Mark Marinovich's Blog, page 2
August 7, 2016
4 Young People who are making 1 Big Difference
We have learned kids can do things. We can make things happen.
Melati and Isabel Wijsen
Students in Bali, an island in Indonesia
I believe that youth are the hope for our planet and that a strong and effective environmental movement must be built through the next generation.
Phillipe Cousteau
Filmmaker, explorer, and environmental advocate
Vigorous efforts to curtail plastic pollution and remove harmful plastic debris from the environment are being made by many individuals and organizations around the world. The challenge of plastic pollution is monumental in scale and until viable alternatives to plastic products are developed and new behaviors, such as requiring reusable bags at grocery stores, are adopted, we are likely to remain dependent on plastic in all aspects of our lives.
The plastic pollution crisis will not be fixed by a single solution and certainly not by a single generation. Some of the most hopeful indications that the seemingly insurmountable problem can and will be resolved come from the youngest activists in the movement to eradicate plastic pollution. Following are four of the many young people who are making a huge difference.
Melati and Isabel Wijsen
Plastic bag ban in Bali
In 2013, Isabel and Melati Wijsen, then ages 10 and 12, attended a class at the Green School in Bali that surveyed the remarkable achievements of historic figures including Mahatma Gandhi. The class made a deep impression on the sisters and they wondered if they could make a difference, too. Isabel and Melati knew that plastic trash was a huge problem on their island. A 2015 study of 192 countries led by the University of Georgia found Indonesia was the second-largest source of plastic trash in the ocean after China. After the girls learned that one of the poorest countries in the world, Rwanda, was able to ban polyethylene bags in 2008, they decided to act. They founded the Bye Bye Plastic Bags campaign to ban plastic bags in Bali, gave talks at schools, and coordinated beach cleanups. At first, the Balinese government displayed little interest in their efforts, but the persistent sisters were eventually told that they if they could collect 1 million signatures on a petition, the government would consider a plastic bag ban. Bye Bye Plastic Bags gathered signatures at shopping malls, events, and Ngurah Rai International Airport, which handles 16 million arrivals and departures a year. Along the way, the sisters went on a hunger strike that became a social media sensation, became friends with the governor of Bali, gave a TED talk in London that has received more than 1 million views online, and met with the UN Secretary General. In March 2015, Isabel and Melati received a letter from the Bali provincial government environmental agency that formally committed the island to becoming plastic bag-free by 2018.
Benjamin Stern
Bottle-less shampoo
Nohbo (“no-hair bottle”), maker of the patent-pending Nohbo Ball, a plastic-free shampoo product that uses a compostable wrapper, was founded in 2015 by 16-year-old Benjamin Stern from Melbourne, Florida. After Benjamin watched a documentary about the harm that plastic bottles are doing to the environment, he was compelled to find a way to reduce the volume of plastic containers that Americans throw away. Benjamin's Big Idea was Nohbo Balls, the world’s first eco-friendly shampoo ball. Nohbo Balls are waste-, paraben-, and sulfate-free, and each ball is wrapped in a biodegradable plant-based material. The shampoo is activated by water or friction. In February 2016, he pitched his idea to investors on the popular TV show Shark Tank and made a deal with billionaire Mark Cuban. "You remind me of me when I was younger," Cuban said. Benjamin hopes to eventually replace the small shampoo and conditioner bottles provided to guests at hotels worldwide with Nohbo Balls. He is currently developing a sunscreen ball and a shaving-cream ball.
Boyan Slat
Passive capture of plastic debris
Four years ago, then-19-year-old Boyan Slat, a Dutch inventor and entrepreneur, designed a passive system for corralling plastic debris driven by wind and ocean currents. Boyan’s system won a prize for Best Technical Design at Delft University of Technology and he established a foundation, The Ocean Cleanup, to develop technologies to rid world’s oceans of plastic. A feasibility study of Slat’s system concluded that it could potentially remove half the plastic in the Great Pacific Garbage Patch within a decade. After his TEDx talk, How the Oceans Can Clean Themselves, went viral, Slat attracted thousands of volunteers and $2 million in funding for pilot installations. In November 2014, he became the youngest-ever recipient of the United Nations’ highest environmental honor, the Champions of the Earth award. A pilot plastic debris capture program is expected to be deployed in Tsushima Island in Japan, where an estimated one cubic meter of plastic pollution per person washes ashore each year.
