Hi there, I’m Office Cat. My pet, Kai, has graciously allowed me to come onto her blog today to introduce the ‘office cat guide to
Blogging’. But first, may I offer my feline feliciations and give you an idea of who I am
Kushie, the Office Cat
and my (blogging) pedigree.
My name is Jenuine WildTansy, and I am an F4 Bengal. But my mom (and pet) calls me Kushka, or Kushie, or Fuzzbutt, which is very undignified.
But what my pet has told me about Blogging is *really* valuable, so valuable in fact that I wanted to share. She’s doing the 30 day challenge, and so am I!
From now on, the ‘Office Cat’s guide to Blogging’ will appear on WPforAuthors, but mom has graciously allowed me to start on her blog first, and get everyone interested.
Forget worrying about SEO, forget worrying about domain names, the first thing you’ve GOT to do is find your gorgeous voice. Like my piercing stare, a gorgous, sleek voice will be strokable, skritchablle and entirely memorable. Once you’ve got your voice, you can plan your blog.
Remember, I’m appearing DAILY at Wpforauthors, and I hope you’ll join me there from tomorrow!
Some days, I have to do two posts for the day, but when I do, it’s because I’m equally passionate about each topic. Today, I’ll be talking about C-PTSD (mental health), and I’ve also got my cats to talk about. Cause they’d never forgive me if I didn’t give them a mention, at least. And in a way, they’re interlinked. I think the cats keep me grounded and sane. They keep me company when there’s only me in the house, and give me something to focus on. Plus, I’m pretty sure the studies on purring at least have some evidence, even anecdotal, in our house.
A short history of cats to date
I was raised in households with cats (for a little while as a small child, then when we moved into our homes in the Cotswolds), birds (always), and dogs (till I left my mom’s). I’m used to having pets around. When we moved to the Cotswolds, I was desperately lonely, and we got Kushka, aka Office Cat. If you go to that post, you’ll see what a doll she was, but despite our best efforts, she died in 2013 from a massive chest infection. We’d adopted her and discovered she had a permanent Upper Respiratory Infection. Kushie was, though, a gorgeous cat. And super smart. And bonded to me like nothing on earth. I held her as she slipped away.
Arty cat go zzzzzMy clothes!Oh HAI!
She was, quite frankly, one of the most incredible cats I’ve ever met. I could tell so many stories, but she is the reason my press is called what it is.
But after we got the house sorted out, and cleaned everything that we could, we adopted our current girls, Haley and Eiryss.
Kittens?
Our girls…
We lost Kushie end of February, after six years with her. After we worked out what we needed to do to clean the house to ensure any cats we adopted next wouldn’t catch what she had. And then we went looking to adopt again. We were lucky to get Kushka, who was an F4 Bengal, as an adopted cat. And unless there was a compelling reason, I don’t think we’d adopt a brand new kitten, and instead rescue. But, given how hard we found it losing Kushie so soon, we chose to look for much younger cats. Luckily, we found Hercules and Missy. The woman we adopted them from was a cat fosterer who had to stop having cats because her asthma and allergies were getting worse, and she couldn’t manage that anymore. Hercules (aka Haley) and Mischief (aka Eiryss) were just under a year when we took them on. Haley was hand-reared, while Eiryss was bought to keep her company. They’re both very different, very sweet and very cute.
Spotlight on Haley
Our gorgeous Haley is white and grey, teeny tiny, even now, and is very much a cat that loves comfort most of the time. Shockingly though, if either of them are catching anything (which is rare, and they’re belled), chances are she’s the blood wee maniac that’s getting birds. She loves comfortable, fluffy blankets, sunlight and the best food. Her favourite toys involve feathers and ribbons, her favorite spot is on my daughter’s knee. In fact, in one of the photos, she’s stolen one of my daughter’s oldest teddies, Scruffy. She looks innocent, but honestly, she’s devious and uses her ‘cute’ to her own gain. Which is adorable.
Exhuberant Eiryss
Until recently, Eiryss was a very active cat. She spent most of her time outside, and isn’t particularly…lapcatissh. Though she’ll climb on Tempus, my other half and beloved, and will cuddle on her terms, but is a very independant, very loud cat. She adore all of us, I’m her favourite at barbeques, where we make her salmon (well, we make my salmon, and she and I share), and she gets to enjoy that with us. Every night, she’ll chase us to bed, so she can get cuddles before going to sleep, and has taken to interrupting my other half’s calls to climb to her spot on the windowsill, in his office. While both of them are very intelligent, Haley has a sly kind of intelligence, while Eiryss is…more direct. She loves pom-poms and dry food (we joke that she thinks she’s an astronaut). Her favorite spot is where she’s photographed, on the windowsill in my office, or our bed, or on top of the bookcase outside our room. She is more adventurous, I’d say, of the two of them. As the summer comes in, we’ll see how she goes, but both of them are slowing down a little.
