Being Impulsive is Impractical… Most of the Time

I got a cat… from Kijiji, free the owner said. Comes with a microchip, fixed, and all her shots.

I kind of thought it was a joke. It was not. The owner even provided medical records for the cat, which is amazing. Though she is tubby as could be, tubbier than I thought a year and a half old cat could be. Won’t eat cat food eagerly, tries to crawl onto your plate, which explains the tub.

The moment the owner left I basically started squeeing. Until I walked into my apartment, looked around, and realized I hadn’t really cleaned since Buster passed away. I mean, I had done the dishes and laundry and made my bed. But it was the dusting and clutter I had neglected.

And there she was, rolling in the middle of the floor, right in the dust.

So I started cleaning but I didn’t finish. I didn’t arrive at the drop off by myself because it is an online thing and people tend to lie, so I did have company. Which meant that I entertained my company and by the time they left, I was utterly exhausted and got no writing or editing or anything done.

On and off I feel like it was too soon to get a cat, not that I regret it, but it’s just that I keep wanting her to do things that Buster did. She’ll never do those things because she’s not Buster. Maybe I’d feel this way no matter when I got another cat, I don’t know.

I just know I saw her picture and fell in love. Except the picture was from months ago and a cat her age can change drastically.

I find it a little hard to get over how tubby she is…

Last night Five Years Dead came back from the editor. I read her notes and started panicking, yay. She didn’t say anything bad, just pointed out what I knew, that it’s more character driven (at least this time around the characters are three-dimensional!) than plot driven and it’s not a fast-paced apocalypse story. Sorry readers, if you’re expecting Mad Maxy: Fury Road with this one, you’re going to be disappointed.

It was an impulsive start, I got upset when people from university kept trying to tell me that you can’t be a fantasy author because you can only write what you know—and you can’t know how to be a mage. I can’t quite remember, but I think something went wrong at work because I rage quit the whole world and started writing about it a few weeks later when the opening paragraph started playing over and over again in my head.

Those who did read it remarked on how different it was from my other books and how they were attached to the characters and wanted to learn more.

No one made comment on the women not being main characters, we never see the world from their perspective. No one (until my editor) said that they had to know right then why the world had ended. But that could just be different readers.

We as humans don’t know why a lot of things happen or how they happen. In Five Years Dead, the surviving humans don’t know why the world ended and can’t figure out why things didn’t come back on. But most of them are just common civilians. The kind that had nothing to do with power plants, the ones who—when the power goes out—checked their phones and the internet, or called a number and were told it’d come back on later.

And then they sat and waited until later, except by then the phone lines were dead and driving to the police station didn’t exactly help because even they didn’t have answers.

There are hints throughout, and I think Scout will figure it out before anyone else does. Gosh, I hope so. I made him smart enough to figure it out, on purpose.

Now I feel slightly better, but I still worry. Readers can be so mean.

… I’m freaking out about it launching. Great, I haven’t felt like this since the day after Trouble launched. Guess it’s new-series jitters.

Well, the only solution is to get on it!