I first attempted to write about life on the poverty line in 1995 but I discovered, after writing about 50,000 words, that because there was so much hardship in the material I was covering, the work was looking very bleak and unattractive, so I put it aside.
Early in 2001, I conceived the idea of writing a novel using the same plot and characters as in the 1995 manuscript, but making it palatable to the general reader by turning my main protagonists into cats, and by making a determined effort to keep the work as light as possible without compromising its integrity. All through my childhood, my Australian-born Irish mother had composed dialogue for our pets. I suspect it came from her mother: all the siblings in that large family anthropomorphised their animals.
And so I constructed a community of rabbits, cats, dogs, koalas, porcupines, birds, etc. all of whom talk and struggle and experience life as people in these small communities do. I intended the work to be a fairy tale about poverty, with the happy ending so often lacking in life, so I deliberately used a more old fashioned narrative style, very different from my usual streetwise one.
I published the finished book in 2014 under the title of MagnifiCat. The AI decided that because the title was the same in name to that of a Roman Catholic prayer, it must be a religious book. I had thought they’d pick up the capital C. Not so. The book sank line a stone, and I went on to other things. Namely these.
Available in E & Print: Https://goo.gl/FtL0zz
and
Available in E & Print: https://tinyurl.com/c96pan8v
(I wish I could figure out how to get these cover shots smaller. I must have known how once; now it eludes me. Spare a thought for this Luddite, I’ll get there yet.)
As the end of 2023 came around, I thought of resuscitating that all-animal novel. It took me quite a few months to get the new back stories right and modernize the dialogue. Now, ten years after the original MagnifiCat, here it is.
As Allan Staines of Pinedale Press said about it all those years ago, If you love animals, you’ll love this book. However, there’s a lot more to the work than that. There’s very little available on what Byron Shire was like in the mid-1980s. Was everybody stoned, was I the only person surviving on the odd drop of alcohol? Anyway, this book nails how it was. If you’re interested in how Byron and Mullum used to be, it’s worth a look.
Available in E & Print: https://shorturl.at/EW2AQ
Danielle de Valera 