Mewsing on life

I’ve had my website on cats for twenty years and one of my cats, Ollie, wrote his diaries for the humour section, writes subscriber Pauline Dewberry. These were very popular and many of my subscribers suggested that they should be published. Before I could edit them and put them into a publishable format, however, life got in the way, and I found myself having to deal with an unexpected health issue. As someone who often writes about what is going on in my life as a way of making sense of it, it just seemed natural to me to make notes about this journey I now found myself on. Over the years, Writing Magazine has been inspirational to me, so I entered For Such a Time as This in a book deal competition, for which I was shortlisted. That spurred me on, and I decided to publish it on Amazon Kindle in January 2020 and then in paperback by The Conrad Press in July 2020. For Such a Time as This is my account of living with acute myeloid leukaemia from diagnosis to remission. Ollie’s Diaries were beckoning me from the drawer where they’d languished while I’d put my efforts into not dying, and I looked at them again thinking that I could probably make a trilogy of them. Landing on all four paws: the diary of a kitten named Ollie was published on Amazon Kindle in May 2021, with book two, Landing on all four paws: Further adventures of Ollie the Cat, published in July 2022. Conversations from the Bridge is the third book in the trilogy which I’m editing at the moment. This is Ollie’s account from Rainbow Bridge and tells his story of how he tries to find the bridge to get back to see Mum to tell her he’s sorry. His adventures are shared, as they were in the first two books, with the cats he lived with at the Lazypaws Guesthouse for Discerning Felines, before finding himself at Rainbow Bridge. It’s a journey of grief, but from Ollie’s point of view, as he experiences the different stages until he finally reaches acceptance. Before the pandemic, I was carrying out research for another book on grief. Provisionally called It’s (Only) a Cat it’s about other people’s perceptions to us cat lovers who have lost our pets and the way they react to us, not fully understanding the depth of our grief. Having caught Covid in December 2020, and now living with Long Covid, all writing and editing is an enormous struggle, but I’m always happy to read about other writers’ news in Writing Magazine and attempting the competitions, a couple of which, I’ve been shortlisted for. Website: www.thedailymews.com