Cats! Forever! And ever!

LOOK AT MY KITTY. LOOK AT HER.

I like cats, so it goes without saying that most of my characters like cats as well. This is one of those instances where I don't feel bad at all for projecting my own likes/dislikes onto my characters - because cats are amazing and if my characters want to remain, you know, my characters, they damn well think so too. (Blackmail works on characters, did you know that?)

That said, while my characters like cats I very rarely...have cats in my novels! I can think of only one instance in which a character actually owns a cat that gets a fair amount of screen time, and she ain't in the series I'm working on at the moment...nor is the cat coming along for a few more books. However, in my notes for both of my series I can see where I had planned for cats to be hanging in the background as stress relievers for my characters, or you know, great comic relief cause catz r funn3h. 

And now I would like to talk about the cat that may never be.

Her name is Sadie. She's a simple black American short-hair with charming green eyes and the proper catitude that says "all this? it's mine. yeah, the TV too. Oh, you're saving the world? Too bad. TV's mine." In my notes Sadie belongs to one of my female characters starting in CROSS//Revenge. These are old notes, however, and Sadie is currently not slated to be in Revenge at all. Or any other book in the series, probably.

I don't know what happened! At first it was that I couldn't justify this character just going out and getting a cat between novels. And then she's not in a spot in her life where taking care of a small creature is very feasible. So Sadie was going to wait until the end of the series when everyone is settled down again and can have a cat. But now I still don't see it. Sadie may never ~come to be~ in this series.

I know. I could just shelve her and use her later in some other novel or story. But you know how cats are. They know what they want and there really isn't any arguing with them. Sadie may be fictional, but she's much the same. She wants to belong to this particular character in this particular series, or she's just gonna stay in the Imagination Shelter forever (luckily, it's no kill!) I still don't have plans for the frisky feline yet but the final books are still a few years away from any official planning, so who knows! Maybe Sadie will appear in CROSS//Repent or later. Or maybe she won't.

Maybe she's run away from home and go shack up with someone else...like you?

How about you? Are there any things that you share with your characters, and yet they never show up in your stories? Or are there characters that you SWEAR you're going to use and then never do? Dish.