This summer I got a wild hair and wanted the kitties to have a screened-in porch attached to the house. My idea was that they be able to go in an out as they pleased. I drew up a design that included a cedar shake roof and metal-capped cupola and waited for my husband to come home.

He’s somewhat used to these requests, and always indulges my ideas. Well, almost always. Which is saying a lot because they inevitably involve hours of custom work by a skilled artisan.

Being a structural engineer, he has the talent. Even when he doesn’t have the time, he finds it.

With a smile on his face, measurements recorded, and a materials list compiled, off he went to get what he needed.  I had NO idea how involved the building of the kitty porch would be; it even had to be wired and screened for safety! I felt guilty as I watched my sweet husband sweat and build and measure and construct. But he said he was happy. He likes to keep busy.

And Voila! I’m so tickled to present the custom screened-in kitty porch, replete with a brick foundation that matches our historical home! Oreo and Frankie love it. My husband and I do too!

In the photo above, Frankie is in the porch; he’s to the right (his green eyes are just about all you can see), but look closely and you’ll see him. And in the picture below (which I took from the opening inside the house), Frankie is watching a bird on the patio.

This last picture is the garden view from Oreo and Frankie’s porch. They are two happy kitties!

“After all, Ginger Rogers did everything that Fred Astaire did.

She just did it backwards and in high heels.”

— Ann Richards

Last fall I began working on a new novel, which I’ve titled Looking For Me. I’m so excited about the story that I’m up all hours of the day and night, writing like my pants are on fire! So, if you don’t see many new posts on by blog, that’s the reason why — I’m putting all my energies into my manuscript.

Many of you have contacted me via Twitter and Facebook, asking what my new novel is about. So instead of writing to each of you individually, I though it would be easier to direct you to this link.

Happy summer everyone!

This is a photo of my beloved Bobb-O. When he passed over to the Rainbow Bridge, I was devastated. Heartbroken. Ground to a powder.

I made special donations to several animal shelters in his memory, but as the weeks passed, I felt the best thing I could do to honor Bobb-O (who was a rescue–a gorgeous, solid black bobtail), was to rescue another kitty from death row. My husband agreed. Oreo, our sweet black-and-white tuxedo kitty, was lonely for a friend and so we set out to find him one.

Going to shelters breaks my heart–all those faces looking up at me. My throat closes and I get teary-eyed. It’s so hard to pick. My husband and I held hands, feeling sad that we couldn’t take them all. While I gravitated to a gray kitty named Charlie, my husband noticed a tiny black kitten. And when I say tiny, I mean he fit in the palm of my husband’s hand.

In an eye-blink we knew he was “the one” for us, and even before signing the adoption papers, we named the little guy Frankie.

A kind woman who works for a veterinarian had pulled Frankie from death row just days before we adopted him. It’s sickening that this precious and sweet little boy was going to be killed for no other reason than his color.

Yes, Frankie is black and it’s a disgusting fact that black cats are far too often deemed as “bad luck” (which is so ridiculously ignorant I won’t even comment), and they are said to be not as pretty or as cute as other cats. Healthy and loving black kitties are murdered by the thousands each year.

We brought him home and from the moment his paws hit the floor, he was filled with wonder. Often he’d sit in my library window and gaze into the sky.

I was concerned how Oreo and Frankie would get along, but it was love at first sight.

From the get-go they’ve been inseparable. Now, 8-months later, Frankie has shot up and is almost as big as Oreo. I recently took a photo of them in my window, and it sums up their relationship perfectly.

I want to thank all of you who sent lovely cards and emails of sympathy when Bobb-O passed away, and I also wanted to share a picture I recently took that captures the beauty of friendship and the very true sentiment that life does, indeed, go on.

Loving Frankie doesn’t diminish the incredibly special bond I had with Bobbo-O and still have with Oreo (or any of the wonderful furbabies who came before him). Love is boundless and brings with it a healing that can only take place when we allow ourselves to embrace life. At least that’s the way I see it.

Melissa Crytzer Fry is extremely talented, smart, kind, and beautiful–inside and out. She’s also one of my favorite people. Melissa, an award-winning freelance writer and novelist, is passionate about the written word, nature, animals, and also photography. These passions are beautifully expressed and explored on her blog What I Saw. I highly recommend that you check it out.

