Falling in Love with a World

The Cat Who Hated is actually my second book series.

The first was called Stuffed Yarnz: The Sea Creature Saga — an ornery orange octopus, a wise old sea turtle, and a cast of sea creatures tangled up in a series of interconnected great plans. It's no longer in print. I come back to it sometimes anyway, turn it over in my mind, think about what it could become.

What I've learned from writing two series is this: you know a world is real when you can't stop thinking about it even when you're not writing.

I wake up at night sometimes with ideas that will probably never make it into a book.

What if Eli drew dragons in chalk on the lane and the magic brought them to life?

What if the Furnace — smug, oracular, always right — was genuinely surprised by something for once?

What if someone bullied Bandit? How would the lane respond?

I think about a hundred stories for every one that actually gets written. I think about details that will never appear on a page — the specific architecture of Ms. Graves's Victorian farmhouse, what's in the cellars beneath it, which of her antique objects are enchanted and which are just old and beautiful and heavy with history.

None of that makes it into the books directly. But it shapes everything that does.

Shadow doesn't change dramatically across the series — that's intentional. He's a grumpy cat. He will always be a grumpy cat. But he learns things. He develops a bond with the lane and its residents that he would never in a million years admit to out loud.

That arc — not transformation, but enrichment — is what keeps me interested in him. He's not becoming a different cat. He's becoming more completely himself.

That's harder to write than a redemption arc, honestly. And more satisfying.

What I find most surprising about this process is that I still love these characters.

That sounds like it should be obvious. But I've read enough about the craft of writing to know it isn't. Plenty of authors describe their characters with something between professional respect and exhaustion. I don't feel that.

I cringe at the early versions of these books sometimes. The first editions weren't what they needed to be yet. But I was never tired of the world — I was impatient to understand it better.

That's what 2nd editions are, really. Not corrections. Attempts to catch the story up to what it was always trying to be.

Somewhere beneath Willowmere Lane there's a luminous underground world connected to an enchanted cave system beneath a wisteria tree. Ms. Graves has a room upstairs that no one talks about. The Great Oak has been watching the lane for two hundred years and has said perhaps three sentences total.

I know more about all of it than the books currently show.

Someday, maybe, more of it finds its way to the page.

For now, Shadow is on his porch. The Furnace is banging on pipes. The mailboxes have opinions.

That's enough to keep me coming back.