Melati and Isabel Wijsen
Students in Bali, an island in Indonesia
I believe that youth are the hope for our planet and that a strong and effective environmental movement must be built through the next generation.
Phillipe Cousteau
Filmmaker, explorer, and environmental advocate
Vigorous efforts to curtail plastic pollution and remove harmful plastic debris from the environment are being made by many individuals and organizations around the world. The challenge of plastic pollution is monumental in scale and until viable alternatives to plastic products are developed and new behaviors, such as requiring reusable bags at grocery stores, are adopted, we are likely to remain dependent on plastic in all aspects of our lives.
The plastic pollution crisis will not be fixed by a single solution and certainly not by a single generation. Some of the most hopeful indications that the seemingly insurmountable problem can and will be resolved come from the youngest activists in the movement to eradicate plastic pollution. Following are four of the many young people who are making a huge difference.
Melati and Isabel Wijsen
Plastic bag ban in Bali
In 2013, Isabel and Melati Wijsen, then ages 10 and 12, attended a class at the Green School in Bali that surveyed the remarkable achievements of historic figures including Mahatma Gandhi. The class made a deep impression on the sisters and they wondered if they could make a difference, too. Isabel and Melati knew that plastic trash was a huge problem on their island. A 2015 study of 192 countries led by the University of Georgia found Indonesia was the second-largest source of plastic trash in the ocean after China. After the girls learned that one of the poorest countries in the world, Rwanda, was able to ban polyethylene bags in 2008, they decided to act. They founded the Bye Bye Plastic Bags campaign to ban plastic bags in Bali, gave talks at schools, and coordinated beach cleanups. At first, the Balinese government displayed little interest in their efforts, but the persistent sisters were eventually told that they if they could collect 1 million signatures on a petition, the government would consider a plastic bag ban. Bye Bye Plastic Bags gathered signatures at shopping malls, events, and Ngurah Rai International Airport, which handles 16 million arrivals and departures a year. Along the way, the sisters went on a hunger strike that became a social media sensation, became friends with the governor of Bali, gave a TED talk in London that has received more than 1 million views online, and met with the UN Secretary General. In March 2015, Isabel and Melati received a letter from the Bali provincial government environmental agency that formally committed the island to becoming plastic bag-free by 2018.
Benjamin Stern
Bottle-less shampoo
Nohbo (“no-hair bottle”), maker of the patent-pending Nohbo Ball, a plastic-free shampoo product that uses a compostable wrapper, was founded in 2015 by 16-year-old Benjamin Stern from Melbourne, Florida. After Benjamin watched a documentary about the harm that plastic bottles are doing to the environment, he was compelled to find a way to reduce the volume of plastic containers that Americans throw away. Benjamin's Big Idea was Nohbo Balls, the world’s first eco-friendly shampoo ball. Nohbo Balls are waste-, paraben-, and sulfate-free, and each ball is wrapped in a biodegradable plant-based material. The shampoo is activated by water or friction. In February 2016, he pitched his idea to investors on the popular TV show Shark Tank and made a deal with billionaire Mark Cuban. "You remind me of me when I was younger," Cuban said. Benjamin hopes to eventually replace the small shampoo and conditioner bottles provided to guests at hotels worldwide with Nohbo Balls. He is currently developing a sunscreen ball and a shaving-cream ball.
Boyan Slat
Passive capture of plastic debris
Four years ago, then-19-year-old Boyan Slat, a Dutch inventor and entrepreneur, designed a passive system for corralling plastic debris driven by wind and ocean currents. Boyan’s system won a prize for Best Technical Design at Delft University of Technology and he established a foundation, The Ocean Cleanup, to develop technologies to rid world’s oceans of plastic. A feasibility study of Slat’s system concluded that it could potentially remove half the plastic in the Great Pacific Garbage Patch within a decade. After his TEDx talk, How the Oceans Can Clean Themselves, went viral, Slat attracted thousands of volunteers and $2 million in funding for pilot installations. In November 2014, he became the youngest-ever recipient of the United Nations’ highest environmental honor, the Champions of the Earth award. A pilot plastic debris capture program is expected to be deployed in Tsushima Island in Japan, where an estimated one cubic meter of plastic pollution per person washes ashore each year.
July 30, 2016
Knowledge is Sour: The Marine Plastic Pollution Problem
I live by the ocean. I used to belong to a gym, a spa, a fitness center, etc., but now I get my exercise with a daily walk on the beach.
