Two Blind Dogs, See How They Run...

I have six mutant pomeranians that I love very, very much. The oldest is Marlon Brando and he's fifteen. The old guy's been with me from the very beginning, from Point A when I was down to my last ten dollars; he's shared every joy and tear with me as I moved from a skanky little apartment with duck-shit colored carpet to my current beautiful house which I've designed. He's feisty as ever, and still chases, or tries to (!), every female in heat. But he can't jump as high, or see as far, or hear as well, as he used to.

His wife's name is Magic. She's ten this year. She's the biggest mutant of all because she's this pedigree pom with papers and she's TWENTY-EIGHT pounds at her biggest. This year, she suddenly contracted diabetes and her excessive weight literally saved her life because she dwindled into a bag of bones while the vets tried to stablelize her. Unfortunately, a week after she became better, she became blind from her illness, the lens in her eyes turning whitish.

My two furbabies have adapted to their conditions with the simplest of doggie reasoning. When Brando can't see where he is, he barks until the others bark back at him, and he is then satisfied that no one has left him out in the yard by himself. When he can't jump on the bed to join me any more, he decides that the laundry basket with my sweaty roofing clothes smell the same as his mom, so he sleeps in it. I give him one of my pillows now and he's happy with that too.

Magic amazes me even more. She's only been sightless for a few months, but she doesn't seem to be depressed about this at all. If it were me (and I'm blind as a bat without my contacts), I'd probably have the toughest time adjusting to a world of darkness. But this dog walks around better than I. She sometimes appears to forget that she can't see because she would run full speed when I call her and bang into the wall, or worse, a tree. That doesn't seem to faze her either. She just gets up and continues running.

Obviously, because of her inability to see, she, too, can't jump any more and she was quite the jumping bean. So now she sleeps with Brando side by side, which amuses me, because she has never liked to share anything with that husband of hers. She's learned to "listen," just like Brando, barking when she can't tell where she is, and learning to recognize the clanking of her food and drink bowl being laid down. She's eating like a pig again, regaining all that weight she lost, and even manages to chew out Brando's ears when he strays too near her food.

I watch my two older ones in absolute amazement every day. Their attitude is very zen: "What is is what is." Sometimes I wonder whether I get that from them or vice-versa ;-)!

I must look at things differently to get my next assignment done. Now that I'm finished with my current contract, I have something new to which I must learn to adapt--writing a proposal for a series. Before, when I was unpublished, it was easy because I just write whatever popped up in my head.

After I've sold, I wrote the synopses for my first two books after I was finished writing. Then, after my first contract, I hadn't needed to give any kind of proposal because I was asked to write a SEAL trilogy. The toughest thing was to come up with the synopsis before each of these stories, and I had to learn how to let do that. It wasn't easy. Since I don't plot my books, it was like pulling my own teeth myself. I adapted, though, and the three books are now done.

So, this is the next new thing to learn. I want to write a series of books that have to do with virtual reality and remote viewing. The topics are already theses in themselves, so you can guess how difficult a task it is to water them down into something, oh, five to ten pages long with characters and love relationships thrown in! I'm not writing a synopsis for one book but three! And I'm still stuck on page one with trying to explain about my world with the VR-RV concept!

In short, I'm blindly trying to find my way around familiar ground. I know the way well; after all, I've written, read, breathed life, and manipulated these characters and storylines over and over before. They know me and I, hopefully, know them too, although they certainly know how to surprise me with their secrets. But this story-arc thing, that I've always deliberately pushed in the back of my mind as I write, has now got to come to the forefront because I've finally figured out that's what a proposal is. It's a different kind of synopsis; instead of the story of the front story, it's the story of the back story.

Like my dogs, I have to learn new skills and bark whenever I feel lost ;-). This is me doing it in this blog. Arf! Arf! Arf! And you know what? I feel much better. LOL.

As Ranger Buddy likes to say when he's mocking himself, "I see, says the blind man." The joke here is that poor RB is blind without his glasses these days too, only that he doesn't care what he's looking at. LOL. Remind me one day to tell you of the extraordinary story of RB talking to the postbox on the ground while he was on the roof. It was...quite a sight to behold....

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