My companions at home are two, two-year-old cats, Benares and Shiva. (People warned me about naming a cat after the god of destruction.) I like to think I’ve gotten through the wild and wooly kitten years and on to the years of peaceful coexistence. Except my cats are Bengals. For the first time in my life I didn’t go to a shelter or a friend’s place for a kitten and I didn’t adopt a mature cat. I’d just lost a cat and she had been marvelous. She was gregarious and liked to travel with me when I went on trips. I wanted that in my next cat and had read that Bengals were friendly, attention-seeking cats and I’d met one that was on a leash in a pet store with dogs all around him. The Bengal ignored the dogs and sat there imperiously. So I got my boys.

Since I brought them home my life has been in turmoil, or if not my life, at least my home. I won’t bore you with the destructive forces of kittens (well, maybe I will in a future post), but let me just say that attention-seeking is not the half of it. These boys will practically grab you by the throat if you’re not giving them enough attention. I’m talking the throw books off the shelves, swing pictures off the walls kind of attention seeking. I’m talking about shred the manuscript and steal my pens attention seeking.

It’s a lot like trying to control a muse. Now I’d never actually thought about having a muse until I thought I’d lost her/him/it. Suddenly every word came out harder and with a lot more doubt that it was the right word, in the right place, at the right time in my manuscript. It all started when I became REALLY serious about marketing my manuscripts. Everything was about producing a product that would SELL, the product the reader would love. And the words came out slower, and more doubts crept in, so I held on tighter and harder. And things got even slower and the doubts greeted me whenever I sat down at my computer.

So I tromped down on the doubts and the sense that something was wrong, and focused harder on finding those right words, in the right place, at the right time. I’m frighteningly stubborn, you see.

And it solved nothing. A lot like following the advice I got from a cat breeder that I needed to do something about my cats to make them behave—like take a rolled up newspaper to them when they were on the counters or pulling something off shelves.

I did what the breeder said and my big boy, Ben, reacted exactly as I didn’t expect: I’d swat him with the newspaper and he’d hunker down and purr at me. Hard to swat him again when he does that.

So it was suggested that I treat them as a big cat might a small one and so, when he was creating some form of havoc, I picked Ben up by the scruff of the neck, yelled, and locked him in a room. The results? Well aside from the room taking a beating from the temper tantrum he threw, nothing changed.

So I was stymied. I didn’t know what to do and believe me, my house was getting torn up, big time. And then one night I realized something. All this bad boy behavior was aimed at getting my attention and my reaction was to give negative reinforcement to the bad behavior by giving him attention. I realized that what I needed to do was just give them attention. Spend time with them. Love them.

And you know what? The destruction didn’t completely stop, but it slowed down immensely. (You see I can’t be at their beck and call ALL the time.)

So what I learned with my cats I applied to my writing. I had to get out of sales mode and focus on what made my muse happy—not right words, in the right place, in the right time, but the story I was telling. I met my muse again and spent time with him/her/it. I relaxed and stopped putting rules around my desk and suddenly I was writing again, focused on creation, not selling.

Which puts me in mind of a wonderful little book called All Cats Have Aspergers. It’s a little book, a picture book really, for parents of Aspergers children. (For those of you unfamiliar with Aspergers, this is a form of autism, but the children are higher functioning, just in a different way than most of us. The heroine of The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo probably had Aspergers. So did the protagonist of the Curious Case of the Dog in the Night Time.) But one of the messages of the book is that Aspergers children (and cats) have their own way of doing things. They want attention when they want attention. They like to play their own games. And they don’t like to be held too tight.

A lot like muses.