There’s an old quote from Beverly Cleary that says, “If you don’t see the book you want on the shelves, write it.”

Apparently, in my case, it was more like: if you don’t know enough about cats to write about them, get one. And that, more or less, is how all of this started.

I wasn’t a cat person. I was a dog person. Very much one.

I had more experience with dogs than cats, including having my Belgian Malinois give birth and raising her puppies. So while I wouldn't exactly call myself an expert, dogs were familiar territory. Cats, on the other hand? Clueless. I didn’t dislike them. I just didn’t really get them.

Then sometime in 2019, a client decided I should start writing under my own name.

At that point, I had already been writing content for other people’s blogs for more than a year. Ghostwriting suited me just fine. Someone gave me a topic, I wrote it, they put their name on it, and I got paid for every word. Everybody was happy. Especially the part where I didn’t have to put my face anywhere.

I didn’t have much confidence in my writing then. To be fair, I’m still not all that confident with it now. I know I can write. People have been paying me to do it for years. But apparently, knowing that and being completely confident about putting something out into the world with your own name attached to it are two very different things.

My client, however, seemed to have more confidence in my writing than I did. He thought my work should have my name and my face on it. He believed I had already made enough mistakes, learned enough from them, and written enough that I should stop hiding behind other people’s names.

So he did something I wasn’t expecting. He paid for a year’s worth of website costs and gave me a blog. My blog.

The plan was for it to be a pet-oriented site, mostly about cats. There was just one tiny problem: I knew absolutely nothing about cats.

Which is how I ended up getting my first cat. For work.

Yes, my entry into cat motherhood was essentially sponsored by a client. 😂 I figured that if I was going to write about cats, I should probably know what it was actually like to live with one. I could read all the cat resources I wanted, but actually having one seemed like a pretty important part of understanding what I was supposed to be writing about.

So I got one.

And then, well... the rest followed.

Somewhere along the way, the cat I got because I needed to learn about cats stopped being a research subject and simply became my cat. Then one cat became more cats, and before I knew it, they were everywhere: waiting for food, taking over whatever space I happened to be working in, sleeping beside me, appearing in photos, interrupting work, and generally behaving as though everything in the house belonged to them and we were merely allowed to live there.

They became part of our family. More importantly, somewhere between getting that first cat for a writing project and all the cats that came after, I apparently became a cat person without noticing it happening.

Years later, that original cat blog is gone. I kept writing for other people. I kept ghostwriting. Life happened. The kids grew. Cats came into our lives, and some, painfully, left it. But apparently, the cats stayed in my story.

Because here I am again, starting another blog. This time, nobody bought it for me or told me I needed to put my name and face on my work. I’m doing it myself, although I can’t say I’ve magically acquired all the confidence I was missing back then. Maybe I’ve just reached the point where I’m willing to write anyway.

And when I was deciding what belonged here, there really wasn’t any question that cats would be part of it.

Hence, Coffee, Cats, and Thoughts.

It’s funny to think that something that became such a big part of my life started because a client basically told me to write about cats. I thought I was getting a subject to write about. Instead, I got my first cat, then more cats, and eventually a house where cat hair is probably now considered part of the decor.

So no, I haven’t always been a cat person. I became one accidentally.

And apparently, all these years later, I’m still writing about them.