The Cat Trusts

There’s a point in the back half of The Taiga Ridge Murders where things are going very badly for our heroine–trapped with no power, isolated by the snow, no way to get help–and Maya looks at the stray cat who has adopted her and notices how oblivious she is to all the worry.

She stops wandering and stands there in her room, staring down at her cat curled up near the fire. Holly is oblivious to any danger, any worry. She trusts, it seems, that there will always be food. There will always be warmth. That Maya will provide it for her. If the trip this morning was traumatizing, she shows no sign of it—she’s satisfied to pretend the whole adventure didn’t happen.

I’ve been sitting here drinking my coffee trying to wake up enough to function–I’ve switched back to the dual-release 10mg melatonin I used to take and that’s been helping me sleep finally (better than a prescription hypnotic did) but it’s extra hard to get moving in the morning. And I’ve been watching Shawn play with his toys, oblivious.*

He plays with the other cats sometimes but has long been comfortable playing on his own. I wasn’t sure after Gus died that he would be, but he entertains himself just fine. He romps and plays oblivious to worry (unless I am very sick, in which case he gets Very Upset) because Mom Has Always Provided and he doesn’t believe there could be a world in which that changes.**

Working in the arts feels like death from a thousand cuts, and those cuts much of the time are fees. Amazon charges a delivery fee, now Apple wants a *30% fee from Patreon iOS app purchases*, Etsy tacked on a new regulatory fee atop the others (FYI the even charge me a cut of the shipping fee, which I don’t set; Canada Post does).

Or the cuts are dwindling visibility and further theft. Twitter collapsed and that had a direct impact on most small creators I know; Bsky has sold some books, absolutely, but I’ve noticed the last couple of times there were a few people doing the “I love these books” things, I just got a spike in piracy instead (indeed, seeing someone download dozens of books from three series, representing over twelve years of my life working, was deeply depressing). And at a time when we should be lifting one another up, remember only one of my close writer friends bothered to acknowledge my last release date.

Or the cuts are because everyone is suffering everywhere. Numerous people have been laid off. They buy fewer books. They’re no longer able to support the work. This is all understandable but it trickles down everywhere.

Or the cuts is just the 2d8 psychic damage from every single day seeing news articles and ill-informed people and sometimes even your own audience telling you your work doesn’t matter, you are replaceable by plagiarism machines, you should not make any money on your labour even though they want to consume it, and also this is somehow all your fault that your work doesn’t matter and you deserve to starve. And then you have to take time away from creating new work to find another income stream for existing work. Again.

Actually replace all the “or” above with “and”. And the cuts come from everywhere. And everyone I know is so fucking tired.

I have no idea what my situation is going to look like a couple of years from now. I had something I was hoping would work out so I’d have a small chunk of money that would buy me time off freelancing so I could focus on writing the last Livi book (that’s not a simple task and will require a lot of devoted time and focus) but that’s seeming less likely the more time that goes by. And there’s no simple solution, because it’s a lot of systemic forces just driving everything down. If I have to quit publishing, I will have to look at something else to make a living on rather than freelancing as well, because while I do like what I do, I know eventually I’ll be resentful if I have to spend all my time working on other people’s books rather than my own (I used to work in publishing so…I know what my tolerance level is).

But that is not today. Today I will go take a shower and get another coffee to do a day reset and get back to work.

Because Shawn trusts. I cannot, but I can try to be worthy of that trust even when the power goes off and supplies dwindle and the storm closes in. I can just keep focusing on what I can do now and believe I’ll figure out alternatives in the future.

“I’ll come back,” Maya tells Holly, but Holly doesn’t look up. Holly sleeps, contented, and Holly trusts.

The Taiga Ridge Murders is out November 12 and I’d love for you to preorder.

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* Please ignore my awful carpet, that’s how it looks even after vacuuming and washing it. It’s very old and worn down and cannot get clean now.
** The exception is, of course, if he has to miss a meal because of a scheduled surgery, in which case you’d think the sky is falling with how expressive he is about his hangriness.