Cats and Coincidences

It’s so funny how things happen. People will tell you it’s all coincidence. Or they’ll insist it’s not synchronicity when, say, the number five keeps turning up. The first occurrence put you on the alert for the next ones. It’s just random. The universe doesn’t actually give a damn about you, and Fate is a myth.

On the other hand, they say that when a student is ready, a teacher will appear. That seems more in line with my experiences.

So I remember talking about needing to study structure. One of my friends linked Jennifer Crusie’s blog because of it. But I didn’t quite ‘get’ the four-act structure she was talking about. How come everyone else always went on about three? So I snagged her “map” and worked out a plot to Kolya, but I kept my eyes open for more information. Especially when my plan for Kolya started looking not-so-good.

When someone on my Twitter feed linked Alexandra Sokoloff talking about structure, I went, even though she’s a screenwriter. And she’s very good. But I got to thinking I needed a book. She mentioned one by Blake Snyder called Save the Cat! I remembered it because I wanted to know if the title came from that scene in Alien when I (it shames me to admit this) was yelling at Ripley to “leave the f*cking cat!”

Last week I took the kid to a used bookstore. They were having a presentation from the Desert Museum and she was hoping for snakes. I like snakes well enough, but they never let grown-ups near the cool stuff, so I wandered the store. Because I have tons of books at home, I stayed away from the fiction.

Apparently nonfiction is no longer a safe place for me either. ^__^

It’s not that I don’t like nonfiction. I love to learn cool stuff, I consider it a duty to know lots of things if I’m going to write, and it just makes it even better if no one I know already knows it. So yeah. Nonfiction is good stuff. But I get a lot of that on the internet, and when I need the in-depth knowledge only a book can give, I usually get it from the library. What we know changes so fast, it doesn’t really make sense to buy a book I’ll only read once before it’s outdated.

So yeah. Wandering with no intention of buying anything. Until I found myself in the writing section. Which I would have avoided, had I known it was there, but it had moved.

Yeah, go on and tell me this isn’t fate. Especially when the book that let me know I was in the writing section had a picture of a cat clinging to the end of a rope on the cover. The one book on the shelf that was turned cover out.

Yep. Now the proud owner of Save the Cat. And it is so good.

Fate likes me.

† No, the title is not about the cat in Alien.