Premier! The Kitties of Sky Village: Mia Kluckka!

Mia Kluckka! The Kitties Go to Rome

My friend, Danny, was particularly offended when I couldn’t but laugh as he tried to hypnotize me using his newly procured hypno-specs, convincing himself of their immediate effectiveness. I guess the ad did its job—in putting Danny under its spell.

Mia Kluccka! Kindle, Paperback, and Hardback—Now Live on Amazon!

The Precocious Donovan Kluckk Leads the Gang to Rome!

In this Life Two of the Nine Lives of Donovan Kluckk, Donovan’s aunt Matilda sends Donovan, Jesse, and Daisy to Rome, with Sniffer as service dog. Slinkk and Stinkk stowaway for the some serious airport and air travel antics. We also introduce the new youthful character—Gio Cannoli!

The underground fort, like the books before arose from the earth out of a real underground fort that my friends and I built in the old horse pasture behind our house in Phoenix. Using some army surplus folding shovels and my Dad’s tools, we tunneled and created what we thought then was comfortable fort space and covered the interior walls with sheets and blankets, with candles for light. For the roof, we found a rusted Jeep hood, which we placed over a 2×4″x8′ wooden frame. Over the hood we shoveled desert gravel and even planted sages and weeds we relocated from the surrounding field— likely not an OSHA safe play environment today. To this day, I don’t know if Mom knew what happened to the bedding.

To enter the structure we had to crawl on all fours between the hood and the dugout. Once inside, were felt safe in our own earthen cocoon. I’ll not forget the night some neighbor likely phoned in a complaint of boys with flashlights disappearing into the ground. A police officer walked his way across the horse pasture, and, after questioning our building practices, did the only thing a reasonable officer would do, in our child minds. He jumped up and down, crashing to earth on the Jeep hood, with dust flying and transplanted xeriscape around his boots. And with a nod of approval, he walked off and left us to our subterranean habitation.

What exactly do boys do hidden in their DIY cavern, circa late 1960’s? That’s easy. They take out the products gleaned from the Johnson Smith catalog, famous for such things as “Sea Monkeys”:

The In-Flight Faerie

The photo I took of my wife, Carol, in front of our Phoenix home provided the inspiration for her in-flight faerie cameo.

Below you see her image morphed into an elf, and in Mia Kluckka she welcomes the children as the in-flight faerie. A good fit for this job description. This is also my way of thanking her for her help in edits and her being my real life sprite in this life.

Inspiration at 32,000 Feet

The Art Linkletter show said, “Kids Say the Darndest Things!” I dedicated this book to Azariah, Nehemiah, two youthful readers. Azariah read to his brother, Nehemiah, The Kitties of Sky Village – Pawlogy. Azariah visited our house to meet Stinkk, Slinkk, and Sniffer. If you listen to kids, they do “Say the Darndest Things!”

I asked Azariah if Nehemiah was also coming over. “No,” he said, “He doesn’t like pets.” He then went on to tell how they were scared on their solo plane trip to visit the grandparents, but had such a good time.

I saw something magical about the child who “Doesn’t do pets,” but who also loves its when his brother reads to him The Kitties of Sky Village. This sparked the image of The Lord of Seat 14B. “Lord Snitwell, who doesn’t sit well.” These two boys have a great sense of humor and will appreciate the truly wild plane trip on the way to Rome.

The Kluckk-o-matic

Donovan’s mad professor inventions and the utopian miscellaneous concepts dropped here and there reflect my own inventive side, which I’ve had since I was digging underground forts and erecting three-story treehouses in cottonwoods, even into the adult work-a-day world with a published US Patent

How Long to Create a Book

Someone commented the other day about how quickly I could produce another book in The Kitties of Sky Village series. I accept that compliment. The truth is that creating a book takes four hours and sixty-nine years. From my years as pastor (and in the business world), I have kept notes … notes on books I’ve wanted to write, ideas, and characters to explore. Some of these have not seen the light of the published page but are waiting to take the screen. Today, while I still refer to my paper notes, the bulk of the concepts and ideas are digitized. Most recently I have brain dumped into Google Keep, not knowing how much that can actually hold.

The value of a series, such as The Nine Lives of Donovan Kluckk, is that the characters begin to tell their own story, and the author merely works as an amanuensis. Compare this to staring at a blank screen and pondering, “What should I write?” That is an agony I have experienced as a pastor even into the wee hours of Sunday morning, begging God for a morsel of truth to feed the congregation assembled in the approaching hour.

