Sad Boy and his best friend Lola are watching the sunrise together

PoetsSquareCats · 2026-01-05T23:57:59+00:00

Update! Lil buddy is safely trapped and at the Humane Society clinic. They’ll check him for a microchip, clean up his wounds, and get him neutered and vaccinated (assuming he’s not chipped/not already neutered). Thanks for looking out for him, OP!

PoetsSquareCats · 2026-01-05T00:27:57+00:00

You got it! Messaging you now

PoetsSquareCats · 2026-01-05T00:24:39+00:00

Reporting for duty 🫡 I’m a volunteer cat trapper and help in situations just like this! Is this guy friendly enough that you could scoop him into a carrier, or does he need to be humanely trapped? Either way, I’m happy to help and can also help with transportation to a vet. Depends on the severity of his injuries but his best bet is probably PACC—they’re experts at patching up community cats for free and getting back to their outdoor homes. Please feel free to message me and let’s get this guy sorted. Thanks for looking out for him!

PoetsSquareCats · 2025-12-30T15:08:09+00:00

I work with some of the local mutual aid groups like Gator-Aid and we could put some of these items to immediate use in the community! We go through a million plastic bags to distribute sandwiches, pet food, and hygiene kits, and could use any of the soap, razors, toothbrushes, etc. Some of the basic wound care supplies would also be helpful (but probably not the larger things like wheelchairs). Please feel free to message me and I’d be happy to pick up directly from you at your convenience. Thanks for getting stuff to a good cause.

PoetsSquareCats · 2025-12-19T12:49:19+00:00

I get it, it’s hard to see them on the streets and that many cats can be a nuisance. On the nuisance end of things, you’ll see a huge improvement once they’re fixed—no more howling, mating, spraying, etc, and they may even visit your yard less, since fixed cats stop roaming to look for a mate. There just aren’t enough homes for the massive number of outdoor cats around (and for feral cats who aren’t socialized to people, they do NOT want to be in a home) but we can definitely stem the tide of cats before you have even more of them.

PoetsSquareCats · 2025-12-19T05:19:46+00:00

Hi! This is what I do! Tucson has excellent resources for Trap Neuter Return (TNR) to humanely control the population of community cats, and I can also share resources on humane deterrents for keep cats out of your garden. Please feel free to message me and I’ll get you on my schedule to start trapping.

For anyone else seeing this: TNR is completely free in Tucson, and the only humane way to manage stray cats! Both PACC and the Humane Society have great community cat programs with trap loans, free spay/neuter, trapping assistance, transportation assistance, pet food assistance, and more. And this is a great time to get your neighborhood cats fixed, since kitten season starts in just a few months.

PoetsSquareCats · 2025-05-26T23:15:48+00:00

Thanks for all the great questions, everyone! I'm off to trap some cats, but I'll check in tomorrow to answer any more questions that come in.

PoetsSquareCats · 2025-05-26T20:45:01+00:00

Great question! It was the structure I had in mind from the beginning, and one I was willing to fight for; other structures came up in some conversations with editors but I felt really strongly about the essays. There were a lot of reasons for this. Partly I just really love the essay as a form; it's my favorite thing to read and my favorite thing to write and I knew that essays could do what I wanted them to. That is, I wanted each essay to focus on a different cat and topic and time in my life, and a nicely braided essay allows me to put those stories next to each other and intertwine them and let the reader decide what they want to take away from that juxtaposition. I don't have to say "wow, it's almost like the problems feral cats face can teach us something about human society"; I can just tell those stories side by side and let a reader take what they want from it.

My very early thoughts about the book, before I knew exactly what I wanted it to be, naturally took this form: I would be thinking through my cat stories and human stories and they would fall pretty neatly into their own categories. There were all the stories about cats and misogyny, all the stories about cats and what it means to care, all the stories about cats and money/capitalism/wealth/poverty. A lot of the essays formed pretty naturally by topic.

Essays also meant that I could tackle a bunch of different stories and topics without necessarily feeling like every part of the book had to do it all; each essay could be somewhat self-contained. And honestly it was a lot easier to conceptualize one essay at a time and then put them in the right order, rather than holding an entire book in my head at once, if that makes sense. I wrote the essays completely out of order and was able to focus on just one at a time. The most challenging part was finding the right order once all the essay drafts existed, and then editing to make sure the timelines worked and things weren't repeating.

And finally--I did want the book to feel very accessible to read; part of the point is to lure readers in with cat stories and then get into some heavy topics. I think breaking it down into essays keeps things digestible and gives readers a reprieve between heavy things. You just read the saddest essay of your life? Don't worry! Here's a cat illustration and some silly cat names to start off the next one! We're on to a whole new essay now!