Unlike my strolls on a treadmill, no two beach walks are alike. The sea constantly changes. Tides ebb and flow. Wind and waves continuously texture and sculpt the water’s surface. The ocean’s mood and color change as the sun moves across the sky, or clouds and fog bring mystery and gloom.
Where I live—on California’s Monterey Bay National Marine Sanctuary—seabirds, sea lions, seals and sea otters are a constant presence. Sometimes pods of dolphins and even humpback whales venture close to shore.
Last year I watched a 30-ton humpback swim sideways up and down the beach just off shore for over an hour, scooping anchovies that had taken—or tried to take—refuge in the shallow water. I once carried an abandoned baby murre away from the beach. The frightened bird pecked at my hands and crapped in my lap as I drove it to Native Animal Rescue, just one of many amazing local nonprofits where I live. A wonderful volunteer received my little bird with open arms and immediately began giving it the care it needed. Lately, juvenile white sharks have been congregating off the beach in my neck of the bay.
A diverse mix of stuff washes up on the shore, too.
When I started walking on the beach, I hunted for sea glass – broken bits of glass etched and smoothed by churning water and sand. For me, the discovery of an emerald green, or even rarer cobalt blue piece of sea glass was nearly as joyful an event as finding a forgotten twenty-dollar bill in a jacket pocket.
Sea glass-hunting is a local pastime. There’s a guy who shows up in board shorts and water shoes each spring after winter storms abate, and sloshes through the water just off the beach to snag the best pieces before they reach the shore. He carries away plastic bagfuls of sea glass. I imagine he has a pile of sea glass in his living room that rivals the mound of mud built by the obsessive Richard Dreyfuss character in Close Encounters of the Third Kind.
Finding a piece of sea glass requires patient sifting and searching among the shells, feathers, bones, pebbles, kelp and other detritus that the surf organizes in neat rows and piles along the shore. One’s focus must be entirely downward. You must look, and look, and look again to spot the stuff. It’s usually hiding in plain sight, staring straight at you.
If you spend any time by the ocean, you can’t help but be moved by the sea’s beautiful and diverse bounty. You can’t help but notice the trash, too.
I used to get lost in a kind of sea glass meditation during my morning walks. Then I bumped into another amazing and awesome local nonprofit organization—Clean Oceans International (COI)—which seeks to address the growing problem of plastic pollution in the oceans. “Practical Solutions to Plastic Pollution” is COI's poetic creed.
I did some volunteer work for COI and learned about giant islands of plastic that swirl in the middle of every ocean and reach miles down to the seafloor. I learned that the plastic doesn’t biodegrade for hundreds of years—it just breaks down into smaller and smaller pieces. I also learned that some of the chemicals in plastic that are absorbed by fish are toxic to humans. I saw photos of beaches and lagoons, and atolls in the South Pacific that are thick with plastic debris, deposited by wind, ocean currents, and human neglect. And I saw pictures of whales, turtles, seabirds, and other marine creatures that ate or became ensnared in plastic debris and met slow, torturous deaths.
All of which made an impression. As I became conscious, I became committed.
When I walk on the beach now, I no longer search for sea glass, unless it finds me first. Now I see the litter—plastic bottles, wrappers, toys, sunglasses, sandals and so on. Aluminum cans also seem to be a favorite single-use consumer item that some people would apparently prefer to discard in the ocean rather than toss in a recycling or trash receptacle. I assume they get some kind of high.
My average beach walk yields about a handful of trash that I sort in appropriate receptacles. I’m still learning how to survive using less plastic in my life.
Relative to the size and scope of the marine plastic pollution problem, my trash mitigation activity is a mere drop in the ocean. We have to start somewhere, right?
Unlike my strolls on a treadmill, no two beach walks are alike. The sea constantly changes. Tides ebb and flow. Wind and waves continuously texture and sculpt the water’s surface. The ocean’s mood and color change as the sun moves across the sky, or clouds and fog bring mystery and gloom.
Where I live—on California’s Monterey Bay National Marine Sanctuary—seabirds, sea lions, seals and sea otters are a constant presence. Sometimes pods of dolphins and even humpback whales venture close to shore.
Last year I watched a 30-ton humpback swim sideways up and down the beach just off shore for over an hour, scooping anchovies that had taken—or tried to take—refuge in the shallow water. I once carried an abandoned baby murre away from the beach. The frightened bird pecked at my hands and crapped in my lap as I drove it to Native Animal Rescue, just one of many amazing local nonprofits where I live. A wonderful volunteer received my little bird with open arms and immediately began giving it the care it needed. Lately, juvenile white sharks have been congregating off the beach in my neck of the bay.
