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Welcome to The Romance Dish, Kate! It’s a pleasure to have you visit with us
today.
Thank you for having me.
For those who have yet to discover you, please share what
readers should expect when they pick up one of the books in your Whitman Street
Cat Café series and, in particular, book one, Like Cats and Dogs.
The vibe I was going for was a small-town romance feel, just
set in a big city. The center of the series is a cat café in Brooklyn. (Lauren,
the heroine of Like Cats and Dogs is the manager. The café is adjacent
to a veterinarian’s office, where Caleb, her love interest, works. Lauren’s
friends are all regulars at the café—her friend Paige manages events—and they
all play roles in each book.) In Like Cats and Dogs, Lauren and Caleb
get off on the wrong foot and annoy each other at first, but in that enemies-to-lovers
way in which they needle each other because they actually like each other. It
was a pretty fun book to write.
A little trivia: Whitman Street is fictional—which gave me
license to make up which businesses were on the street; I drew a map, even—but
it’s loosely based on western part of Atlantic Avenue in Brooklyn. I’ve lived
in Brooklyn since 2006, so a lot of setting is drawn from my own experience.
I’m a city girl, for sure, but even within cities, people build their own
communities, and that’s one of the running themes in the book—it’s a found
family, small community story, just set in the country’s most populous city.
I’m an animal lover so, of course, I enjoyed the cats and
dogs that were featured in Like Cats and Dogs. Are you a cat person or a
dog person? Or both? Do you have any pets? (If you do, please feel free to
share a photo)
I like dogs, but I am ultimately a cat person. I put my cats
in the series, actually. Lauren has a cat named Molly, who is named for my own
late cat (who passed in 2020 from cancer). Then there’s the “office manager,”
Sadie, the cat café’s one permanent resident. (The café otherwise doubles as a
cat shelter, an idea I stole from the real-life Brooklyn Cat Café, which
rescues and helps find forever homes for cats.) The shelter where the real-life
Sadie was adopted referred to her as their office manager, probably because she
can be pretty bossy. (She orders me around pretty regularly, although she’s
also a big ball of sweetness. The guy who cat-sits for me when I go out of town
calls her a lovebug. One of the friendliest cats I’ve ever known.)
Here's a recent photo of Sadie in her “draw me like one of your French girls” pose in her favorite spot on one of my couch cushions.
She's adorable! She also appears to be giving you that "why are you taking my picture" look I often receive from our family cat.
Lauren’s and Caleb’s story is an enemies-to-lovers trope.
What draws you to this trope and what makes it fun as an author to write? Do
you enjoy reading it as much as writing it?
It’s a fun but difficult trope to write, because you have to
get the balance right. The characters hate each other, except they actually
don’t, and they fight and spar, but they enjoy the sparring, and ultimately
they get invested in and care about each other. I think about love and loathing
as being two sides of the same coin—they are both strong emotions. So it’s
tricky, but I love that moment when the fighting flips over into kissing. The
passion switches direction. It’s delicious. It’s a trope I really enjoy both
reading and writing, but it’s hard to do well.
In addition to being a romance, Like Cats and Dogs
also feels like a love letter to Brooklyn. By the end of the book, I was ready
to book a flight. As a local, what is it about this area that makes it special?
I lived in Manhattan for a few years before I moved to
Brooklyn, and one of the things I noticed when I moved here is that Brooklyn
feels more, I guess, residential. There are definitely things for tourists to
see—the Brooklyn Museum is wonderful, and the view from the Brooklyn Heights
Promenade can’t be beat—but to me, Brooklyn is less touristy than Manhattan,
and more just people living and going about their lives. It’s a little more
raw, too; this is literally true in Prospect Park, which is similar to Central
Park but less aggressively landscaped, but also true of the streets, where
there isn’t really a grid the same way there is in Manhattan. It’s very
walkable, which I like (as is true for many New Yorkers, I don’t own a car) and
you can find all kinds of mom-and-pop shops and restaurants. I’d love it more
if it were less expensive, but it’s a pretty great place to live.
