Blog Hop: My Next Book – Another Journal of Ted Terrier by Ted Terrier (Dog) and Emma Knight (Human)

Many thanks to Michelle Goode for tagging me in this Blog Hop, which consists of ten questions about my current project/s and then tagging other authors/writers. Here goes!

1. What is the working title of your next book?

Ted: It will probably be Another Journal of Ted Terrier as The Journal of Ted Terrier was my first book and that is already published on Kindle and will be out very soon as a normal paper book too. And if a lot of people (or anyone else who isn’t human) like it and want more then I will do another one. In fact the first one isn’t all my writings that I’ve already done – it is only some of them, which I chose with my human sister, Emma – whom I rely on for mind-reading, so that she collects my thoughts, and then writing or typing to put them down – and then a friend of ours – Sue Mynall - did the drawings for those bits of writing we had selected. And also while I am about it Gejo Canovas did the cover for us too and is a very good friend, whose best friend I fancy!

2. Where did the idea come from for your book?

Ted: It came from me! It’s all my ideas and about my life and what I think and feel about the things that the humans in my life do.

Emma says I have to let her say something about it too. You might find we argue during this Q&A, but don’t worry that’s normal for a brother and sister – even though different species – and also for those who collaborate and it’s called creative tension – when it’s about creating something, which is what we have done.

Emma: Hi Everyone, Emma Knight is my pen-name; appropriate as I am the one holding the pen because Ted cannot. (Though Ted is also not his real name: We’re a pair of pseudonyms ;))

In real life I, Emma, - though as Ted is keen to remind you I’m not really called Emma - am a writer of screenplays and a psychotherapist. When the idea for this came – and to be fair it wasn’t really even an idea, it just simply popped out! – I was suffering a severe case of writer’s block, and feeling quite miserable about it. Writing makes me feel good! I was sitting on the sofa next to our Jack Russell Terrier and, fortunately, with a little journal in my hand and a pen. I spontaneously started writing from his point of view. And out poured a great deal of ideas, thoughts, concepts, observations in and around the life of a dog; how they may see the world, and adventures that go on around them. Of course, real Ted’s own character had a massive influence on how it all came out.

Ted: So, just as I said, it came from me!

Emma: Yes it all came from you, Ted J

3. What genre does the book fall under?

Ted: It doesn’t fall under any genre – nothing fell on top of it – and anyway I don’t know what a genre is but it sounds a bit like it might be painful?! ;)

Emma: No, Ted, it’s not painful – it just means what sort of a book is it. What is a bit painful though is trying to fit it into a genre. It’s a bit like instalments in a diary – as in The Diary of Adrian Mole – though the order is a bit random because Ted can’t focus on one thing for too long, and I am appalling with dates. So it’s disorganized but linked because the people in it are all Ted’s humans. Some readers have likened it to The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, though we hasten to add that no dogs get murdered in this book. It was also not planned with any particular readers in mind, though it seems to appeal to older children and adults.

4. What actors would you choose to play the part of your characters in a movies rendition?

Ted: If you read my book then you’ll find out ;)

5. What is the one sentence synopsis of your book?

Ted: I find it impossible to write just a single sentence, and if I did, it would be very long cos my sentences always are, and in fact they should be several sentences really.

Emma: Anecdotes in the Life of a Jack Russell Terrier.

6. Will your book be self-published or represented by an agency?

Ted: It’s been self-published cos no publisher will accept the way I write. They say you have to send the first three chapters and have to have a plan for a story, but as we said above, I don’t write in a straight-line order and I don’t think in chapters or for long enough to plan a story, and also my sentences are too long - so I’ve just got the human I love best to publish it for me! You can find it on the amazon dot websites on the internet J

7. How long did it take you to write the first draft of the manuscript?

Ted: I don’t know. It just took however long it took and is still taking.

8. What other books would you compare this story to within your genre?

Ted: It’s just a book of all its own type and can’t be compared to anything, and also cos it doesn’t have a story, or at least it has lots of stories, but we already answered this in the wrong question, or this is the wrong answer to this question and the answer to it is above!

