of a cliffhanger, and my characters complained to me in my head until I changed it so that their stories were resolved enough in this book that it could end here. I'm hard at work on Book 2 and deeply in love with it. But if anything should happen and this is the only book that these cats appear in, there is a satisfying ending. That was very important to me.

I think that's it for today. I'll put up an announcement when The Loudest Meow is up this week. Until then, take care.

Characters Who Show Up

Spoiler Alert: This post contains woo-woo content. If that is not your thing, I understand. But this is my writing life.

With every book. I am a brainstormer and an outliner. However, when I start writing a book linearly, characters always pop up and demand their time.

I've already written a post on Margaret, the grandmother in Joy Returns!, who commanded me that she had to be a character, and she had to appear in the first chapter. I tried to ignore her. After all, I'm the writer. In my opinion, this character needed to respect my authority. But Margaret won out, and I'm glad that she did.

Then there were the horses in Kate and the Horses. I dreamed a whole another horse story one night. I even woke up in the middle of the night with the story intact in my head, but I told myself that I didn't have to write it down, I knew it, and went back to sleep. You can imagine the rest of the story. I woke up with just the knowledge of having dreamt a horse story. And for a moment, I crashed into despair, but then I heard these voices in my head of horses I'd known in my childhood. I had never heard them before, but it was immediately clear to me who they were. They told me not to worry. “We have a story for you.”

For The Loudest Meow, coming out this September, there's a grey cat who I've never known before who just appeared in ink while I was writing out a scene. I hadn't even consciously thought of her, but my pen knew, and there she was, a beloved character who I think about all the time and sometimes think I see out in this “real world.”

Right now I'm writing the second of that talking cat fantasy series, tentatively titled Here Come the Kittens! I've been thinking about it for months, and I told myself that I would start writing it linearly once all our summer guests had left. A voice in my head scoffed, “You have way too many other things to do! You won't be ready.” I responded, “Let's see.”

On that Monday after they all left, I found myself in my writing bed with my hot pink composition book, the delegated notebook for Book 2, writing Chapter 1. And then a character showed up. Alasdair had been in Book 1 but only in reference or on the other end of a telephone conversation where we never heard him actually talk. I had him in my outline for this book, but I didn't think he would show up this soon.

And this is the place where I issue the warning. In my current imagining of this character, Alasdair is an academic blowhard. He imagines himself high up above the common cat (i.e., everyone else). When he made his request to be in Chapter 1, I okayed it. It made sense to me. But then in real life, I had a very unpleasant encounter with an Alasdair-like person who did not respect my thoughts or my feelings and basically tried to squash me like a bug. I didn't make the connection at the moment of that interaction, but later on, when I wrote, I understood what happened. That day I began writing Alasdair into the chapter. Before that occurred, he visited me.

“But I already said you could be here,” I told Alasdair. “Why did you have to hit me over the head with a sledgehammer?”

I'm still not sure. I have some theories. In these books, I have a character who idolizes Alasdair and another who has learned the hard way that she has to learn how to work with him. I had basically fallen in with the cats who find him ridiculous. Perhaps this was Alasdair's way of reminding me about his claws, his bite. It will be interesting to see how we work together on this book.

Tools and Writer's Block

This past Monday, on the Creative Penn podcast, Joanna Penn talked about her recent experience using dictation. She said she had a very productive day using this tool, and then the next time, she had a difficult time. For me, it's always helpful to be reminded that even very successful writers have good and bad days. And then she elaborated. She said that on the day where she produced a lot of content, she was working on a scene that she had already thought about quite a bit. On the day when it was challenging, she was working on a moment in a place where she had never been, a place she couldn't speak of off the top of her head, a place where she needed to research and look at things. It got me thinking about different tools and what I use when. Hopefully, this will be helpful to you, too.

1. When I'm scared, I cluster. If you're not aware of clustering or know it by a different name, that means I write words and phrases all over the page. I circle each “cluster” of words and I connect them to different clusters on the page. It's a great way for me to imagine a moment. I can add in physical details, sensory details. I can ask myself questions. I often have inspirational moments working this way, things about character and story that I hadn't considered before.

2. Sometimes in the middle of clustering, I find myself writing full sentences in paragraphs. I often don't know immediately that I've shifted to that mode. When I discover I am, I roll with it.

3. I generally type after I've clustered or I've written linearly by hand in a notebook. And I don't always write linearly by hand in a notebook. Sometimes I go from the cluster straight to typing. But if I start to type, and I look at the blank screen and have the willies, I will return to the notebook, and I will write based on my clusters linearly by hand.

4. Some days I know I need to type. The words are coming up fast and furious, and I can't write them down fast enough.

5. I also type when I've tried clustering and writing linearly, and I'm having a lot of critical voices in my head, and I feel like I'm just digging myself into a hole. I type then to get the words out. That happened this morning. Here I am, writing.

6. In this process, I'm accompanied by music. It's an incredible comfort to me. It gives me something to listen to other than the critical voices in my head. But it has to be a certain kind of music. I listen to jazz, instrumentals and classic vocalists—Billie Holiday, Ella Fitzgerald, Sarah Vaughn, Etta James. That's the type of music that works for me.

