There are more cats than dogs in America, and cat lovers have long been stereotyped as socially dysfunctional and strange. I’ve had some of those feelings myself. Last year, a fascinating woman named Carolyn Smith moved to my town of Cambridge, N.Y. and asked if she could join my writing workshop.

Cat lovers are underserved in media. So much writing about cats is hyper-emotional or sappy. I’ve got a thoughtful and compelling one for you: CatsinCambridge.Net.

Carolyn is a well-educated, world traveled Brit, the daughter of a roving and imperious diplomat. She told me right up front that she had moved to this area with 13 rescue cats she simply could not bear to leave behind in her Seattle home with a failing rescue organization.

She sold her house and moved her. A few weeks ago, at my pestering and urging, she put up her blog, it’s called CatsInCambridge and it is beautiful, thoughtful and very well written.

Carolyn also shocked me with her seriousness about writing, her quickness and her determination to be thoughtful, honest and often funny about living with cats. I was also surprised by her blog. I urge a lot of people who wish to write to spent some time and money on a good, well-designed and easy to navigate blog.

The vast majority of those people blow me off or roll their eyes. Most writers want the New York Times to discover them, they don’t care to do the hard work of establishing a worthwhile blog. Carolyn did the work, you can see this new blog for yourself.

I think this blog is long over due. Much of the cat writing I read seems patronizing to me.

Carolyn bought a house, which is kept clean and orderly and admits that caring for these cats has become her life. “What can you do?,” is her motto, along with Leave No Cat Behind. Carolyn is intensely private, I’ve rarely seen her around town.

I love her very British point of view and very elegant writing style. She has lived and worked all over the world – as the child of a British diplomat and an executive at  British Airways. She was sent off early to one of those harsh and demanding British boarding schools.

I’ve always heard that they really teach people to those schools, which is what I suspected when I agreed to bring Carolyn into my class. I have a lot of interesting people in my class, Carolyn stood out.

I think this is why she came her, to learn how to write about cats, now the focal point of her life.

She is painfully shy and reclusive, only her great love of cats could have prompted her to start a blog. And my incessant nagging.

She writes about her life as well as her cats, and that is also compelling reading for me. Carolyn has had an unusual life, and she wants to write about it. She has a lot of cats with great back-stories, I am enjoying them. She has been all over the world, sometimes in very remote places.

Like many animal lovers, Carolyn struggles with grieving when one of her cats dies. She also writes about grief honestly and openly. I think she can be helpful to others.

She has a string of mysterious men in her life, I’ve not yet been able to get her to write about them in any detail.

Carolyn writes on her blog about The Provenance of Willow,  Norman the cat who traveled to Paris on the Air France Concorde; how she keeps her house clean and sane with so many animals, her Triptych window, filled with cat seats and perches, her wild journeys to Kiriwina, once the Trobriand Islands, and the drama of Joey, a Seattle cat who has gone missing.

Her flight from Seattle with her cats ought to be a Netflix movie some day, it just might be.

As I hoped, her blog has become important to her, she writes on it almost every day. The more important a blog is to any writer, the harder they work at it, the better it is and the better it does. Carolyn was listening.

I am proud and happy to call your attention for the second time to CatsInCambridge.net. I hear every day from people who love it already.

The blog is free and fascinating. Of course, you will and should make up your own mind about it.

If you are a passionate cat lover – most cat lovers are – I think you’ll find a valuable and meaningful place to go on the Web with Carolyn Smith.