Cassie

There are certain triggers for Cassie that let her know that someone is soon going to be leaving the house. My husband puts on his belt or his shoes. I swap out sweat pants for jeans or use the blow dryer on my hair. Any one of those things sets her off whining and pacing and jumping up and down with no thought of respectability or former training. Someone is going someplace and she doesn’t want to be left behind.

Most of the time, if the two of us are going somewhere, she goes with us. But by the time we’ve done the blow dryer/jeans/belt/shoes routine she has worked herself up into such a frenzy that it is no longer about being with us but about being in the white heat of the moment. It’s not good for her. She never calms down even after we’re in the car. She just keeps up that constant high pitched bark that I translate into “Please don’t leave me behind. Please let me come along. Please. Please. Please. I’ll be your best friend.” By the end of the trip, whether to the parents for dinner and a playdate with her cousin Circe or a longer drive to the beach, she’s exhausted in the way that a new baby is when you’ve had to let her cry herself to sleep.

I’ve seen this happen with writers sometimes. They act before they really think about what they are doing. They don’t read or follow guidelines for agents or editors. They decide to write a book in a genre that is hot at the moment even though they don’t feel passionate about that genre. They don’t read in their chosen area. They badmouth agents, publishers, reviewers in open forums online, forgetting the fact that the Internet is the world’s largest elephant and it never, ever forgets. They are so excited to be a part of this wonderful crazy business that they are jumping up and down and getting in everyone’s faces without thinking about what that might look like from the other side.

No, I don’t have a particular incident or person in mind as I write this. I was just cleaning out some files and came across a note that I had taped to my computer monitor back when I was running a 2400 baud modem (in other words, a long time ago.) The note said simply that you needed to act like a professional long before you are published.

I’ve started working with Cassie to diffuse her triggers. I might change into jeans and then go sit back at the computer for half an hour. Move the blow dryer into another room and use it but go nowhere. When she realizes no one is picking up their keys she settles back down again. After she’s calm, we can leave and it is usually a much more pleasant experience for us all.

The children’s publishing world is a small one. People move around all the time. Writers become editors and editors become agents and you never know who you will meet that will help you grow. Editors and agents are interacting with authors on Twitter and Facebook, blurring the lines between work and after hours fun. Think before you dash off that smart-aleck response to someone but at the same time, don’t be afraid to interact. I know, it sounds like a slippery slope but you can mange it if you just slow down and think before you act.

Put that enthusiasm into your writing and let your work speak for yourself.

Cassie and I have a snack game we play every day sometime around noon. It’s been long enough since breakfast and still too far til dinner that she gets a little grumbly in her tummy. So I ask her if she wants snackies and if it’s time to play the game.

The game is simple. I take 3 of her dog biscuits and break them into 4 or 5 pieces. Makes it look like a veritable feast. (Sorta like putting our diet dinners on a salad plate.) Then I send her to her crate in a down stay while I go hide them. I put one under a giant pile of toys. I shove some inside the well-chewed bones around the house. I put on the chair, the edge of the coffee table. I put one under her blanket. You get the idea. Then I release her and let her go “find” the treats. It’s great fun because she loves to find them and then she gets to eat them. It exercises her brain and tires her out at the same time. Bonus for me, she usually takes a nap afterward.

I may have mentioned a time or two that Cassie is a smart dog. Today I said “snackies” and “play the game” and suddenly she disappeared. I didn’t think much about it at first. I just went to the kitchen and grabbed a few biscuits. Then I went looking for her. She had already gone to her crate and laid down and was giving me her best “focus” look. She was ready to play the game. She knew what she had to do before we could play. She wanted her reward.

I’m working on Flyboy’s story. Now. Still. Whatever. It’s gone well. It’s gone, well, not so good. Some days I can write 1,000 words, solve plot problems in my sleep and craft sentences I find so brilliant I want to write them in gold. Some days I write three sentences and I call it a good day. On Monday I reread what I had written so far and decided it didn’t stink as much as I thought it might. Last night it seemed like the most boring story ever. EVER. Today it looks fixable.

This is the way the game is played. I know what I have to do to get there. I have to put myself in the chair and write one word at a time. It’s hard. Every day I fight it. I fight going to my office chair. I fight opening the manuscript. I fight putting my fingers on the keys. But I want that reward, the finished book.

I just need to take the first step and sit in the chair.