9. Who or what inspired you write this book?

Ted: Me! Me and Emma together. Me and my other humans. Watching how they behave and how different we are and yet the same and how we relate to each other. And cos dogs and humans are best friends.

10. What else about the book might pique the reader’s interest?

Ted: My theory that human beings are too intelligent for their own, and others, goods – even though I love them more than any other species including my own - and so they have muddled thinking and that’s why it’s interesting to study them. But they are brilliant too! Please read and let me know if you agree with me…

E-book on amazon.com

Paperback on amazon.com

E-book on amazon.co.uk

Paperback on amazon.co.uk

Tagging for the next blog hop:

Ray Noble is a scientist, musician, singer, writer and song-writer, who also writes a blog on ethics.

Esame Okwoche is a mother and prolific insightful writer. You can find some of her work at her blog Esame's Rants.

Mike Howarth-Baker is the author of What If? He writes poems and quotes based upon his life experiences and thoughts and feelings on everyday life. His facebook page.

Bit of a late entry and extra addition just in case ;):

Murna Safford-Kuaea is a ‘moderately conservative writer, poet, inventor of really cool stuff, novelist and closet idealist.’ She has seven titles available on amazon and can tell you what she is working on in her blog hop J Her facebook: NovelIdealist SK and Twitter: Novelidealistmsk.

The Last Custard Cream...

When humans go round to each other’s homes to visit each other the first thing that happens – well in my home it’s the second thing that happens cos the first thing is that I greet them enthusiastically and then they have to get past me to be able to see my humans – is that they get offered a cup of tea. Emma is saying that’s what happens in homes in England and it may be different in other countries – in America she thinks they get offered a cold drink like maybe a beer, but in China they would probably get Chinese tea, which is different because it is green, instead of black, and they don’t add milk to it. Tea here gets milk added mostly and sometimes sugar too. I’ve heard Emma offer sugar to people in their tea and sometimes when the say ‘No, thank you’, she says ‘No, you’re sweet enough’ and then they all laugh. I laugh too cos I don’t need any sugar at all cos I’m the sweetest enough. I also don’t need tea. Humans – well English humans – need it for all sorts of reasons – to be social with each other (I have a lot of socialness in me already!); to wake them up in the mornings (I just open my eyes and bounce); to help them sleep at night if they are Emma or Judy (I just close my eyes and stop bouncing – humans, not Emma and Judy, say tea makes them too awake so they can’t sleep so they don’t have it to make them sleep); to make them feel better when a bad thing has happened - well just come and see me and you won’t need tea . The other thing that happens when they get given tea is they also have biscuits. They usually sit down in the living-room and hold their mugs, or cups in saucers if they are doing it very properly, and then the biscuits get put on the coffee table – which is called a coffee table even if it’s being used for tea-having. I get very excited when the biscuits go on the table and try to take one, but I’m not allowed to. So instead I go round visiting each human, and smile at them pleasingly, and wag my tail and then bark if that doesn’t work. Sometimes they say ‘Oh Teddy’ and give me a little bit. Often not though as they think I am too fat and also that their biscuits are not good for me. Emma says that is very true if they have chocolate in. I like chocolate! That’s another thing we’re always told that something is bad for us when we like it. That doesn’t make sense! How can it be bad when it’s good?! But Emma says it is important that humans know human chocolate isn’t good for dogs and dogs can have dog chocolate. Anyway the last time this visiting and having tea happened the biscuits on offer were custard creams. After the visiting has finished my humans went and said ‘Goodbye’ to their visitors. You can see what I did…

Love and licks, Ted and Emma XOXOXOXOXOXOXOX

To read more stories like this one please visit the rest of my blog http://tedterrier.blogspot.co.uk/ or you can get my book The Journal of Ted Terrier from any amazon website

The Blog of Ted Terrier © 2013 by Emma Knight

Dear Human Friends,

I am a dog so there is no limit on how many humans I can have as my Valentine so I want you all!

