The Cat's Whiskers

One doesn't often hear the expression, 'the cat's whiskers' these days. I wonder how that expression came to mean someone special, someone who thinks he/she is amazing. I was led to think of it as I watched Kitty O gauge the size of the open door before sauntering in. He, of course, let his whiskers tell him that I had pulled the french door ajar enough so that his capacious middle would not get stuck.

Do books have whiskers that let them know the size they should be? And by that, of course, I mean authors. I do think authors have an innate knowledge of just how large or short their work needs to be. Sort of like that line in "Amadeus" when Mozart tells the King his piece has just the right number of notes.

So when I finished "While the children slept," the second novel in my Commissioner Oscar D'Costa mystery series, I was sure it was the right length, not a page too short, not a line too long.

Well, you can imagine my surprise when my editor got done with what I thought was a completed manuscript. Apparently the whiskers I speak of are the property of editors!

I guess I'll never have a cat's whiskers, though I think I should try and be the cat's whiskers.... at least to Kitty O. It might ease the pain of knowing the manuscript is still becoming.

The one I did finish, "The Girl Who Went Missing," is available on Amazon.