During the week my time to work in the garden is governed by how many times Cassie rings the bells to go outside. When the water starts to drip in the bird bath we must go out so she can inspect the area and then retire to her hill to watch as the birds flock to the water. Several times a day we need to go out so she can nose along the coyote mint, nuzzling the bees as the scoot from flower to flower. How it is that she hasn’t gotten stung yet is anyone’s guess. When bugs skitter along on the ground she follows them, eyes on the prize so fiercely that she often trips over things in her path because she is watching the bug instead of where she is going. Of late she is fascinated with our resident Charlotte, the garden spider who has set up camp in the water feature area and can often be found waiting in her web which is just in line with Cassie’s nose. Luckily the “leave it” command seems to be working and Cassie only pauses to say hello to Charlotte before moving on.

In the mornings I am frustrated by her constant need, every hour, to go outside for something or another. I am grumpy, still waking up, and trying to get to work. But as the day goes on I find myself adapting to her rhythm. While she investigates the bugs I pull a weed or two, repot a plant or move some rocks. When she is tired we go back inside and I can go back to work for a little while.

Today I was pulling up some lovely Yarrow to divide and put into pots to grow until fall. As I separated the plants Cassie came over to check out what I was doing. I held the damp roots toward her nose and she sniffed them all around then slowly sniffed the length of the plant and back down again. She sat down and stared at me and I wasn’t quite sure what she wanted. I went back to teasing the roots apart into individual plants. As soon as I pulled another one apart she began the sniffing process again. By the third time I was also looking closely at the plant, wondering if someone had sprinkled liver or some other doggie delicacy around the leaves. Of course I found nothing.

I laughed at my silly dog doing what we call the Cassie inspection and quickly finished up the potting so we could go  back inside.

I’m taking a writing class right now, one of those look closely at your work, tear it apart so you can rebuild it stronger than before kind of classes. This is a very good thing for me.

When I got the first assignments I read them over several times and couldn’t wrap my brain around what needed to be done. I wanted to pull open my story, go right to work, turn in the assignment, collect my pats on the back and move on.

But I couldn’t do it because I couldn’t get it and I couldn’t get it because I wasn’t taking the time to look closely at what needed to be done. It’s not that I thought the story was already perfect. Far from it. It’s that I wasn’t willing to look at it word by word, as closely as Cassie sniffs those plants when she does her inspections.

I’ve always said I was a seat-of-the-pants kind of writer. An intuitive writer. I didn’t know what I did or why I did it but I knew what needed to be done. Or so I thought. Now I wonder if I was just getting by or just plain lucky.

Today I opened the assignment and tore it apart, sentence by sentence, until I began to finally see how I could apply it to my work. At first it felt forced but as the day wore on I began to feel little light bulbs clicking on. By the time I had done a couple of the assignments I could see how the few changes would strengthen and deepen the story.

Writing a first draft in fast, hot heat is a good thing. It lets you get the story down while the emotion is bubbling at the surface. But the next draft, that’s where you need to slow down and reflect word by word, motivation by motivation, until you get to the heart of what it is you are trying to say.

From now on I’m going to try to remember to slow down and give my writing the sniff test before claiming it’s done.

Cassie likes to nap in whatever room I am in. When I get up to go into the kitchen for a drink of water she move from her bed to the center of the library so she can still see me. If I stay in the kitchen too long she will move to her rug in the entry area, the closer to see me. What she doesn’t like is when I go in the bathroom and shut the door. If the door doesn’t latch, she pushes it open, again and again. If it is completely shut she will lay down as close as she can get, nose facing the door, so as not to miss me when I come back out. It’s like she’s afraid there’s an escape route in there that she can’t see and I’m going to leave the house, leave her, without saying goodbye.

I tell her trust me. I’ll be back.

She’ll often respond with one of her big dog grumbles as she sinks to the floor to wait.

I use the phrase trust me a lot in our training. At the park I ask her to jump on and over a variety of strange things. Sometimes she hesitates, pauses to glance at me, make sure I really want her to jump up on that spinning merry-go-round. I say, “Trust me” and then give the command and she always does what I ask.

I treasure that trust and do my very best not to abuse it.