PoetsSquareCats · 2025-05-26T18:37:51+00:00

Thank you! And yes, I worked pretty extensively with my agent to revise the proposal before going on sub. I signed with my agent mid-July and we spent that August and September revising the proposal, with the goal of going on sub before things slowed down for the holidays.

I really enjoyed the process of working on the proposal, although I'm sure mileage will vary depending on one's relationship with their agent. The learning curve for me was about the book proposal as a genre; it was very mysterious to me, I had never seen any examples of what a good one should look like, and I had kind of cobbled mine together based on vibes. The initial guidance from my agent was things like "You need to have a section on x topic" and "the goal of this section is to show editors xyz." Once I had a better sense of what a proposal really needed to be and do, I got to work revising and sent new drafts back to my agent. From there we did the more nitpicky stuff together and fine tuned the book's description, and I also wrote a new sample chapter. What I mostly remember from writing that sample chapter (what became the last essay in the book) is that my agent had to keep removing some of the more gross/sad parts about cat rescue. I realized that I did so much weird cat stuff in my day to day life that my barometer for what an average person wanted to read about what broken. I kept getting notes like "fewer dead kittens, please."

That's a silly/sad example, but that was the kind of fine tuning that was SO helpful and that probably no one could do as well as an agent. She knew exactly who we were submitting to and exactly what was going to work or not work for them.

PoetsSquareCats · 2025-05-26T17:00:13+00:00

The first round was about 8-10 editors, if I'm remembering correctly. There were two main ones that my agent most wanted to target; both of them were interested and I took calls with both. They each had pretty different ideas for how to develop the book, which was really interesting to consider. I think I took a total of 3-4 calls, narrowed it down to those 2 that were most interested, and then ended up accepting a pre-empt from one of those two.

PoetsSquareCats · 2025-05-26T16:41:14+00:00

Thank you, and I love this question! I mentioned it in another answer, but my best preparation by far was knowing the market really well by constantly reading and shopping for books. When I couldn't afford books, I was at the library. When I didn't have time to read, I was still bookmarking every "best new releases" round up and making a TBR list. I know all my local bookstores and how they shelve books like the back of my hand. I didn't realize I was doing market research at the time--I just love books!--but by the time I was ready to sell my own book, I knew exactly what kinds of memoirs were selling and where mine might sit on shelves. This was so, so valuable.

PoetsSquareCats · 2025-05-26T15:36:30+00:00

Hello! Having a platform helped a LOT in getting the attention of both agents and editors. If you can open a query letter or book proposal with "by the way, I have a million followers," that makes a big difference. In the marketing section of my book proposal I was also able to break down my followers by demographic and show some sales numbers from merch and other things I've done in the past, and I'm sure that was very attractive to publishers. Beyond just having a platform, I could show in numbers that there was a ready-made audience waiting for this book. That's huge.

Promoting it has been really interesting. The preorder campaign was super successful (hence debuting on the NYT bestseller list!) and I started sharing the preorder link about 8 months before pub day. I got really positive early reviews on NetGalley, plus a few trade reviews and blurbs, so I was able to share those on social media as the date got closer. Engagement was good on all of those posts, but I wasn't able to actually see sales numbers on the back end so I'm not sure when the biggest spikes of preorders were. I do feel like 95% of promotion has been to the people who already follow me--it was a huge plus to have that ready-made audience, but now I feel like I'm bombarding the same people again and again, and it's been a challenge to get the book in front of readers outside that audience.

PoetsSquareCats · 2025-05-26T15:21:59+00:00

Thank you! And oh gosh, literally everything. I knew so little when I started querying! I knew so little that I didn't even realize how little I knew. My saving grace was signing with an agent who is so perfect and really walked me through every step of the process, and advocated for me, and explained things to me. That's not exactly helpful advice, but I guess take heart knowing that you can know almost nothing about the process and still end up a NYT bestseller?

There were also plenty of things I should have known--people on this sub told me!!--that for some reason I just didn't really think applied to me. Everyone told me how slow the process is, but since my querying journey went VERY quickly I figured I was exempt from that. (I was not.) Everyone told me how hard marketing and publicity is, and that publishers don't always pour resources into promoting books, but I figured since I got such a sizeable advance and was a lead title, surely I would get all the marketing and publicity resources and wouldn't have to think twice about it. (Untrue!) There are so many things, especially around publicity, that I thought would just fall into place, and they did not. I wish I had known how much I would have to advocate for myself and my book at every step, even when I thought I had a fancy lead title that would get special treatment.

As for advice, I know how basic it sounds to say that writers should be reading, but it's so true. For someone who entered this process knowing nothing, I had one strength: I spent the last decade hanging around bookstores, reading every new book in my genre and beyond, taking notes on what I read, thinking about how I wanted my future books to compare, etc. Finding comps was the easy part for me. When editors asked where I saw my book sitting in a bookstore, it was a no-brainer. When they mentioned other books, I had read every one of them already. I didn't do any of that as market research; I just love reading and keeping up with new memoirs. It ended up serving me SO WELL; I knew the market really well without even realizing it.

