February 17, 2009 – I appreciate  feedback. Comments about my dog voice excerpt have been helpful. Explaining the sequence as a poem helped, and several people suggested the term “Two Legs” was clunky and out of sync with the rest of the verse. I agree. I’ll call him the farmer.
  As long as there is a narrator putting the story in context, it seems to me the general idea of the voice is working, although I have to polish it up, smooth it out a bit. Thinking of the dog’s voice as a visual, fast moving poem was a big breakthrough for me. I don’t have a name yet for the dog, but in this draft I am calling her Rose, as that is easy for me to picture and write about. There are other animals in the book – sheep, a steer, a rooster, goats – but none are central. I am considering inserting a coyote that the dog has encountered.
  Initially, the dog, rooster and steer talked. Then they had meetings. My editor had other ideas, and she was right. It was beginning to read like a Young Adult book. So the dog speaks through actions, not words, and uses words because that is necessary. The research into how dogs think has helped. I have to be careful to not anthromorphisize much. Some is inevitable, but I don’t believe dogs think like us, so I don’t want to fall into that trap. One thing I have become expert on – farms in blizzards.
 You know the motto of the writer – use everything, and then use it again.