Saying Goodbye – guilt and cats and manuscripts

There is nothing worse than having to walk out the door with two little feline faces gazing up at you with that “you’re not going to leeeeeaaaave us, are you?” look on their faces. Worse than kids, I think, because kids you can explain it to. Cats, however, they don’t get it and regardless of what anyone says, I know they pine when I’m not there.

No, this isn’t me anthropomorphizing my animals. My regular cat sitter has spotted the signs numerous times. I’m their pride leader – the alpha female—and when I’m gone, they go off their food. They start tearing things up when they never would before. Or they come rushing to the door and throw themselves at my cat sitter’s feet for pats, they are so starved for human attention.

Knowing this has made it very hard to travel without them. These cats actually travel very well and I swear they like to show off on their leashes for new people. When I’m forced to leave them at home for a business trip there’s always a guilty part of me that worries that I’m a bad pet owner. And of course I miss them and their warmth on my lap, Shiva acting like a mountain lion and peering down at me from atop the cupboards, and Ben chasing his tail every morning (he has yet to catch it). All the little rituals of catdom.

I’ve realized as I’m getting ready for this trip, that saying goodbye to my cats is a lot like saying goodbye to a manuscript. (Except, thank goodness, a manuscript doesn’t pine – does it?) For this length of time away I considered a variety of cat spas for the boys and I have to say there are some very nice ones, but it doesn’t matter the quality of the care, any cat spa is not their home and they won’t have the space to run that these two little bad boys need. As a result I managed to find a live-in house sitter. Making the choice to go this route is a lot like making decisions about whether to send a manuscript out to the world, or to self-publish.

With the traditional publishing route you need to assess your work for what kind of publisher might publish it. Consider what genre it is, but also consider whether it transcends a genre. For example, there are best sellers out there that are Science Fiction, but you won’t see them shelved in a science fiction section of a book store, because they are ‘bigger ‘ than a science fiction novel. An example is Jurassic Park. Harry Potter went far beyond Fantasy and the Thornbirds (gag) went beyond romance to family saga. For my cats, I knew they were ‘bigger’ than most cats –maybe not in size, but definitely in attitude and activity level.

You need to assess your manuscript to decide what publishers to send your work to, just as I had to assess whether a cat boarding situation might serve Ben and Shiva. Then you need to research your publishers to know whether they publish your kind of work. You need to identify an editor you think might be your target audience. A helpful place for this is Publisher’s lunch, or by listening to editor presentations, or reading their blogs. Then, or course, you need to edit and package your manuscript and get it out the door. I often find that this work – the business side of writing—is the toughest part of the whole ride, and I have to specifically schedule time to do it, or it won’t get done.

Self publishing is more like what I’ve done to arrange a home stay for my cats. It all falls to you to determine your product – cover, blurbs, and how the manuscript looks – just as I had to arrange exactly what I could live with for the boys. For the cats, this involved interviews and the cat sitter spending time with the boys.

For self-publishing, this takes patience and willingness to learn a whole new skill set and when you have the manuscript ready to go, it involves a whole new level of anxiety because although you’ve presumably done due diligence to make sure you’re your manuscript is decent and clean of mistakes, you are putting the work out there without having an editor tell you it’s perfect.

So you put it out there and the first time someone comes back to you to tell you it’s not perfect, you cringe. Just like a cringe when I learn the boys were lonely when I was gone. But in both cases I did what was right. I had to go, whether for business or to refill my soul with travel, and the manuscript –whether self published or published in the traditional sense—had to go too, because we’re writers, right?

And what we write is meant to be read.