The Cat Who Saved Rehoboth
Cat & Mouse Press, Lewes DE publishes an anthology every year. It’s themed and last year 2 years ago the theme was Pets. I wrote a couple of short stories, one called Maddog which I thought was a hoot. And another called Pippin, which was accepted and published (though I changed the name at the Publisher’s request.)
I also had an idea for a story called The Cat Who Saved Rehoboth. It was super fun to write but I didn’t finish in time to submit it. Besides, the anthology has a 3,500 maximum word count and my first draft come in at a whopping 20,000 words.
I edited and rewrote the story four times, and eventually got the story down to bare bones at 7,500 words. No way to make it shorter with all the characters in the piece. Still, I offered it to my Beta Readers (more on them to come) who each said they’d love to read it. And each very much enjoyed it. I included a short chapter that had been pulled from the story in an attempt to hit 3,500. I felt it needed to be included in the back story – worrying without it a very important part of the story wouldn’t make sense. Pam read that too and said she didn’t need it, but it gave her the idea to make a series out of The Cat Who Saved Rehoboth. What a great idea! That first story was the natural ending though, so now I’m backing up.
This was also the first “mystery” that I had ever started. So I took Pam’s advice and started writing a series of shorts or maybe even novellas based around Saint Anthony – the stray cat who keeps saving the city from disaster. What fun!
I’m going back to that first story written (the last one for the series) and will be adding back some things cut to reduce word count but not all (I have a theory about writing too many words, but that’s for a later post). I’ve written the first story and loved finding out how this stray tabby came to be. Chapter 1 is in rough draft status and comes in a whopping 17,000 words. Chapter 2 is close to the completion of the rough draft – the cliffhanger has yet to reveal itself to me.
