The short answer here is yes, but… I don’t know so much that it’s a “gotten in the way” as “assisted badly.”
In 2007, when I first moved into an apartment with my best friend. About a month later, we got a pair of stray kittens from their coworker. The kittens were sisters, a grey tabby-tux and a standard tux. I ended up with the standard. She had a little mark under her nose that looked like a mustache. I named her Moiraine Damodred Grappin, after Moiraine from The Wheel of Time, and her nickname was Rainey. Her sister was named Jenny by my best friend.
Rainey lived until 2023. RIP. I miss her a lot.
But the thing with Rainey was that over the almost exactly 16 years I had her, she saw me through everything: moves, relationships, jobs, everything. And that little cat saw a lot of what I’ve referred to before as the “Golden Age” of my writing productivity. She also saw the burnout after.
Rainey was my girl. Granted, I had another cat, Cersei, for almost the same amount of time, but… Rainey was my shadow. She was absolutely the type of cat who behaves more like a spouse or owner. She wasn’t the stereotypical type of cat that you think “that cat has staff, not owners.” No, Rainey was a hardass, but… she was a caretaker. That girl saw me through surgery recoveries, illnesses, depression, and heartbreak. She was smart as hell and… I really can’t say enough about how amazing she was.
Anyway, the specific behaviors I most think of with her “assisting” with my writing comes from… probably the 2009-2012 or so era of my writing. At the time, I was in an apartment on my own (in the same complex as my best friends, who had started a family) and my main computer at the time was a laptop. I didn’t write at my computer desk often. More often than not, I was on my couch, with a background noise movie or music on. That was my spot for gaming, writing, pretty much everything.
As much as Rainey loved being a lapcat, she understood the limited lap access that came along with computer being there, and she was happy loafing next to me. Cersei did, too, but Rainey was more regular of a couch companion.
Back in the days before I got Scrivener, I used WordPerfect over Microsoft Word, but I also tended to do a lot in Wordpad, mostly because .rtf files were easy to format and move between computers, since I was very much not in the world of shared folders and files or anything back then. File transfers were email attachments.
And I printed my novel outlines so I could reference them most easily. Working on a small, single laptop screen… yeah, I wasn’t much of a pro at keeping multiple windows open or switching between them yet (that wouldn’t come until later in 2012 when I started working at a call center. But I digress). So I’d have my outline printout beside me, usually sitting on the couch, so I could glance at it quickly without having to deal with clunky touchpad mouse controls.
Well, the place I set my outline just happened to also be Rainey’s spot.
There were plenty of times she was a paper stand for me. All things considered, she was decent at it. A purring, fuzzy, cuddly paper stand that put up with her lot in life.
She was there through everything from Empeddigo to The Deadly Studies.
I was just barely starting to peek out of burnout in September 2023 when she passed. I like to think she would be proud of me for still writing and still chainmailing. Because she saw the onset of that too and… very much put up with metal rings everywhere.
You were the absolute best, Rain-cat.
In 2007, when I first moved into an apartment with my best friend. About a month later, we got a pair of stray kittens from their coworker. The kittens were sisters, a grey tabby-tux and a standard tux. I ended up with the standard. She had a little mark under her nose that looked like a mustache. I named her Moiraine Damodred Grappin, after Moiraine from The Wheel of Time, and her nickname was Rainey. Her sister was named Jenny by my best friend.
Rainey lived until 2023. RIP. I miss her a lot.
But the thing with Rainey was that over the almost exactly 16 years I had her, she saw me through everything: moves, relationships, jobs, everything. And that little cat saw a lot of what I’ve referred to before as the “Golden Age” of my writing productivity. She also saw the burnout after.
Rainey was my girl. Granted, I had another cat, Cersei, for almost the same amount of time, but… Rainey was my shadow. She was absolutely the type of cat who behaves more like a spouse or owner. She wasn’t the stereotypical type of cat that you think “that cat has staff, not owners.” No, Rainey was a hardass, but… she was a caretaker. That girl saw me through surgery recoveries, illnesses, depression, and heartbreak. She was smart as hell and… I really can’t say enough about how amazing she was.
Anyway, the specific behaviors I most think of with her “assisting” with my writing comes from… probably the 2009-2012 or so era of my writing. At the time, I was in an apartment on my own (in the same complex as my best friends, who had started a family) and my main computer at the time was a laptop. I didn’t write at my computer desk often. More often than not, I was on my couch, with a background noise movie or music on. That was my spot for gaming, writing, pretty much everything.
As much as Rainey loved being a lapcat, she understood the limited lap access that came along with computer being there, and she was happy loafing next to me. Cersei did, too, but Rainey was more regular of a couch companion.
Back in the days before I got Scrivener, I used WordPerfect over Microsoft Word, but I also tended to do a lot in Wordpad, mostly because .rtf files were easy to format and move between computers, since I was very much not in the world of shared folders and files or anything back then. File transfers were email attachments.
And I printed my novel outlines so I could reference them most easily. Working on a small, single laptop screen… yeah, I wasn’t much of a pro at keeping multiple windows open or switching between them yet (that wouldn’t come until later in 2012 when I started working at a call center. But I digress). So I’d have my outline printout beside me, usually sitting on the couch, so I could glance at it quickly without having to deal with clunky touchpad mouse controls.
Well, the place I set my outline just happened to also be Rainey’s spot.
There were plenty of times she was a paper stand for me. All things considered, she was decent at it. A purring, fuzzy, cuddly paper stand that put up with her lot in life.
She was there through everything from Empeddigo to The Deadly Studies.
I was just barely starting to peek out of burnout in September 2023 when she passed. I like to think she would be proud of me for still writing and still chainmailing. Because she saw the onset of that too and… very much put up with metal rings everywhere.
You were the absolute best, Rain-cat.
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