The cat walked up to me, out of the blue.

“I want to be a writer,” he said.

I slammed my special writing pen with the puffy pink feathers onto the desk.

“Good gravy, stop scaring me like that!” I said. “I’m trying to turn the greatest American novel into the greatest American Broadway musical, and you come up with stupid questions like that.”

“It’s not a stupid question, it was a statement,” said the cat. “I want to become a writer.”

“Nobody BECOMES a writer,” I scoffed. “We’re born that way. That’s like a boy saying he wants to become a girl. Everything is wrapped up and pre-ordained right in our DNA.”

“What’s DNA?”

“Don’t Need to Ask.”

“How rude,” said the cat. “Well, I’m going to become a writer, with or without your help. I’ve got stories to tell and someone out there wants to read them.”

I flipped my hair back and sighed. “This is exactly the conversation we had last Tuesday, when you said you wanted to be a duck. You can’t be a duck or a writer! You’re a cat.”

The cat frowned and walked away, his tail whipping back and forth.

“We’ll see about that,” he growled.

I turned back to my writing desk, and shook my head. “This country …”