Watch or listen to the recording of Antony Johnston talking about his book The Dog Sitter Detective Takes the Lead, Louisa Scarr talking about Gallows Wood, and Philipp Schott on Eleven Huskies.
By Zazie Todd, PhD
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Bark! Fest, the book festival for animal lovers, took place in September 2024. I organized it to celebrate the launch of my new book, Bark! The Science of Helping Your Anxious, Fearful, or Reactive Dog, which is out now and available wherever books are sold. We heard from some incredible authors of books about animals.
This is the recording of the panel Canine Crime and Mystery with Antony Johnston, Louisa Scarr, and Philipp Schott, DVM.
You can watch the panel on Youtube or below, listen wherever you get your podcasts (Apple, Spotify) or below, or scroll down to read a transcript of the highlights.
All of the Bark! Fest books are available wherever books are sold, including from Bookshop (which supports independent bookstores), UK Bookshop, and my Amazon store.
If you love crime and mystery novels, you’re in for a treat as dogs help solve crimes in these remarkable books. When a singer dies in mysterious circumstances, dog sitter Gwinny Tuffel and the singer’s Border Collie investigate in Antony Johnston’s cosy and witty The Dog Sitter Detective Takes the Lead. In Louisa Scarr’s dark and compelling Gallows Wood, PC Lucy Halliday and her dog Moss search for the body after a severed hand is found in the woods. And when veterinarian (and amateur detective) Dr. Bannerman and his champion sniffer dog Pippin holiday near a remote lake, he has to try to save some poisoned sled dogs and figure out why a float plane crashed in Eleven Huskies by Philipp Schott DVM.
We talked about:
Other books mentioned in this panel:
Learn more about the authors:
Antony Johnston: https://antonyjohnston.com/
Louisa Scarr: https://www.instagram.com/louisascarrwriter/
Dr. Philipp Schott: https://www.philippschott.com/
The conversation is co-hosted by Zazie Todd and Kristi Benson.
Z: So we're going to start by talking to Anthony Johnston about his book, The Dog Sitter Detective Takes the Lead, which I absolutely loved. I said on Instagram. I read this and I immediately had to go out and buy the first one because this is the second in the series.
But just so everyone knows, you can read it on its own like I did, if you want to. So tell us about this book. The Dog Sitter Detective Takes the Lead.
A: Sure. And I just realized that I was muted when I said hello earlier. So sorry. Hello everyone. It's lovely to be here.
Yeah. So The Dog Sitter Detective Takes the Lead, as you say, is the second book in the Dog Sitter Detective series. The first book is simply called The Dog Sitter Detective.
It's a series starring Gwinny Tuffel, who is a semi retired actress who takes up dog sitting to make ends meet when she retires to look after her father who's ill. A decade later her father dies and leaves her pretty much penniless. And so Gwinny has to try to revive her acting career at the ripe old age of 60, while also trying to sort of maintain the house that she's been left, which is falling down around her ears.
And of course while she's doing this, she keeps stumbling across dead bodies that have been killed in baffling ways that only she can solve with the help of the dogs that she is sitting.
So in the first book she's at a wedding when the bridegroom is killed and she winds up looking after a pair of salukis while investigating that crime.
And in this book, The Dog Sitter Detective Takes the Lead, she's dog sitting a border collie called Ace for an aging rock star called Crash Double. Crash is leaving the country for a few days to go and perform a concert in Dublin.
He lives on a houseboat in Little Venice in London. And so he hires Gwinny to look after Ace, to stay on the houseboat and look after Ace while he's away in Dublin over a bank holiday weekend, which also happens to be when there is a carnival in Little Venice, a house, you know, barge and canal carnival, which he can't abide. So he's glad to get out of the city. But unfortunately Crash's body during the carnival turns up in the canal floating in the water.
He never made it out of London, let alone out of the country. And so it is up to Gwinny with Ace, the border collie and her friend, a retired detective called Birch, who has a black lab called Ronnie, and the four of them together, it's up to them to solve the mystery.
The police think that Crash committed suicide and drowned himself in the canal. But Gwinny doesn't believe that. She refuses to believe that and so goes about investigating his death.
Z: And Gwinny Tuffel is a really fun character. So how did you come up with the idea for a book with her as the amateur detective?
A: So it came about partly just because of the genre that I started to write. So I started writing The Dog Sitter Detective during the first COVID lockdown.
And I was writing it really just myself. I wasn't even thinking about publication. And I wrote it basically to cheer myself up as much as anything.
So I wanted a character who would be kind of light hearted, but also could help with a bit of representation. Believe it or not, at the time when I started writing, older women detectives were not a common sight in crime fiction. Now it seems that you can't swing a cat or a dog without hitting one. But at the time they weren't all that common.
So I thought, well, I'll do that. And I made her a former actress because I have acting experience. I acted a lot when I was younger. Amateur, not professionally, but still.
And because I have experience of showbiz through Atomic Blonde, my work writing screenplays, I know a bit about that life and that world and the behind the scenes. So I felt that I could write a convincing actor character.
And then of course, she had to be a dog lover. So I made her a lifelong dog lover who had a succession of adopted dogs through her house, through her family as she was growing up.
And so all these things came together to create this character who, yeah, I came to kind of fall in love with while I was writing because she's flawed, definitely, you know, and she's not polished either.
She has more than a few sort of sharp edges and occasionally rubs people up the wrong way. But I kind of like that about her. She's like a naughty schoolgirl sometimes, which I think is a delightful aspect of the character. And I just really enjoy writing her.
Z: I love her for sure. And I have to ask you about the dogs as well, because each book in the series features a different breed of dog. So how do you go about deciding what kind of dog you want to include and actually writing that dog as a character?
A: Lots of research, which is probably the best part of the job, getting to, you know, sort of learn about and meet loads of different kinds of dogs. Yeah, I decided early on that to make it a series, to vary things throughout the series, I would have her looking after a different breed of dog in each one. So, like I said, in the first book, she's looking after a pair of Salukis.
In the second book, it's a Border Collie. In the third book, which is coming out next year, it's a Jack Russell Terrier.
And the reason for that actually is because. So I used to own a pair of Lurchers that were both Saluki crosses. I grew up with a Border Collie in my family, and my partner grew up with a Jack Russell Terrier in her family.
So that was actually how I decided the first three. From that point onwards, obviously, I'm going to have to find new breeds, but how they work into the story is kind of organic. It's, you know, the. The kind of story and the way that the investigation develops kind of relies on what the dog is.
