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INTRODUCTION to WILLI WHIZKAS and his companions
As a child I loved being read or told a story, I still do, I never grew out of it. John Paws is very good at telling tall tales and would make up stories about our cats which he would tell me at night as we relaxed with a glass of wine, I now make up the characters and plots then John closes his eyes and sees everything from the cats point of view, for example, when you buy a cat a new sparkly jewelled collar, once it’s round his neck he wont see it again! Willi Whizkas really exists - he lives with us. He picked us as his humans in late 1999, when he was a really cute beige Maine Coon kitten he had been looked over as a show cat as he was 'ginger', but once he got his paws under our table he showed his true colours!! In real life Willi Whizkas really is a cat on a mission of naughtiness and adventure, so we started to watch what he would get up to. Some cats would come into his garden and he’d attack them quite furiously, others he’d just ignore. Some cats he just casually greeted whilst others he would run to greet them then sashay off into the bushes tails entwined with his playmate for another day filled with adventure and derring-do. Some days he’d sleep all day on the bed too exhausted to even raise an eyelid, others he’d be out with the dawn chorus, coming home reluctantly at night bursting with excitement, covered in bits of twigs, grass and slugs, other nights he’d be so tired he could barely drag his tail through the door before collapsing on the mat almost comatose. So we started to speculate as to what exactly he was doing whilst out of our sight, and the Willi Whizkas series was born. In 2001 we started to write the stories down as we had rattled off quite a few by then, we thought it would be nice to keep a record so we could read them again later as some of them were very funny and it was a shame to lose them.
Tushtots joined us in 2001. He was in a poor neglected state; his fur was one solid felt and full of fleas, his broken jaw had set crooked and his teeth were shattered. He really was so hungry his tummy skin did hang down like a bag of udders and he didn't have long on this earth things were so bad. We held our breath not knowing how Willi would react to the new 'emergency' member of our family, but he absolutely adored him from the first moment he set eyes on him. He looked out for him after he'd been shaved of all his fur, he would love and lick him and when Tushie cried he would lick him between his ears to calm him down. When Tushtots fur grew and he was allowed out, Wills took him on adventures and cuddles up at night with him in their ‘snooozeee’ on the work surface in the kitchen. Tushtots then made a career move, shortly after being rescued he became a ‘baby’, he doesn’t want to be a cat anymore, he just wants to be loved and cuddled by his new humans as for once in his sad life he feels secure and loved, he now only goes out on a collar and lead much to the amusement of Willi who will break off from important tasks like supervising newts in the pond, inspecting nests or marshalling baby birds round the lawn to come and escort Tushie and myself round the garden when we have ‘walkies’. Tushie is now a very much-loved cat!
The tales are ‘true’ based on what we have seen our ‘boys’ do. We have just finished book 5 and in a few weeks time we’ll start on book 6 with a whole host of new characters. We are hugely complimented that people are buying the books, and bowled over that the book is being enjoyed and laughed at because we wrote the stories purely just for our own enjoyment. We never ever expected that they would be good enough to be published and we were just happy that friends who loved them and saw their own cat and what it did in the tales were passing them around. Never in our wildest dreams did we think our naughty cat would be going global and a 'cult book' in America!! Over the road live two marmalade coloured cats, we call Ginger Podgers and Fred Who Stares, they join Willi in his next book, The Tiddleswick Taillifters along with Grumpwhiskers, Pusstachio and Skwonx In fact we have so many cats such as Al Caponie and his cheesy brother Mouse Caponie, Woolleybum and Mewriel in humorous stories that we can’t wait for the next books to be published so ‘fans’ who loved the first book can get into Willi’s World and enjoy the fun. We haven’t published the tales for money. We have all we need in life, our small home, happy cats and full tummies so if we do make a little bit from the books it would be a bonus, and we’re so daft we’d spend it on the cats anyway!! Willi and Tusher get fan mail, but because they are so busy out having adventures, the mail is answered on their behalf! To contact Willi we have a web site with an email link http://www.williwhizkas.co.uk/ and he loves to hear from others, humans and cats!! © Cat Turner (UK) Willi Whiskas is available at Waterstones, and all major bookshops and can be purchased from Amazon. This is the ISBN number 1903 506183 and the price in the UK is £7.99. Please click here to read more stories of Willi and his friends |
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