You belong in a boat out at sea

You belong among the wildflowers
You belong in a boat out at sea
Sail away, kill off the hours
You belong somewhere you feel free

– Wildflowers, Tom Petty

Once I met a bloke who lived on a boat named after a Tom Petty song.

His name was Paddy and hers was Wildflower and they must have made an impression because nine years later they are still in my life.

Wildflower the boat

Wildflowers – the song

Nine years later and the Captain and I were privileged enough to  see the man himself in concert. We had no idea it would be our last opportunity.

I’d always quite liked Tom Petty, but he certainly played a bigger part in my life after I met Paddy. The first time he came over to my house I tried to impress him with a best of Tom Petty CD casually playing in the background (smoooooooth…)

He still gives me shit about that.

Petty for Paddy is like Bowie for me – a massive part of his life for most of his life. He has a Petty lyric for just about every situation. He’s dealing with the loss of his idol in a typical Kiwi bloke fashion, but I can tell he is hurting. We both are. We have so many memories wrapped up in TP. In the end even my cat (the late, great Mr Pies) was a fan.

The best of those memories was earlier this year when we actually got to see a Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers concert.

Paddy was turning 50 and our initial plan was to head to Hawaii – Hawaii Five-0 styles. Our plans changed pretty quickly though when I spotted on TP’s official Instagram that he was touring the United States at the same time we were going to be over there. My fuzzy American geography decided that our best bet was to detour via Texas, and so the adventure began.

When tickets went on sale I found myself at 4am mashing keys and refreshing my browser in a bid to secure our spot. I was mildly hungover after a few drinks to celebrate the end of the working year and all the usual things went wrong. The internet dropped out, my computer froze, the website got confused because I was in New Zealand trying to buy tickets for a concert in the United States.

But I got there in the end, waking Paddy up to crow about my success. (He muttered something unintelligible and went back to sleep.)

TP didn’t disappoint – the distance we traveled, the adventures to get there – the frisking Paddy got at the airport trying to leave Hawaii (a story for another day) were all worth it. The man still had it. It was an absolutely amazing concert and you could tell he was loving every minute of performing.

The crowd were loving it too – quite a bit judging by the funny smelling cloud of smoke that appeared over the stadium when he played Last Dance with Mary Jane.

It was amazing and we were both so freaking happy (and not because of the funny smelling smoke).

And to make the night even more perfect, out of all of his massive back catalogue, what did he play? Wildflowers.

Paddy probably won’t admit it, but it was quite an emotional moment.

Here’s my wonky recording – ignore the wobbles, the sound is good!

Margarita slushie – essential Texan concert fuel
Pre concert excite! (Yes Paddy is wearing a laser kiwi T shirt. NZ represent!)
The man himself
Waving celphones is the new waving cigarette lighters
Post TP glow – and awesome T shirts!

Paddy says losing Tom would have been so much worse if he had never got to see him play. It’s like the best thing and the worst thing happened in the same year. I’m so sad, but happy at the same time that I could help make this happen for him.

I’ll leave you with another favourite of Paddy’s from the 2010 Mojo album

I know that look that’s on your face
But there’s somethin’ lucky about this place
And there’s somethin’ good comin’
For you and me
Somethin’ good comin’
There has to be

– Something Good Coming – Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers

Goodbye Mr Pies

Nearly 16 years ago I got into an argument with my flatmate (housemate or roommate for non-Kiwi readers) about whether or not we should get a cat.

“Don’t be ridiculous!,” I said (in a rare moment of sensibleness). “We are going to go our separate ways in a year. Who is going to take the cat? Who is going to pay for the food and the vet bills? We are not getting a cat. End of story.”

It was not the end of the story.

Around midnight said flatmate woke me up to say she thought she had heard an injured cat in the back yard. I muttered something about her probably being high and turned to go back to sleep when I heard it too. A woeful yowling noise that could have woken the dead.

We woke another flatmate up and the three of us headed out to the back yard, armed with a cigarette lighter, because students didn’t have useful things like torches. We followed the noise into the bushes down the back of the property and when I thought we were close I grabbed the lighter. After burning my fingers several times (I didn’t smoke) I found the source of the caterwauling and tried to grab it before it could run away. Still thinking we were hunting for a wounded adult cat, I was shocked when my hands closed on a ball of fluff the size of a regular cat’s head. Where was the rest of the cat? How could it still be meowing? Once my eyes got used to the light I realised I had captured a tiny black kitten. I was amazed that something so small could have made so much noise.