So the dogs in these books are. They're not magical. They're not, you know, they're not Lassie or sort of psychic or anything like that. They are just realistic, ordinary dogs.
But as we all know as dog lovers, every breed of dog has its own characteristics, its own habits, you know, the things it prefers to do, the things it's good at. And so I wanted to incorporate those into the story.
So everybody knows, for example, Border Collies, smartest dogs on the planet. You know, you won't find a more intelligent breed. And so that plays into the story in the second book quite a bit.
You know, Ace's ability to sniff things out and to understand commands and do things under his own initiative is actually a big part of the story and it affects how the investigation plays out.
So, like, it's a lot of back and forth between what I want the story to be and what kind of story it has to be to suit the breed of dog.
So I've kind of made a rod for my own back. It's only going to get more difficult as the series goes on. I realize that, but, you know, I'm having fun.
Z: Good, good. And he's definitely a real character, like, not just a prop to the story. He has an important role to play, too.
A: Very much, yeah.
Z: And as I alluded to in your introduction, you write across many different genres, including video games. So what do you especially like about writing cozy crime, like The Dogsitter Detective?
A: I guess it's mostly that it makes me smile while I'm writing it. So, as you say, I write a lot of different stuff in video games. For example, I kind of specialize in sci fi and horror, which are obviously not genres that, you know, are known for being light hearted.
So I get plenty of, you know, grim and gritty action when I'm writing those things. So cozy. Yeah, it just makes me smile while I'm writing it. It makes me laugh, you know, I happily admit that I laugh at my own jokes all the time. I figure if I don't laugh at them, nobody else is going to, you know.
But also specifically with cozy, one of the things I like about cozy, because I've been a cozy reader pretty much my whole life and I love watching cozy stuff on tv.
But until I wrote this series, I hadn't written any cozy. And one of the things that I love about it is the fact that it's so focused on the puzzle, you know, and the puzzle of the crime really takes center stage in cozy's. And you can get really elaborate puzzles as a result. Really elaborate crimes and things that you're trying to work out as a reader while you're reading them.
And for me as a writer, I like the challenge of kind of pitting my wits against the reader because most crime readers, and especially cozy readers these days are really familiar with the form. They know the classics, they know all the tricks.
It's a bit like being a magician, you know. You know that the audience is watching you as closely as they can to figure out how you're doing it. And it's kind of like that being a cozy writer because you're so focused on the puzzle, you're trying to outwit the readers and misdirect them and pull the wool over their eyes a little bit, all the while knowing that readers are looking for that and they're expecting it and they're going to be trying to, you know, do the opposite.
So I really enjoy that. I just think that's a great challenge. It makes the books a lot of fun to write. And yeah, it just means that it's a really enjoyable process.
Z: I love that. And so you're already talking a bit about the process, but we know that you're a very organized writer because you have a book of that title, The Organized Writer.
So tell us something else about your process in writing these Dogsitter Detective books.
A: There you go. It's just behind me. There you go.
Yeah. I can't help it. I talk about process whenever I talk about writing because that's just the way my brain is wired, I suppose.
So one of the things that I do when writing any book, and that includes the Dogsitter Detective books. My process, my sort of habit. And the one bit of advice that I always give to people who might be struggling to be productive or to meet a deadline or to finish a book, is that I write to a word count quota, a minimum every day.
And so when I'm writing the Dogsitter Detective books, my word count is 1,000 words a day. So every day I come here to this desk first thing in the morning, and I do that before I check my social media, you know, before I check my email, any of that, and I start writing. And only when I've written a thousand words am I allowed to then do anything else. Now, if I'm feeling good, if I'm in the zone, actually, I might write 2,000 words.
You know, I'll just keep going. You know that those days are great. Obviously that doesn't happen all the time, but as long as I hit that thousand word minimum, then I give myself permission to stop that, check my email, et cetera, et cetera. And doing that, making that a discipline, getting into that habit just makes me really productive. And I know has made other people really productive because it's one of the things I talk about in The Organized Writer.
It's how I know that I'm going to hit my deadlines, because I plan out how much I need to write, when I need to start writing in order to meet my deadlines using that word count minimum. So I find that really useful.
K: So, Louisa, can you tell us about your book, Gallows Wood?
L: Yes, certainly. So, Gallows Wood. The whole series features a police dog handler called PC Halliday and her specialist search dog, Moss. So Gallows Wood begins, as she is called out, to a wood where a hand has been found, a human hand.
And their job is to find the rest of the body, which they do, of course. But there's something about this case which reminds Lucy of something closer to home. Of her husband, who disappeared two years ago.
So she wants to keep investigating, but the new DI is Jack Ellis, and rightfully so. He wants Lucy far, far away from this case. But the call of the woods is strong.
So her and Moss, Lucy and Moss return to the woods.
Now, I won't say what they find because that's the book, but I will say, you know, there's lots of lovely, fluffy police dogs. You never know who you're going to trust. Shades of line of duty in there. And it's. Yeah, it's a lot of fun.
K: Yeah, I loved reading this. I find the writing really compelling. And it was one of those books where you really. You start to feel like you're in it, like you start to feel it and you're reading it and you're like, I'm getting a little stressed.
That's really good. So, in the book, PC Lucy Halliday has a human remains detection dog named Moss. Moss is based on your own dog, Max. And we know that Max couldn't be with you tonight, but tell us about him and how Max influenced your descriptions of Moss.
L: Yeah, so, yeah, so I'm in a Premier Inn. This is not my house. I'm in a Premier Inn tonight. Which is why I don't have Max here. He's at home with my husband.
But, yeah, so we got Max. Or I should I say I got Max, because he's my dog, definitely not my husband's, from a puppy and he is a working cocker spaniel crossed with a springer.
So anybody that's met spaniels knows this is a terrible, terrible combination. So very smart, very high energy, absolute nightmare puppy. I didn't sleep, you know, nothing. Drove me absolutely bonkers.
So my dog trainer said, you need to take him to scent training to give him, you know, to tire his brain out, to give him something to do. So I did. I did as she says. Um, he loved it, didn't tire him out. He just got more and more excited.
But it did give me the idea. And I was chatting to my agent one day and just said, what about a police dog handler, A cadaver dog, basically?
And he said, yes, write it. So I did. And that's where it comes from. So, basically, Moss in the book is pretty much Max to a T. Except that obviously Max is not a police dog. He's just a domestic at home, drive me nuts dog.
But, yeah, basically they're the same. And it was really just fun, just kind of observing the things he does and then putting it in the book. For Lucy, both the sort of characteristic and what Anthony said is very true.
