The Cat in the Attic

My cat has been acting NUTS over the last three days. Crying at the ceiling and scratching at the walls and doors. Running rampant from one end of the house to the other.

I went through the usual checklist to find out what was wrong:

-food in his dish
-water in the spare bathtub
-clean litterbox
-window blinds in the second bedroom up 12"
-vacuum cleaner put away in the closet

Nothing out of the ordinary, so I started squirting him with water whenever he was being noisy to discipline him, or shutting him in the bathroom for a "time-out."

... I have since apologized to my cat with treats, catnip, and cat grass--because he was apparently trying to tell me that the neighbor's cat was stuck in our attic.

There must be a spot on our roof gable where the ventilation siding is movable--like an office ceiling tile grid. The cat got on the roof and pushed his way up into the attic, but then couldn't get back out when the panel dropped behind it.(We have access to the attic through the garage, but I haven't used it in months.)

Just glad that after fifteen minutes of crawling through the attic framework and insulation --it really was a cat and not this guy:

Do roofers get some sort of discount for using excessively long nails?

Rain Rain Go Away

Let me start by saying... when it rains, it pours.

The last two months have been terrible, but since I'm certain everything I could write about it could be topped by someone else's trials, I'm just going to keep my mouth shut.

Instead, I wanted to get back into blogging with a quick post on THREE DIMENSIONAL CHARACTERS.

I have tried for a long time to put up a facade that I am a writer and not a Vulcan/nerdy math/science kind of person so it's always harder for me to make believable characters than to fix plot issues.

While creating character charts for my current novel, I asked myself the following question:

Is there a character from another book that would do a better job "acting" if given the role as the MC?

My first thought was that this would be an easy experiment and that I was going to find that my favorite characters were the protagonists of my favorite books. 

Not so.

 As it turns out, I'm pretty willing to overlook two-dimensional characters as long as there is a page-turning plot, and so I had a hard time creating a list of characters I would enjoy reading about in ANY setting.

Once I found a winner, the question now becomes:

How would the story be different if [Han Solo/Princess Leia] were replaced as the MCs?

Keeping the answer in mind, my goal is to make my characters lovable in any setting and not just the one I originally wrote for them to star in.

Please add your own tips in the comments! I really appreciate them all!