The first thing we noticed when we got the poor thing inside was that it absolutely stank, like something had peed all over it. We gave it a bath in the sink, dried it off and popped it in a shoebox with a towel and a hot water bottle. A fourth flatmate woke up. “Is that thing staying?” he asked. We shrugged, if we couldn’t find an owner, then probably yes. We popped the shoebox in the bathroom, where we surmised there would be less damage if its occupant peed everywhere, and went back to bed. As soon as the lights went out the howling commenced in earnest. “Is that thing staying?” flatmate became “if someone doesn’t shut that thing up it’s going out the window” flatmate and Anna the sucker stepped in. I picked the kitten up and popped it on my pillow, where it promptly fell asleep. The choice was taken out of my hands, I was Mum from that night forth.

The next day we tried to deduce gender, but the kitten was so tiny it was almost impossible to tell. We couldn’t spot any boy bits so we declared our new friend a little girl and named ‘her’ Holly because we found her just before Christmas. A check up at the vet some time later told us a different story, our little fleabag was actually a little boy, and we might want to consider a name change. To keep things simple we just decided to drop the H and Holly became Ollie.

If Harry Potter was the boy who lived, then Ollie was the cat who lived. Right from the start we were told not to get attached to him because he probably wasn’t going to make it. He was only about three weeks old and we were told by various well-meaning cat people that if his mother had abandoned him, if he had been peed on, if we didn’t have a heatpad or fancy food then he was probably going to die. Nevertheless we purrsisted, feeding him kitten milk with an eyedropper and keeping him warm. Before long he was drinking milk from a dish by himself (give or take a bit of faceplanting) and using a litter box. Score one for the cat who wasn’t supposed to make it! Since then Ollie made it through a lot, getting hit by a car, a dicky thyroid, getting lost at new homes. He was the poster child for a cat’s nine lives.

I’m a big kid now! (blurry pre digital camera shot of Ollie graduating from bottle feeding. Note milk beard.)

Because he was so young when we found him, Ollie didn’t really know how to cat. This meant he was a terrible hunter. He knew he should chase things but he had no idea what to do with them if he accidentally caught them. Other than the 3am live mouse chases after having them proudly delivered to the foot of my bed, this was something I didn’t actually mind that much.

Because he wasn’t weaned properly Ollie also sucked his tail. It was kind of adorable when he was a kitten, curled up like a tiny doughnut, but not so cute when he was still doing it three years later. We tried to stop him, but if you pulled his tail out of his mouth he would just slurp it back in like a piece of spaghetti. It was really quite gross. His tail was crusted and pointy like a paint brush (in fact somewhere I have a tail painting where I gave in to temptation and dipped it in some water colours). At one point the tip of his tail became ginger. I kid you not. I have no idea what is in cat saliva but he actually managed to suck the colour out of his tail.

Students. I don’t actually have an explanation for this photo.

Then there were the wet patches. If you tuned out the weird slurping noises and let him stay in your lap for too long he would leave large drool spots in rather embarrassing places. He did it in the bed too, necessitating a few awkward conversations with new boyfriends.

Blep!

Our first real challenge came at Christmastime when we were all going to go our separate ways. Who would take the kitten? As predicted, it turned out to be me. I put him in what from memory was a bird cage and took him to my Mum and Dad’s, where we separated him from our adult cats Pirate and Topsey. He took it all in his stride, getting cuddles from my little sister and posing for a family photo. By then it had been unofficially decided that the fuzzball was mine.

Ollie’s first Christmas

Mum only just told me recently that when I turned up with Ollie she thought it would be a disaster. “Oh god, she’s got a cat. How is she going to cope with that while she’s flatting?” she said to Dad. After a few years of watching me with Ollie, she quickly changed her tune. Yes I saved him initially, but he saved me in so many ways. Those were her words, and they are so true. Through struggles with mental illness, messy breakups, living arrangements falling to bits, work and study stress, Ollie stuck to me like glue. I was never really on my own. He never judged and he was always there.

Renting with a cat isn’t easy (that’s a subject for a blog all of its own) but I wouldn’t have had it any other way. Ollie and I have lived all round the country – several flats (and a brief stint in a friend’s Kombi van) throughout Christchurch, another few rentals down south in Timaru when he went with me to journalism school, a number of homes further south in Oamaru where I worked for the local newspaper and we lived on our own like grownups, and finally across the Strait to Wellington where we moved about a bit before buying our first house together (with the help of some bloke called Paddy).

