Harvey's sponsored bark

Arrff! Harvey here again.

Mrs Boss says she's going to put me into a sponsored bark. She's figured out how to do it. One day, not so long ago, I wandered innocently into the dining room. Lo and behold, there was a new door in there. And standing inside this door was a golden retriever, about my size, but not as handsome.

The other dog barked at me. I barked back.

The other dog's hackles rose. So did mine.

The other dog growled, and snarled, and got fiercer and fiercer. So did I!

Then Mrs Boss ran down the stairs, asking where the burglars were. Burglars? There was only me - and the mystery dog, of course.

Then Mrs Boss picked up the new door - which wasn't a door at all! She said it was a full length mirror. She'd just bought it, on account of doing more dressmaking and needing to keep her hems straight. She said the other dog was only me reflected in the mirror. I didn't believe her. I'm much better looking than that other dog. But I had to admit I couldn't find that dog anywhere in the house. Not even a sniff of him.

Mrs Boss hid the mirror down the side of the bookcase. She says if she ever wants me to bark and bark and bark, she'll get it out again. And perhaps people could sponsor me to raise money for dogs who don't have nice gardens to dig up, or plenty of windfall apples to gorge themselves silly on.

So on Tuesday I was just having a little practice bark outside. I didn't think anyone would notice over the din of Mr Boss mowing the lawn. And then... silence. Mr Boss had run over the electric cable with the mower! And he had the nerve to blame me for distracting him! He's gone to buy a new mower now. Mrs Boss is reviewing the life insurance.

Since the nights began to draw in, Mrs Boss has been knitting. I don't know what's happened to her writing. She says neither does she.

She did have a little piece published for National Flash Fiction Day in June. It's right here.

But she is optimistic about having some writing news next month. It's September, you see, which is one of her favourite months. A time for new plans, she says. And new slippers too. On Wednesday she went to the park in her old ones. Talk about embarrassing. I had to laaarrrrfffff!

Harvey: on the occasion of his tenth birthday

Arrrfff! Harvey here. I was ten last Thursday. Any gifts of tennis balls gratefully received. Total destruction guaranteed within twenty minutes.

What with one thing and another, Mrs Boss has had to join the ranks of the 6a.m. dogwalkers, traipsing the darkened streets with a torch. She says she doesn't mind clear mornings when the sky is all black and twinkly, but rain is not so much fun.

Also, while she is not the most social of persons (particularly at 6a.m) she is surprised to find the early morning joggers incapable of as much as a grunt of hello.

So anyway, while she may be too whacked to keep up the blogging right now, she just wants to say that she is still batting about. She was happy to have a poem commended in the Sentinel quarterly poetry competition. It has reminded her that she is supposed to be a writer, and therefore should be writing.

Before that, though, my next walk is due. Oooh look - it's raining!

August news

I was going to let Harvey tell you about his Great Escape this time, but I've elbowed him out of the way so I can share a few bits of writing news.

The most surprising thing of all was winning the monthly poetry contest in Writers' Forum magazine. My entry is printed in the current issue, number 142. Although I don't write much poetry I am enjoying it more and more, especially after my welcome win!

Since my interest in poetry seemed to be growing this year, I began looking for a small press poetry magazine to submit to. I came across The Dawntreader, published by Indigo Dreams and decided to subscribe. It's a quarterly magazine, focusing on poetry that relates to nature, spirituality, myth and legend. Right up my street! And so I also feel honoured that one of my poems is in the current issue of Dawntreader (issue 23)

Thirdly (because you know things always come in three) I was very happy to be shortlisted once again for the Flash 500 flash fiction competition - that's the one for the second quarter of 2013, in case you're looking for the results on the website.

Although I shall probably continue with flash fiction and poetry, I don't see myself writing as many mid-length stories in the next few months. I've been looking through the folder of research that I started with a view to writing a historical novel. I really want to spend some time on that now, and don't think I can cope with more than one narrative at a time.

I've been trying to post a gratuitous picture of Harvey, for anyone who's missing him, but I am having so many problems with Blogger today that I need to go into an empty room and scream!

Snow

There are some things snow is good for. Dogs digging...

Changing everyday places into spooky, shadowy spots that you're a little unsure about venturing into...

And making you really appreciate the dashes of colour you stumble across in the white, white, landscape.

But I'm slightly bored with it all now, and would be quite happy for life to return to normal. However... Big excitement! I've just seen the postman walk up the street. Maybe he'll bring me something nice. Like snowshoes.

Harvey's Christmas crisis

Harvey here to wish you all a yappy New Year!

Mr and Mrs Boss sneezed and sniffed their way through Christmas, as if there was no end to the supply of tissues. To round things off the three of us made an emergency visit to the vet's last weekend, after I had an altercation with a piece of wood in the park.

A nice tasty piece of wood it was too. I was just getting my teeth into it for a really good chew, when, quite unprovoked, a lump of it wedged itself across the roof of my mouth. Jammed fast between my molars, it was. Pesky thing.

