#evernighties Family, friends and pets that I wrote into my books.

The newest prompt in the #evernighties blog challenge is  "Family, friends and pets that I wrote into my books".
Oh, this could be a long post, so I'll skip family and friends altogether and just talk about pets, which are family and friends too, in any case!
I love animals, and my pets pop all over my writing!

My Haflinger mare, Kaylee, is a central character in my short story "Headshy", and her journey from mistreatment  to trust and confidence is both her true story and very much part of the story arc of the book. She also made another cameo appearance in "Spellbreakers"!
Kaylee is living proof of "little people" power. She's a small horse, not fast, and not inclined to play tricks. But she proved to be a wonderful work-horse, and almost bombproof on the road, keeping her wits about her in situations where flashier horses would have exploded like fireworks.
We walked 5000 km together from 2009 to 2011, on all sorts of paths and roads, from Germany to Brittany to Catalonia, and then back to France. This long foot trip was part of the inspiration for Spellbreakers.
She's happily retired in a pasture just outside my garden now, with a ridiculous Shetland pony called Boomer for company.

Then there is Jade, the hell-hound. So called because he's impressive, large and black. In fact he's the most embarrassingly gentle, friendly and sweet dog that you will ever meet. He's been known to turn absolute cat-people into piles of pooch-cuddling mush. Jade appeared as Amber in Spellbreakers. And he pops up also in the story I am currently writing, The Elder Man, as himself.
Although Jade is a basically a four-legged clown, there is from time to time a touch of the supernatural about him... and that always comes out in my stories, where he always has something magical about him.

Of course there is Muffin.
Muffin was my adored white cat, who died in 2016. She was my "Little Doctor", and many other things. I think she held my world together and everything came apart somewhat since she passed away.
In my whole life, only one other death affected me more than hers. 😭
Muffin appears as herself in Spice & Vanilla. I truly wanted to write her in a story where she still was alive, and doing her healing work.
Muffin always looked a bit grumpy... but she wasn't. 
There are also three more family cats in that book, Jonesy, Ebola (as Plague... yes, don't ask me about the name), and Tamburino as Tambourine.

And there is Luna, my "lemur cat"!
She is the newest addition to my menagerie, with her brother Lumos. Because of her face-markings and her propensity for tree-climbing, we decided that her father (identity unknown) might have been a ring-tailed lemur escaped from the reserve zoologique of Salviac, not far from us!
And that's how I had the idea of writing a ring-tailed lemur (two actually), in In the Eye of the Wind. Luna's pet name is Puny Loony, and the lemurs in the book are called Puna and Luna.

Even my ducks made it into my stories... in Spice & Vanilla (just as a small flash-back), and in The Elder Man, my current WIP. Here it is my Cayuga ducks, specifically. Cayugas are beautiful  ducks with the loveliest iridescent black feathers, and in this story they appear with the collective pet name they have here in real life, the Paphoonies. If you want to know how that name came about you will have to read the story...