IN THE WORKS

April has been a crazy busy month for book events, but last night was my last one for a while.  This was a book club, and wow. What a nice group. I love book clubs, because the interest and enthusiasm is off the chart.  People have read the book. They want to talk about it. They are truly interested.  This was for The Orchard, and I do think memoirs might lend themselves to book discussions.  And it's humbling and gratifying to hear from people who were impacted by the story in ways I couldn't have foreseen. I'm always surprised by the personal stories people share.

But now I have to buckle down and get to writing again. I'm ready to tackle the second draft of Stay Dead, the Play Dead sequel.  Several people have asked about the cool cat series, but since those books are self-published, they have to go on the back burner even though I'm really anxious to get back to the second cat book.  Stay Dead is a contracted book, due to the publisher September 1. So I'm guessing I won't have the second cat book done until 2014 by the time it's edited and formatted, but it could be earlier. Kind of doubt it though.

Some people have said they want to read more about Max.  Well…

For the curious … a little about The Geek with the Cat Tattoo.  The cat in book two is Max's brother, and book three will feature Max's sister.  The second book is set in Minneapolis. Max's brother has a bit more…power (cool?) than Max. (Max always felt inferior to his siblings, although they all consider themselves matchmakers.)

 Max's brother runs away from an abusive owner and immediately stumbles upon a geeky guy throwing up outside a bar. Max's brother follows the guy home to make sure he's okay, and ends up being adopted by the geeky guitar-repair dude who is painfully shy around females.  (Which is how he ended up drinking too much and throwing up.) And so begins the matchmaking.  The love interest in the story is Melody's sister (from book one), someone geeky dude has had a crush on for two years because she often comes into his shop to drop off and pick up her dad's guitars.  So we will see a glimpse of Melody and Max, but not much. 

I always worry about giving away too much of the plot. Hope that's not too much. :D

THE GEEK WITH THE CAT TATTOO

I've been busy with what I think of as a mini-book tour for the paperback release of The Orchard. Things have slowed down a bit for a few days, so I decided to pull out my cat project. I haven't worked on this for a few weeks, and I didn't remember it with fondness, so I was pleasantly surprised to find that it wasn't awful. It's about 1/4 done. Not sure when I'll have the time to finish it because my main project (when all of this other stuff slows down) will be my Frasier, Play Dead sequel. But the cat stuff is fun. Just plain fun.  

I'm going to post the opening page here. This is the second book in the Cool Cat trilogy, and I think this might be the most fun of the three plots.  Working title: The Geek with the Cat Tattoo.  (Thanks to L.K. Rigel for that suggestion!)

This book stars the brother of Max from The Girl with the Cat Tattoo, and this cat is the most talented (magical?) of the three siblings. 

The Geek with the Cat Tattoo

I'm on my fourth owner and he's giving me a look I've become familiar with over the years. That look of suspicion. That look that says he knows. Or at least he thinks he knows.

He's going to ditch me. He's already contemplating the how and where. Take me to a shelter? Been there, done that, have the T-shirt. Or pack me in a box, drive fifty miles from Minneapolis, and dump me on some country road? Neither of those choices scare me, I try to tell myself. Living in the country. That might be nice, right? A lot of field mice to eat. A big sky.

Oh, my God. What am I saying? I'm a city cat through and through. I couldn't survive out there. I'm already imagining myself falling in with a bunch of feral cats who have rotten teeth and mange. Egads!

"What the hell are you?" asks my fourth owner. He's standing in the kitchen looking down at me, and the terror in his eyes has turned into something that scares me more than the possibility of life in the country with a pack of inbreds. 

 "Are you the devil?" Fourth Owner nods his head, as if coming to a conclusion. I remember when he picked me up from the shelter. He didn't know anything about cats. I wasn't even sure he liked cats, but lucky for me he wasn't around much. He works somewhere in downtown Minneapolis, and always talks about the cubicle where he goes with his slicked-back hair and body spray I can smell from a mile away. But like all of my previous owners, he's finally figured me out. He's figured out that I can put thoughts in his head.