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The Muddy Month of MayJune 01, 2008 You'll notice that the #1 subject in the bloggery since April 25 has been The Puppy, who didn't have a name or a face when the saga started but now has a name (Fellow Traveller), a slew of nicknames (Trav, Travvy, Puppy, Pupster, Kidster, Baby, Brat . . .), and an adorable and ever-changing face. His snoot is getting longer. Black shadows have been appearing on his face, first under his eyes, then above them, and also along the outsides of his forelegs and on his tail. His muzzle is white, his cap is a darkening sandy color flecked with black; the last couple of days he's looked like a puppy in a monkey suit. Today he got his last round of inoculations (including rabies -- he now has his first tag), another hit of Frontline and Heartgard, and two pills for the tapeworms that the first round of worming didn't address. He weighs 25.5 pounds, up from 19.1 two weeks ago and 11.9 two weeks before that. I also made his appointment to be neutered a month from now -- four months seems early, and I'm going to do more research on pros/cons, but a week ago he started humping his stuffed animals (he tried with Chamois, the elderly yellow Lab barn dog, who was not amused at all) and he's been showing distinct signs of alphaness: when older dogs try to take toys from him, he growls and they back off; when he tries to take a toy from them, they usually let him have it. Hah. I started out to say that Travvy wasn't the only thing happening in the month of May, and see what happened? I've already written a long paragraph about Travvy. Now Trav wants to go for a walk. Back soon; hold that thought! Bloggus interruptus resumptus. So the first week of May, around the 7th, I e-mailed The Mud of the Place in three files off to Don Sakers at Speed-of-C Productions. Which is to say -- production is under way. It was another week (at least) before I finished the Afterword and the Acknowledgments, and somewhere in there I managed -- with major help from a friend -- to solve the cover crisis. My original plan was that an island artist whose work I've loved for years would do the cover art. I delivered him a copy of the ms. in mid/late February -- not long before Rhodry died, but I don't remember the date. The vague understanding was that I needed it sometime in April; what wasn't understood was who would call whom, and April skidded into history without any contact. In early May I left a message, didn't hear back, assumed that Plan A had hit the wall, and scrambled to come up with Plan B. Don suggested using a photograph. I asked my jill-of-all-trades barnmate, Ginny, a very good amateur photographer, if she had anything that might fit the bill -- "the bill" being something that evoked the tangle that Shannon paints on her living room wall, aka the wall between her and her locked studio. She thought she might -- and she did: one of several photos she took last fall at the Mai Fane meadow in Tisbury. Don thought it would definitely work. So I'm awaiting the preliminary proofs and starting to think about The Next Stage, which is promotion, which involves Mud's own website, developing a list of bookstores and media outlets (focusing on southeastern Massachusetts and those with a lesbian/gay/feminist focus or interest). Even the thinking is exhausting -- I feel like I'm running perilous close to empty, and I don't like the feeling. The money crunch is worse than usual, thanks to nearly $1,400 in unexpected truck expenses (ball joints and four new tires needed to pass inspection) and the rapidly increasing price of gas (currently close to $4.50/gallon here), on top of expected expense for puppy (including travel to/from) and the unpaid time I put into a last substantive edit followed by a copyedit/proofread of the Mud manuscript. Money crunches make me even cheaper than usual, but pinching pennies at this point where Mud is concerned is cut-my-own-throat foolish. Putting one foot in front of the other has never been more important.
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