It felt like Ollie and I against the world for such a long time but when we allowed Paddy into the mix, we became a funny little family.

Meeting Ollie was a pressure moment for Paddy. He knew that if the cat didn’t like him it would be a deal breaker. In fact I’m pretty sure I wore a black cat T shirt on our first proper date, just to hammer the point home. Luckily for Paddy Ollie was a bit of a hussy when it came to men and he let him cuddle him straight away. A couple of years later and they were best buddies. Ollie even came to stay on the boat a few times.

Bros

 

When Paddy first met Ollie he was a little rotund (Ollie not Paddy!). At one point the vet told me if he got to 7kgs we were going to have to talk. Unbeknownst to me Paddy had a history of renaming people’s cats and this time took to calling mine Mr Pies  (as in who ate all the…).

Annoyingly, the name stuck. Mr Pies, Pies, Pie-eater, Piesy, Pie pies, His Royal Pie-ness. Ollie started coming when called Pies, he knew that ‘pies’ equated to food and that ‘pie time’ was dinner time. In the end I was calling him Pies too, despite my concerted efforts to call him by his real name.

Sadly every story does have an end and Mr Pies’ was just over a week ago.  It wasn’t a shock, he wasn’t in pain and he let us know when it was time for him to move on. We knew our time with him was coming to an end, it just happened a little quicker than anticipated. Ollie’s 16 years made him quite an old man in cat terms and unfortunately his kidneys had just worn out. Right up until his last week with us he was just as playful as when he was a kitten. A miracle kitty arthritis drug had given him a new lease on life. He would hurtle up two flights of stairs and be squawking at me from the top to get up there and feed him in the time my creaky knees had got me a third of the way. When he started struggling with his favourite thing (eating) and started pooing in strange places though, we knew something was up. He was so thin too. From his fighting weight of nearly 7kgs he had dropped down to 3kgs.

The vet told us we might have a couple of weeks, but unfortunately we had just days. The morning I woke up and he was still in bed with me not demanding breakfast I knew things weren’t good. When I popped him down and he was wobbly on his feet I knew they were even worse. We’d read that with kidney issues they aren’t in pain, their bodies just aren’t processing toxins and it is a little bit like being very drunk. Sometimes they just naturally go to sleep. Paddy told me to stay at home with him that day and if things still weren’t good we would take him in to the vet. Ollie and I snuggled all day; He rested his paws on me and purred. When his breathing started to get shallower I told him it was okay, he didn’t have to stay, he could rest now – but if my boy was anything it was stubborn. He started hassling me like he wanted food (he was on a special diet for his thyroid but by that point we decided he could have whatever he liked. Raw eggs and bacon flavoured baby food were his favourites – thank you internet!) I carried him upstairs and we sat in the sun (it was a rare sunny Wellington winter day) and he had a good chow down. The little bugger kept wanting to wander off though and he kept falling over. His body wasn’t doing what he wanted it to do. He let out a yowl of frustration and I knew. It wasn’t fair, he was in distress. I called Paddy and he came home early. Ollie cuddled up to him and started purring, which he hadn’t done for a while. When I said to Paddy we should try to get an earlier vet appointment he started purring louder. I am so sure he was telling us yes.

I sat in the back of the car with him and we cranked up the tunes. Ollie was a bogan, he liked car rides but only if accompanied by loud music. Like his Dad he was a bit of a fan of Tom Petty, so that is what he got. He didn’t want to be in his carry cage and I figured this time he didn’t have to be, so he sat on my lap, peering out the window and watching the traffic go by. When we got to the vet it was amazing. Pretty much as soon as we put him on the table, he fell asleep. It was like he had waited until we were all together and decided ‘okay, it’s time for me to go now’. When the vet put him to sleep we didn’t even see him take his last breath, it was so quick and so peaceful, it was obvious he was ready to go.

I’m crying as I write this, but I am also grateful. I am grateful that we got to say goodbye as a family. I am grateful for all those wonderful years, for all the times he drove me insane, for all the times he made me smile. I’m grateful for the friends we made together and the adventures that we had. I’m grateful for all the times he was there for me when times were dark, when the responsibility for a little animal that loved and trusted me helped keep me going.

As my little sister said, I was literally with him from the beginning to the end – and all the highs and lows in between. As a kitten he used to eat my books. As a cat he is immortalised on the cover of my first published book – pride of place, exactly where he belongs.

