Just thought I would share a crochet project I recently finished! I love seahorses. If you know, you know. And I also love yarnbombing, or at least the IDEA of yarn bombing, because a true yarnbombing takes afghan sized creations to be as impressive as I would want to be.
So I got the idea to make my own garden flags. Cheap acrylic yarn holds up to all sorts of weather. It does eventually fade but it’s so easy to make flags that you can just make another.
Here is the one I just put up for Valentine’s Day right before the 2026 ice storm hit my area:
Here is a close up version. The eyeball is a white button with 4 holes and a little black button with only two holes sewn on top of it.
How about you? Do you love the idea of yarn bombing but you’re too lazy to do a full bomb???
Meankitty doesn’t just interview authors. She likes to interview READERS, too, and other humans willing to describe how cats are the best. Today’s interview is with Mewla Young who is also a cat blogger (Pictured: Ginger Grrrl)
1) Do you live with any cats? Please state names, ages, appearances and temperaments of the cats.
I serve three cats at present. Uli is the handsome 10-year-old tabby. He’s a moody boy, sometimes grumpy and sometimes a sweet little Casanova.
Uli’s step-brother is 10-year-old black beauty, Kwazi. This cuddly lover boy’s life purpose is to “make love, not war.”
In August 2021, Ginger Grrrl showed up at our doorstep. She won’t divulge her age, but she’s a mean-as-a-mamba, hot-headed redhead.
2) If you want to tell us about any humans in the house, that’s okay too. But you don’t have to.
Cat-Dad hangs out and takes turns with me entertaining the cats, scooping their litter, and otherwise worshipping them.
3) How much do you desert your cats (leave the house for things like “jobs” and “school”)?
I work from home, so I’m always available to my furballs. Of course, if I’m on an important phone call, I’ll need to close my office door or the cats will crawl all over me until I finish. This evening, I’m on the couch, balancing my laptop with my left hand and typing my answers with the pointer finger of my right hand so as not to disturb Kwazi, who is sprawled on my lap.
4) How much do you read and what do you usually read?
I read or listen to a book or two every week. I love mixed-genre novels. You can’t beat science fiction with some romance thrown in (like Catagenesis by the great Jody Wallace). I also like books about technology or science (Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari), living a vicarious rock and roll life via biographies about musicians, and books written by comics (just re-read Bossypants by Tina Fey)
Author’s note: Mewla was NOT paid to plug the author’s book!
5) Why do you think cats are better than dogs?
Cats are much more beautiful, more dignified, and cleaner than dogs! Smell a cat and then smell a dog. Enough said.
6) What are some of your favorite blog entries or videos you’ve done that portray cats very accurately, which is to say, as if they are the supreme beings on the planet?
Ginger Grrrl does a lot of reporting on my blog, including her series on cat care. She’s the first to point out that we humans are pretty thick at times, and tries to ensure that humans don’t make stupid mistakes when rearing and serving their cats.
7) In your experience, do you think cats would make better superstars of fiction, comics, movies or television? Please explain your choice with superlatives about feline gloriousness or at least something that makes sense to the humans reading this.
We need more books, comics, movies, and television shows involving cats! Cats make the world go round, so when will publishers and movie and TV producers better cater to cat lovers? We need cat superheroes and cat villains too! There’s a long history of cozy mysteries involving cats—beginning with books by Rita Mae Brown to Mollie Hunt—as well as children’s books, but why are there so few Young Adult novels, comic books, and movies that involve cats?
8) Do you have any amazing or humorous real life cat stories you’d like to share?
Well, the drama at our house began with Kwazi and Uli, step-brothers who have a life-long bromance, portrayed on their YouTube channel Cuddling Cats Kwazi and Uli. When Ginger Grrrl came along, Kwazi was smitten with her, and Uli was furious. He felt betrayed but forgave Kwazi. To this day, however, Uli despises Ginger. Ginger just waggles her cute butt in his face. Ginger and Uli still take turns pulling dirty tricks on one another. It’s quite a melodramatic love triangle.
In my SFR whodunit with mind reading talking cats, you can find out who did it! How? One easy method. Buy the book and read it! Catagenesis on sale now.
Why can’t mind reading cats figure out who’s doing it any faster than a 110,000 word book? It’s a mystery. I mean, literally, it’s a mystery novel. As to what they’re doing instead…
Wow, those cats really aren’t much help, are they!
Jody Wallace’s 30+ titles in sf/f and contemporary romance feature diverse protagonists, action, adventure, and plenty of cats. Visit her at www.jodywallace.com and the cats at www.meankitty.com
Anybody like to review SFRs? I have a few ARCs of CATAGENESIS left to share if you have a proven track record of actually posting reviews OR we already know each other. How about it? Reviews can be short, a paragraph explaining why’d you’d recommend, are ambivalent about, or did not like the book in question — and I’m not the kind of author who’ll get ticked at you if you don’t give me 5 stars A+++. What kind of asshole does that?? But seriously.
