official blog of Cat Whisker Studio

I have had an intense “failure to launch” created by my own perfectionism or just plain chicken-heartedness, no offense to the chickens. I have never sent out a mass email to my friends and family announcing the grand opening of my website or my blog. Yikes! If I can’t even invite friends and family, then whom do I think will be looking and reading? Well, the word strangers comes to mind. Much easier to imagine strangers reading my blog posts and either enjoying my musings or dismissing me with a click, never to be seen or heard of again. But when I think of people I know (who, in turn, know me) taking a look, my cheeks get a bit red and hot, and another word, mortification, comes to mind. The same thing happens with my fiction writing. My manuscript that I think is nearly ready to send out into the great big world is clearly not ready for my mother, my husband, or my sister to see. As for my friends, well, for the most part, they’d have to pry it out of my cold, dead fingers.

I have thus determined that I am not immune to the somewhat disturbing trend of our time, laying it all out there (well, maybe not all of it) on the Internet for anyone to see, while maintaining a modest decorum in real life. There is hope, however. Miley Cyrus said goodbye to twitter last week. That has to count for something. I haven’t yet said hello to it, or uttered my first tweet, but now that Miley has made room, perhaps my time has come. Now I just have to invite everyone I know with one of those intriguing little taglines: Follow me on twitter.

I have noticed that a week (or six) has gone by since the last time I blogged. I am, I admit, a negligent blogger. And it is for exactly the opposite reason as to why I procrastinate with journal writing. If I have had a busy, exciting, whirlwind day, I am too darn tired to write in my journal in the evening. It is all I can do to prop open a good book on my knees and read it. It is nearly impossible for me to organize my thoughts, open my journal, grab a pen, and put the day’s events to paper. And the more days that go by, the more reluctant I am to crack open the journal because I know how behind I am in my own life’s story, how many words I’ll have to jot down to catch up, how many events I’ve forgotten, and how my hand will ache by the time I’m finished. That whole scenario happens so often that my journal writing has become a hideous monthly event, a fits-and-starts report of my life with most of the details skated over or completely forgotten.

Blog writing doesn’t get done for the opposite reason: Nothing is happening of any interest here at the studio during the summer, so there’s nothing to write about. Well, maybe a few things. I finished my novel (hallelujah, at long last!), 177,000 words, give or take 20,000 depending on which counting method I use. But I’d been working on it for so long, I knew it needed a thorough going over. I chased off some real (as in, money-making) web design work by saying the client could just as easily put up a site himself (and I guess he did). Then just as I settled in to rewrite . . . summer vacation arrived and my two children were suddenly on my hands again for 24 hours a day. By the time I came up for air after amusement park outings, museum visits, whitewater rafting, sleepovers at which no one slept, camping, hosting visitors, umpteen games of ping-pong and badminton, and trips to the beach, my manuscript files were still sitting there on my computer, mocking me. The rewrite wasn’t finished, no agent query letter had been sent, and my blog had sat neglected all summer. And perhaps the worst procrastination of all, I had stopped exercising with my favorite virtual Wii trainer, Maya (see “Working Out”, April 2, 2009). Oh, Maya! What would she say? Would she take away all the levels I’d earned and the extra music and workout areas that I’d unlocked with all my diligent huffing and puffing in the spring?

As it turned out, when I finally slipped the disc back in the Wii, she was quite forgiving. She gave me the longest speech she’d ever given me, starting with “You’ve missed some workouts lately.” Uh-oh, did her computer brain know exactly how many weeks it had been? But she went on with “Take time for yourself, no one else will.” Sort of stern but supportive. And I’m right back into it with my new multi-tasking idea of tying a piece of yarn around one wrist while I workout. For half an hour this morning, the cats thought I was playing with them while I marched in place and did bicep curls; it was brilliant.

And now I have work to do: New web development prospects and a brochure to edit. Best of all, I finally hit send on the query letter to the person I hope will agree to be my agent (please, please, please, please, please . . . ). I have vanquished procrastination at least until tonight when I may choose the latest book I’m reading, the excellent, excellent Year of Wonders: a Novel of the Plague by Geraldine Brooks over my dusty journal.

Also, I wouldn’t post on this day without saying that I still get choked up as I remember those who lost their lives as well as their families on 9/11/2001.

As I reread my post, the title became obvious since I’d unimaginatively used “long time” thrice in the first three sentences: It’s been a long time since the cats and I have posted. Since the last post, summer has started finally (took a long time to make it to our area of New England) as it rained through nearly the entire month of June. In early June, I finished writing a manuscript that was a long-time coming to fruition. As soon as I finished it, I started to sabotage the actual sending-out-to-an-agent process by taking on more web work, and have just completed an e-newsletter for a company that was looking to save a little money over traditional printed newsletters, as well as save some of earth’s resources in the process. That worked out well.