A diverse mix of stuff washes up on the shore, too.
When I started walking on the beach, I hunted for sea glass – broken bits of glass etched and smoothed by churning water and sand. For me, the discovery of an emerald green, or even rarer cobalt blue piece of sea glass was nearly as joyful an event as finding a forgotten twenty-dollar bill in a jacket pocket.
Sea glass-hunting is a local pastime. There’s a guy who shows up in board shorts and water shoes each spring after winter storms abate, and sloshes through the water just off the beach to snag the best pieces before they reach the shore. He carries away plastic bagfuls of sea glass. I imagine he has a pile of sea glass in his living room that rivals the mound of mud built by the obsessive Richard Dreyfuss character in Close Encounters of the Third Kind.
Finding a piece of sea glass requires patient sifting and searching among the shells, feathers, bones, pebbles, kelp and other detritus that the surf organizes in neat rows and piles along the shore. One’s focus must be entirely downward. You must look, and look, and look again to spot the stuff. It’s usually hiding in plain sight, staring straight at you.
If you spend any time by the ocean, you can’t help but be moved by the sea’s beautiful and diverse bounty. You can’t help but notice the trash, too.
I used to get lost in a kind of sea glass meditation during my morning walks. Then I bumped into another amazing and awesome local nonprofit organization—Clean Oceans International (COI)—which seeks to address the growing problem of plastic pollution in the oceans. “Practical Solutions to Plastic Pollution” is COI's poetic creed.
I did some volunteer work for COI and learned about giant islands of plastic that swirl in the middle of every ocean and reach miles down to the seafloor. I learned that the plastic doesn’t biodegrade for hundreds of years—it just breaks down into smaller and smaller pieces. I also learned that some of the chemicals in plastic that are absorbed by fish are toxic to humans. I saw photos of beaches and lagoons, and atolls in the South Pacific that are thick with plastic debris, deposited by wind, ocean currents, and human neglect. And I saw pictures of whales, turtles, seabirds, and other marine creatures that ate or became ensnared in plastic debris and met slow, torturous deaths.
All of which made an impression. As I became conscious, I became committed.
When I walk on the beach now, I no longer search for sea glass, unless it finds me first. Now I see the litter—plastic bottles, wrappers, toys, sunglasses, sandals and so on. Aluminum cans also seem to be a favorite single-use consumer item that some people would apparently prefer to discard in the ocean rather than toss in a recycling or trash receptacle. I assume they get some kind of high.
My average beach walk yields about a handful of trash that I sort in appropriate receptacles. I’m still learning how to survive using less plastic in my life.
Relative to the size and scope of the marine plastic pollution problem, my trash mitigation activity is a mere drop in the ocean. We have to start somewhere, right?
July 5, 2016
Acknowledgements
My name is Mark. I just published my first novel, The White Boats, about a boy who risks life and limb to save a whale that's entangled in plastic fishing net. I am the credited author, but in truth I had a lot of help. I would like to acknowledge some of my closest collaborators, without whose nagging doubts, steadfast skepticism, disparaging judgments, inconsistent labors, infectious pessimism, chronic naysaying and continuous interference my novel would not have been possible.
Impatient Mark was an ever-present support. Impatient Mark just wanted to get the novel done. He would have published it six months ago if he had his way. Impatient Mark usually blew through his work, focusing on quantity rather than quality, leaving his sketchy output to Future Mark to clean up. Impatient Mark’s relentless agitation helped push me toward the finish line. I shall be forever appreciative.
Obsessive Mark, another key contributor, counterbalanced Impatient Mark’s rough-edged writing. Obsessive Mark might spend two hours analyzing a 30-word paragraph to make it 1 percent better, and then revert to the previous draft the next day. The thesaurus was Obsessive Mark’s best friend. He would regularly turn to it to find an apt substitute for the word “the”—and then change his mind an hour later. My novel is the better for his contributions.
Wikipedia Mark stepped in when I didn’t feel like doing the tedious research that good novel writing requires. Wikipedia Mark had little taste for mind-numbing fact-checking and slow learning, so he skimmed summary paragraphs in Wikipedia articles and cherry-picked key details around which entire chapters of my novel pivot. Wikipedia Mark helped give my novel verisimilitude and made the writing sound well-grounded in my story’s sometimes-arcane subject matter. Thanks, Wikipedia Mark!