When you’re writing a novel a lot of things can happen that you didn’t plan on. You hear writers say that something came out of nowhere but it works so they let it stay. And sometimes you have to try a bunch of things that don’t work just so you can figure out what might. With me it usually starts with a character who wants to go someplace or something that makes no sense to me. My job as a writer is to follow him wherever he goes and to trust that it will all make sense later. And even if it doesn’t make 100% sense later, chances are that it will probably lead me in just the right direction I need to go. The story will tell itself to you if you let it.

For the last 20 years, no matter what version of the novel I was working on, Flyboy has always had the same main goal. Always. Recently he stood up on the page and pointed me in a different direction. This, he said, this is what I want more than anything else. Really.

Moments like this scare me in my writing because I am so afraid of doing the wrong thing, of messing up the story, of missing the target and falling on my face. Is this really the direction I want the story to go? If this is such a great idea why didn’t I think of it 20 years ago? What if I spend all that time following him down this new path only to find out that it goes absolutely nowhere?

Regardless of all those thoughts, I know what I have to do. I have to explore all the possibilities. I have to follow Flyboy down a new path and see where it takes me.

It’s just a matter of trust.

Cassie has a rug about 10 feet from the front door. It’s her place to go to when the doorbell rings and she has to wait until we tell her she can get off it and say hello. The idea, of course, is to keep her from hurling her giant self at the person coming through the door. In the kitchen she has a rug too. It’s her kitchen place and if she is in the way in the kitchen we can tell her to go to her place and that’s where she waits. In the library, which is where we spend the evenings with our laptops and the TV, she has another place. When she’s done playing for the night she crashes there, getting up to rotate every so often but most of the time staying there as though it were a giant doggy playpen. She has another “place” in my office and yet another up in our bedroom. And of course she always has her crate when she wants to retreat to her cave.

I think she likes knowing that when life gets too overwhelming and she needs a break she has a place she can go to rest and restore her spirits. When she’s feeling rejuvenated (or when we release her from a stay) she bounds forth ready to be here, be now, and be real.

What a smart dog.

I have a place too. I have a beautiful big office with a view of my new garden. There are still things to be done there, tweaking and some more shelves and I probably ought to throw a few things away, but it’s a beautiful room with a big antique oak teacher’s desk for my computer and an antique library table facing it, covered with my latest research books. I have a comfy reading chair facing the garden with a view of the bubbling rock and the bird bath.

But I don’t write in my office.

Instead I sit on the couch in the library with a lapdesk on a pillow across my knees. I shove a couple of pillows behind my back and type in a position that is far from ergonomic. I know this because my shoulder is getting worse and my wrists are complaining and basically I hurt all the time.

What a silly human.

Right now it’s late evening. Cassie is curled up in her bed in front of the fireplace, grunting or groaning every so often, reminding us in her doggy voice that she is still here, still watching over us. Her tail goes thump, thump, thump, and I have to smile, wondering what she’s dreaming of.

What a smart, happy dog.

Me? I’m sitting on the couch, hunched over the laptop, trying to remember if I have any Motrin left to take later.

I don’t know what keeps me from writing in my special place but I think I need to figure it out.

Cassie has had it easy lately. I haven’t been doing as much work with her as I have in the past. Partially because a lot of the basics are trained and she just needs to be reminded of them and partially because, well, life has felt like a little too much in places. A little too crowded and sometimes a little too overwhelming because I feel so ill-equipped to deal with, well, “stuff” to use the technical term.

But Cassie’s a smart dog and has been learning things on her own.

Things like, there’s Al, the good postman, who always wants her to come out to say hello and give kisses; Mark, the okay postman, who mostly ignores her, and Frank, the big bad postman, who is terrified of her, especially when she goes right up to the screen door to say hello. So now she whimpers when Al comes so I can let her out into the courtyard and they can both get what they want. When Mark comes she waits majestically at the screen door, tail thumping when he says hello. And when Frank comes she stays on her rug, far enough away from the door for him to feel safe enough to deliver the mail.

Things like, Uncle Bryan and Uncle Dave are soft touches when they come over to visit because if she sticks close to them, treat magically falls from their fingers into her mouth. And if she performs tricks without being asked, they fall even faster.

Things like, if she rings the bell enough times I’ll eventually stop what I’m doing and go out back with her, if only to sit on the loveseat and watch her watch bees or work on her suntan. She gets what she wants and I get a break I didn’t know I needed until I had it.