What can readers expect from you next?
I took a bit of a hiatus that I’m just now coming back from, so I don’t have anything specific coming out in the near future, but I’m currently working on a contemporary romance about two actors who fall in love while working on a movie together, and a couple of rom coms that are similar in tone to the Cat Café series (one is a childhood-friends-to-lovers, which is my absolute favorite trope, and the other is my attempt to write a love triangle).
Let’s do a few rapid-fire questions.
What are your passions (aside from writing, of course)?
I have a lot of hobbies! I love crafts. I knit and crochet
and recently started doing embroidery/cross stitch. I used to paint and draw,
although haven’t done much of that recently. I love art; the Met is my favorite
place in New York City and I go 2–3 times a year just to look at beautiful
things.
I took violin lessons for many years but haven’t played in
public in a while. (I think sometimes about finding an orchestra to play with
again, but there are only so many hours in a day.)
(Basically, if it hadn’t been writing, I would have ended up
in some other creative profession.)
The other thing I like about Brooklyn is that I have family
nearby. My brother lives near me and has two boys, and I try to spend as much
time with my nephews as I can. (They are 8 and 3, which are very funny ages.)
Also sports. I’m not athletic—I do cardio and yoga sometimes,
but I’ve never really been a team sports type—but I love watching them. The
Olympics just happened, and I watched as much of that as I could, but I also
love baseball—don’t hate me, but I’m a Yankees fan—and I suspect this is not
surprising if you look at my backlist.
What would readers be surprised to learn about you?
I have a degree in English lit and almost went to grad
school for teaching; instead, I currently work in educational publishing and
work on textbooks and educational materials for K-12 students. People seem
surprised to learn that I frequently work on math books. I was always very good
at math, but couldn’t figure out what to do with that, and it turns out that
the group of people who can edit text and also understand math is pretty small,
so it’s a good niche for my skillset.
What are you currently reading or looking forward to
reading?
I just finished the new Casey McQuiston book The Pairing, which is about two exes that end up on a food and wine tour of Europe together. (After watching the Paris Olympics, I really want to go to Paris, so this hit the spot in that sense. The setting descriptions are delicious.) Next in the queue: Apprentice to the Villain by Hannah Nicole Maehrer, which is the sequel to Assistant to the Villain, which I loved. (This series is funny and imaginative and also emotional and romantic.)
But the fiction TBR is giant right now because I’ve been
buying books faster than I can read them. I’m looking forward to The Paris
Affair by Maureen Marshall, The Lost Story by Meg Shaffer, The
Rom-Commers by Katherine Center, You Should Be So Lucky by Cat
Sebastian and many, many others.
I’m also a history buff and read a lot of heavy nonfiction.
I’m currently working on The Demon of Unrest by Erik Larson, about Fort
Sumter and the beginning of the American Civil War. (It’s very good, reads like
a thriller.) I’ve also been reading The King’s Assassin, which is a book
about George Villiers, a favorite of King James I of England (the recent series
Mary & George with Julianne Moore and Nichols Galitzine is based on
this book, which is quite dishy).
Where can readers find you online?
On social media, I’m most active on Threads and Instagram.
You can find me in both places @katemcmurraygram. If you want a full list of my
books, it’s on my website, www.katemcmurray.com.
(Fair warning: the website is a bit anemic because I accidentally deleted it
last year—long story—and have been slow to get it back up, but you can
find a complete list of my books there.) I also just relaunched my newsletter,
which you can sign up for here: https://eko-km-newsletter.beehiiv.com/subscribe
Okay, readers, now's the time to put your pets in the spotlight. Let's hear about them! Or give us your favorite book recs that feature animals. You know I'm always happy to add to my book buy list. And yours too!
One randomly chosen person who posts a comment before 11:00 PM, September 15 will receive their choice of one print book from Kate's Whitman Street Cat Café series.
*U.S. only
*Must be 18