Om nom nom!
Cover cat

I am a witch without a familiar. He was my best friend. I am bereft but also so glad he was a part of my life for so long.

We buried him in a grove in the forest out the back of our property where he liked to lurk. Eventually we will clear a path down there and put in a bench so we can hang out. He’s got his blankie and his mousies and a tonne of catnip to keep him company in kitty cat heaven.

When I broke the news on Facebook it was really lovely. People from so many different parts of my life who remembered him from different times got in touch. It made me sad, but it made me smile.

So goodbye Ollie, Mr Pies, Piesy, Wolliver, Woozle, Mow mow, Boop Kirtlan. I will miss your chattiness, your attitude, your cuddles, and your incredible ability to find the most noisy thing in the room at 3am. I will miss seeing you at the door when I come home from work, having you steal water from any unattended glass an typing my blogs from underneath your furry butt.

You were the handsomest, bravest, loyalest, craftiest, naughtiest, most loving cat in the world and I will love you forever.

I will end with a million photos of Ollie, because he deserves a million photos.

 

Gators, guns and a new book

This is one of those blogs where I publicly announce I am going to do a thing so it forces me to do the thing.

The thing I’m referring to is another book, which I am in the process of writing (and now I have told all of you so I can’t back out).

I think it will just be an e-book this time. Though when I say ‘just’ an e-book, please don’t take that the wrong way.

Ebooks are great, I’ve read some brilliant ones. I’m talking more length really. I suspect I won’t have the material for a paperback as this story covers a shorter period of time. It’s more of a taster. I don’t think the process of writing and finishing it isn’t going to be any easier than it was for Starboard though!

Sorry sailors, but this time it’s not about boats – but it is about travelling.

I found that, next to the sailing and the crazy, quite a few Starboard readers picked it up because they were interested in travel writing. So this time I thought I’d give that a go.

This is going to be a story about travelling to the United States. A story about alligators, firearms, cowboys and an island that is home to more than 500 cats.

It is also a story about travelling there at a particularly unnerving point in time.

When we left the country’s president had just started lobbing bombs at Syria. While we were there North Korea’s leader was (mercifully unsuccessfully) launching missiles in our general direction and making all sorts of nuclear threats- it really was a fabulous time to be over there with an anxiety disorder!

Despite all the background excitement we had some fantastic, memorable, hilarious experiences, met some wonderful people and had many of our preconceptions challenged  (in both good and bad ways).

I’m going to tell you right now, I’m really nervous about writing about the US. There is so much history, culture and shared experience that I have not lived through and can’t possibly truly understand.

As a western tourist I am fully aware I am writing from a place of privilege. There are some heartbreaking things happening over there right now and I am writing about a holiday – but I hope I will be able to do some of the places and people we saw some justice.

Like Starboard, this can only scratch the surface. I wrote that book after living in the South Pacific for just a few months. In this case it was mere weeks. There is absolutely no way you can get your head around a country in that period of time.

It was a fantastic adventure though, and I am looking forward to sharing it with all of you.

My working title is Gators, guns and keeping calm – and, because I now know you need a tagline explaining what the book is about (thanks Starboard publishers!) – an anxious Kiwi’s guide to the United States of America

Though it’s early days yet and in a month’s time I might decide I hate it and go with something entirely different. Any better suggestions much appreciated – feel free to leave them in the comments 🙂

The trip was initially just going to be to Hawaii for Paddy’s 50th birthday (Hawaii Five-O styles) but then I discovered Tom Petty was going to be doing a tour in the states at the time we were going to be over there.

Since Petty to Paddy is like Bowie for me this absolutely had to happen. We worked out Texas was the best timed and placed concert, so I bought us tickets to his show in Dallas.

We thought Hawaii and Dallas would be an interesting enough combo, but then we got talking to travel agent friend and suddenly the trip grew.

So thanks to her the book now covers the following destinations: Hawaii – Waikiki, Maui and Lanaii (the island of 500 cats), San Francisco, Texas – Houston and Dallas and (the place I have wanted to visit forever) New Orleans.

Here’s some sample pictures to whet your appetite (and an entire album of cats for the cat people). I’m hoping if I go for e-book format I might be able to include a few more photos that I could with Starboard, but I’m not entirely sure how that sort of thing works. I’ll have to do my homework!