I have limitless love and I love you all!

With Lots of Licks, Ted Terrier

XOXOXOXOXOXOXOXOXOXOXOXOXOXOXOXOX

My e-book available now on amazon.co.uk and .com and other amazon dots!

Love and Licks, Ted and Emma XOX

My Journal is being published...

Available tomorrow on amazon.com kindle and other amazon sites....
Love and Licks, Ted and Emma XOXOXOXOX

Paralympics and Disabled Beings

It's very difficult when you are unable to do something because you are lacking in the necessary body parts. As you will know from my last post I was unable - or as humans call it; disabled - by being Cushinged and that made me lack energy and wee a lot and drink and eat a lot. I kept having to go to the vet for her to get the Cushing out of me and it seems she has managed that very well cos now I am too much un-Cushinged - it was supposed to stop when I was normal again but now I am a little bit the opposite. I've become a puppy again and have lots of energy, and I have grown a lot of hair back and want to go for walks a lot and jump around and, and... write all my thoughts to you. But it seems Emma got Cushinged too cos she kept telling me she didn't have the energy and unfortunately I need her to write. Actually she got Herpesed, which is very painful indeed and I wouldn't wanna get cos a Herpes sounds even worse than a Cushing, so I understand and forgive her. My other unability as a dog is that I can't write cos it's hard to hold a pen with paws or to type with paws - have you ever tried it fellow paw-beings? You end up hitting too many keys at once. You need to use someone with fingers to help you. So I have pet-stirred Emma til she finally said I could borrow her fingers and her brain, and as usual, dear readers, I hope she doesn't take over and start trying to correct me or put her thoughts through too - oh no, too late, she says pet-stirred isn't a word and I mean pestered, but if she knows what I mean I don't know why she can't just keep calm, carry on typing and leave me to it. We love each other loads really!
It makes me wonder how it would have been for any of the paralympians if their able-bodied helpers - for those who had to have them - had decided to correct them or tell them to do something else, when, even with the body parts they were lacking, they were highly skilled at what they were trying to do, just as I am highly skilled at all the things I try to do. I think being unable in some ways makes you more able in others. It's just like I always say humans have too much intelligence for their own goods. Maybe even too much ability with their hands and other parts to act on that intelligence and cause all sorts of chaos in the world to themselves and to others trying to live in it, including other animals and plants. But I digress - which as it suggests means digging around in all sorts of other things (the resses) than the thing which we are talking, or writing about, which Emma says I do a lot, but of course I do cos I am a dog and that's what dogs do, especially when they are trying to dig up something they buried to save for later. Getting back to the unable paralympians - some of them didn't have eyes or eyes that worked, and so another human had to direct them where to go, and that didn't work very well for those having to do long-jump - which is basically running and them jumping as far as you can in a pit of sand - cos many of them ran and jumped in the wrong directions and hurt themselves, or others badly. As my human mum Jane would say -  "that's not very sensible." A bit more sensible were the blind runners, who could hold hands with their guide who could see. That worked a lot better and they did very well. they all had to wear blind-folds to make them equal - in case some of them could see more than others - and the guides had to run at the same speed and just make sure they went in the right lane and right direction. I would have been very good at that job. Emma is laughing her head off - well not literally, that's her again and I've just told her that if she did that she wouldn't have a head and that's too much unability cos someone can't function at all without a head. Now she is laughing even more so I'm asking her why and she says cos I'd not have been a very good guide-dog for the blind runners at all cos I pull people along cos I go faster than them, and I