Much of my novel’s success should be credited to Unreliable Mark because he contributed some of the best prose. Unreliable Mark didn’t show up for work very often, but when he did, he might knock out one, two, or even three near-perfect pages that would require little refinement by Future Mark later on. Given the high quality of his work, I did everything I could to encourage Unreliable Mark to spend more time assisting me, but he was usually unavailable. Nevertheless, he was a huge help.
Tired Mark was a valued collaborator who hung in with me through thick and through thin. Tired Mark often had trouble focusing, especially when he was exhausted from a restless night, ill health, or crashing from an early-morning caffeine rush. He rarely felt like writing and it usually showed in the work. However, Tired Mark understood that the only thing that separates a genuine novelist from a dilettante is the act of writing itself. If Tired Mark did not push through the distractions and fatigue on a near-daily basis, the world would never know about my novel. For that we should all be grateful.
Finally, I’ve referenced Future Mark’s important contributions in passing and I must give him my deepest bow of gratitude. I knew that I could rely on Future Mark to clean up messes that my other collaborators created at some later, indeterminate time. Future Mark brought new ideas, fresh energy, and vigorous enthusiasm to the process, and made Impatient Mark, Obsessive Mark, Wikipedia Mark, Unreliable Mark, and Tired Mark’s writing sparkle. I’ll thank him the next time I see him.
Impatient Mark was an ever-present support. Impatient Mark just wanted to get the novel done. He would have published it six months ago if he had his way. Impatient Mark usually blew through his work, focusing on quantity rather than quality, leaving his sketchy output to Future Mark to clean up. Impatient Mark’s relentless agitation helped push me toward the finish line. I shall be forever appreciative.
Obsessive Mark, another key contributor, counterbalanced Impatient Mark’s rough-edged writing. Obsessive Mark might spend two hours analyzing a 30-word paragraph to make it 1 percent better, and then revert to the previous draft the next day. The thesaurus was Obsessive Mark’s best friend. He would regularly turn to it to find an apt substitute for the word “the”—and then change his mind an hour later. My novel is the better for his contributions.
Wikipedia Mark stepped in when I didn’t feel like doing the tedious research that good novel writing requires. Wikipedia Mark had little taste for mind-numbing fact-checking and slow learning, so he skimmed summary paragraphs in Wikipedia articles and cherry-picked key details around which entire chapters of my novel pivot. Wikipedia Mark helped give my novel verisimilitude and made the writing sound well-grounded in my story’s sometimes-arcane subject matter. Thanks, Wikipedia Mark!
Much of my novel’s success should be credited to Unreliable Mark because he contributed some of the best prose. Unreliable Mark didn’t show up for work very often, but when he did, he might knock out one, two, or even three near-perfect pages that would require little refinement by Future Mark later on. Given the high quality of his work, I did everything I could to encourage Unreliable Mark to spend more time assisting me, but he was usually unavailable. Nevertheless, he was a huge help.
Tired Mark was a valued collaborator who hung in with me through thick and through thin. Tired Mark often had trouble focusing, especially when he was exhausted from a restless night, ill health, or crashing from an early-morning caffeine rush. He rarely felt like writing and it usually showed in the work. However, Tired Mark understood that the only thing that separates a genuine novelist from a dilettante is the act of writing itself. If Tired Mark did not push through the distractions and fatigue on a near-daily basis, the world would never know about my novel. For that we should all be grateful.
Finally, I’ve referenced Future Mark’s important contributions in passing and I must give him my deepest bow of gratitude. I knew that I could rely on Future Mark to clean up messes that my other collaborators created at some later, indeterminate time. Future Mark brought new ideas, fresh energy, and vigorous enthusiasm to the process, and made Impatient Mark, Obsessive Mark, Wikipedia Mark, Unreliable Mark, and Tired Mark’s writing sparkle. I’ll thank him the next time I see him.
My Paws-on Muse
Writing is a solitary exercise. After writers interact with the world and absorb its joys and pains and politicians, they retreat into their heads and try to organize and translate their impressions and experiences in words. It isn’t an automatic process. When the words pour forth, writers can fluidly describe the movies in their minds precisely as they see them. More often, they must painstakingly labor over every word to ferret out the elusive thing that they are trying to decipher and communicate.
When the words won’t come, many writers turn to their muses for inspiration. Sometimes our muse is a person, usually a woman, as originally defined in Greek mythology. Our muse may also be a spiritual being.
