Nimbus: A Guest Post from Jan Eldredge

Meet Nimbus the cat. Joined by a theater-loving rat and a kind witch, Nimbus is on a quest to find her beloved owner Fletcher after they get separated in this spellbinding adventure. Read on for an exclusive essay from Jan Eldredge on writing Nimbus.

I love cats. To say I’m a cat person is putting it mildly. If I could rescue every stray cat and feral-woods cat in the world, I would. When I die and go to heaven, it will be a glorious place filled with cats, cats, cats. And all the English Breakfast tea I can drink and all the Krispy Kreme donuts I can eat. 
 
My editor knew that about me. (Not the tea and donuts thing, but my mild obsession with cats.) After my first middle-grade novel, Evangeline of the Bayou, was completed, she suggested I write a story about a black cat, especially since black cats are so misunderstood. It seemed like a good idea, even more so because misunderstood creatures hold a special place in my heart.

But creating a story from nothing—other than that it should be about a misunderstood black cat—is not easy.

So, I began by researching superstitions about black cats, which led to superstitions about cats in general. Sadly, there have been a lot of harmful misconceptions about our feline friends over the years. One such fear is that cats will steal the breath from sleeping babies. Since I also write stories about monsters, and anything scary that goes bump in the night, I’d already done a fair amount of research on those kinds of beings. As I thought about the breath-stealing superstition, my mind seized on a connection with the nightmare demon, a creature that’s found in beliefs all around the world. And though it’s known by different names, one thing it has in common with its multicultural counterparts is that it will crouch on the chest of a sleeping person and steal their breath, their energy, or their soul. That was the connection that started the creative ball of yarn rolling in my mind.

I immediately knew the story would open with a heroic black cat being accused of trying to steal a child’s breath, when it was actually defending the child from a life-stealing nightmare demon.

I love writing spooky, magical stories, not only for children, but for readers of every age. I believe we all enjoy reading for the escapism a good book offers, for the opportunity to explore other worlds from behind the safe pages of a book. It’s within these other worlds that we discover answers to questions, learn new concepts, solve old problems, and understand what it is that makes us human. This is why I also love reading books for children. Books for young readers are the best at immersing us in stories that are dangerous—yet exciting, scary—yet funny, and where anything can be magical, and everything is possible. I hope readers will find Nimbus to be all of these things.