We have dogs, but I am secretly a cat person. I’ve had close to twenty (all indoors). When poverty prevented vet trips, I became petless and stayed that way until I met Joe. Joe hates cats. He keeps saying they are noisy, due to once upon a time being kept up by a stray cat in heat. I keep telling him the dogs are a thousand times louder, but then he starts talking about smells, and what if they attacked his dogs, and so on.

But he’s not here, he still works in New York, so I stared feeding the strays.

We have a cat population so thick, they’ve made their own trails running under storage sheds and between our houses, burrowing under and and leaping over from place to place where the cat ladies feed. I’ve become one of them, but I have an end game. I am gaining their trust and keeping them close.

There are no real birds to speak of here, only a handful in the entire neighborhood have escaped the cats. When I first moved in, I was delighted to find a few snakes and a turtle, signs that wildlife migrates through the area from nearby railroad tracks, and I got excited at the chance to nurture a little urban diversity.

But, the cat colony kept growing. There is no diversity here, just cats and the few birds that have learned how to avoid them. I haven’t seen a bunny in over a year.

There are dogs though, the large, aggressive ones that people in shabby neighborhoods keep to protect them. When I first moved in, I thought the cats had Manx blood and were inbreeding, until I noticed the ones whose tails had healed permanently mangled from narrow escapes. Now I see the limping, the scars.

I love cats, and I love nature, so I want to act, even if I only manage to help a little. I know no-kill shelters are overrun, and I know many of these cats aren’t likely to be adopted, so working with a catch-and-release spay and neuter program seems the best option.

Now, Joe is currently making a comfortable amount of money. However, because of our mutual goals, I’m on a small allowance while we finish paying way too much for this place, so we will be allowed to move it to land (which also means we need money for land). There is no way the cat-hating Joe will help me with this goal, unless I’m also contributing my own funds, then he might think about it.

My own funds being limited, this will be a slow process that might not help much, unless I do the weird thing all the people with real jobs are doing and earn my own money. In my current situation, the best way to do that is with my writing. It will still take patience, in the meantime I can continue doing what I can with my own money to help.

Obviously I can submit my work and use that money to buy the vouchers I will need, but I’m still at the stage where I don’t have much material worthy of submission. I’m working on correcting that right now. In the meantime, I still wish to keep up my fiction blog, and my uninterrupted writing time is short.

Here is where I need your feedback. I could simply do my normal weekly flash, working hard in the background on a novel that features a cat, then self publish and then use those book sales to raise the money. In essence, leaving my blogging out of it, but the project would result in my first novel, a simpler story than the one I will talk about below.

Or, I can blog the occasional cat-related flash with a donation button in the P.S., and possibly weave that flash into a flash novella, occasionally making one of my little films to illustrate some of the flash to promote novella sales. If I did that, the novel I work on could be the idea I already have, character sheets and all, but it has an aspect that I would find challenging as a writer. It’s a little intimidating, and I’ve been either working to developing my skills or been procrastinating, I’m not sure. Both projects would be more complex and challenging this way.

Maybe I won’t be able to raise any money in a decent amount of time, I might end up just paying out of pocket until we eventually move, but I can continue to donate to the cause. Any money I make from either cat project would be donated, forever and ever, amen. It might not end up a huge amount, but I will be doing what I can.

Okay, writing community. What would you do?