Email me if you’d like to apply to be on my ARC team!
Here is a short blurb that a helpful cyber denizen helped me with, as opposed to the long one on the book page you can see if you click the cover.
Two humans, a bunch of cats, a space ship … and murder.
Until a talking cat interrupted a business meeting, Han-Ja Gee thought he knew everything. He made a living selling information and secrets to almost anyone willing to pay. If he could discover how talking cats actually exist, he could pay off the life-debt he owes and leave Trash Planet forever.
On a generation ship whose passengers woke up two thousand years late—and whose cats became sentient—Farah Shine Collins struggles to adjust. When she is asked to partner with a local citizen from the current century in solving a murder on board the ship, she knows it will be trouble.
Han-Ja dreamt of escape and Farah dreamt of a place to call home. Neither expected to fall in love. If they cannot stop the killer, the collateral damage will be more than their hopes and dreams. It will be their lives.
Thanks again to Aysha for helping me gain more perspective on revising my book blurb! Be sure to ask me about the Catagenesis ARCs today.
Jody Wallace’s 30+ titles in sf/f and contemporary romance feature diverse protagonists, action, adventure, and plenty of cats. Visit her at www.jodywallace.com and the cats at www.meankitty.com
I ask because most of my books aren’t in paperback and I’m trying to decide if I should remedy that. So I made a poll! You can elaborate in the comments.
[ays_poll id=4]
Jody Wallace’s 30+ titles in sf/f and contemporary romance feature diverse protagonists, action, adventure, and plenty of cats. Visit her at www.jodywallace.com and the cats at www.meankitty.com
In honor of summer and it being too hot here in TN to reasonably go outside, I am setting several of my series starters to “free” for a couple months.
You’ll have to track down which ones, though :). I don’t know if Amazon will comply, either. Please feel free to contact me if you have questions!
Here is a cat who is free of concerns:
Jody Wallace’s 30+ titles in sf/f and contemporary romance feature diverse protagonists, action, adventure, and plenty of cats. Visit her at www.jodywallace.com and the cats at www.meankitty.com
So far I’m pretty dubious about March. Feel free to give me reasons to be POSITIVE….one way or the other!
Cass says hi.
Jody Wallace’s 30+ titles in sf/f and contemporary romance feature diverse protagonists, action, adventure, and plenty of cats. Visit her at www.jodywallace.com and the cats at www.meankitty.com
In my most recent newsletter, I updated my subscribers about my audiobook news, some releases in Magic, New Mexico, and included a free holiday short story! To encourage more folks to sign up for the newsletter, I will include the first page of the story here and then the sign up link. So if you sign up — let me know and I’ll make sure you get the whole story! I love having subscribers — it’s like I have friends I email every month, ha. (Please note that I email my friends a lot, too, and in fact they get real sick of texts about cat vomit and why am I so tired.)
New Year’s Magic, by Jody Wallace
At precisely 12:00 am on New Year’s Day, when he came at her for a celebratory kiss, Ana’s date turned into a pumpkin.
“Crap!” Ana snatched up the large gourd before any of her fellow revelers smashed it. The residual effects of the spell should prevent bystanders from noticing the transmogrification, but the spell to change Jimmy back into the human he’d been ten seconds ago wouldn’t work on pumpkin pulp.
A pumpkin…and a cat butt!
She was going to kill that damn cat. This time, she was really going to do it.
Leading with the pumpkin, she pushed free of the throng. Confetti and balloons drifted from the ceiling as the crowd broke into a drunken rendition of Auld Lang Syne. Her stilettos pinched her toes with every stomp.
Not that the date had been going fabulously—it was hard for a sorceress to relax with a normie, even one as cute as Jimmy—but she’d been dateless for too long. The last man who’d truly interested her… Well, the less said about him the better.
Except she’d be saying a lot of things to him here in about twenty minutes. Threatening things.
What do you think happens next? Want to find out? Go here to sign up for my newsletter. It comes out about once a month and always, always has gratuitous cat.
Jody Wallace’s 30+ titles in sf/f and contemporary romance feature diverse protagonists, action, adventure, and plenty of cats. Visit her at www.jodywallace.com and the cats at www.meankitty.com
Did you ever wish you could talk to your cats, find out why they are stalking around the house at 3 am and howling? Or staring at the wall with an eerie, fixed concentration? Today’s writer prompt brings that fantasy to life. Sort of. How do you imagine this scene would go? What would happen next?
We’d love to see what you come up with!
We’d love to see what you come up with in regards to talking to cats! Drop me an email and we can share your efforts with everyone else in the newsletter!
Jody Wallace’s 30+ titles in sf/f and contemporary romance feature diverse protagonists, action, adventure, and plenty of cats. Visit her at www.jodywallace.com and the cats at www.meankitty.com