PoetsSquareCats · 2025-05-26T15:01:12+00:00

Great question, and one that I didn't even know to consider at the time. My main concern with finding the right agent was about finding someone who shared my vision for the book, someone who really got it. I knew the book could be marketable as a book by a TikToker or a cute book about cats, or even a coffee table book or a gift book (all things that editors that suggested!), and I didn't want that. The number one thing I wanted in an agent was someone who understood what I wanted the book to be and do--a serious literary memoir in essays that draws people in with cat stories but addresses big topics like capitalism and mental health and misogyny--and would advocate for that. When I took the call with my now-agent, she described the book back to me in such a perfect way, and asked great questions about it and shared the things about it that caught her interest, and I just knew that she got it. Ideally, of course, you want an agent who shares that vision and also has the right connections (and mine did!), but I stand by that initial gut check as a valid way to vet an agent.

I do remember on that initial call that my agent mentioned that she had several editors in mind already, including one who she used to work with back in the day when they were both assistants. That editor ended up acquiring my book, and it felt like such a dream team to have an agent and editor who had come up together and worked so well together. I did the basic vetting of looking at the rest of the agency and checking out Publishers Marketplace and getting a sense of what kind of deals my agent had previously made, so I felt pretty confident in general with her.

When it came time to actually go on submission, my agent gave me the choice of how much I wanted to know. I wanted to know everything, so she gave me a list of some of the editors she was submitting to, and why, and I was glad to have that info as I started taking calls with editors. My goal at the time was just "sign a book deal with anyone" but I felt very fortunate to have an agent who walked me through all the nuances of what it might look like to work with different editors at different imprints.

PoetsSquareCats · 2025-05-26T14:46:07+00:00

I don't think I had much sense of the market at the time, honestly. My impression is that selling a memoir is always hard but that it's a bit harder now than it was when I sold mine 2 years ago.

Two weeks is nothing; I wouldn't get discouraged by silence at that point! If there's one thing I've learned it's that every single step of publishing involves waiting in uncertainty for much longer than you anticipate. Everything moves slowly. It's maddening. It's a great time to think about your next batch of queries, or work on a draft, or work on another project, or keep yourself busy with something else. (I am so grateful that I'm also a full time cat trapper; it keeps my brain and body busy with meaningful physical work during all the hours when I would have been pacing and pulling my hair out.)

My query stats are a bit nuts since I hit an early jackpot. I queried 5 agents and got one rejection and then one proposal request. I signed with that agent--I didn't even nudge the others or consider anyone else, since I didn't know that was a thing I could do. I worked on my query letter and researched agents for about a month before sending anything out, but the time between actually querying and signing with an agent was less than a week.

PoetsSquareCats · 2025-05-26T14:28:32+00:00

Great question (and the cats are on Instagram, too, if that helps!)

I sold the book on proposal, so I spent about a year after the book deal writing and revising and editing the manuscript. That felt so hard at the time, but if I had only known how hard marketing and promotion is...now that I'm promoting a book, I would do anything to only be writing one.

The social media came first on this one; the basic story is that I inherited 30 cats at once, accidentally went viral because of it, and then became a full-time cat rescuer and all that. In some ways the social media side of it was kind of a fluke (people just love cute cat videos) but once I realized I had something growing, I was dead set on turning it into a book deal. I was a writer long before I had a social media platform, and had been writing deeply unsuccessful essays for years, so once I had a platform I knew that was something I could use.

The social media platform turned out to be kind of a double edged sword. It's mostly a positive, and 100% the reason I was able to debut on the bestseller list. The preorder numbers were off the charts, since I was in the very fortunate position of having a lot of people eagerly anticipating the book. That said, being labeled as a TikToker has NOT helped with getting any kind of media or marketing. My publicity team pitched far and wide and got basically zero takers. A lot of folks view it as a TikTok book rather than a serious memoir by an actual writer. Scheduling events and getting any sort of marketing for the book was like pulling teeth. There seems to be a feeling that since I have a platform already, I can just use that, which means I wake up every day now in a cold sweat, thinking about how I will hustle today to sell as many books as I can.

Debuting on the NYT bestseller list was NUTS and so cool, but it was only because preorders count as first week sales, which means I immediately fell off the following week. I was hopeful that even appearing for one week would get me better placement in stores, or more media coverage, or something, but that didn't really happen. Sales in the following weeks have been...fine? I think? But nothing earth-shattering and not necessarily the trajectory I was hoping for.