decide which direction to go even if it's not the direction we need to go in. Well we'd win eventually!! You have to know the rules to break them as humans say. Yes, but you're not supposed to break them, as Emma says, cos then you'd lose whatever medal you won. Oh and gold medals aren't really gold - they are silver but painted gold, which I think is not very nice. It's be like getting a babybel cheese that has something that's not as good as a babybel cheese inside it - hm yes, that's irony... I'm an ironic dog cos that's what happens to me when I get my anti-Cushing pill... Emma's just said that IS like gold within gold cos it makes me feel a lot better. Anyway there is a problem for the runners cos who runs with a blind man runner. We only saw the women and they had to have men runners as their guides. It made us wonder who the men would have had - perhaps it would need to be someone like Ussain Bolt or Mo Farrah, who both ran as Olympians, who are fully able. I'd love to run in a race with Ussain - I'd win even though I have shorter legs than him - or maybe I wouldn't - the man, who is called the Blade Runner (Emma loves that film) cos he lost his lags and has blades instead, and whose real name is Oscar Pistorius, was beaten in a race by a man with longer blades, Alan Olivera, and Oscar said it was unfair and that Alan cheated. So maybe to make it fair in a race between me and Ussian Bolt, I'd have to have blades added on to my legs or he'd have to have part of his legs chopped off so we'd be the same height. My favourite paralympian is Ellie Simmonds. She does swimming. I don't think I've ever done swimming or if I did it was accidental. I don't like water very much. In fact I hate it when I have to go out to have a wee and it's raining, and I hate it even more when it's raining hard cos that scares me. And then when I have to have water on me cos Emma says I need to have a shampoo and cut, I don't really like that very much either, but she makes it into a game and tells me I'm a good boy and so it's not as bad as it was when I got dragged to the beauty parlour and bad very short back, sides, ears, tail and everything - so much so that Emma said she didn't know who I was though she was only joking really. And then recently she had to cut my hair even before she gave me a shampoo and threw water on me cos I was growing what she called dreadlocks. I don't think she understood that I was trying to look more like Ussain Bolt and Mo Farrah, cos they are black men and can grow dreads, but I'm a mostly white dog so don't usually grow dreads. Maybe she dreaded them though and that's why she took them off. No wonder I have trouble being a cool dog as I keep being given bad haircuts - though I better not complain cos then Emma will send me back to the beauty parlour and her way of doing it is far nicer, even though I almost always look a bit daft. Oh yes, she says I just look like I am! That's love for you :). Anyway, Ellie is like me cos she is vertically challenged, cos she is a dwarf. I don't know how she got dwarfed but Emma says some people just come out dwarfed when they are born. I suppose it's like me - I came out dwarfed too cos I have short legs like Ellie has short legs and arms and feet, like me with my paws, that sort of look too big for the rest of her. She is very nice and everybody loves her and she won lots of medals. When she won her medals Emma cried. In fact Emma cried a lot at the Olympics and then even more at the Paralympics. She said it was all very moving - all these amazing people overcoming all sorts of things to even take part and then some of them win, and that makes her cry even more. It's all good crying she says. And she and other humans getting very excited and jumping up and down while all these people did their running, and jumping, and swimming, and cycling and well all sorts of other things they do to entertain themselves. And in a way it's all a bit strange cos there are lots of signs up at the moment telling people to 'Keep Calm and Carry On' - and for a while in the summer that's not what they were doing. I found it funny to watch them, but like the dancing horses, I kept calm and carried on cos somebodies have to. Even though I'm too much anti-Cushinged, I still have very calm moments, when I watch my humans be foolish and funny... like me :)