Mr and Mrs Boss couldn't fix it, so off we went in the car. The vet had a peer between my jaws, stuck a needle in me, and my eyes grew heavier and heavier. When I woke up, the wood was gone. I was all staggery on my legs, like Mrs Boss when she's drunk too much. And they didn't even let me keep the piece of wood as a souvenir. That was pretty strange, since Mr Boss kept saying what a very expensive piece of wood it was.

Mr Boss says my New Year's Resolution should be to stop eating wood. Mrs Boss says hers is to write more poetry. Sounds like a fun filled year, then. I can hardly wait.

Jo's new desk

I wanted to show you my new desk, but you know how a certain dog pops up everywhere. Harvey's rather full of himself at present, as he is to appear in a Christmas story later this year. He doesn't mind that I changed his name for the purposes of the story, since he has already had friend requests on Facebook from people he doesn't know. How do these people find you? It's a mystery. Of course if genuine friends of mine wish to befriend Harvey, that's fine. He's a pretty friendly dog.

My desk cost twenty pounds in a charity shop. Maybe my grandparents had a similar one when I was small. There feels something very familiar about all the neat compartments inside the fold-down front.

Apparently the young folk refer to a charity shop as a 'chazza'. Does anyone else know this expression? It was a word I'd never heard before, but now I'm using it all the time, being such a chazza addict.

Nostalgia seems the theme of my life lately. I've been re-reading a childhood favourite, 'The Secret Garden' by Frances Hodgson Burnett. It's a lovely escapist book. I think you can read it at any age and still be uplifted by it.

And two other nice books I bought from the chazza recently for a couple of pounds: H.E. Bates' 'The Darling Buds of May' and 'A Breath of French Air'. The latter seemed particularly appropriate after my little excursion this summer. I love the 1950s style of the covers, and have enjoyed reading them both, although it is hard not to picture David Jason as Pop Larkin.

That's it for now. The desk awaits!

Harvey's sunshine award

Wotcha! Harvey here. It's been a while since Mrs Boss let me do a blog post. But last week she went through the end of her finger with the secateurs. Since then her typing has been even wonkier than normal. And that's saying something.

If you visit this blog often, you'll have guessed Mrs Boss is the kind of person who spends forever thinking about a thing before she does it. Her blog friends Patsy and Teresa both gave her awards a few weeks ago. Has she posted them to the blog? No!

So while she's off plastering up her finger again, I thought I'd grab Patsy's sunshine award for myself. I deserve it, don't I?

As recipient of this award I now have to tell you about what makes me happy.

1. Food. Mr and Mrs Boss are far too picky. They yank me away from all kinds of eating opportunities. Chips on the pavement. Bread by the duckpond. Nice bits of old wood, bursting with fibre. Just what a dog needs, I say. Bad for me, they say. And apparently the person beginning with V told them I was overweight. I don't know how he figures that out. Every time they try to put me on the scales, I lie on the floor, making myself as flat as a bearskin rug. So how do they know I'm overweight if I don't get on the nasty scales?

2. Digging. Mr and Mrs Boss don't understand that all the really interesting things in the garden are beneath the lawn. How am I supposed to retrieve them if I don't dig? Of course when Mrs Boss digs, she calls it something fancy, like 'dividing the hostas'. When I dig, she calls it 'ruining the grass'. What's grass anyway? Just a load of boring green stuff. And underneath there are things to eat.

3. Meeting people. Most people, anyway. You find the odd one who doesn't like dribble or doghair on their clothes. But most people appreciate me making a big fuss of them. Take the man who visited last week, for instance, to help Mr and Mrs Boss write something called a will. How boring it would all have been if I'd just ignored the will man. The will man loves dogs. I left extra doghair on his pinstripe suit, to show I love him too.

4. Barking. Some days you're just in the mood to let rip. You know what I mean? Bin day, for instance. When Mrs Boss is writing, she says my barking makes her jump. Wouldn't you think she'd be used to it after four and a half years?

5. Sleeping. You can't beat a nice snooze, even though there is an ongoing dispute with Mrs Boss about my favourite chair. I know I've won the battle really. She just likes to pretend she's in charge sometimes.

6. Playing. Chewing up tennis balls is the best sort of playing. But what a lot of people don't realise is that when you're a golden retriever, everything in life is a game. Humans take themselves far too seriously, in my opinion. Chill out! Would you rather be a wiggly worm, under the boring grass, living in the dark? Or up here in the sunshine, eating, greeting, and sniffing out fun? Mrs Boss says doing a will makes you think about these things.

Mrs Boss says I have to pass the sunshine award on to other blogging friends. Of course, she's taken so long thinking about it that most of them have it already! So I will just list the following three. If they would like to accept, all they have to do is paste the award to their own blogs, tell us what makes them happy, and pass it on. I would say "simples!". But I'm a retriever, not a meerkat.

Biddy Fraser at The Bluebell Blog

Joanna Campbell at Brightwriter60

Hayley N Jones at Writing, Reading and Waffling

Have a barking good Easter. Harvey xxx

New Year News

Merry New Year from Harvey and me.

