Do any of your characters have pets? Tell us about them.

Pets almost always don’t play a prominent roll in my stories. In my experience, they tend to get in the way. If a character of mine has a pet, I forget that it’s there half-way through the story and then have to figure out what the heck is going on with it later. A lot of my stories involve travel of some kind, so a pet generally gets in the way of a character’s ability to follow routs I want to take.

The exception to this is when the pet plays a story role. For example, Garret from My Sylvan Weed has a pissy black cat that he doesn’t get along with. Later on in the story, the reason for this interaction is discovered and eventually rectified. The relationship between Garret and the cat is a basic reflection of other relationships going on in the story. These are the kind of things I like.