They have their own character and his characteristics. Both the sort of, like, the downside, because he does. Now he's a bit older, he does have a downside, but also when he's out and about and sniffing and you just see the tail go up and you think, oh, no, that's it.
And he's gone. He's after a pheasant. And you'll see him three, you know, three hours later with a pheasant in his mouth. And I'm just, you know.
So, yeah, that's, that's Max, basically. Sorry, not Moss. Max.
K: That's awesome. My wife and I have separate dogs, too. Some people don't understand, but I'm like, no, no, there. There are definitely.
L: Yeah.
K: She has a springer crossed with a herding dog. Yeah. And I'm sort of. I'm hearing sort of like, oh, yeah, there's a lot of your dog gist.
L: Yes. Yeah. Oh, I get that. My husband's very much "your dog".
K: Yeah, I know, I know. So Lucy Halliday has a tricky route to becoming a police dog handler. Without giving away any spoilers, what can you tell us about Halliday and her relationship?
L; Yeah, so Lucy, I mean, she's obviously. She's a detective in a book. Well, she's a PC. And so she, of course, has a complicated backstory. She has secrets because, you know, I know it's a trope, but books would be very boring if our detectives didn't have secrets. So she does.
But, you know, her childhood was very much. She was an only child. She had some couple of rescue dogs which were her basically her best friends, which she grew up with and training them. And she joined the police force because she wanted something to keep herself busy. And that route, she ends up actually as a DI in the Major Crimes Team.
But something happens which we won't go too much into detail, because that's the plot which sees her going back to the rank of PC and taking a sideways move into the dog unit, the dog handling team. So at the beginning of the book, she's not so sure that's what she wants to be.
She's obviously loving being with the dog and she's very used to being around dogs and she's got a natural aptitude for it, but because of the circumstances. With her ending there, she's not quite sure.
So you see that sort of journey as we go through the book. And by the end, she's very much a settled, settled member of the dog unit.
K: So your book is a police procedural and it seems like you know a lot of. You know a lot about how these things work. So how did you do research for this?
L: So I've written police procedurals before. One of my best friends is a PC and he's done everything under the sun. He's done detective work, he's done undercover work. So he's really helpful in that.
Yeah, he basically just gives me an overview of how these things work and I can call on him and ask questions.
I was very fortunate to be put in touch with a police dog handler for this book. And Paul is retired now and he works. So he's worked as a dog handler all his life and now he works as an instructor and he sources puppies.
So he's always got, you know, a big. He's got a big white van and he's always got a couple of puppies in tow, like a Labrador, Malinois.
And he knows everything there is to know about police dog handling in Hampshire. And very fortunate, he's a brilliant storyteller as well. So he'll tell me all these stories about what he's been doing.
And luckily for me, I get to put that in a book each time. So, yeah, I'm currently writing the third book, so Gallows Wood was the first that's out now. Memorial Park is this one that I was holding up earlier, that's out next February, and that's about a missing child and all about the sort of tracking. And because Lucy gets another dog, she gets a German shepherd for book two called Iggy, and he's a tracker.
Track and attack is a general purpose dog. So he does the traditional dog that you will see in a lot of the videos with the teeth and the barkie and. Yeah, she does that in Memorial Park.
And then the third one, which I'm currently writing, has a data dog, which I think is fascinating. Or a digi dog. And they find SIM cards and memory sticks and laptops and it's just. Yeah, it's just fascinating what they can do.
It's really interesting for me. I love it.
K: Yeah, for sure. You need to learn about all that as part of your, you know, as part of your job almost, you know.
L: Yeah.
K: So we've been told that you write books very quickly, which is great because it means we don't have to wait too long for the next book in the series. So what's your writing process like?
L: It's probably very similar to Antony's, to be honest. I. I'm quite strict with myself in that I don't believe in waiting for the muse to come to me. I. I have a desk.
Not this one, obviously, but I have a desk at home and I go there after the school runs down and after the dogs walked, me and Max go in. He, like, now lies on the sofa. He's got his way after four years and now lies on the sofa.
But, yeah, and then I just sit and I write until the school bus comes back again. But I think at the beginning, I sort of. I write quite freely. I'm not quite, I know the bare bones of the plot, but I'm not quite sure. And it's that act of writing, I think, which really gets me to know where we're going this time and where the characters are going. And then once I've got a very messy. I wouldn't even call it a first draft. Just. Just. Just words, basically, I go back and I plot it all.
Actually. I've probably got some cards somewhere here. When I've lost them, I plot them on cards which I then stick up on the board and really put, you know, perfectly plot it out and make sure it fits the plot and make sure it makes sense and all the clues are in the right place and write notes like, need more dog.
You know, and I've got a chapter and, you know, there's a dog there somewhere, but I haven't mentioned it at all. So I have to go back and put the dogs back in. And yeah, all that sort of stuff.
And that whole process takes about three to four months to get a whole sort of first draft, which is good enough to go to the editor. And then, of course, they always come back, unfortunately, and you have to.
But, yeah, it takes about three to four months to get to that point, at least.
K: Wow, that's fascinating. In my mind, I went to, like, that meme with the guy with the red string and the cards and the.
L: It's a bit like that, yeah. If you go to my Instagram, you'll see the cards on the whiteboard. They're sort of. It's not quite as crazy, maybe, but me explaining the plot is to my editor is very much like lots of hand waving and her looking at me confused.
Z: Okay, so we're going to move on to Philip Schott, Dr. Schott, and learning about your book. And I'm really thrilled to have you as part of this because my book club actually read one of your other books, The Accidental Veterinarian, and we all loved it.
So that's why I thought everyone was going to love, love Eleven Huskies as well, by definition. So please tell us about Eleven Huskies.
P: All right, yeah, thank you. So Eleven Huskies is the third in my Dr. Bannerman vet mystery series. First two, Fifty-four Pigs, second one, Six Ostriches. You kind of see a pattern there. It's deliberate.
So Eleven Huskies. Bannerman, veterinarian, flies north with his family. I live in Manitoba, so pretty much set in Manitoba. So northern Manitoba is all wilderness, just rocks and trees and lakes. They fly there for a holiday, a canoeing holiday.
His wife, his brother in law, who's an RCMP officer, and his brother in law's partner, and of course Pippin, Peter and Laura's dog. They go north to a flying fishing lodge where 11 huskies are ill.
This lodge owner has a sled team and the dogs are ill. And Peter rapidly determines that it's been a poisoning. I'm going to say right now, the dogs don't die.
