Hey! Great news! I may be able to get the next eBook, on the cat family, out by summer. We’ll see.

After self-publishing the two domestic cat books, I just had to take a break and was fortunate enough to find an excellent book on Campanian volcanism in the local university (Oregon State) library.

That series was hard work, but fun, and it also helped me learn a little more about writing.

There will be 38 species facts in the new eBook, and I’ve been practicing here and am, quite frankly, having a ball. I hope you are enjoying these posts on such beautiful animals, too.

How quickly I can finish up the whole 50-fact book depends on how well and how quickly I can cover the really knotty part: evolution.

Cats do walk alone, but they don’t exist in a vacuum. They are here now because of complex interactions that have played out for tens of millions of years, directly so since the Dawn Cat Proailurus, probably.

Other members of the cat family, now extinct (the sabercats); possibly a sister family (barbourofelids); and an assortment of bear-dogs, dog-bears, raccoon-dogs, many more kinds of hyenas than we see today, and the rest of the holarctic Miocene, Pliocene, and Pleistocene zoo all played a role in shaping the modern cat family.

And Earth was not passive during all this biological drama.

I haven’t a clue how it all fits together.

Neither does anyone else, I suspect, but there are hypotheses and theories about it, and I’ve got to try to describe those as best I can, at least in a general sense, from a lay point of view.

It was one thing to write about Fluffy in the here and now. It is quite another to do that!

Fortunately, we only need a glimpse, since the book concentrates on the modern family Felidae, but those roots must be described.

I’m getting into this now, and it requires some concentration. So, probably there will only be spasmodic volcano, space, and random-topic posts for a while. As before, I’ll still be monitoring Popocatepetl and updating the page (see menu up above).

While the posting slows down a bit, I’ll be busy in the background, working on another cat book, hoping to get it done by June (we’ll see)!

As always and once again, thank you for your interest and ongoing encouragement.

Featured image: Jo-Knopf at Pixabay, public domain.