News

It’s Sunday morning. I’ve the house to myself, as I often do on a weekend morning. Jon and Trinity are still snoozing away, and it’s just me and the dogs. I almost said, just me and the boys, because Pip and Sasquatch are both boy dogs, but too many people on the net are all too eager to infer that I do indeed have a few extra men hanging about the house. Even if I did have two extra men at my beck and call, they’d probably still want to sleep in on Sunday morning, and I’d still be sitting here by myself with just the dogs. Does that sound unromantic? Or just true?

Has anyone caught that it shouldn’t be just me and the boys? Our little furry princess, our last fuzzy girl, has passed away. She didn’t quite make it to eleven years. I thought she’d hit twelve, but checked her papers and we were wrong. I think I was confusing her birth date with my first pug, Pugsley. I did have them both at the same time, so . . . Pugsley died at eight, and Phouka only just over ten. They say pugs are a long-lived breed, but you couldn’t prove that by my experience with them. We lost our first pug about eight years ago. But in the last year we have lost two dogs. Remember Jimmy, our olden dogger? He died at seventeen, a ripe old age, let’s hear it for that mutt constitution score. Yeah, technically he was half beagle which makes him a puggle, but he was sooo not a designer dog. He was a mutt, and looked nothing like the dogs that they call puggles. He looked like what he was the off-spring of a enterprising beagle who climbed the wrong fence one dark night, and found the pug of his dreams, or at least of his one-night-stand. I really debated on whether to share the news yet. Everyone was still having fun with the post Dragon con fun. I had essays that I still wanted to blog about it, and how much fun it was, but in the end I finally had to share about Phouka.

Because right now, I don’t want to rain on the fun of Dragon Con’s post coital haze. I’m going to have Darla put up the first chapter of SWALLOWING DARKNESS, and I didn’t want to take the fun out of that. Then we’ll be building towards the actual release date of the book, itself. I finally realized, that there is always going to be something fun, or exciting, that I won’t want to darken with my bad news. So, like all bad news, just give it to me, baby. Rip that bandage off, and let me see. So, we’re down to two dogs, when less than twelve months ago we had four. Rough year.