For the latest on William and Ernest, please see “Back in the slammer again” on my other blog, to write is to write is to write.
When I created Whiskertips, I didn’t intend to write about cats. The title was a last-ditch effort to find a name not already in use.
I tried Synecdoche, Metonymy, and Contrariwise (a term some people say suits me to a T). I tried Words, Words, Words. In short, I ran through Shakespeare, Mark Twain, Lewis Carroll, Emily Dickinson, and The Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms.
All those years when I didn’t even know what a blog was, people who did were grabbing all the good stuff.
Then, in my moment of desperation, Alice B Toeclaws, resident Muse, jumped into my lap. Voila! A blog was born.
But note the subtitle: Cats, books, and life in general. I expected to do book reviews, family stories, opinion pieces. I wanted to write about whatever came to mind. And for a while I did.
As time went on, however, whatever came to mind became, increasingly, cats.
When I was too tired to write, or when I had nothing to say, I uploaded pictures of William and Ernest.
Then one day, I backed off and took a good look at my creation.
And I didn’t like what I saw.
I was well on my way to being pigeonholed as a Cat Lady.
I am not a Cat Lady.
Yes, I tell stories about the cute things William and Ernest do. Yes, I have chronic backache from scrunching into one-quarter of the bed so William and Ernest don’t miss their REM sleep. Yes, baby-talk is my second language. Yes, I wear cat hair as an accessory. And yes, I post their pictures and write about them as if they were human.
But I am not a Cat Lady.
I am a Writer.
To make that clear, I created the second blog, dedicated to writing.
And I managed to go two whole months without mentioning cats. Then I snapped.
But–and this is important–in that post, I connected William and Ernest to writing.
That made it legal.
But it’s a slippery slope. I know what happens when cats stray in. I feed them. They stay. Sometimes they have kittens.
But not this time. If William and Ernest want Cat Chow, they’ll have to stay on the Whiskertips side of the fence.
Unless they have a very good excuse for trespassing.
Whiskertips 