Melissa Grant Writes

I clearly had no business writing a middle-grade book, and I often have stopped to wonder why I did it. I started writing a book in my mid-thirties about all my uber-rich dog-walking and training clients.

Some of them should be VERY afraid.

I had one who was the wife of a bigwig at a company we’ll call Macrohard. I was basically a dog nanny and paid handsomely for it. It was in that very affluent community I spoke of earlier, in a HUGE mansion. Not kind of huge, maybe 20,000 sq. ft. huge.

She had a house manager who would arrive every day before I did and unlock the many exterior doors. I would park in the employee lot (my white Dodge Neon with the green paw prints all over it couldn’t be seen in FRONT of the house! Horrors!), come in through the kitchen, grab the dogs, and either leave or sit in a basement room (no chairs, concrete floor) or take them somewhere for a walk.

One day it was pouring down rain, and the house manager was caught in traffic. I showed up, and the kitchen door was locked, but the owner was sitting maybe 5 feet away at the kitchen table drinking coffee.

I knocked.

She didn’t look up.

Maybe she didn’t hear me.

I knocked again.

Nothing.

I suddenly realized she was going to make me wait until the house manager came to unlock the doors, in the pouring rain. I have many more tales like that to tell, but somehow it never quite clicked.

Yet.

I think the concept of Cloudia resonated with me more than a book about my career with dogs because eleven was one of several periods of time in my life when I felt utterly lost and out of place. When I wrote it, some heavy stuff was going down in my life.

The dog-walking tell-all WILL happen; count on it. But I digress.

My biggest issue, according to Tiffiny, was my multiple points of view. I love epic sagas that span decades, have multiple characters and practically need a spreadsheet to keep up. Who knew most kid brains don’t work like that?

Well, you should have, Melissa.

A middle-grade book should have one, maybe two POVs. I had five different points of view and over 32 chapters; 17 needed fixing.

AND I called her parents Rose and Storm rather than Mom and Dad, so there were hundreds of those to fix.

AND I let the adults ‘save the day’ (I blame Disney and the era I grew up in for this one) and she should’ve had more agency.

AND I said she didn’t like pancakes and then had her eating pancakes.

I decided to move to Iceland and raise *ponies. Who needs this BS?

*Yes, I know they’re technically horses but look at them. They’re ponies!