What impresses me most of all is that she is learning how to keep guard of me without me doing anything at all. We’ve had a lot of strangers in the house lately. I’m selling stuff on craigslist and the roof guy was over and then the window guy and each time there’s someone new, Cassie has a routine. First she barks like crazy from her place about six feet from the front door. Then, if I let them in, she sniffs them all around and follows us whereever we go. If I stay standing, so does she. If I don’t open the screen door and someone, say a sales person, stays on the other side, she barks until I either let them in or they go away.

I haven’t been blogging a lot lately. Haven’t done much on Facebook or Twitter either. I messed up in a couple of places. I gave away some power and forgot to grab up some power that was offered to me. It’s messed with my head in a lot of ways. And anything that messes with my head, messes with my writing.

Today the roof guy came over so we could sign the papers to get started on the new roof. Cassie went through her whole routine –  barking, standing, following. When we went into the kitchen and sat down at the table she finally decided it was okay to sit down too. But she placed herself a slight distance away, between the roof guy and me, facing him. It was a classic German Shepherd guard pose and I wish I had captured it with a picture.

I wasn’t ever in any real danger but I like the idea that she is there, watching out for me when I might be too out of it to watch out for myself.

This is what I want to learn how to do with my writing life. I need to figure out what I love to do, what I tolerate doing, and what makes me so mad I just want to run away and not do at all.

I need to find my sweet spot, the things that make me want to write, whether or not treats magically fall from the sky.

I need to remember that sometimes taking a break from doing something I love in order to do something else I love is exactly the right thing to do.

Mostly I need to learn how to guard myself. To step back, watch and wait.

To remember that no one is going to care about my writing, my words, my work, as much as I do and if I don’t care enough to guard them well I shouldn’t be surprised when they are taken from me.

Cassie has a lot of toys but only a few favorites that she returns to again and again. Mr. Monkey is one. A large stuffed monkey that she picked out when we went to the local pet store after a visit to the vet a few months ago. She carries him around every day and never tears him up. But her absolute favorite toys are the egg babies. In my continuing quest to find a ball like object that she would enjoy I brought home this.

It’s a turtle with a pouch in the bottom and you stuff the little plush egg babies inside. It took Cassie about 30 seconds to figure out that the object was to get the eggs out of the turtle. I can get four of them inside. Once she “guts” it, she chases those little eggs all over the house. She throws them in the air and then pounces on them. She kicks them like soccer balls. She tosses them under chairs and then pushes them out with a leg stretched under the chair. (I’ve seen her do this enough times to know that it’s on purpose.) Once in a while she lets me play with her, dropping an egg baby at my feet. But I usually only get to throw it once and she will amuse herself for half an hour or more. When they roll under a big piece of furniture she lays down in front of it and gives a different kind of bark. Once that must mean, hurry up. I need my egg baby and I need it now. The egg babies have squeakers in them and I always smile as I see her race by me with an egg baby in her mouth going “squeak squeak squeak.”

When she’s had enough, she’ll climb into her bed for a much needed nap. A hour or two later she will ring the bells on the patio door. It’s not to go outside for a potty break. It’s because it’s playtime (again!) and all her egg babies are spread all over the house. We have turtle egg babies and chick egg babies. I stuff as many as I can into the tummy pouches of both, make her go through a bit of her training routine, and then give them back to her to start the whole game all over again. We do this six or seven times a day. She never gets tired of digging out the egg babies. She never gets tired of throwing them and chasing them and carrying them around.

I’m working on a couple of books that deal with topics that I don’t know a lot about. That means research. And I’ve never been very sure if I was any good at researching. I save everything because I take horrible notes and then it takes me forever to find stuff. I have a rotten memory, another reason to save everything or buy so many of the research books. But there’s something about the dig, something about having to find the story within the research that makes me smile every time. When I first start reading about a new topic I’m convinced it was a crummy idea and there is nothing there that will make a story. I’ll read for a while and then walk away and go play with some other kind of writing. But an internal bell rings, drawing me back to the research, and I dig in again. Same topic. Same book. Same page. But I dig deeper and discover something. Maybe a name, maybe an event, but something that makes me happy enough to carry it around with me for a while. To toss it in with my other words and see what happen. And because when I do this something magical usually DOES happen, well it excites me enough to want to go back and dig some more.

I repeat this process over and over again on a book, dig deep, find something new to me, play with it for a while, let it rest, then dig some more. I never get tired of digging, of discovering, of playing with my discoveries.

