Throughout his writing career, Raymond Chandler was never far from his beloved cat, Taki, a black Persian whom he referred to as his secretary. Taki was originally spelled Take. However, Chandler grew tired of telling people she was named after the Japanese word for bamboo and thus pronounced with two syllables. He got Taki around the time he started writing novels. As Chandler wrote to a friend, she was a constant presence on his desk, “usually sitting on the paper I wanted to use . . . sometimes leaning up against the typewriter and sometimes just quietly gazing out of the window from a corner of the desk, as if to say, ‘The stuff you’re doing is a waste of time, bud.’”
(Same with my cat, BeBop, who is my editor, and harshest critic.)