So this is really important because in Fifty-four Pigs, all the pigs die in the first page. And I get so much blow back on. That book was positively received, except by people who are expecting a cute story about a lot of pigs.
So the pigs all turn into bacon very rapidly. So all the ostriches survive and all the huskies survive. So it's not much of a spoiler because it's not that tied into the plot anyway.
So there are some human deaths. However, these are murder mysteries, after all. So around the same time, a float plane has crashed into the lake and it's determined that that was murder.
So Peter trying to have his holiday, but at the same time he's drawn to these. He's drawn to puzzles and trying to figure that he doesn't really believe in coincidence.
He's got a mathematical mind, understands about probabilities and so forth. Very focused on that. Maybe there's some way to tie this together, the poisonings and the crash. So that takes off from there.
Z: And Dr. Bannerman's pet dog, Pippin has a very special nose and perhaps a little bit unusual in some ways. So tell us about his sniffing abilities and also how he and Dr. Bannerman work together.
P: Right. So, you know, one of the things I wanted to do with these books and specifically then regarding Pippin, is just open. And I think Louisa's doing this a little bit too.
Just kind of peel it open a little bit for humans to understand how narrow our view of the world is. Like we're such a visual species, right? So we really understand the world through what we see, a little bit, through what we hear.
But primarily we think that is the world, the objects that we see, to understand that other species, in particular, in this case dogs, understand the world completely differently. Their sensory reality is entirely different than ours.
The way they construct reality has all sorts of interesting implications. So in this, in his books, it becomes very handy because he's a particularly gifted scent finder and he and Peter have a particularly strong bond.
And because of Peter's interest in kind of dabbling a little bit in figuring out mysteries, Pippin's sense of smell comes in. Comes in handy.
Z: It does. And so this book is set in northern Manitoba. So it's a different setting than the previous two books. And it's actually very evocative of the landscape there. We hear loons calling and so on.
So what made you decide to set the book there in northern Manitoba?
P: Two things. First of all, the first two books were set in New Selfoss, the fictional town, Icelandic Canadian town, on the opposite side of the lake from Gimli, which is an actual Icelandic Canadian town.
And so when I first pitched this to my series to my editor, he said, okay, yeah, small town murder mystery, you know, what about these small town murder mysteries? How do the demographics work out?
Like, everybody's going to be dead by the end of the series. Right. You may want to take them off site occasionally. So, okay, by the time, third book, it's time to take them off site.
That was reason one. Reason two is that I love the north. In fact, just yesterday I was in Whitechapel Provincial park doing a hike just across the granite ridges and through.
Now the aspen's starting to turn color and the glistening blue lakes and so forth. It's fabulous. It's really what Canada is all about from my perspective. So I want to introduce international readers particularly to this idea, the soul of Canada, if you will.
Z: That definitely comes through. And so you're a veterinarian as well as a writer, and Dr. Bannerman is a veterinarian. But what made you decide to also become a writer? How did that come about and how did this book series or your first books come about?
P: Yeah, so, you know, the title of the first book gives. It gives a clue. The Accidental Veterinarian. Unlike most of my colleagues, I didn't have any idea of being a veterinarian when I was growing up.
All my colleagues including my wife, who's a veterinarian, before they could even pronounce the word. It's a difficult word, right? Veterinarian. They knew that's what they wanted to do. It's one of those things like Astronaut or firefighter that just little children just glom onto.
And a lot of people are carried with that. Most of my classmates and colleagues are carried by that passion right through. I didn't have that. I didn't have any pets growing up.
I didn't dislike the idea. It just wasn't part of my WeltUmschau, German word, my world perspective.
And so I dabbled in writing growing up. And in fact, in first year university I took an English class and was offered a fellowship to pursue that. But my father, German physicist, said, Philipp, this is very good. However, you must put bread on the table for your family, get a profession and you can do this in your spare time. All right?
As A freakishly obedient 18 year old says, okay, I'll get a profession. And I flipped through the university course calendar. This was an actual book in those days, alphabetical. It was rejected, everything, with the arrogance of the average 18 year old. Until I landed on V, the very last thing, Veterinarian and veterinary medicine. And I didn't have an objection.
So I thought, okay, let's do this. And I was interested in animals for sure. So I became a veterinarian accidentally, essentially or inadvertently. And then the writing was always in the background.
It turns out veterinary medicine is a good entree into writing. Like when I pitched my first book, pets are having their cultural moment, you know, long may it last. So it was a very. I mean, I got a reply in 20 minutes saying, yeah, show us more. We want this.
Z: Excellent. Yes. Well, I'm glad they did that. That's good for everyone else who gets to read the books.
And so in Eleven Huskies, without giving anything away, the action really builds through the book. Did you go into writing it already having planned that or what was your process in writing this book?
P: Yeah, so, you know, like Louisa and Antony, in some ways I'm very organized. I also have a word count because I've got a parallel career. I can't do it daily, so I have a weekly word count.
It was 3,000 words while I was working full time. Now I've upped it to 5,000 words a week. So sometimes it clumps to 2 or 3,000 words a day, but just has to because my schedule.
But I'm pretty strict about that. I just start to write. But the disorganized aspect is I really just. I start with an image in my mind. I know how it starts.
Like there's usually a very, it's very visual and I know how it ends. And I've got that in mind. Too, very specifically. Also very visual. And a couple of points I want to hit along the way.
Like in the case of Eleven Huskies, I want it to be in the north, and I wanted a forest fire to be part of it, but the rest of it, it just kind of. I just. It just sort of happens. You know, you just start to write and then you realize, okay, this is kind of good. I like this.
And then that builds. I realized then, for example, that forest fire, that could become a major. A bigger plot point than I thought it was going to be, and drive elements of the plot forward towards the end and create, you know, build the tension and so forth.
So that just happened kind of organically.
The partial transcript has been lightly edited for content and style.
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Clockwise from top left: Zazie Todd, Philipp Schott, Louisa Scarr, Kristi Benson, and Antony Johnston hold up their books at Bark! Fest (or in Kristi's case, her cat, Apricat). |
By Zazie Todd, PhD
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Bark! Fest with Antony Johnston, Louisa Scarr, and Philipp Schott, DVM
Bark! Fest, the book festival for animal lovers, took place in September 2024. I organized it to celebrate the launch of my new book, Bark! The Science of Helping Your Anxious, Fearful, or Reactive Dog, which is out now and available wherever books are sold. We heard from some incredible authors of books about animals.