Lanaii cat sanctuary (an island with 500+ cats! Aka heaven)

Lanaii Cat Sanctuary

 

And a few others
 Leis and champaign Maui
Alcatraz
 Texas gun range
Texas drag racing
NASA
Space dinosaur
NASA spacesuit art project
Tom Petty playing Wildflowers in Dallas Texas
Tom Petty played Wildflowers! (The song Paddy named the boat after) You can listen to it here: Tom Petty – Wildflowers, Dallas Texas 2017
Bourbon Street New Orleans
New Orleans street boat
New Orleans Khris Royal
Swamp lady - gator tour
New Orleans gator
Anne Rice's house
Stalking Anne Rice’s house
New Orleans Lafayette cemetary
New Orleans - Lafayette cemetary
New Orleans, Which Way is Starboard Again? Karran Harper Royal
And finally some shameless product placement after lunch with the lovely Karran Harper Royal 

The waiting is the hardest part

Wildflower was named after a Tom Petty song

 

which I think is just perfect for her and Paddy, but it is another Petty song

 

that’s haunting me right now.

The first question I get from people I haven’t seen for a while is ‘so when is the book coming out?’

If I had my way the answer would be tomorrow.

Unfortunately, the answer is still – next year.

Getting a book published involves large amounts of agonising waiting. There’s the wait after you pop your baby in the post and send it to various publishers. Did they get it? (that is normally answered by the first rejection letter) Did they read it? (also answered by the rejection letters) Do they think it’s a stupid idea?  – I was lucky in this respect. A lot of people warned me not to expect to hear anything back from the publishers, not even a rejection. But those I did send material to all got back to me in some form or another and gave me reasons and helpful advice (none of which, thankfully, was ‘it’s a stupid idea’).

If you are fortunate enough to find someone willing to take a punt on you (thank you David Bateman Publishing!) then there is even more waiting in store.

It’s a hard wait too, because you have adrenalin coursing through you. You’ve run hysterically around the office, squealing and waving your arms in the air like Kermit the frog. You’ve told all your family and friends. Your dream has come true, you are going to be an author – and you want it to happen now, now, now!!!

kermit-arm-flail-1392075955

However – while your book may be the center of your universe, at this stage it is only on the periphery of your publisher’s. As one of my publishers politely told me on our first meeting “I have about seven books  in different stages of development on the go at the moment. The one closest to being published is the one I love the most. When yours gets to that stage, you’ll be hearing from me every day”.

While that gave me a bit of a reality check and stopped me freaking out over long periods of silence, it didn’t make the waiting any easier.

The first really nerve-wracking wait was the wait to iron out the contract – as far as my paranoid brain was concerned until my signature and the publisher’s signature were on that piece of paper there was every chance they could change their minds.

It's real!
It’s real!

After everything was signed and sealed it wasn’t so bad. There were still things I could do – arrange photographs, send them in. Then it was back to waiting.

 

Patience is a virtue I struggle to posses however – so about a month ago I dropped the publishers an email (trying not to sound too needy) just to get an idea of where everything was at.

They were kind and humoured me – giving me late June – early July as my next milestone. That’s when editing will start in earnest. They’ll go through the book decide if they want any changes made and whether they want me to add anything. I’m a little bit nervous about that, but also intrigued as to how the whole process works. Then we start thinking about things like the cover and hopefully by Novemberish there should be an actual, physical book to hold.

It takes about nine months to get a book out into the wild (not counting the time it takes to write it) – and then you have to think about the best time to release it.

This bit I found kind of fascinating because it’s something I’d never really thought of. Christmas is the time that jumps immediately to mind, but for a newcomer into the market it’s not actually that practical. Yes there are more people out there buying books, but there are also more books out there. At Christmas time you are competing with cook books and All Black biographies – even a relatively well-known writer risks getting buried.

Other than that – the next biggest book-selling days are Mothers Day and Fathers Day. Not exactly days I would have thought of, but it kind of makes sense. You don’t really buy books for Easter or New Year, everyone’s birthdays are on different days and books are often the perfect gift for Mum or Dad.

So we are aiming for Mothers Day next year – which means this time next year you could be holding a copy of Which Way is Starboard Again? (or whatever the book ends up being called) in your hot little hands. The aim is to have the book in shops by March and get promoting after that – so I apologise if I am insufferable for few months round about then.

But for now, it’s back to waiting. I’m not complaining – this has already been an amazing ride. I still can’t believe it is actually happening – but I do wish it would happen a little faster!