A Writer's Notebook, Day Four-Hundred-And-Seven

I am still thinking a lot about Ulysses, which may not be all that strange, it being only a week and a day since his passing.  It is intense in a way that the loss of a pet has never been for me, and I am aware that a large part of that is because of how much care we gave him, but I know that others feel a strong loss, even if they were not part of his care regiment, so I think it is something more than that.  I do not know, but I feel that I may not be able to just move away and not work through this in my writing.  I don't want to write a book of dead cat poems, really, though I suppose that is one way to do it.  I also don't want to write a straightforward book on the order of many others about a special pet, though I am sure I could do that, and likely in a way that might be successful.

The issue with doing such a book, I think, is that I don't want it to become what I am expected to writer.  I have little interest in my career being totally dedicated to that form of personal narrative.  It is not the content, really, but the fact that pet narratives of that sort are not my general mode and I do not want to prevent the publication of other works in the future.  If I were to write such a book, about Ulysses, I would want to publish it, to share his story, and hopefully to use proceeds, at least in part, to fund something in his honor.  In such a case, I also don't want to think that writing a book about the cat I loved was a reason I never got my novel(s) published, or that I was pushed towards a form of writing which does not reflect my own creative impulses. 

I do think that their is a solution, though it is not apparent.  The specifics of it, indeed, are not resolved for me at this time ,but I know that there is a way to tell the story that will transcend the usual in terms of such books and allow me to create something that is truly worthy of Ulysses, unique and impacting beyond the expectations such a book suggests.  I don't yet know what that is, or even what it means to suggest such a possibility, but I trust that it will clarify so that I can consider how to write such a thing, especially since I don't believe it will be easy to stop writing about this at any time soon, one way or another.

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