I am dog-sitting this week -three little dogs – two dachshunds and a curly-haired Heinz 57. I’m not really a little dog guy, but well, I like dogs and I’m missing not having one. It’s not practical right now, so I am enjoying ‘borrowing’ their affection for a while. They started very doubtful, but like most dogs have decided they love me… which is all very well expect they also therefore must sit on me. And having very short legs, demand to be picked up. Because they’re small dogs and small dogs seem to have their ‘intruder’ setting on 11 – they constantly jump off to bark – because this is town. And then we repeat the process.

I think their largest reason for loving me is that I take them on walks on the beach. No, really, it is not an attempt to sandpaper their undercarriage, it just looks that way. However, getting them there involves three leads. Three LONG leads. And three hyper-excited small dogs. This ends in disaster with depressing frequency – one even managed between my legs, over the fluffy one, round the other and then under its own legs, while the other two raced in opposite directions around me before attempting to chase off a much bigger dog. All this to a chorus of yips and barks and squeaks in fifty different sharps and flats.

The beach of course is source of great delight, full of new washed-smelly delights, including a puffer fish which would have killed them, fragrant remains of old sea-birds, and those ephemeral tokens of the desire to continue the species, just not quite yet. There are the alluring scents of other dogs and the siren smell-call of wallaby beyond the marram-grass. I have a need for my eyes on the little rat-bags the whole time, but despite the stress of keeping them out trouble and from killing stray rottweilers — by getting stuck in their throats — they revel so in it that I keep doing it.

It is remarkably like writing at the moment. I have in hand two dachshunds and a fair number of other ‘leads’ although only two point of view ones. And I think they’re having fun. They’re certainly excitable, noisy and taking on things far bigger than themselves and running loops around me. Oh yeah, I have been avoiding pufferfish, but I think they rolled in the dead sea-bird. I’m avoiding the other things but keep calling them back from their desire to chase alluring hints of distant stories.

And the leads… the leads do get tangled. That, if I want the story to move forward, instead of dissolving into a chaotic mess in which after doing a sort of demented maypole imitation I fall over, squashing at least one participant, and wrecking the entire adventure requires that I… pull that lead through and make sure it attaches only to one character. Really, there’s not a lot to it. Each point of view very clearly establishes within the first line whose point of view it is. It does not include information from the other point of view until after the scene break *** and then clearly indicate that we have changed point of view. Don’t switch too often or then simply become totally twisted in the reader’s mind. These are my rules anyway, along with not ‘jumping back’ to far with the scene change unless the other POV character is not involved, or you wish to establish that the two POV characters are interpreting the scene completely differently.

You may be able to head hop and break all these precepts. All I can say is I cannot.

Goodnight from me and the triple heads of Cerberus lapdogus.