Life can take some strange twists and turns. There are futures you never imagined just beyond tomorrow. At least that's the way it seems to me now. It all started with a simple vacation.

February of 2007 — I headed down to Venezuela for a two week vacation with my two adult children, Philip and Coral. Venezuela is surprisingly close and relatively inexpensive. Plus it has diverse wildlife. I'm not the world's best birdwatcher, but 1,346 species of birds — 42 percent of all South American birds and 12 percent of bird species world-wide — can be found in that one relatively small country. Plus a variety of diverse wildlife include giant anteaters, tapirs, crocodiles, river dolphins and capybara.

That last is the animal that changed my life. As we drove down a dirt road through a ranch/wildlife preserve in the Los Llanos region of the country on one sultry night, Carlos, our guide, got out of the truck and picked up a three-month-old capybara off the road. Coral held it and fell in love with its blunt nose, squiggly ears, dark eyes and hair like wire.

As soon as we got home, all I could hear was how I should get a pet capybara. Looking on the Web, there were plenty of references along the lines of "frequently kept as pets" but no actual citations of pet capybaras. Finally we found Mary Lee Stropes of www.capybaras.org. She pointed us to a couple in Nacogdoches who had some babies for sale. As soon as we saw Caplin Rous, we fell in love.

Caplin was only 11 days old and three pounds when we got him but he grew like a weed. I took him to work with me every day for the first three months and then about once a week for the next three. At first he spent most of his day sleeping on my lap but he soon transferred to the desk and finally to his own bed on top of a couple of file cabinets pushed together. By that time he was about 50 lbs. and too big to sneak in to work where the sign on the door says “No dogs allowed,” but nothing about capybaras.

Since Caplin's baby days I'd been keeping a blog for him on MySpace. He eventually had FaceBook and YouTube pages as well as an official blog on blogspot.

It wasn't surprising that when I decided to write a novel for my 10-year-old granddaughter, it turned out to be about capybaras as much as the cats she had requested.

After a frustrating round with publishing houses, my agent finally conveyed the verdict from an editor at Random House. The language of the book was too sophisticated for younger kids and the book was not long enough for older kids.

When Animal Planet decided to air a segment on Caplin for their series Animal Planet's Most Outrageous, I decided to self-publish. The Adventures of Celeste the Cat : Celeste and the Giant Hamster came out on amazon.com in late May, just missing the first airing of the Animal Planet segment.

Caplin's fan base on MySpace, FaceBook, his blog (which has moved to www.GiantHamster.com) and twitter, gave the book some success. But things really heated up when author/ book-reviewer Jeff VanderMeer tweeted about a dream he had featuring a capybara. I replied (as Caplin) and we started a conversation that led to Jeff's doing an interview with me for his blog (http://www.jeffvandermeer.com/2009/06/24/the-fantastical-capybara-an-interview-with-typaldos-about-caplin-rous/#more-5063) that was taken up by www.boingboing.net. Jeff's blog got more than 30,000 unique hits that first day. Who knew so many people loved capybaras? Not even they did since most of them first heard about capys from Jeff's blog.

A week or so later, Jeff did a review of Celeste and the Giant Hamster on his amazon blog, Omnivoracious (http://www.omnivoracious.com/2009/07/capybara-madness-celeste-and-the-giant-hamster-by-melanie-typaldos.html).

Caplin's 2nd birthday was on Friday and we had a big celebration from 10 a.m. to noon at Garrison District Park on Manchaca Rd. in South Austin.

I am also doing a book reading at the Buda Public Library on Aug. 6 from 2 - 3 p.m.