Though Melissa in incredibly busy, she graciously accepted my invitation to be featured on Brava, and I’m delighted that she did. So please welcome Melissa as she talks about how her love of photography has impacted her writing (and vice versa).

Trying on the Photographer’s Hat

Aspiring novelists are often advised to simply observe. That means mining the environment for stories, paying close attention to people’s quirky habits, speech patterns and gestures. The seeds of a storyline sprout from simple glances at everyday objects, from facial expressions, from overheard conversations.

And while viewing life through a writer’s eyes is terrifically helpful advice to anyone, so is another recommendation that is rarely offered: See the world through the eyes of a photographer.

When your goal is to capture a beautiful image – preserving that precise moment in time – something interesting happens. You instinctively begin to look at your surroundings differently. You find yourself tilting the camera, moving in and out of the sun for different effect, positioning yourself on the ground despite the biting red ants congregating near your head (yes, this has happened to me).

What you’re doing is looking at your subject from different perspectives, different angles. And in doing so, you really start to notice. You see and experience details – things you’d have simply shrugged off, ignored – the movement of the yellow jacket on the purple petals of lupine, the scent of rain on parched earth, the hum of the locust in the nearby acacia bush.

What a treasure-trove for the writer (or anyone who wants to live in the moment)!

Do you have to be a trained photographer with fancy equipment? Absolutely not. I have never taken a photography class (most professionals are nodding their heads emphatically, “We can tell!”). But that’s not the point.

The point is to change your mindset, change the way you view the world. Even if your pictures aren’t perfect or even worthy of sharing (yes, I’ve got plenty of those), you’re forcing yourself to see differently, to absorb details, to be present.

Soon you’ll be seeking photographable images in every moment – in the office, outdoors, in classes, at the supermarket – even if your camera isn’t near.

I stumbled upon my photo odyssey purely accidentally, as a result of outdoor hikes with a neighbor and friend who shared my wonder of the desert southwest. Our five-mile hikes became more about exploration and photos than heart rates and fitness.

The most thrilling part of this discovery has been its impact on my writing. My now-constant wide-eyed wonder and appreciation for detail has improved the sensory writing in my current work-in-progress (WIP) tenfold. The snippet below, from my current WIP, was inspired by these very hikes and their resulting photos:

Hope wiped her eyes and nodded. She looked out at the glowing mountains, now a Sedona red with the sun’s tinting, and waited for Charlie to return. She had begun this morning like most others, with a brisk jog among the low-statured desert vegetation, the amorphous plants and trees rising like green clouds from the flesh-colored dirt of the ranch’s rolling hills.

She closed her eyes. There was nothing about her morning ritual that she didn’t savor. The wet-dirt smell of dusty creosote bushes after rain hit their delicate elliptical-shaped leaves, the fragrant prickly pear cacti when they were in bloom, like musky perfume, the yellow-flowered mesquite trees, and the fuzzy lemonade-colored, caterpillar-like flower pods of the acacia bush.

She took note of it all. And each morning when she reached the crest of the hill about two miles behind the ranch, she stopped and looked out at the Santa Catalina Mountains. Her morning tradition: take a deep breath, stand in awe at the extreme forces that shaped the mountains, the years and years of natural sculpting and uplift, pressure, pulling, and deformation.

Hopefully, with the crutch of my camera, I’ve taken the first steps in learning how to better picture everyday beauty with the naked eye and to paint pictures with words.

So, writers, readers – everyone – pick up that camera (even a disposable one) and look at the world through the eyes of a shutterbug. Your writing will benefit. Chances are, so will you.

~~~

Melissa, a Northwestern PA transplant,  is  living out her writing dream in southern Arizona, among wildlife ranging from javelina, bobcats and quail to mountain lions, coyotes and Gila Monsters. She and her husband are also the proud owners of two Bengal kitties. Besides being the author of the What I Saw nature/writing/creativity blog, Melissa is also the owner of AZCommPro Communications and a writer/enthusiast of literary women’s fiction.

Please follow Melissa on Twitter (@CrytzerFry).

Note: All photographs are copyrighted and owned by Melissa and may not be copied without her written permission.