You might recall a post titled, “A Cat Conversation in Five Parts” from a few weeks back. An essential element of the character motivation in that dialogue was that Gina, the orange cat, was freaked out by the mere presence of a strange human being and a strange dog on her front porch.

Gina is no longer freaked out.

I heard a sound and looked up from my computer to discover Gina exploring the van. I apologized to her, but I’m allergic to cats, so I escorted her out. Politely, of course.

Five minutes later, I heard another sound. I looked up to discover…

… a tail, entering my bathroom. I laughed, but again, escorted Gina to the door. This time I gave her a small lecture: we have no food for cats, we have no cat toys, and you would be competing for napping space with a dog you don’t like in a place that belongs to her. So sorry, oh cat, but this is not your place.

I’m sure if you own a cat, you know how this story goes.

I have several other pictures, too, but the internet is slow today and I should be writing a book. It turned out that Gina’s persistence in entering the van outweighed my persistence in removing her from the van. Fortunately for the sake of my allergies, I’m the one with the opposable thumbs and after the fifth time or so removing her, I closed the door and turned on the fan. Win for the human being. This morning Tank — the big black cat — entered the van and I knew that I wasn’t going to win. If Tank wants to take over my van, I’m probably just going to have to move out. Fortunately, he checked it out, then decided it was not satisfying and exited. Whew.

In writing news, Fen is being a little too clever, which I think is good news? But I was setting something up and she refused to play along, so now I’m needing to do some re-thinking. Fortunately, I’ve got options. It feels like the story has loads of possible directions in which to go, so I’m just seeing where the current takes me.

At the same time, I’m doing a thing that once upon a time I swore I would never do: I’m making major revisions to A Lonely Magic. I have very mixed feelings about this. Part of me believes — sorta strongly — that a book once published should exist as it is, that it isn’t fair to the reader to make dramatic changes. Minor edits, okay, but a book shouldn’t be in flux after it’s out in the world. But… well, I guess I’ve changed my mind? There are things I know I would do differently now and fixing them was an itch I just couldn’t stop myself from scratching. I started revising with the idea that I was just doing it for me, just to satisfy myself… and now I know that no, once I finish these edits, I’ll be re-publishing.

The overall story won’t change, of course, since that would be an entirely different book, but it’ll be tweaked some. A fun bit of serendipity is that I’ve been debating this for weeks now, got thoroughly into my revisions this week, but was still questioning myself. Last night, I got an email from ProWriting Aid that talked about writing lessons learned from Hamilton, one of which was, “Don’t be afraid to change.” All right, technically it was “Don’t be afraid to change at the last minute,” but I decided to take this as the universe granting me permission to do what I want to do. I love it when the universe does that.

The cover will change, too. But that’s a longer story and one I should save for another day, when I’m not trying to write a book and when I’m ready to start trying to sell a book instead. But… nope, longer story. I’m not going to start telling it now. I will just say that the new cover of A Lonely Magic gives me a little thrill of glee and the cover for the book now titled A Precarious Magic (part of that long story) makes me want to clap my hands and jump up and down with joy. I can’t wait to show them to you! Except I am going to wait, because first I have to finish writing and revising these books. Onward!