As the reader, you might say,”She seems awfully scared.” You know, at this moment, I feel that's true. But it's part of the process. I'm currently working on early chapters in a new book. I'll write about that more in another post. But I do feel that this strategy of listening to yourself and using various tools at different times combats what is commonly known as “writer's block.” When it seems you can't write or the critical voices and the fear feel overwhelming, try another way, even if only for five minutes. You'll build muscle. You'll collect memories that you can then use in the future. “I didn't think I could do it then, but I figured out a way, and I wrote.” And, someday in the future, I would like to try dictation. I think that could be a powerful tool, and I am curious to see how that would fit into my current strategies. I would love to hear how you approach writing. I feel we can always learn from each other.

Kate and the Horses on Sale

My second novel,Kate and the Horses, is on sale in the Kindle store for 99 cents through Thursday, August 23, 2018, at 8:30 a.m. PST.

But what's it about? Awkwardness.  Loneliness. Thrift stores. Horses. Black Beauty. Spumoni. Ella Fitzgerald. Odd socks. Camp games. Trail rides. The Sound of Music.

Intrigued? Give it a try.

https://www.amazon.com/Kate-Horses-Wendy-Ledger/dp/1974677834

Instagram and the Visual Way of Life

Last week, I started an account on Instagram, and then I had an immediate dilemma. It's so visual!

Maybe you looked at those sentences and blinked, read them over, thought, “What?” Let me try to explain. I'm an auditory-kinesthetic person. I do my best when I'm hearing things. Music has always been extremely important to me. I sometimes have trouble in social situations, especially groups, because I'm very sensitive to energy in the room. I know that sounds New Age weird. Let me just tell that if I went to a party, and a day later, you asked me to describe what people were wearing at that event, I probably wouldn't know. However, I could tell you what people said, and I could give you my take on the dynamics in the different interactions in the room.

I think that I was born with this predisposition, but I also believe that I didn't help myself when I was young. In third grade, I was diagnosed as nearsighted. The first time I wore glasses to school, the boy seated in front of me, turned around and said, “You look like a librarian!” That's when I decided I would rather look the right way rather than be able to see. Writing that down feels so horrifying now, but that is what I believed.

I would so love to go back in time and listen to that boy's voice now. Was he, as I thought at the time, truly appalled at my looks with my new frames? Was it just a clumsy way to try to connect? Regardless of his intent, I wish I could have said “Thank you” and really mean it. I wish I could have taken that as a sign and pursued work as a librarian in my adult years. I think I might have enjoyed it. Of course, I would still be writing books on the side. But I would also be an advocate for books all day long. That sounds like that might have been a terrific thing to do.

In some parts of the school day, I could get by with not wearing my glasses. But in math class, the teacher wrote the homework problems on the board, and I couldn't read them. I would have to ask someone if I could copy their paper later on. No one ever said, “You were in the class. Why don't you have it?” They were fine with it, but it put an additional stress on me. I was also the type of kid who wanted to get her homework done and in on time. The math teacher would often explain concepts by working on a problem on the board. I missed a lot and spent a lot of time trying to figure things out by myself, told myself I hated math, and still refused to wear my glasses.

Then contact lenses became commonplace, and that solved my problems for a while. It turned out that I had sensitive eyes, and in my adult years, I returned to glasses, but this time I was happy to do it. I'm an introvert. As I mentioned above, I sometimes have a hard time in social situations. They can feel overwhelming, but now I can hide behind my glasses.

It seems somehow right that my mate, Mike, is highly visual. He's a photographer. How things look is important to him. He sees when colors are wrong or things are crooked. He loves having a beautiful home. Often he has to tell me when he has changed something, even something as evident as a red-and-white checked tablecloth. Otherwise I might not notice it for weeks.

It has been challenging as a writer. I was in a writing group one time, and the leader said, “Close your eyes.” She said, “We're going to go around the room. Keep your eyes closed. When it's your turn, describe this room.” I had been in that group six month. I had to say things like, “We're sitting on carpet,” while the person next to me each time described something in the room in great detail. It's humbling. I now try to go into rooms and list things in my head and consciously notice things. It's also been embarrassing with people because I often don't remember faces. I do my best. When they come up to me and call me by name, I hope that if stall, tap dance, listen to their voice for a while, I can come up with a context and be able to identify them. It's not anything personal. It has happened with people that I've known and loved for years. It really is not you; it's me.

So lately I'm finding that social media has helped me with this issue. When I ventured into Pinterest, I had a revelation. Collecting images is comforting. I marveled at how satisfying it felt to gather them up and present them as a way to “talk” about my interests and my passions. It's made me look at things more.

This week, starting Instagram, I felt momentarily panicked. Here I have to create images. People just do this on the fly. At first I thought Mike would have to take all my pictures. But then I got into it. And now I'm starting to say to him, “This is something I should put on Instagram.” I'm beginning to recognize the importance of visual moments. (It helps that Instagram has captions. I really like that I can write captions.)

Anyway, if you would like to follow me on Instagram, I'm there as Wendy Ledger Author. I'll follow you back and look forward to seeing what you're doing there, too.