This is the recording of the panel Canine Crime and Mystery with Antony Johnston, Louisa Scarr, and Philipp Schott, DVM.
You can watch the panel on Youtube or below, listen wherever you get your podcasts (Apple, Spotify) or below, or scroll down to read a transcript of the highlights.
Get the books
All of the Bark! Fest books are available wherever books are sold, including from Bookshop (which supports independent bookstores), UK Bookshop, and my Amazon store.
The conversation with Antony Johnston, Louisa Scarr, and Philipp Schott, DVM
If you love crime and mystery novels, you’re in for a treat as dogs help solve crimes in these remarkable books. When a singer dies in mysterious circumstances, dog sitter Gwinny Tuffel and the singer’s Border Collie investigate in Antony Johnston’s cosy and witty The Dog Sitter Detective Takes the Lead. In Louisa Scarr’s dark and compelling Gallows Wood, PC Lucy Halliday and her dog Moss search for the body after a severed hand is found in the woods. And when veterinarian (and amateur detective) Dr. Bannerman and his champion sniffer dog Pippin holiday near a remote lake, he has to try to save some poisoned sled dogs and figure out why a float plane crashed in Eleven Huskies by Philipp Schott DVM.
We talked about:
- How Antony Johnston came up with the idea of Gwinny Tuffel, the pet sitter who is the amateur detective in his Dog Sitter Detective books
- Why Johnston especially enjoys writing cozy crime
- The story of PC Lucy Halliday, the human remains detection dog handler, who is the main character in Louisa Scarr's Gallow's Wood
- How Scarr did the research for this book which is a police procedural
- How Dr. Bannerman and his pet dog work together in Dr. Philipp Schott's Eleven Huskies
- Schott's love of the northern Canadian landscape and how it plays out in his books
- and more, plus readings from each of the books!
Other books mentioned in this panel:
- The Dog Sitter Detective Plays Dead by Antony Johnston (the next book in the series)
- The Organized Writer by Antony Johnston
- Memorial Park by Louisa Scarr (the next in the PC Lucy Halliday series)
- Three Bengal Kittens by Philipp Schott (the next in the series)
- Heal the Beasts: A Jaunt Through the Curious History of the Veterinary Arts by Philipp Schott, DVM
Learn more about the authors:
Antony Johnston: https://antonyjohnston.com/
Louisa Scarr: https://www.instagram.com/louisascarrwriter/
Dr. Philipp Schott: https://www.philippschott.com/
The conversation is co-hosted by Zazie Todd and Kristi Benson.
Highlights of the conversation with Antony Johnston
Z: So we're going to start by talking to Anthony Johnston about his book, The Dog Sitter Detective Takes the Lead, which I absolutely loved. I said on Instagram. I read this and I immediately had to go out and buy the first one because this is the second in the series.
But just so everyone knows, you can read it on its own like I did, if you want to. So tell us about this book. The Dog Sitter Detective Takes the Lead.
A: Sure. And I just realized that I was muted when I said hello earlier. So sorry. Hello everyone. It's lovely to be here.
Yeah. So The Dog Sitter Detective Takes the Lead, as you say, is the second book in the Dog Sitter Detective series. The first book is simply called The Dog Sitter Detective.
It's a series starring Gwinny Tuffel, who is a semi retired actress who takes up dog sitting to make ends meet when she retires to look after her father who's ill. A decade later her father dies and leaves her pretty much penniless. And so Gwinny has to try to revive her acting career at the ripe old age of 60, while also trying to sort of maintain the house that she's been left, which is falling down around her ears.
And of course while she's doing this, she keeps stumbling across dead bodies that have been killed in baffling ways that only she can solve with the help of the dogs that she is sitting.
So in the first book she's at a wedding when the bridegroom is killed and she winds up looking after a pair of salukis while investigating that crime.
And in this book, The Dog Sitter Detective Takes the Lead, she's dog sitting a border collie called Ace for an aging rock star called Crash Double. Crash is leaving the country for a few days to go and perform a concert in Dublin.
He lives on a houseboat in Little Venice in London. And so he hires Gwinny to look after Ace, to stay on the houseboat and look after Ace while he's away in Dublin over a bank holiday weekend, which also happens to be when there is a carnival in Little Venice, a house, you know, barge and canal carnival, which he can't abide. So he's glad to get out of the city. But unfortunately Crash's body during the carnival turns up in the canal floating in the water.
He never made it out of London, let alone out of the country. And so it is up to Gwinny with Ace, the border collie and her friend, a retired detective called Birch, who has a black lab called Ronnie, and the four of them together, it's up to them to solve the mystery.
The police think that Crash committed suicide and drowned himself in the canal. But Gwinny doesn't believe that. She refuses to believe that and so goes about investigating his death.
Z: And Gwinny Tuffel is a really fun character. So how did you come up with the idea for a book with her as the amateur detective?
A: So it came about partly just because of the genre that I started to write. So I started writing The Dog Sitter Detective during the first COVID lockdown.
And I was writing it really just myself. I wasn't even thinking about publication. And I wrote it basically to cheer myself up as much as anything.
So I wanted a character who would be kind of light hearted, but also could help with a bit of representation. Believe it or not, at the time when I started writing, older women detectives were not a common sight in crime fiction. Now it seems that you can't swing a cat or a dog without hitting one. But at the time they weren't all that common.
So I thought, well, I'll do that. And I made her a former actress because I have acting experience. I acted a lot when I was younger. Amateur, not professionally, but still.
And because I have experience of showbiz through Atomic Blonde, my work writing screenplays, I know a bit about that life and that world and the behind the scenes. So I felt that I could write a convincing actor character.
And then of course, she had to be a dog lover. So I made her a lifelong dog lover who had a succession of adopted dogs through her house, through her family as she was growing up.
And so all these things came together to create this character who, yeah, I came to kind of fall in love with while I was writing because she's flawed, definitely, you know, and she's not polished either.
She has more than a few sort of sharp edges and occasionally rubs people up the wrong way. But I kind of like that about her. She's like a naughty schoolgirl sometimes, which I think is a delightful aspect of the character. And I just really enjoy writing her.
Z: I love her for sure. And I have to ask you about the dogs as well, because each book in the series features a different breed of dog. So how do you go about deciding what kind of dog you want to include and actually writing that dog as a character?
A: Lots of research, which is probably the best part of the job, getting to, you know, sort of learn about and meet loads of different kinds of dogs. Yeah, I decided early on that to make it a series, to vary things throughout the series, I would have her looking after a different breed of dog in each one. So, like I said, in the first book, she's looking after a pair of Salukis.
