Road Trip, with dogs

Story is powerful. If there’s one thing I’ve learned in a misspent life of writing things, it’s that. If you write it, it will do something. It might get published and make you money. It might get published and not make you money. It might do something else.

We’re going to California in May for a number of reasons but one is to give a talk at the Ojai Library about my Hollywood blacklist novel, out last December.

That book was a very long time in the making because I never could quite get it to come right. But even in its first draft it had the uncanny ability to make things happen. I wrote an earthquake into it and they had one in California, not in the town the book is set in, a thinly disguised version of Ojai, but in the same state, which unnerved me considerably. I didn’t actually think I had caused it but it was creepy. Even more unnerving, I made an old boyfriend with whom I had not been in touch in 20 years into the template for one of the characters and promptly got back in touch with him. When one thing led to another, a member of my writers group summed it up breathlessly with, “Amanda has run off to California with a character out of her book!”

Well, that put a stop to the book for a while. I rewrote that character and rewrote him and rewrote him until he was completely fictional since in the meantime I had married the boyfriend. We are still together. And then there were the pugs. I gave the main character a herd of pugs in what was probably the third or fourth draft, and we somehow acquired pugs of our own, some intentional and some distributed by the universal pug distribution system.

Time went on and I wrote more drafts and the damn thing still wasn’t right and eventually we had no pugs again, since they don’t live anywhere near as long as we do, which is the heartbreak of having dogs. And then the book was finally where it ought to be because I found an editor who knew what was wrong with it and wanted to publish it if I would fix it. And now the book is out and suddenly we have pugs descending on us, pugs requiring a cross-country drive.

We have made a lot of cross-country drives over the years, moving us back and forth from California to Virginia and my mother the same, always with dogs and cats, ours and hers, depending on who was moving where. Whenever we let my mother’s Black Pussycat out of his carrier, he would climb into the interior of the motel room bed. In the morning Tony would have to lift one end of the bed up so that Mother could extract Pussycat. My parents, on a previous move, once spent a week in Amarillo, Texas, recapturing their batshit crazy tortie Adelaide, otherwise known as Addled Egg. We have snuck a Newfoundland into a hotel and convinced a Hampton Inn that two pugs appearing at different times were actually the same one.

So this trip should be right up our alley. We are driving since we can’t take the pugs on a plane, and anyway I am not getting on a plane until they have more than one air traffic controller and his intern per tower.

We are taking Dogma, the border collie mix who is currently the Only Dog since we suspect that if she picks up the pugs with us and escorts them back to Virginia she will be a damn sight more receptive than if we left her at home for three weeks and returned with new dogs. She’s been needing something to herd and pugs are probably an adequate substitute for sheep.

And here are Darcy and Heathcliff, who belonged to my beloved goddaughter who died last fall, much too soon. I am not sure which is which.

We are renting a gigantic minivan with seats that fold down in the back and have found Motel 6, which gets excellent reviews and allows multiple pets so we will not be attempting to smuggle them in by night on this trip. What could possibly go wrong? We do not ask because the book also has rattlesnakes in it and I do not want to manifest those.