In a sense, I am following the characters and writing what I see them doing. They scold me if I try to take them out of character. Like those panoramic cliffhanger shows, such as Star Trek or Batman, I find myself excited about the next episode, not knowing what new dilemma awaits the kitties.

In the wings stand a book of science fiction, also another allegorical spiritual work along the lines of C.S. Lewis’s “Screwtape Letters,” and a book of a theological reflection on separation of church and state. The Sky Village saga has been such fun that I temporarily shelved these sketched out adult features yet to be written.

“Better to have written than never written at all”

I’ll throw this in for other writers interested in process. In the beginning was the note, forged in the formless and the void. Though the phone is a great way to capture a note, I still use small paper notebooks to scribble an idea, should I awaken middle of the night. This practice came to me as pastor, when an inspiration struck me in night hours. If you don’t record them, you may awaken with amnesia of the concept that visited you in the night.

In bound blank notebooks, I further sketch out ideas and concepts, such as The Kitties of Sky Village. In Google Keep (a virtual notes app) I drop miscellaneous chapter and character ideas. Now to move from the colored pencils notebooks, Google Keep, to a writer’s storyboard in Scrivener, where I can create chapters and move virtual cards around on a corkboard:

Scrivener allows one to rearrange the story cards at will; in fact, one could write the entire book using Scrivener.

With Scrivener’s organization, I start writing the chapters in Word, saving all the work as I go in OneDrive. There is not much worse than having a computer glitch and losing your work; save as you go. Back it up. From Word, for children’s books, I create chapters in Canva, an amazing online editor that gives formatting only dreamed of a few years ago.

One of the most challenging is editing your own work, as the brain does not want to see the scribal errors. I am indebted to my wife, Carol, who is better than an AI in spotting errors. For Kindle books, the finished process involves downloading a Canva PDF into Kindle Create, in order to create an upload package that Amazon’s KDP uses to create something that Kindle can read. A paper or hardback requires exact margins and gutters, which KDP tools do provide proof programs. I use ChatGPT to suggest Canva margins, which I then run as a trial through the KDP proof to see if image and text stay in the boundaries. Sometimes it takes three or four trial runs to get the margins correct. Chapter books with matching images are even more tedious to arrange with the text, but the outcome is worth it. The only reason I use AI to help with the art is that it gives me an intelligent magic marker art of the vision I had of the scenes. The color Kindle versions provide exceptional depth of image; whereas, paper printed images require that I rework every image to maximize for print vs digital. Again, tedious but necessary.

Now, I know what you’re thinking. “Jim, your writing process is the very thing that inspired the Kluck-o-matic inventions in the story!”

Part of me looks forward to writing text only books, but the child in me loves a picture book. Tell no one, but I actually reread The Kitties books on Kindle for the joy of it.

The Unlikely Least

I suppose if there was a theme for “Mia Kluckka!” it is that God chooses the weak and unlikely to lead the rest of us in the kingdom. In a world filled with Lord Snitwells who don’t sit well, we can learn to appreciate one another. One secret, which I won’t reveal here, reminds me of God’s way of choose the lease of these as I greet our cat, Stinkk.

I hope that the readers will enjoy discovering, or rediscovering, the sacred “M” on their tabbies and those sacred moments around us that we have been too busy to notice. One of the reveals in Mia Kluckka, is Jesse’s gift. He, as a nonverbal autistic hero of the series, shares an unexpected blessing at the end of the book.

Azariah summed up the The Kitties of Sky Village with the declaration, “It’s a cliffhanger!”

Jim

Attention Campers

This is a work of fiction.

The children, cats, dogs, guides, inventions, underground adventures, talking creatures, flying salmon, suspicious airport scanners, ancient feline saints, and other improbable events found in these pages are products of the author’s imagination, even when they seem alarmingly believable.

Any resemblance to actual persons, dead poets, pets, popes, pilots, or particularly disagreeable minors in Seat 14B is either coincidental, affectionate, satirical, or one of those things best left unexplained.

Historical, religious, and geographic elements have been blended freely with fantasy for storytelling purposes.

No cats were canonized, no pugs were inserted into airport scanners, and no cannoli were harmed in the making of this story.

Probably.