I always begin January full of beans, writing and submitting in a frenzy of good intentions. But it's oh so hard to keep that up once spring comes and the weather improves. My challenge for 2012 is to hang onto my New Year momentum beyond crocus time.

To do this I am going to have to be much stricter about using any spare minutes constructively. So, I, Joanne Fox, hereby declare I shall only visit Facebook every other day. I am also resisting the urge to rearrange my study yet again. There's an irritating chap called General Clutter in there, and all my attempts to evict him have been in vain. Therefore I hereby recognise that rearranging the study is another displacement activity, rather than a way of achieving anything. Shut that door!

Now I can share some positive news to kick off the year. As a result of entering the Earlyworks Press short story competition in 2011, I will have my story included in their competition anthology. I know I shall be in some good company, and congratulations to the overall winner.

Here's to less faffing about in 2012!

Acrostics

One of the recent tasks in our writers' group was to write an acrostic in three minutes. What's an acrostic? Well, what you do is choose a word and write it vertically down the page. Then from each letter you write a word or line horizontally, with the aim of describing the vertical word. So if I wrote a very basic acrostic for Harvey I could say something like this:

Highly

Adored
Retriever,
Velvet
Eyes
Yearning.

Here you can read more about acrostics, their use in mnemonics, poetry and coded messages. The thing is, once you start playing with acrostics they soon become addictive! Try it. It's fun!

Fungus season

I never used to believe in allowing dogs on furniture. But then...

Harvey came! Now we can't get rid of the old armchair which doesn't match the new sofa and chair. Nor can I put a small bookcase into that spot by the window, as I had planned to do. And how he can be comfy crammed into that little space is beyond me. But if Harvey's happy, we're happy. Mostly.

If you were passing by last August you may recall Harvey found a humongous fungus in the garden. August must be puffball season as there is another one sprouting up.

It's quite a bit bigger than our windfall apples, as you can see. I hoped it would continue getting bigger and bigger, until we could climb inside and sail away like James and the Giant Peach. But things are nibbling at it. Whether Harvey is one of those nibblers I don't know. He's not saying.

Spilling Ink

Extra treats for Harvey this week, as I heard I'd won second prize in the Spilling Ink flash fiction competition.

Until last year I had something of a blind spot where flash fiction was concerned. I'd never tried writing it, because I couldn't imagine being able to develop characters in the way I wanted within a word count of perhaps only 500 or less. For me, characters and relationships are the things I really like to explore in stories, way ahead of plots or themes.

But then for some reason I went through a bit of a sea-change. I started experimenting with flash fiction, and found I enjoyed the challenge. I realised that if the main character was clear enough in my mind, it was possible to pin them down on paper. It was just a matter of working hard within the tight focus of the story, and not getting distracted by rambling sub-plots as I am inclined to do. That may sound obvious, but I am a great believer in the principle that we only really learn by doing.

So the moral of this particular tale is that even if you think you can't, have a bash anyway. You may find that you can!

Blog takeover day : Harvey's humongous fungus

Mrs Boss says she's never known a Retriever get into as much trouble as me. Unfair! Was it my fault I fell down the stairs last week? I was responding to a crisis - namely, the sound of breaking glass and shouting. And what did I find when I landed with undue haste in the hall?

Mr and Mrs Boss had only gone and cracked the glass panel in the front door while trying to shift the old sofa out of the house. They were having a right old ding dong about who was to blame! Humans - honestly! Didn't they know I was on a mission to make that sofa mine. Yes I know I already have the best armchair, but sometimes a dog needs a little more space, you know?

I think Mrs Boss was still a mite tetchy after I tore through the fence the other week and destroyed two tennis balls belonging to the neighbours' grandchildren. A fortnight before that, I conquered the hedge on the opposite side and gave the other neighbours a scare. Mrs Boss says in ten years at Zigzag Road no Retrievers have ever escaped before. Well, that's hardly a record to boast about is it?

Anyway, on Sunday I tried to make amends to Mrs Boss by bringing her a present. I thought it was a ball. Mrs Boss thought it was a ball too. But when she picked it up she gave a shriek (not unlike the pesky parrot that keeps sitting on my fence). The item in question was bigger and heavier than she expected. "It's a humongous fungus," said Mrs Boss. Though you can see from the picture below that it does look similar to the ball they bought me in honour of the World Cup.

Mrs Boss says it's a good job I hadn't done more than take a nibble from the edge. In the hope of identifying exactly what the humongous fungus was, Mrs Boss cut it up. She thought it might be like the puffballs she used to collect for cooking on country walks. In fact, the fungus was totally solid...

Do let me and Mrs Boss know if you can tell us what it is. It smelt strongly of mushroom, it was quite spongy in a dense kind of way, and there was no stalk.

That's it from me.

With lots of wuff, Harvey. xx

P.S Mrs Boss forgot to tell me to add a link to Sally's blog. Apparently Sally is the one co-ordinating all this blog takeover stuff. I hear that if you shoot on over there you can find links to posts by writers' muses, husbands, and even (shock, horror) other dogs!