(most photos (c) Artenapan, a few of them myself or Tempus, my partner)
And that’s the girls
If you like them, they do, of course, have a Facebook and Instagram, though we’re pretty bad at updating them. (well, no, I’m terrible, Artenapan is great at it).
These are my girls. Let me know about your pets, please?
So, Glass Block will be out on Friday the 20th, and in the countdown to it, I’ll be sharing some stuff. Tomorrow, I’ll be talking about why it’s even related, in a way to my non-fiction, but front and centre, I wanted to share my dedications. Not everyone that supports me is specifically name-checked here, for various reasons, but I’ve covered, I hope, everyone important.
Dedications
Dear reader. Most of these names won’t mean a thing to you, unless you’re one of the people listed. You are welcome to skip them, but if you know me, online or off, you might not wanna 😉
First up though. I want to put a special dedication into the book for the Nanowrimo. Without it, the book, the series, the universe would never have been written. So, if you’re at a bit of a loose end in November (or April/July for Camp Nanowrimo), wanna meet some people just as crazy about writing as you or want to support up and coming writers, then head on over to http://nanowrimo.org. A portion of every sale of EVERY book I’ve written or will later publish goes to Nanowrimo.
To my beloved, David – without your unwavering belief, clever ideas, encouragement and comfort when it all went pear-shaped, this book would be gathering digital dust. Without your love, I’d be a completely different person, and I hope every day coming is as good as the last – together. To Katie-Anne – love you, big sis. Thanks for being my unwavering cheerleader – even when I was being an angsty dumbass. I miss you so very much, and wish you were with us still.
To my children – there’s two of you right now, though there may be more in the future. Love you loads. Thanks for putting up with your mom’s crazy need to write everything down and take photos of stupid stuff 😉 You’ve grown into two of the most amazing people ever, and I’m so grateful I got to be your mum, and still get to be. To Keith – People are lucky to have one best friend. I’ve got four, and you’re one of em. Thank you so much for sending the notes and the part I thought I’d lost. Thanks for talking to me about forensics, and not dying laughing when I said the dumb stuff™. Get your book written sunshine ;), you’ve proved you can write other stuff, and kicked ass at it in the process. To Mary Ann – founder of #chartermemberofteamkai, patient, intelligent and funny. I think you, of all people on this list, have been waiting the longest for this book. Tada! To Brianna – I’m really looking forward to all the mischief we’re planning, and I’m hoping you are too! Thanks for being there to chat every day (just about!) To Valerie, Quinn and everyone else that kept me going – Thanks for all you do! To all my other writing community friends and cheerleaders – I’m not sure that to say other than #writingcommunity on Twitter is awesome! The Facebook communities are awesome, from IAG (which I helped co-found), to the others I take part in are awesome too! To my mother – I dunno what to say, other than thanks. Without everything you did for me as a child, I’d never have loved books enough to want to write one, and without your patient tutelage, I wouldn’t have nearly as much fun with learning, nor be so obsessed with continuing as an adult. To my family and my family-in-law – thank you for your unwavering patience, support and funny conversations. And thank you for not looking at me as if I am completely insane when I went hunting for a pen and paper, or said completely random things that made you stop and ask me to repeat myself. I never did without explaining what I’d been thinking, but still, I’m grateful for the kindness, love and support – and occasional books handed over when you realized what I was trying to work out. To all my Nanowrimo participants – thank you for letting me ML and thank you for cheering me on when I hit crazy word-counts. Here’s to many more years of that. And to Nanowrimo HQ itself. Office of Letters and Light will receive 5% of all sales, of all books from now on, as they have. This year has been rough, I know, but I’m hoping that it’ll get easier. To Troy, Simon, Zoe, Jack, the lecturers at Gloucester University and all of my classmates – Thank you. You know what for but thank you. My voice only got louder once I did that degree – best four years of my life! I’ve continued to grow since then, and I’m on my second degree now! And to my newest friends at Ludosport Bristol (And beyond in the Ludosport community)– THANK YOU. You don’t know what you gave me back, and how much I enjoy training, nor how happy I am to be allowed to. What an awesome sport! And if you’re not included above…to all my friends and fans online – Social media is a blast, sure, but it really does get in the way of writing. Thank you for being the distraction I needed to get the story straight in my head ;). Love you loads – thanks for your support, crazy about you all!
Work at Home Writers licences this article as a free reprint as long as all links remain intact and the article is unedited. For edited or commissioned guest articles/blogs please contact D Kai Wilson-Viola via our contact form.This notice can be removed, but the bio should remain in place.
One of the biggest challenges writers, or anyone that works from home face, is thier home office. There are lots of things to take into consideration, from where to situate it, to organising your paperwork and more.
In this series of articles, we’re going to talk about all of this, with a couple of things that most people don’t think about when setting up a home office besides.
First up – what do you *really* need?
One of the key mistakes people make when planning a home office is looking at space and then cramming themselves into it – or conversely, not thinking through everything they need and then discovering they’re scattering themselves over several rooms to accomplish it.