Love and Licks, Ted and Emma XOXOXOXOX

The Queen's Diamond Jubilee

Me and Emma have spent the last three days watching the Queen getting a diamond jubilee. We watched it on television cos there were a lot of people going outside to the different places that the Queen went and it was cold and wet and so it might have been hard to see anything cos of all those other people also trying to see, and also we might have got very cold and wet and then ill. Prince Philip - who is the Queen's husband but not a King cos she is a woman who can't make him King but if she was a man he'd be her Queen - did go on the boat on the river Thames, but then after that he did get ill so it was good that we decided not to go. I am ill anyway with Cushing's disease - which doesn't mean that it is the disease that belongs to Cushing and he was mean and gave it to me - but maybe means that it was someone called Cushing who invented it: Emma just said that's wrong too cos people don't usually invent diseases - though they might if they are baddies in horror films or terrorists so it's not such a silly idea that I thought that was it - but they name them by their own name if they discover them. I am now wondering how he discovered it. Maybe he did when he was in horror films cos it does feel quite horrific to the person or animal who is being Cushinged. It made me lose hair and stop running around and my legs wouldn't work properly and I felt sleepy and sad and very hungry even though I had an increasingly big belly. Maybe it puts an alien inside you that eats all the food you eat so you never feel like you've had enough to eat. And then eats your muscles too so they don't work, and bits of your hair and your happiness too. It also makes you drink a lot and pee a lot. Prince Philip has a bladder infection which means that his pee could be more or less too and may hurt - maybe he got Cushinged on the river. My humans were very upset and worried that I'd been Cushinged. Emma spent a very long time taking me to see the vet for her to take the Cushing away. I got excited when we went to the car, even though I was ill, but then I knew where we were going when we were in the car and I got scared and shook and Emma kept telling me it was okay but I knew it wasn't. The vet is nice and so are the other people there but they keep taking blood from me like vampires - so maybe that's the connection with Peter Cushing - and then Emma made me eat pills. They taste very nasty and so she kept trying to fool me by hiding them in other things to eat. She first tried babybel cheese - that was very good cos I like it very much - but sometimes I'd remember that she was tricking me and so I wouldn't eat it, and other times I ate the whole thing and got even fatter. And then she tried a doggy treat which is specially made to put pills in but it's chewy and so I chewed it, and then the pill and it tasted horrible so I wasn't going to chew that again. Now she hides it in a little of my food - and I don't get any more until I have eaten that little bit, and I do want more, so I do what she wants and eat it up, and then Emma thinks she has fooled me but she hasn't but she tells me I'm a good boy and I like that and so does she so we're both pleased.
As I said before we were watching the Queen getting her diamond jubilee for three days. As fas as I can work out the diamond jubilee is a very special diamond indeed and the people wanted to give it to the Queen as a treat for 'reigning over us' - as humans sing a lot, so she leads them along with reigns - which must be invisible cos we can't see them - reigns are like dog leads for horses, so she is leading her humans along, just like I do with Emma when I take her for a walk, though she thinks she is taking me. As well as singing a lot about 'reigning over us' and God saving her - God is dog backwards! - the people also said the  Queen is a selfless servant - so am I so I should be getting a diamond jubilee too but Emma says I am already a diamond so I don't need to get one. The Queen and her family looked for the diamond jubilee by standing in a boat that went along the river Thames, which is the big river in London, and they did that for four hours, and so did people in nine hundred and ninety nine other boats of all sorts of shapes and sizes and ways of moving through the water too, and then many people watched them do it from either side of the river, and all the people on television too, and they cheered and waved and the Queen waved back, and some people sang to her even though they were very wet cos it was raining a lot. The best bit for me, and for the Queen too cos she got so excited like me, was Joey the Warhorse running along the roof of the National Theatre and jumping up on his hind legs, like I do when I get myself ready for a human hug. So that was Sunday and nobody can have found the diamond cos on Monday they were looking for it again except this time they had a big concert of Sirs and Dames singing in front of the Queen's home, and came out to look too and there were very many people all cheering and dancing and waving flags and then they were very happy indeed cos the Queen found a great big diamond that she lit a fire with! There are also people running round the place with another fire that they keep passing between each other and that's gonna happen for 70 days and then they will all play games with each other that include more running. Maybe by then I can join in cos my running is getting better again. So I thought that was it with the Queen and her diamond but then there was more today when the Queen and her family met in a big church and other sorts of songs were sung to her, but the best part for me this time was when they went home again - and also lots of people cheered again and waved again - she was in a carriage and there were lots and lots of horses and I got very excited and ran up to the TV and barked a lot. When she went home the Queen found she had a lot of diamonds there already so maybe all the parties were just to show her what she already had all along but she has done it all very well anyway. I like her cos she loves horses and dogs.

Love and Licks, Ted and Emma XOXOXOXOX