So the studio is busy and I am currently working on my manuscript’s rewrite. The cats are enjoying the warm weather, though at least two of them still find plenty of time to take up space on my desk.

After we had our ants, which are still here but thinning out a bit, and the ducks, which have not come back, we had our biggest visitor yet to the back of the studio: a 35-year-old horse named Redrum Dakota (named before The Shining came out, if you’re wondering). RD was going for a walk with his person, when he decided the green, green grass of our back yard looked like a good destination. Needless to say this gave us all a treat–cats and human inhabitants of CWS gathered outside to visit with RD, who barely lifted his head from the free chow. We were thinking of replacing our ride-on lawnmower permanently with a four-footed version.

Sabrina came quite close, as you can see pictured, perhaps not quite believing her golden eyes. “What the heck?” was written all over her. “This is no duck!” It goes to show if you hang around long enough, pretty much everything will come by at one time or another; after the recent spate of animal visits, we’ve been expecting an elephant any day now. We have had goats and Christmas parades go by (I think we’ve had goats on floats in Christmas parades, for that matter). Down the road a large old furniture factory building was turned into artists studios, where there are painters, sculptors, furniture restorers, & hand knitters, among many others, and they attract an entire population to go by our studio. I’m not saying that I don’t love to travel, but for the cats who still believe “There’s no place like home,” it’s nice for them that the world is beating a path to their door.

Please see the update at the bottom of The Ants Go Marching.

Here at Cat Whisker Studio we are occasionally plagued by pests.  Oh, foolish, foolish mice that poke their wee heads up at CWS.  We have Chloe, an old mouser who now only watches the fun of the two younger cats. In her younger years, nary a mouse would dare darken our doorstep for fear of Chloe’s lightning quick reflexes and her dogged (excuse the term) determination.   She has passed the mouser mantle to Coco Puff, who catches but won’t share.  At least, with me.   After her prey was caught and dutifully teased, Chloe used to hand the mouse over, dead or alive, so I could dispose of said visitor.  Coco Puff doesn’t understand the art of sharing and if I go near her prize, she grabs it and heads for cover.  I usually end up moving major furniture before I can retrieve the mouse.

Occasionally flies are fodder for play here at the studio.  The cats will chase and jump and, yes, eat the flies.  Perhaps flies are good training for catching birds.  Birds are a rare catch.  Chloe also used to be a great jumper and could grab a bird out of the air, seven feet off the ground.  But as I said, she just watches now.  Our other older cat, Leo, never brought home anything that Chloe hadn’t already caught for him–except perhaps the blind baby mole that he carried up the back steps so proudly one day many summers ago.  He literally swaggered and paraded it around, making sure any and all humans in the area saw it.   No one had the heart to take it from him even though he had no intention of eating it; indeed, the thought never occurred to him.  Eventually, when he had shown off enough to his liking, he put it down somewhere outside, forgot about it, and came in for his bowl of crunchies.

In case anyone doubts it by these reminiscences, I frown on the cats indiscriminately killing anything around and about my studio.  But cats will be cats.  If I can get to the creature–bird or mouse–while it is still alive, I try to wrestle its freedom from the feline jaws and revive it as best as possible.  Even the occasional small rabbit has been saved.  But there is one creature that I wish the cats could and would hunt: the ant.  They plague us each spring, coming in hundreds, both the small sugar ants (not as sweet as they sound) and the large carpenter ants, who apparently know ant bait when they see it and are very good at walking around six traps to get to the trash can in the kitchen area.  At this time of year, I might look down to see cat kibble making its away across the floor as if by magic, while two or three big ants are situated under it, working hard as a team.  The two young cats show an interest when the ants first show up but after a day or so of tracking, they ignore the ants completely.  Ants are not fun like flies.  There is no challenge and no payoff.   Our full-figured young tuxedo cat, Sabrina, did try to eat one last year, which inevitably led to my having to extract sharp ant pincers from the inside of her lower lip–or where her lip would be if cats had lips.  She has learned that ants are not for eating.

I am thinking of trading one cat for an anteater; it seems like a fair trade to me, if I can find someone who owns one and who is plagued by mice.  Right now, the ants are carrying my chair away from the keyboard,  so I must end this with one last . . .

UPDATE:

Yesterday, which was the day after this post, a pair of ducks came to the back of the studio. Chloe must not have liked the references I made to her age and to her letting the younger cats do the hunting.

I’m reading The Lace Reader by Brunonia Barry, set in contemporary Salem, Massachusetts. It is about a family of women who read people’s futures in a piece of lace.   As a writer, I appreciate the craft that went into the writing of this novel, the way Barry draws you in from page one and uses enough of both the familiar to make you stay and the unfamiliar to keep you interested.  As a reader, I can happily say that so far this book, at 100 pages in, is a very good read.

