My dog Audrey has no teeth. Not in a metaphorical, “she’s soft” way. Literally none. They all fell out a few years ago and she has been operating on gums and vibes ever since. She eats slop. She gums my hand for affection. She is, without exaggeration, the kindest creature I have ever met.<\/p>\n
The dog in Dead Dog Barking<\/em> is the opposite of Audrey in every way. He barks. He doesn’t stop. He has all his teeth. He is loud, demanding, and he has personally cost me two relationships and a bathroom renovation. (Long story.)<\/p>\n I needed to write about both dogs to make the book work.<\/p>\n Doug \u2014 the fictional dog in the novel \u2014 is a soundtrack. He’s noise. He’s the thing Charlie can’t escape, the thing that won’t let her settle, the audible representation of every thought she’s tried to outrun by going to India. He’s the chaos.<\/p>\n Audrey, behind the scenes, was the reason. She’d sit on my feet under the writing desk. She’d follow me into the kitchen at 2am when I was stuck. She’d listen \u2014 really listen, head cocked, gums working \u2014 when I read chapters out loud to test the rhythm. I wrote the entire book at her pace.<\/p>\n Audrey is fourteen. She walks like she’s wading through honey. We do laps of the same paddock every morning and it takes us forty minutes to do what a younger dog could do in eight. I used to find that frustrating. Now I find it instructive. Books also take forty minutes to do what they could do in eight, if you let them.<\/p>\n Most of the best lines in Dead Dog Barking<\/em> came on those slow laps. I’d be three steps behind her, watching her sniff the same tuft of grass she’s sniffed every morning for a decade, and a sentence I’d been chasing for a week would just walk into my head.<\/p>\n I get nervous when writers put dogs in books, because I know what they’re about to do to them, and I refuse. There is no dog death in Dead Dog Barking<\/em>. The title is misleading on purpose. (Charlie threatens. Charlie fantasises. Charlie does not deliver.) If you can’t bear losing a dog in fiction \u2014 and I can’t \u2014 you are safe here.<\/p>\n To everyone who has ever been kept awake by a neighbour’s dog and considered, just for a moment, the unspeakable: I see you. I wrote you a book.<\/p>\n To Audrey: thank you. You’re the good one.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" A love letter to my dog, who is the opposite of the dog in the book \u2014 and exactly the reason the book got finished.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":14,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-38","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-author-notes"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/deaddogbarking.gigdemo.xyz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/38","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/deaddogbarking.gigdemo.xyz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/deaddogbarking.gigdemo.xyz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/deaddogbarking.gigdemo.xyz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/deaddogbarking.gigdemo.xyz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=38"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/deaddogbarking.gigdemo.xyz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/38\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":115,"href":"https:\/\/deaddogbarking.gigdemo.xyz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/38\/revisions\/115"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/deaddogbarking.gigdemo.xyz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/14"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/deaddogbarking.gigdemo.xyz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=38"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/deaddogbarking.gigdemo.xyz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=38"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/deaddogbarking.gigdemo.xyz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=38"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}One is a soundtrack. One is a reason.<\/h3>\n
Old dogs and the case for slowing down<\/h3>\n
Dogs in fiction, dogs in real life<\/h3>\n