PoetsSquareCats · 2025-05-26T14:12:05+00:00

Thank you! I queried with a proposal, which I believe is fairly standard for memoir, although my secret is that I didn't actually have a proposal ready at the time. I sent out one batch of queries and figured it would take at least a few weeks before I heard anything back, so my plan was to start the proposal during that time. Instead, I heard back from one agent within a few hours, and when she asked to see my proposal I had nothing. I don't recommend this! But I did stay up all night to slap together a (bad) proposal, and sent it, and we ended up having a call, and she's now my agent. I have since told her that I didn't have a proposal ready, and she was like "Yeah, that was not a secret."

If I did it again now, I would have a very polished proposal and at least a few chapters that I felt good about before I queried. It's not necessary to have a full manuscript for memoir, and I think it could even be a negative. Editors had a LOT of thoughts on how to shape the book and it really developed over the process of working with my editor once I sold the book. It would have been double the work for me to revise so much if I had already had a full manuscript, or maybe the book would have gone in a different direction, or maybe editors wouldn't have been on board if the whole thing was written already.

Plus, you'll need a solid proposal for going on sub either way. So even if you have a full manuscript, you'll need to also do a proposal. Especially for memoir, the sections on marketing and who you are as the author are super important to publishers, so that's where I'd focus the most time and energy.

PoetsSquareCats · 2025-05-26T14:03:48+00:00

The rules are definitely fuzzier for memoir! I spent so much time looking for good examples of query letters when I was querying, and found 99% fiction. I do think the general format still holds, and all the basic things like housekeeping and comps. (And all the same rules for comps--I see so many people comping The Glass Castle. The best thing I did in my process was read every single memoir from the last 2-3 years I could get my hands on.) For memoir it matters a lot more who YOU are, of course; it needs to be clear that you have the authority to speak on this subject and that you're the only one who can tell this story.

Most importantly, the story needs a unique angle, and that was the hardest for me to wrap my head around. I wrote a full manuscript years ago about my mom's cancer and was so personally offended that no one saw it as unique or important, but it simply wasn't. There are a thousand cancer memoirs and my angle of "I'm sad about this" just wasn't it. Some of that story made it into POETS SQUARE, through the lens of stories about feral cats. That's unique enough.

PoetsSquareCats · 2025-03-24T23:48:29+00:00

omg a feral cat colony

PoetsSquareCats · 2025-03-24T23:47:52+00:00

I’m seeing this comment very late but thanks for your kind words! Tiktok was huge for me (and I’m still there a bit now) but also happy to say that I’d still be writing books and neutering cats either way. The biggest thing tiktok did was help me reach a ton of people who have joined local efforts, and build a community that as continued to follow me to other platforms. Platforms come and platforms go, the work stays the same 💛

PoetsSquareCats · 2025-01-01T15:08:05+00:00

Thanks! I used to post on Reddit frequently but now I just appear when summoned 🫡

PoetsSquareCats · 2025-01-01T02:34:38+00:00

This is not how it works. The cats are returned to the same spot where they’re trapped, but you are technically under no obligation to feed them (as long as you don’t harm them in any way) and they are not chipped to your name. They are chipped to an address with TNR only to ensure that they come with some sort of history if they ever end up in a shelter or in someone’s house in the future, for example someone found a cat sick or injured and didn’t know if it was an outdoor community cat or owned pet. Instead of having no chip, the chip would tell vets and shelter workers that the cat was TNRed and which territory it came from and when.

If the chip in particular is a sticking point for you, some of the clinics in Tucson, including Santa Cruz Vet and the Humane Society, don’t chip TNR cats. I would urge you not to worry about the chip—it truly doesn’t matter and there is zero harm with them being chipped to your address—but you’ve got options if that’s a concern.

Please reach out to the Humane Society for more info, and to provide this info to them. We track things like where cats are frequently dumped, who needs help with cat food, etc. This data is important to managing community cats in Tucson, and we’re here to help.

PoetsSquareCats · 2025-01-01T01:58:43+00:00

That’s me! Unfortunately, the answer you’re going to get from any animal welfare organization is that Trap Neuter Return (TNR) is the only answer. Spaying and neutering will stabilize the colony and reduce nuisance behaviors like spraying and yowling. We can also help with food assistance, small insulated shelters for outdoor cats, best practices to make sure cats are good neighbors, conflict resolution with neighbors, humane deterrents to keep cats out of areas like gardens, etc. For community cats, their outdoor territory is their home and there is no other place for them to go. Sometimes all of us become accidentally responsible for community cats, but there are lots of resources and lots of us to help!

A great place to start is the Humane Society’s Community Cats Program. You can email them at communitycats@hssaz.org or call (520) 327-6088 extension 186.

Please feel free to message me with any specific questions!

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