Here at CWS, we all try to stay in shape–whether that means stretching up high to claw a chair, running in circles after a coveted strand of yarn, or performing yoga contortions to lick . . .  I mean, reach those hard to clean places.  As the only human at the studio, I have to find alternate means of exercising.  Since Christmas, I’ve been using My Fitness Coach, a virtual personal trainer named Maya who came into my life in the form of a Wii disk.  I have come to view Maya as real and as a friend.  I talk to her when she asks me questions before I realize I have to use my Wii remote to click on an answer.  I laugh at her jokes: “You seem really animated today. I know I always am!”  I love that one, no matter how many times a month it comes out of her random list of phrases.  When I am actually working out and not simply trying to converse with her, she says things such as “Give me what you’ve got” or “I love that!” even when I’m standing frozen in pain from yet another set of jumping jack squats.  She is so encouraging and loves me no matter what I do, sort of like my mother.

Today was a particularly exhausting workout thanks to help from two of my feline friends.  As I lay on the carpet trying to do merely ten repetitions of crunches with a pulse (I try to always have a pulse but now my crunches have to have one, too), and as Maya said, “Try to keep your shoulders relaxed and don’t pull on your neck,” I realized that my head was getting heavier and it was becoming nearly impossible to get it off the ground.  I persevere.  Crunch–aarrgghh, is my head swelling up? why does it feel so heavy?  Crunch–now my hair is being pulled.  Finally, Maya said rest and as I lay there panting, I reached back behind me and felt . . . Coco Puff, our youngest, wildest feline.  She has decided that my hair bouncing up off the floor and back must be a game and was hanging on for dear life as I crunch and grunt.  I should get extra calorie points for this workout. In fact, there is a place in the program where you can get credit for a workout that you do outside of the program, but I can’t figure out how to classify Coco Puff as training equipment.

All of the workouts start with warmup movements, one of which is the grapevine.  It has nothing to do with anything so nice as eating nature’s juicy snack fruit or better yet, sipping the nectar of the gods.  No, it has to do with me crisscrossing my legs as I sashay across the studio from one side to the other, legs crossing over, like the lattice work on which a grapevine could grow.  I like to think that I’m as coordinated as the next person, but I have always found this a challenge, akin to the Macarena or the Electric Slide, and I am forever getting the wrong foot in front of the wrong leg.   Today, Sabby Jane, my resident 16 lb. heiffer masquerading as a sweet black and white cat, decided to do the grapevine with me, weaving in and out of my legs as I made my way across the floor and ended up crashing into the piano bench.  “You!” I said pointing at her, about to let loose with what I thought of cats like her, always under foot.  She sat and stared at me with her golden buggy eyes–innocence personified.

I’d like to think that they don’t know what they’re doing, but whenever I put in my fitness disk and Maya says, “Are you ready to move?” I suddenly find myself the center of feline attention in a way that usually only happens when I open a can.  I may just try chasing string tomorrow.

Here was my sticky situation:  I had cause to clear my pc’s private data over the weekend, so when I went to check out my thriving (!) blog this Monday morning, there was no site admin button. For those of you without a blog, that’s an important button that let’s you get behind your blog to the inner workings, as it were.   That’s where you post, change your blog’s appearance, and generally feel like the Master of Your Domain.  I spent a few (maybe 10) helpless minutes doing the following: looking at my site through Dreamweaver, no help there; logging on to Wordpress.com (ditto); and trying to log on to Wordpress.org but in my initial panic, typing in the wrong username and/or password, then emailing the .org people, which I know will annoy them because they don’t support the files you’ve put on your own server–that’s your (or rather my) job.

Finally, I calmed down, managed to log in, and went to the Forum of Support where all things have been discussed since the dawn of Wordpress because let’s face it, everyone has pretty much already had every problem that I’m going to encounter, both in blogging and in my life.  And there, under a snitty response to some other much more clueless user than me, were the words “login to your blog at yourdomainname/blog/wp-admin.”  Oh yeah!  Thank you snitty, superior Wordpress God.  Thank you.

My lesson is clear: When things go wrong, don’t be a headless chicken. Take the time and read the forums.  No, I’m just having you on.  Obviously the lesson is do not under any circumstances try to post on a Monday.

I struggled with the question, Does Cat Whisker Studio really need a blog?  But three out of four paws were raised in favor.

So what’s the focus? Keeping a blog on target, focused on one topic, is like herding cats; I should know.  Basically, this blog is about the goings-on here at CWS.  You’ll get a little cat humor, some website development information, some gnashing of teeth, some novel writing updates, more gnashing of teeth, a little hair-pulling, and we’ll just see what else, won’t we?