I am going to begin this blog with the simple fact that Rosh Hashanah begins this evening. Then I will talk about my first book: Children of the Cat Goddess, about a race of super-intelligent alien Cats that exist on a different world in the Galaxy. I came up with these Cats in early college and finished writing their story during my sophomore year. It was a while before I “hit” on another idea worth writing about–my year as a grad school student–but Children of the Cat Goddess is my first real “book” (even if it is only 100 pages long). The Cats were matriarchal; had a Goddess; and the “Peninsula Cats” had a caste system based on eye color (the aristocracy had purple eyes).
Well, over the years I came up with various sequels, all of which until now are unwritten (I will find better names for the first four later):
- Northwards into the Chilly Winterlands;
- South into the Mountain Republics into the Jungle Lands;
- Further Southwards into the Lands of the Elephant Lords;
- Westward through the Seas to the Land of the Sabretooth Tiger and Wooly Mammoth;
- Tales of Cats and Larkumalki;
- The Book of Warren [a Cat who travels to Earth and writes his book about “the difference between Man and Beast, and how Man needs to respect Beast”].
Well, I am not giving up on the Tales of the Land of the Firebird, but I am working on a book which morphed from Tales of the Cats and Larkumalki: The Book of the Cats of Irlak. Larkumalki are, in effect, cat fairies or elves. Though they do not exist, the Irlaki Cats believe they do. The Book of Warren is self-explanatory. As for the other 4-book set, the idea is that the Peninsula Cats get the technology both from themselves and from the human crew that visits them, to travel throughout their world in discovery–the Cats discover something humans did late in our history: that it is not necessary to conquer either the other species of Cats or the Elephant Lords.
Someday I hope to publish my six-book set. Until then I work periodically on The Book of the Cats of Irlak, while doing reading for pleasure this week–Thomas the Rhymer; The Dog Master; and The Overstory; before getting back to my research for Tales of the Land of the Firebird. Sigh. I don’t know how I will get Tales of the Land of the Firebird done in time.