I was so ready to e-publish my book, but I’ve been dealing with some chilly feet lately. There’s just so much to know! I know I need to publisize it, so I need to find websites that review young adult e-books. So many will only review published books, or adult, or romance. Lot of romance out there. I wish someone would start an e-only young-adult website.
I’ve been reading a lot of people saying that e-books are badly edited or even proofed, and I’ve seen that just in reading the sales pitch for books on the Amazon site. Really basic grammatical errors and spelling errors in three sentences. A few people were saying they wished there were more reasonably priced proofreading services out there, and I was thinking, I could do that. I was a magazine editor for 13 years. After a while, errors would literally jump off the page and smack me. (And yet, when I re-edited my book last week, I still found errors. You can never edit enough!) So I’m thinking of offering that service.
So if I could sell a few books a month and proof a few books a month, maybe I wouldn’t need my “day job.” Which I’m not getting anyway, which is scary. But my house is so clean!
Okay, I’ve been dying to blog about my newest cat (we’re at four now — the house is starting to look like that show Animal Hoarding). We have named her Cleo the Mini-Cat, the Worst Cat in the World. Actually, that’s just what I call her; she is my daughter’s cat, and she is named Cleopatra because her stripes look like eye makeup. The only way my husband would allow her to stay is if my daughter promised to take her with her when she moves out (she’s 19), which I hope will be in about 20 years. Anyway, I was driving out of town with my daughter and mother, and I saw some trash against the median in the center of the road. I only looked at it because the trash moved. As I drove by, I realized it was a gray kitten, so I pulled into the next parking lot and ran to the road to get it. I was horrified to see an armada of cars cresting the hill, and I realized they would reach her before I did. So I kicked off my sandals and started running down the center of the road waving my arms and yelling “stop!” which they did, thank God. I scooped her up and jumped up on the median, and the cars roared by again. She was in a full seizure, her eyes open and fixed, one pupil big and round and the other a tiny slit, and it looked like she was bleeding from her butt. My daughter jumped behind the wheel and we raced to the vet’s office, honestly just to have her put down. Between the eyes and what seemed to be internal bleeding, I figured she was dying, and I just wanted to end her pain. Halfway there, the seizure ended, and she started screaming — no other word fits. The vet took her temp, which was really low despite her being on a hot concrete road in July. He said she was minutes from death and ran from the room, saying, “I don’t know if I can save her — call me tomorrow.” I figured she’d die, and when I called the next day, the vet was still not sure she would survive. She was in so much pain, they had to give her narcotics, and she obviously had a serious head injury. The bleeding turned out to be external, a big cut on her hip that required four staples.
Every day, I’d call and the vet would say, “I don’t know yet, call me tomorrow.” Finally, we were ready to come back to Kansas City, so I called the vet, and he said, “She can go home.”
(This is the day Cleo came home, still on narcotics.)
Oh crap. That’s when I realized an argument was going to ensue in the Carter household. My daughter was set on keeping her as her own — she’s dating a Marine who is deploying in November, and she’s going to be sad and scared and lonely and need this kitten’s love (cue the violins). And I was head over heels in love. I don’t know why; I’ve never instantly loved any pet we got, but holding her in my hands, thinking she was dying, I just fell in love. I had to keep her.
And then there was the $150 vet bill.
The vet can only assume someone threw her out a car window, but it didn’t do any serious damage. She has a line of white fur from the cut, and I do think she’s a little brain damaged. She knows no fear — she will trade punches with my male cat, who is five times her size, and he’ll literally knock her off the back of the couch, but she’ll just sink her claws in the upholstery, climb back up and go for his throat. He’s terrified of her, but he also kind of likes her. She likes to sneak up on the other cats (all strays) while they sleep and bite them on the butt. These are some tough cats who take no crap off anyone. So she’s not all there in the brains department. We have two mice in an aquarium, and we call it mousy TV — they keep her entranced for hours. And she isn’t afraid of the snake either — they get in striking matches through the mesh top of the snake’s aquarium. You can only pet her when she’s sleepy, otherwise she assumes your hand is a toy to be chewed on. She likes to eat shoes. So yeah, she’s a little weird.
The weird thing is, Whoopi Goldberg adopted a kitten who had the exact thing happen in NYC in July. How many frickin’ losers are there out there throwing kittens out car windows?
When I hear about crappy things happening to kids and animals, it makes me go completely red-rage crazy. All I can say is, Don’t worry, God, there’s three kids and four cats you don’t have to worry about. I got this one.
alisaacarter
Alisa A. Carter 