I think it’s good to remember that there are times we need to dig deep and times we have to let ourselves just play. In the end it all (usually) comes together in a story but it’s hard to remember that when we are fighting the process.

Gotta go. I’m pretty sure I just heard a bell.

The other night before feeding Cassie her dinner I made her run through a bunch of training routines. We are working on long stays with me out of sight. After about 10 minutes of working on stays I went through some of her tricks . . . roll over, take a nap, peek-a-boo and my favorite, tell me a secret.

She was hungry, really wanting her dinner, but I knew that to reinforce the idea that nothing in life is free, I needed to make her work for her food. Because I had done so much with training before feeding her I decided not to use the Buster cube. I filled her bowl with all the food at once and walked away.

It was completely quiet. So quiet that it took me a minute to realize that I was not hearing the sound of a hungry dog eating her dinner. I was not hearing the chomp, chomp, chomp of kibble between her teeth. I was hearing, well, the sound of waiting.

I turned around and looked at her. She was looking at me. Intently. Focus, they call it. And I realized what had happened. I had forgotten to release her, to give her permission to eat. My poor hungry dog was watching me, giant streams of drool starting to fall from her mouth as she waited for me to tell her okay, go ahead and have your dinner, you earned it. Of course as soon as I realized what I had done I released her and she broke focus and began to eat as though this was just another step in her training. Which I suppose, it was.

You know where I’m going with this, don’t you? Are you waiting for someone to give you permission to write? Are you waiting for someone to release you so that you can tell the stories only you can tell?

Don’t.

Don’t wait. Don’t believe you need permission from anyone to write. Don’t believe you need to wait until someone moves away or dies or in some way, real or imagined, gives you permission to write.

If you really feel like you need permission from someone to write, let me know. I’ll send you a personally crafted permission slip so you can release yourself to tell the stories you are meant to write. I mean it.

Writing is hard enough. Why make it any tougher on ourselves?

Cassie is a smart dog. She’s like that really smart kid in school who starts acting up because he’s already reading 4 grade levels ahead of everyone else. So with Cassie I practice a line of training called, Nothing in Life is Free. I use it for everything from going in and out of doors, putting on leashes, saying good morning while I’m still in bed but most of all, at feeding time.

Cassie loves her food but I don’t just put her food in the bowl and walk away. That would be too easy. Sometimes I start off slowly using a game similar to the “shell game” where I put a few pieces of food under some, but not, all of the bones. First she has to “find it” by smell, then she has to lift the top off in order to get to her food.

But usually dinner time is about Buster and Leo. Buster is on the left and Leo is on the right. (I didn’t name them that, that’s what they’re called. The Buster cube and Leo.) Before she can have breakfast or dinner the first thing Cassie has to do is find wherever she has left Buster and Leo. She knows “find it” and she knows their names so I have her find Buster and tell me. She puts her paw on it and barks. Then I pick it up. Same thing with Leo. Once I put her food in them I put them on the floor and make her wait.

Cassie’s release word is “danke” so before she can eat I’m saying things like wonka, fonka, bonka. I do a bunch of fake words and then throw in the real one. She pounces on Buster first and proceeds to roll him around the room until she gets all the food out. There’s a bit of a maze inside Buster and she has to keep rolling it until the food works its way up to the top and out of the hole. Leo works a little differently. The holes are smaller and rolling doesn’t work. She has to pick it up and throw it down to get a few pieces of kibble out.

Doing this has stretched her eating time from three minutes when she would just inhale everything in her bowl to about twenty minutes of working the puzzles to get the food out. It challenges her brain and she realizes that if she wants to eat, she’s going to have to work for it.

Writing isn’t easy. Sometimes you just have to be patient. You need to sit and wait, ignoring all the wrong words until the right words come along. Sometimes you know what you want to write about but you can’t find the right vehicle for the story. You have to sniff around until you find it. Sometimes getting the right words down in the right way is like working those pieces of food out of the Buster cube. You turn them over and over again and only a few of the right words fall out but it’s enough to keep you going. Sometimes the story fights you every step of the way until you want to throw it across the room. And maybe that’s what you need to do, get mad at it because if you’re mad, you’ve got your emotions involved and if you’ve got your emotions involved the story is going to reward you. Eventually.

There’s no quick and easy path to writing a book or getting published or staying published. It all takes time.

Nothing in life is free. Not for dogs. Not for writers.