Hello, world!

I, Perdita Whacknoodle, your favorite dog author (I’m sure) have been quite absent from my blog for several weeks. I will explain, but I am not happy about it.

As you know, I am a very thoughtful dog and a magnificent dog-author. My three books are loved by people all over the world, and that makes me very happy.

But, as you also know, dogs have paws and computers have keyboards. Therefore I have arranged with an unusual human, who I call my scribe, to translate my thoughts, ideas, stories, and canine revelations into books so humans can learn from me. It is a good partnership–I do the thinking and creating (which, of course, is the hard part), and my scribe merely scrabbles on the computer and turns my gems into books.

So far, so good. He seems happy to help, and I am careful to keep the power of my mental transmissions very low so his brain won’t explode.

We were happily working on my FOURTH book and Nancy, the wonderful artist, was busy turning my fabulous stories into pictures for the world to see, so I was confident that even more fame and fortune was just around the fireplug, so to speak.

And then, WHAM! My scribe and his helper (who he calls his ‘wife’) suddenly, with NO warning, left. Vanished. Vamoosed!

They went to Italy, of all things, and left me here with NO SCRIBE AVAILABLE. I had no outlet for my powerful thoughts except for the evening bark-around.

I had no way, without my scribe, to share my thoughts with the humans who need them.

My scribe obviously has his priorities completely wrong, because he should be more concerned about MY success and MY mental health as a dog-author, than having fun gallivanting around Italy for no reason.

Oh, he told me about all the great food. He praised the spaghetti carbonara, the lasagna, the pizza. But, big deal. Why should I care about HIS insalade caprese?

What’s worse, he did NOT bring me even a morsel of the lasagna, nor even a noodle of spaghetti! Sure, he has pictures, but they have no smell and don’t do anything for me!

THEN he had the gall to tell me that Italians love dogs and he saw a LOT of dogs over there. He even made pictures of them, as if that would make everything OK.

I am, honestly, very lucky that my brain did not explode like a watermelon falling off Farmer’s truck because of the pressure of all my unreleased stories while he was gone. But, did he care? Did he?

No! Believe it or not, he keeps talking about the food in Italy, of all things. Can you believe I was abandoned in the midst of my creative burst, for lasagna? (I think it’s sort of sad how humans ONLY think about food. Thank goodness dogs are not like that at all.)

So, I will punish him for a while longer, and then we will get right back to work on my next opus, May Contain Nuts, in which my young translator, Laoorel, tries to get “the truth” out of me.

Dog against human. Obviously not a fair fight, intellectually, but I keep it simple for her, and for my scribe, too. Maybe . . . just maybe . . . I can get him back into his productive mode and finish this long-awaited book.

But first I have to stop him from talking about lasagna.