By contract, I am required to supply my publisher with a photo for the back-of-the-book author shot. No problem. I e-mail my editor the photo I had professionally taken a few years ago and that I will probably still be using when I'm 90. It's lovely, she says, but given that this is a cat book, might I have some pictures of myself with my cats we could use?

I do not. Not only do our cats not cooperate in the picture-taken process, they actively sabotage it. Plus...