So, think about what you really need. Do you *need* a sprawling desk or can you fit your work into a smaller area? More importantly, if you do need a lot of space, do you *always* need that space? In the case of people who work from home making products, you might need quite a lot of space that can be condensed down, or alternatively, you might have machinery that doesn’t compact well.
Choosing your space
In most homes, there are areas that have to serve dual functions – in our house my home office is in one of two places – at the dining room table, where I do most of my paper based work, and in the guest room, where I write and type. Our filing cabinet, through neccesity, lives in the conservetory, so my home office is scattered througout our living space. It makes organising my workspace in a traditional sense very difficult, which is why i’ve learned to plan my tasks carefully – but if you’ve got a space room, or area under stairs or even a corner of another room that you can use as your office, that’s perfect. If you can’t, do what I do, and repurpose areas without changing the ‘flow’ of your house.
Using your diningroom table
One thing I learned, early on, was that using my dining room table meant that I needed to pack up before the kids got home from school, or at least make sure I was using as little of one end of our 10 seat table as possible – if I didn’t, I’d spend time when I was getting tea ready, cleaning up eveyrthing on the table, so I have a rule now – if my paperwork is going to take longer than the time I have between breakfast and tea, or if it’s the weekend, I don’t do it unless it’s an emergency. I’ll do other bits of prepwork on the laptop instead.
You have to consider a couple of things when looking at your dining room table, or kitchen table – and one of them is how much ‘traffic’ it sees. Mine is pretty high, to be fair – there’s four of us in the house that use it constantly, sometimes at opposite ends from one another. Others might find that sometimes their table is entirely ‘free’. So I’ve taken to thinking of it as a conference room of sorts – and ‘book it’, even if that booking is just a mental one.
Got nowhere at all?
A good way to look at the home office in general that’s ‘shared’ with other duties, is to consider when you’re going to lose it.  I have to plan for visits, because I lose my office then.  It’s not a hardship, I just plan around it. So if you’ve got no space, consider instead making your ‘home office’ anywhere with a table and some space to keep a filing cabinet. Can’t even manage a filing cabinet? Keep some boxes that hold foolscaps and store your paperwork in there. They stack and can store in many places easily.
D Kai Wilson-Viola is a blogger with a purpose. She’s owns DigitalSteward LLC, a full service design and copywriting company that offers everything from WordPress support, to grant writing, and lots of things in between. A parent, blogger and author, she works with her diverse experiences to run Work at Home Writers, a blog which talks about working as a writer from home, whether you’re an author, copywriter or blogger.
So, firstly, I’ve spent the last week with shingles all up one side of my face. It’s not *the most* painful thing I’ve ever felt, but gotta be honest, it’s close. Because of this, my ‘October announcements’ post and this one have kinda rolled up.
The pot of my soul, cracked as it is
I’ve been talking about ‘levelling up’ a lot on my private groups. I’ve been talking about several things really, but I want to be clear. My major one is community. I talk – a lot – about #payitforward and that the #writingcommunity is very important to me. To do that, I’ve been thinking about levelling up my life. I’ve lived my whole life accommodating various things. Mostly, I guess, psychosis. My mental health is a major element of my life, and even when I’m at my best, I’m… not? I live with imperfect cracks, like a little jar, a Kintsugi pot fixed with the things I find around me. My soul is visible in places – in others, it’s patched and safe. There are raw patches, that I guess I’ll eventually cover over. But that little pot is pretty tight right now. I’m managing to fill it up a lot more often, even if there’s…less space in there. We’re working through various things as a business team, because we do sort of have some plans. For now though…
Substacking
This is my newest project. I’ll be sharing snippets and more. But this Kintsugi thing? I’ll be talking more about it. As for levelling up? Because I’ve had shingles this week, I’ve not managed as much as I wanted to. But I’ve taken a couple of things forward. I’ve grabbed a Duotrope trial, to start working towards getting to my stories out there and building my name as a writer, but also to bring in a challenge. To ‘earn’ it, I have an amount I have to be paid for the pieces I submit, and that’s ok. It’s a low goal. I’m using my diary again. I’ll be clearing my office space. I’m also getting Uni work done – I’m booked in for tutorials, and I’ve got my books ready to go. I’m a bit excited to complete my first year of Uni, and start moving towards my PHD. And I’ll keep condensing down stuff to here. I’ll talk about that more in the coming weeks, but it’s pretty much a clean up and combine exercise right now 😉
And that’s me this week. Oh, and Kill Kit Killers is out on the 15th. That’s kinda exciting, and I know what the next three books are too! Woot!
Kai is a writer, author and avid reader. A mental health advocate, Ludosport athlete and coder. She’s the mother of two young adults, owned by two cats, and lives with her beloved in the Cotswolds.
That sounds like so much fun! I love games, especially RPG. Haven't played with a group in a few years.…