Developing a well-rounded, believable character is just one challenge writers face. But you aren’t limited to just writing about human characters. Animals can play an important role in your story. Having lived and loved many cats during my life, I found developing cats as characters in my novels to be extremely easy.

Of course one of the first things you must decide when using a cat as your character is will they be able to communicate or “speak” to other animals as the animals do in Rita Mae Brown’s Mrs. Murphy mysteries or are they going to be restricted to just cat-like behavior such as the cats Koko and Yum Yum from Lillian Jackson Braun’s Cat Who series.

In my novel, Summoned, one of my main characters, Tosh, is a small grey cat. Since this is a fantasy novel, I had the liberty to have the cats actually communicate telepathically. Cats with this ability are actually called STACS. (Yes, that is just CATS spelled backwards. ) However, telepathy is not the only method of communication used. A lot of what a cat says is through non-verbal behavior which provides another outlet for telling the story.

GRIMM FAIRY TALES: V0LUME 11
Publisher: Zenescope 
Pub Date: May 15, 2012 
ISBN: 9781937068332 
Author: Joe Brusha 
Pages: 172

In this twisted, sometimes erotic, graphic novel series, Sela Mathers (a modern day Snow White) is dealing with the aftermath of The Dream Eater Saga. She overhears an elder telling the story of Jack the Giant Killer to a group of kids. In this tale, Jack’s family is killed by a ruthless king, resulting in Jack giving up his soul to the Dark Hords in exchange for the power to destroy giants. What is shocking about this tale is that it is true.

Sela’s love‘s, Erik, soul has been captured and is now in Limbo. With the help of Druanna, she travels to the Limbo to save Eirk’s soul, but she comes face to face with the realms’ wicked leader Alicia and her deadly assassin, Jack the Giant Killer. Alicia, along with her undead army, has plans for Sela.

THE PIGEON PIE MYSTERY
Written by: JULIA STUART
Published by:  DOUBLEDAY
ISBN: 978-0-385-53556-4
Pages: 335
Pub Date: AUGUST 7, 2012

    After the scandalous death of her father, Maharaja of Brindor, which involved him in a private situation with a maid in his bedchambers, the Indian Princess Alexandrina, nicknamed Mink, is left with nothing as her father left her with several debts. Within a year everything she owned was repossessed, leaving her with only her lady’s maid, Pooki. Queen Victoria hears about Mink’s situation and gives her permission to stay at the Hampton Court Palace.

CYNTHIA’S ATTIC: THE MAGIC MEDALLION
Written by: MARY CUNNINGHAM
Published by:  Echelon Press Publishing
ISBN: 978-1590804605
Pages: 160
Pub Date: 2006

    Picking up shortly after first book in the series (set in 1964), Augusta Lee, or as everyone calls her - Gus, and her best-friend Cynthia (both twelve-year-old) are eager to return to Cynthia’s magical attic that took them back in time, where they resembled and was mistaken for their grandmothers. Once again they climb up to the cobweb invested attic and open the mysterious trunk that throws them back to the year 1914, where they hope to go to the circus with Gus’s great-grandfather, Charles, but their plans drastically change as their grandmothers, Clara and Bess, hide inside a crate that is in the back of the wagon. They might be able to fool Gus’s great-grandfather in believing they are their grandmothers, but their grandmothers will probably hear their voices from the crate causing an awkward situation that they would probably want to avoid.

    Gus and Cynthia return to the attic where they find two clown costumes left there. They slip the costumes on and are magical transported to the circus, where they are mistaken to be new clowns by Blackie, the evil hobo clown and circus leader. They befriend a girl about their age named Annie. She was left as a baby at the circus and was raised the by an acrobat named Lilly.

Thank you for inviting me to visit with you today and to talk about the first two published books in my royal siblings, The Gasquet Princes, four book series.

When I started writing From Now Until Forever, published by Astraea Press, all I knew about it was that it should have a royal hero. I couldn’t ‘see’ my heroine, nor for that matter my hero, so I went for broke and started freewriting.

Melanie, my heroine turned up right away, and indicated this would be a short story geared towards an online site I’d submitted to in the past. I was given a scene through her eyes – well I was given a tiny snippet of scene, let’s be honest about it. All I knew, some guy with blond hair was getting shot at.

Not a lot to go on, but hey, I thought my word target was a tad over a thousand words, surely I’d get something. I did, but according to the ‘crit’ group I belong to while it captured their attention it wasn’t enough, they wanted more!

So I tried again and took it up to five thousand words, submitted it to a publisher looking for content for their anthology. At the same time a friend read it for me and said ‘she wanted it’ if the story was rejected. It was. So I went back to my friend, Kate, who promptly told me, ‘Good, but you have to extend it to fifteen thousand words.’