In the second book, it's a Border Collie. In the third book, which is coming out next year, it's a Jack Russell Terrier.
And the reason for that actually is because. So I used to own a pair of Lurchers that were both Saluki crosses. I grew up with a Border Collie in my family, and my partner grew up with a Jack Russell Terrier in her family.
So that was actually how I decided the first three. From that point onwards, obviously, I'm going to have to find new breeds, but how they work into the story is kind of organic. It's, you know, the. The kind of story and the way that the investigation develops kind of relies on what the dog is.
So the dogs in these books are. They're not magical. They're not, you know, they're not Lassie or sort of psychic or anything like that. They are just realistic, ordinary dogs.
But as we all know as dog lovers, every breed of dog has its own characteristics, its own habits, you know, the things it prefers to do, the things it's good at. And so I wanted to incorporate those into the story.
So everybody knows, for example, Border Collies, smartest dogs on the planet. You know, you won't find a more intelligent breed. And so that plays into the story in the second book quite a bit.
You know, Ace's ability to sniff things out and to understand commands and do things under his own initiative is actually a big part of the story and it affects how the investigation plays out.
So, like, it's a lot of back and forth between what I want the story to be and what kind of story it has to be to suit the breed of dog.
So I've kind of made a rod for my own back. It's only going to get more difficult as the series goes on. I realize that, but, you know, I'm having fun.
Z: Good, good. And he's definitely a real character, like, not just a prop to the story. He has an important role to play, too.
A: Very much, yeah.
Z: And as I alluded to in your introduction, you write across many different genres, including video games. So what do you especially like about writing cozy crime, like The Dogsitter Detective?
A: I guess it's mostly that it makes me smile while I'm writing it. So, as you say, I write a lot of different stuff in video games. For example, I kind of specialize in sci fi and horror, which are obviously not genres that, you know, are known for being light hearted.
So I get plenty of, you know, grim and gritty action when I'm writing those things. So cozy. Yeah, it just makes me smile while I'm writing it. It makes me laugh, you know, I happily admit that I laugh at my own jokes all the time. I figure if I don't laugh at them, nobody else is going to, you know.
But also specifically with cozy, one of the things I like about cozy, because I've been a cozy reader pretty much my whole life and I love watching cozy stuff on tv.
But until I wrote this series, I hadn't written any cozy. And one of the things that I love about it is the fact that it's so focused on the puzzle, you know, and the puzzle of the crime really takes center stage in cozy's. And you can get really elaborate puzzles as a result. Really elaborate crimes and things that you're trying to work out as a reader while you're reading them.
And for me as a writer, I like the challenge of kind of pitting my wits against the reader because most crime readers, and especially cozy readers these days are really familiar with the form. They know the classics, they know all the tricks.
It's a bit like being a magician, you know. You know that the audience is watching you as closely as they can to figure out how you're doing it. And it's kind of like that being a cozy writer because you're so focused on the puzzle, you're trying to outwit the readers and misdirect them and pull the wool over their eyes a little bit, all the while knowing that readers are looking for that and they're expecting it and they're going to be trying to, you know, do the opposite.
So I really enjoy that. I just think that's a great challenge. It makes the books a lot of fun to write. And yeah, it just means that it's a really enjoyable process.
Z: I love that. And so you're already talking a bit about the process, but we know that you're a very organized writer because you have a book of that title, The Organized Writer.
So tell us something else about your process in writing these Dogsitter Detective books.
A: There you go. It's just behind me. There you go.
Yeah. I can't help it. I talk about process whenever I talk about writing because that's just the way my brain is wired, I suppose.
So one of the things that I do when writing any book, and that includes the Dogsitter Detective books. My process, my sort of habit. And the one bit of advice that I always give to people who might be struggling to be productive or to meet a deadline or to finish a book, is that I write to a word count quota, a minimum every day.
And so when I'm writing the Dogsitter Detective books, my word count is 1,000 words a day. So every day I come here to this desk first thing in the morning, and I do that before I check my social media, you know, before I check my email, any of that, and I start writing. And only when I've written a thousand words am I allowed to then do anything else. Now, if I'm feeling good, if I'm in the zone, actually, I might write 2,000 words.
You know, I'll just keep going. You know that those days are great. Obviously that doesn't happen all the time, but as long as I hit that thousand word minimum, then I give myself permission to stop that, check my email, et cetera, et cetera. And doing that, making that a discipline, getting into that habit just makes me really productive. And I know has made other people really productive because it's one of the things I talk about in The Organized Writer.
It's how I know that I'm going to hit my deadlines, because I plan out how much I need to write, when I need to start writing in order to meet my deadlines using that word count minimum. So I find that really useful.
Highlights of the conversation with Louisa Scarr
K: So, Louisa, can you tell us about your book, Gallows Wood?
L: Yes, certainly. So, Gallows Wood. The whole series features a police dog handler called PC Halliday and her specialist search dog, Moss. So Gallows Wood begins, as she is called out, to a wood where a hand has been found, a human hand.
And their job is to find the rest of the body, which they do, of course. But there's something about this case which reminds Lucy of something closer to home. Of her husband, who disappeared two years ago.
So she wants to keep investigating, but the new DI is Jack Ellis, and rightfully so. He wants Lucy far, far away from this case. But the call of the woods is strong.
So her and Moss, Lucy and Moss return to the woods.
Now, I won't say what they find because that's the book, but I will say, you know, there's lots of lovely, fluffy police dogs. You never know who you're going to trust. Shades of line of duty in there. And it's. Yeah, it's a lot of fun.
K: Yeah, I loved reading this. I find the writing really compelling. And it was one of those books where you really. You start to feel like you're in it, like you start to feel it and you're reading it and you're like, I'm getting a little stressed.
That's really good. So, in the book, PC Lucy Halliday has a human remains detection dog named Moss. Moss is based on your own dog, Max. And we know that Max couldn't be with you tonight, but tell us about him and how Max influenced your descriptions of Moss.
L: Yeah, so, yeah, so I'm in a Premier Inn. This is not my house. I'm in a Premier Inn tonight. Which is why I don't have Max here. He's at home with my husband.
But, yeah, so we got Max. Or I should I say I got Max, because he's my dog, definitely not my husband's, from a puppy and he is a working cocker spaniel crossed with a springer.
So anybody that's met spaniels knows this is a terrible, terrible combination. So very smart, very high energy, absolute nightmare puppy. I didn't sleep, you know, nothing. Drove me absolutely bonkers.
