OMG! My hearing service dog's lost a lot of weight!

Today I took Rocky to his groomer's for the first time in many months, simply because I had wanted him to keep his coat thick and warm for winter. Well, spring's indeed arrived, so it was time for him to shed his woolly mammoth look. The transformation was so shocking that when I emailed this picture of him to one of my friends, he said: "I don't recognize that dog. What have you done to Rocky? Where is he?"


I'm sure that some of you have paid close attention to the brouhaha over how Amazon.com had "de-ranked" books by GLBT writers this past weekend, so I decided to check whether my books were ranked at all. I was very pleased to see that EYES OF DESIRE 2: A DEAF GLBT READER was still ranked, along with ... what? My novel MEN WITH THEIR HANDS now has its own ISBN number and its publication date of October 2009 listed there. Yayyy! Some folks have asked me when ASSEMBLY REQUIRED: NOTES FROM A DEAF GAY LIFE would be available on Amazon. I'm not even sure when, but for the time being, please support RID Press directly at this link here and get your copy sooner than later! (Thanks.)

In the meantime, I'm getting psyched and ready for my week-long trip back to the East Coast. It'll be so great to catch up with friends in Philadelphia, DC, and New York. I know that I may be a little sad knowing that I won't be seeing Elsa again, but at the same time, I know I'll get to introduce Rocky to all my friends! (And yes, Tom and Jonathan have their own dear miniature daschund named Wendy. I can't wait to meet her!)

Elsa 1994 - 2007 (May she rest forever in peace)

Our much-beloved Basset hound Elsa died today. For those of you who knew me when I lived in New York, you know how much I doted on her. She was a beautiful dog with lots of sparkling personality to match; like her namesake Elsa Maxwell, she had the innate gift of befriending anyone, including those who claimed to dislike dogs. I cast her as herself in my not-yet-released feature film GHOSTED, so it's going to be hard for me to see her in the movie when I return to editing its final cut. As my former partner Tom said in his email, "We had to put Elsa to sleep this morning. She developed what appeared to be lung cancer, and was beginning to suffer. She was nearly blind, couldn't walk very well, and had been panting for about a week. She virtually stopped eating and had lost about 10 pounds over the course of a week. [My sister] Marcia and [her wife] Lynn took her to the vet for us--we couldn't do it. There was much crying on all our parts, but it really was time. She didn't suffer at all at the end, they gave her a sedative and off she went, very peacefully." She was thirteen years old. The picture of her above is the last time I was with her in February 2007; the one below is when she was an adorable puppy in June 1994 who bounced right into our lives and earned our great love and affection. It was so hard to leave her back in 2005 when I moved from New York to Minneapolis, so it's even harder to let her go now. It may take me yet another box of kleenex before I can talk about her without emotion in my voice. No words can convey how much I will miss her.