The Story Behind the Story

How I happened to write a funny mystery about two girls and two cats in Blissfield, Michigan. . . .

Once upon a time, I lived on a farm just outside Blissfield. And I had five cats. One was a fluffy, feminine white cat who could sniff out trouble before it happened. Another was a little tomboy tabby kitten with oversized ears who was fast and rough and liked to get into trouble. Those two knew how to handle all my other cats, plus my two dogs, and every single visitor who ever came to my farm.

The story was born the day I noticed my white cat sniffing the air and twitching her tail. I realized that she smelled something I couldn’t detect, something she thought I should investigate. Every time she did that, sure enough, there was a crisis I could solve by just following my white cat. Because she seemed to be “whiffing” the air, I nicknamed her Fiona Whiffer.

Then I started thinking about what my friends and I liked to do when we were ten or eleven years old. We loved playing with our cats and riding our bikes and spying on neighbors. We also liked to imagine what older kids and strangers in our town were up to. Thinking back on those days, I began to write about Samantha Rose Stonemather and her best friend Dessie Preston, the Original Security Girls. The result? A novel called The Fine Art of Following Cats.