So my dog trainer said, you need to take him to scent training to give him, you know, to tire his brain out, to give him something to do. So I did. I did as she says. Um, he loved it, didn't tire him out. He just got more and more excited.
But it did give me the idea. And I was chatting to my agent one day and just said, what about a police dog handler, A cadaver dog, basically?
And he said, yes, write it. So I did. And that's where it comes from. So, basically, Moss in the book is pretty much Max to a T. Except that obviously Max is not a police dog. He's just a domestic at home, drive me nuts dog.
But, yeah, basically they're the same. And it was really just fun, just kind of observing the things he does and then putting it in the book. For Lucy, both the sort of characteristic and what Anthony said is very true.
They have their own character and his characteristics. Both the sort of, like, the downside, because he does. Now he's a bit older, he does have a downside, but also when he's out and about and sniffing and you just see the tail go up and you think, oh, no, that's it.
And he's gone. He's after a pheasant. And you'll see him three, you know, three hours later with a pheasant in his mouth. And I'm just, you know.
So, yeah, that's, that's Max, basically. Sorry, not Moss. Max.
K: That's awesome. My wife and I have separate dogs, too. Some people don't understand, but I'm like, no, no, there. There are definitely.
L: Yeah.
K: She has a springer crossed with a herding dog. Yeah. And I'm sort of. I'm hearing sort of like, oh, yeah, there's a lot of your dog gist.
L: Yes. Yeah. Oh, I get that. My husband's very much "your dog".
K: Yeah, I know, I know. So Lucy Halliday has a tricky route to becoming a police dog handler. Without giving away any spoilers, what can you tell us about Halliday and her relationship?
L; Yeah, so Lucy, I mean, she's obviously. She's a detective in a book. Well, she's a PC. And so she, of course, has a complicated backstory. She has secrets because, you know, I know it's a trope, but books would be very boring if our detectives didn't have secrets. So she does.
But, you know, her childhood was very much. She was an only child. She had some couple of rescue dogs which were her basically her best friends, which she grew up with and training them. And she joined the police force because she wanted something to keep herself busy. And that route, she ends up actually as a DI in the Major Crimes Team.
But something happens which we won't go too much into detail, because that's the plot which sees her going back to the rank of PC and taking a sideways move into the dog unit, the dog handling team. So at the beginning of the book, she's not so sure that's what she wants to be.
She's obviously loving being with the dog and she's very used to being around dogs and she's got a natural aptitude for it, but because of the circumstances. With her ending there, she's not quite sure.
So you see that sort of journey as we go through the book. And by the end, she's very much a settled, settled member of the dog unit.
K: So your book is a police procedural and it seems like you know a lot of. You know a lot about how these things work. So how did you do research for this?
L: So I've written police procedurals before. One of my best friends is a PC and he's done everything under the sun. He's done detective work, he's done undercover work. So he's really helpful in that.
Yeah, he basically just gives me an overview of how these things work and I can call on him and ask questions.
I was very fortunate to be put in touch with a police dog handler for this book. And Paul is retired now and he works. So he's worked as a dog handler all his life and now he works as an instructor and he sources puppies.
So he's always got, you know, a big. He's got a big white van and he's always got a couple of puppies in tow, like a Labrador, Malinois.
And he knows everything there is to know about police dog handling in Hampshire. And very fortunate, he's a brilliant storyteller as well. So he'll tell me all these stories about what he's been doing.
And luckily for me, I get to put that in a book each time. So, yeah, I'm currently writing the third book, so Gallows Wood was the first that's out now. Memorial Park is this one that I was holding up earlier, that's out next February, and that's about a missing child and all about the sort of tracking. And because Lucy gets another dog, she gets a German shepherd for book two called Iggy, and he's a tracker.
Track and attack is a general purpose dog. So he does the traditional dog that you will see in a lot of the videos with the teeth and the barkie and. Yeah, she does that in Memorial Park.
And then the third one, which I'm currently writing, has a data dog, which I think is fascinating. Or a digi dog. And they find SIM cards and memory sticks and laptops and it's just. Yeah, it's just fascinating what they can do.
It's really interesting for me. I love it.
K: Yeah, for sure. You need to learn about all that as part of your, you know, as part of your job almost, you know.
L: Yeah.
K: So we've been told that you write books very quickly, which is great because it means we don't have to wait too long for the next book in the series. So what's your writing process like?
L: It's probably very similar to Antony's, to be honest. I. I'm quite strict with myself in that I don't believe in waiting for the muse to come to me. I. I have a desk.
Not this one, obviously, but I have a desk at home and I go there after the school runs down and after the dogs walked, me and Max go in. He, like, now lies on the sofa. He's got his way after four years and now lies on the sofa.
But, yeah, and then I just sit and I write until the school bus comes back again. But I think at the beginning, I sort of. I write quite freely. I'm not quite, I know the bare bones of the plot, but I'm not quite sure. And it's that act of writing, I think, which really gets me to know where we're going this time and where the characters are going. And then once I've got a very messy. I wouldn't even call it a first draft. Just. Just. Just words, basically, I go back and I plot it all.
Actually. I've probably got some cards somewhere here. When I've lost them, I plot them on cards which I then stick up on the board and really put, you know, perfectly plot it out and make sure it fits the plot and make sure it makes sense and all the clues are in the right place and write notes like, need more dog.
You know, and I've got a chapter and, you know, there's a dog there somewhere, but I haven't mentioned it at all. So I have to go back and put the dogs back in. And yeah, all that sort of stuff.
And that whole process takes about three to four months to get a whole sort of first draft, which is good enough to go to the editor. And then, of course, they always come back, unfortunately, and you have to.
But, yeah, it takes about three to four months to get to that point, at least.
K: Wow, that's fascinating. In my mind, I went to, like, that meme with the guy with the red string and the cards and the.
L: It's a bit like that, yeah. If you go to my Instagram, you'll see the cards on the whiteboard. They're sort of. It's not quite as crazy, maybe, but me explaining the plot is to my editor is very much like lots of hand waving and her looking at me confused.
Highlights of the conversation with Philipp Schott, DVM
Z: Okay, so we're going to move on to Philip Schott, Dr. Schott, and learning about your book. And I'm really thrilled to have you as part of this because my book club actually read one of your other books, The Accidental Veterinarian, and we all loved it.
So that's why I thought everyone was going to love, love Eleven Huskies as well, by definition. So please tell us about Eleven Huskies.
P: All right, yeah, thank you. So Eleven Huskies is the third in my Dr. Bannerman vet mystery series. First two, Fifty-four Pigs, second one, Six Ostriches. You kind of see a pattern there. It's deliberate.