My muse is a little cat named Cassidy. I call her Kitty Gato, a pet name that I callously appropriated from a friend of a friend’s cat. Kitty Gato lives in the next building over. She roams freely in my complex during daylight hours. A couple years ago Kitty Gato started dropping by my sunny 2nd-floor deck for afternoon naps and soon became a daily visitor. I would stop whatever I was doing and give her pets in exchange for purrs. When winter arrived the frequency of Kitty Gato’s afternoon visits declined. I assumed that her owner was keeping her indoors.
Early one cold and rainy winter morning I heard Kitty Gato’s plaintiff mews outside my window. I opened my door to investigate and Kitty Gato dashed inside. As much as I love cats, I was hesitant about allowing her to shelter in my home because I often have instant and intense allergic reactions to cats. But the alternative was worse. My conscience wouldn’t allow the friendly little cat to soak outside in 29-degree weather. In she came.
That winter Kitty Gato spent many days in my apartment sleeping off dreary weather and observing my strange writing behavior. The ever-curious cat was keen to understand why my fingers tapped rows of plastic buttons for hours on end. And what exactly did I find so fascinating about the glowing screen that should divert my attention from her?
I commenced writing my first novel, The White Boats, and found the work exceptionally challenging. I’ve been a writer for 40 years, first as a journalist and later as a screenwriter and copywriter. The freedom of the novel form required a deeper emotional and creative commitment, and level of focus, than I had previously experienced. The going was tough. When I had room in my schedule (namely weekends and holidays), I slogged forward, but I wondered if I would ever complete my short, simple novel.
Fortunately, I found a muse.
Kitty Gato graciously joined me on my novel-writing journey, and assured me that I would eventually cross the finish line and release my story to the world. Together, we reveled in exciting new plot developments, rejoiced at the discovery of a slippery mot juste, and bore down when I placed beloved characters in grave danger. When the writing was going well, Kitty Gato found a cozy spot to curl up and nap, confident that I would require no further encouragement that day. In time I completed my novel, thanks in no small part to Kitty Gato.
Kitty Gato’s paw prints are all over my work—literally and literarily.
When the words won’t come, many writers turn to their muses for inspiration. Sometimes our muse is a person, usually a woman, as originally defined in Greek mythology. Our muse may also be a spiritual being.
My muse is a little cat named Cassidy. I call her Kitty Gato, a pet name that I callously appropriated from a friend of a friend’s cat. Kitty Gato lives in the next building over. She roams freely in my complex during daylight hours. A couple years ago Kitty Gato started dropping by my sunny 2nd-floor deck for afternoon naps and soon became a daily visitor. I would stop whatever I was doing and give her pets in exchange for purrs. When winter arrived the frequency of Kitty Gato’s afternoon visits declined. I assumed that her owner was keeping her indoors.
Early one cold and rainy winter morning I heard Kitty Gato’s plaintiff mews outside my window. I opened my door to investigate and Kitty Gato dashed inside. As much as I love cats, I was hesitant about allowing her to shelter in my home because I often have instant and intense allergic reactions to cats. But the alternative was worse. My conscience wouldn’t allow the friendly little cat to soak outside in 29-degree weather. In she came.
That winter Kitty Gato spent many days in my apartment sleeping off dreary weather and observing my strange writing behavior. The ever-curious cat was keen to understand why my fingers tapped rows of plastic buttons for hours on end. And what exactly did I find so fascinating about the glowing screen that should divert my attention from her?
I commenced writing my first novel, The White Boats, and found the work exceptionally challenging. I’ve been a writer for 40 years, first as a journalist and later as a screenwriter and copywriter. The freedom of the novel form required a deeper emotional and creative commitment, and level of focus, than I had previously experienced. The going was tough. When I had room in my schedule (namely weekends and holidays), I slogged forward, but I wondered if I would ever complete my short, simple novel.
Fortunately, I found a muse.
Kitty Gato graciously joined me on my novel-writing journey, and assured me that I would eventually cross the finish line and release my story to the world. Together, we reveled in exciting new plot developments, rejoiced at the discovery of a slippery mot juste, and bore down when I placed beloved characters in grave danger. When the writing was going well, Kitty Gato found a cozy spot to curl up and nap, confident that I would require no further encouragement that day. In time I completed my novel, thanks in no small part to Kitty Gato.
Kitty Gato’s paw prints are all over my work—literally and literarily.
