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It’s Saturday. I have a few precious moments alone, well, okay, not alone-alone. I mean we have four dogs once you’re up, they’re up, and alone isn’t really accurate when you have a beagle howl/barking at your feet. Jimmy maybe half pug, but his bark and attitude towards it is all beagle. Please do not think we bought him as some designer dog. Jimmy is sixteen, and when he was born he was just a mutt. When we adopted him at the ripe old age of ten, he was so just a mutt. A mutt with patches of hair missing, pellets from a BB gun under his skin, and a case of claustrophobia that made him throw up in his crate every night. We actually tried sedatives on him, but it made him loopy, so we compromised and gave him a larger area to sleep in. A bathroom wasn’t big enough, so he has the run of the living room/kitchen area. He sleeps on the loveseat. This worked out well, until at fifteen he began to loose some of his housebreaking sensibilities. Now, first thing every morning is clean up. We’ve taken up the carpet in the living room and won’t put it down again until we’re short a dog. But I can’t imagine not looking down into that intense little face and letting that really loud bark hammer between my eyes every morning. He is a pushy little dog. I’m nattering on about the dogs because you guys are going to have to wait until next week for me to explain to you what the heck I was alluding to in the blog about sausage making.
Friday was a very long day. I did an interview to support the Guilty Pleasures comic book. I talked to people in New York from 8:30 to 11:00 that morning. I’ll probably still be talking to people come Monday. Nothing bad. It’s all good stuff. Among many things we’re discussing the cover for THE HARLEQUIN, Anita 15. It will all eventually lead to good stuff, but there was no way to work on the book. We’re discussing the cover and the book isn’t done. This has become a standard with me in the last few years, but I always find it disturbing. It’s like doing the well baby check-up when the baby hasn’t been born yet, or like doing the postmortem when the patient is still alive. It just seems out of order. Publicity is great, but more and more the other parts of the business are interrupting the actually writing of the books. I cannot seem to make anyone understand how disruptive even a small interruption can be to the writing, let alone hours of it. I’m tired, discouraged, because I now no longer believe I will have the book done before I see you guys in New Orleans. Right now, it feels like I will still be hovering just before the climatic scene, but never getting to it. Before I left for Orlando and New York the book was so real to me, the climax so close, and since then it seems like I haven’t had a peaceful day complete to get back into the book. There have been constant interruptions. Some of it on my end, landscapers, remodeling of the last bathroom, the new library shelves, but a lot of it has been on the other end. The end that wants the book done soon, but somehow I don’t get left alone to finish it. God, it sounds like I’m whining, I hate that. If all I can do is whine I’m stopping. I’m just really, really tired guys. Sorry about that.
I just fed the dogs. We all got a late start this morning. But when I came back in Sasquatch, our smallest pug, was sitting in the big comfy chair. Sunlight had filled the chair, and his earnest little face was so intent on me, so full of who he is, that it made me laugh. I said, “Hey, pretty dog.” He bounded down off the chair to follow me, as everyone was, because I had the food bowls. Just like that, my mood is a lighter, just my dog sitting in sunshine, looking at me. It isn’t the big things that keep you going, or help you day to day, it’s the small things, the everyday treasures. Some days I wonder about having four dogs, but most of the time they lighten the load, which is what they’ve been doing for us humans for about ten thousand years is it now? I’d have to look it up to be certain, and get two books to agree, but a long time. I have a good friend who’s an agnostic. He wants proof that God, or Goddess, or anybody, exists. I told him one day that of course a higher power was behind the creation of everything. Las Vegas wouldn’t take the odds on all this being accidental. That didn’t convince him, he’d heard it before. I told him God has to exist otherwise why would dog’s have scratchy spots that make their leg go when you pet them. He laughed, and said it was one of the best arguments he’d ever heard. If it was all a cosmic accident why would there be so many things that are just for fun, just because they make us smile?
I’m outta here. You’ve seen me depressed, whining, happy, now philosophical. So time to stop blogging and get on with my day. Besides, I just heard Jimmy pee on the floor. I love my dogs, I love them all. Damnit.