So Eleven Huskies. Bannerman, veterinarian, flies north with his family. I live in Manitoba, so pretty much set in Manitoba. So northern Manitoba is all wilderness, just rocks and trees and lakes. They fly there for a holiday, a canoeing holiday.
His wife, his brother in law, who's an RCMP officer, and his brother in law's partner, and of course Pippin, Peter and Laura's dog. They go north to a flying fishing lodge where 11 huskies are ill.
This lodge owner has a sled team and the dogs are ill. And Peter rapidly determines that it's been a poisoning. I'm going to say right now, the dogs don't die.
So this is really important because in Fifty-four Pigs, all the pigs die in the first page. And I get so much blow back on. That book was positively received, except by people who are expecting a cute story about a lot of pigs.
So the pigs all turn into bacon very rapidly. So all the ostriches survive and all the huskies survive. So it's not much of a spoiler because it's not that tied into the plot anyway.
So there are some human deaths. However, these are murder mysteries, after all. So around the same time, a float plane has crashed into the lake and it's determined that that was murder.
So Peter trying to have his holiday, but at the same time he's drawn to these. He's drawn to puzzles and trying to figure that he doesn't really believe in coincidence.
He's got a mathematical mind, understands about probabilities and so forth. Very focused on that. Maybe there's some way to tie this together, the poisonings and the crash. So that takes off from there.
Z: And Dr. Bannerman's pet dog, Pippin has a very special nose and perhaps a little bit unusual in some ways. So tell us about his sniffing abilities and also how he and Dr. Bannerman work together.
P: Right. So, you know, one of the things I wanted to do with these books and specifically then regarding Pippin, is just open. And I think Louisa's doing this a little bit too.
Just kind of peel it open a little bit for humans to understand how narrow our view of the world is. Like we're such a visual species, right? So we really understand the world through what we see, a little bit, through what we hear.
But primarily we think that is the world, the objects that we see, to understand that other species, in particular, in this case dogs, understand the world completely differently. Their sensory reality is entirely different than ours.
The way they construct reality has all sorts of interesting implications. So in this, in his books, it becomes very handy because he's a particularly gifted scent finder and he and Peter have a particularly strong bond.
And because of Peter's interest in kind of dabbling a little bit in figuring out mysteries, Pippin's sense of smell comes in. Comes in handy.
Z: It does. And so this book is set in northern Manitoba. So it's a different setting than the previous two books. And it's actually very evocative of the landscape there. We hear loons calling and so on.
So what made you decide to set the book there in northern Manitoba?
P: Two things. First of all, the first two books were set in New Selfoss, the fictional town, Icelandic Canadian town, on the opposite side of the lake from Gimli, which is an actual Icelandic Canadian town.
And so when I first pitched this to my series to my editor, he said, okay, yeah, small town murder mystery, you know, what about these small town murder mysteries? How do the demographics work out?
Like, everybody's going to be dead by the end of the series. Right. You may want to take them off site occasionally. So, okay, by the time, third book, it's time to take them off site.
That was reason one. Reason two is that I love the north. In fact, just yesterday I was in Whitechapel Provincial park doing a hike just across the granite ridges and through.
Now the aspen's starting to turn color and the glistening blue lakes and so forth. It's fabulous. It's really what Canada is all about from my perspective. So I want to introduce international readers particularly to this idea, the soul of Canada, if you will.
Z: That definitely comes through. And so you're a veterinarian as well as a writer, and Dr. Bannerman is a veterinarian. But what made you decide to also become a writer? How did that come about and how did this book series or your first books come about?
P: Yeah, so, you know, the title of the first book gives. It gives a clue. The Accidental Veterinarian. Unlike most of my colleagues, I didn't have any idea of being a veterinarian when I was growing up.
All my colleagues including my wife, who's a veterinarian, before they could even pronounce the word. It's a difficult word, right? Veterinarian. They knew that's what they wanted to do. It's one of those things like Astronaut or firefighter that just little children just glom onto.
And a lot of people are carried with that. Most of my classmates and colleagues are carried by that passion right through. I didn't have that. I didn't have any pets growing up.
I didn't dislike the idea. It just wasn't part of my WeltUmschau, German word, my world perspective.
And so I dabbled in writing growing up. And in fact, in first year university I took an English class and was offered a fellowship to pursue that. But my father, German physicist, said, Philipp, this is very good. However, you must put bread on the table for your family, get a profession and you can do this in your spare time. All right?
As A freakishly obedient 18 year old says, okay, I'll get a profession. And I flipped through the university course calendar. This was an actual book in those days, alphabetical. It was rejected, everything, with the arrogance of the average 18 year old. Until I landed on V, the very last thing, Veterinarian and veterinary medicine. And I didn't have an objection.
So I thought, okay, let's do this. And I was interested in animals for sure. So I became a veterinarian accidentally, essentially or inadvertently. And then the writing was always in the background.
It turns out veterinary medicine is a good entree into writing. Like when I pitched my first book, pets are having their cultural moment, you know, long may it last. So it was a very. I mean, I got a reply in 20 minutes saying, yeah, show us more. We want this.
Z: Excellent. Yes. Well, I'm glad they did that. That's good for everyone else who gets to read the books.
And so in Eleven Huskies, without giving anything away, the action really builds through the book. Did you go into writing it already having planned that or what was your process in writing this book?
P: Yeah, so, you know, like Louisa and Antony, in some ways I'm very organized. I also have a word count because I've got a parallel career. I can't do it daily, so I have a weekly word count.
It was 3,000 words while I was working full time. Now I've upped it to 5,000 words a week. So sometimes it clumps to 2 or 3,000 words a day, but just has to because my schedule.
But I'm pretty strict about that. I just start to write. But the disorganized aspect is I really just. I start with an image in my mind. I know how it starts.
Like there's usually a very, it's very visual and I know how it ends. And I've got that in mind. Too, very specifically. Also very visual. And a couple of points I want to hit along the way.
Like in the case of Eleven Huskies, I want it to be in the north, and I wanted a forest fire to be part of it, but the rest of it, it just kind of. I just. It just sort of happens. You know, you just start to write and then you realize, okay, this is kind of good. I like this.
And then that builds. I realized then, for example, that forest fire, that could become a major. A bigger plot point than I thought it was going to be, and drive elements of the plot forward towards the end and create, you know, build the tension and so forth.
So that just happened kind of organically.
The partial transcript has been lightly edited for content and style.
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