Sausage and bacon, and Stardogs

So I am peacefully at my desk in the pallid hours of pre-dawn, wrestling with the intricacies of HTML (we are not friends) getting Stardogs
ready. Relief in the shape of a tinkling telephone is seized with unseemly haste. "Yes, what time do you want to go," I say before the other has managed to get a word out. I don't need a lot of leading astray, do I? This haste has its downsides. Last time was some bloke from the Red Cross. But this time it is Norm... but he doesn't want to go diving. "What sex is your pig?" he asks.

Really. The sort of personal questions people ask me at 6.30 AM. "I haven't got a pig. And I don't really care what sex the pig I haven't got is."

"You weren't home last night. I put one in your sty. I want to bring a second, but the same sex."

"Oh. Well, I'll go and have a look call you back."

Now there is a fine art to sexing piglets. It's not like sexing chicks which is arcane and involves strange invocations. It just involves looking at the undercarriage of the pig. A process, which if the pig will simply stand still and allow to you to look at the nether underquarters is not painful, life-threatening or even vastly undignified. If the piglet is going run wee wee wee squeaking and shrieking the moment it sees you, and hiding its nether end in the straw in the piggyhouse, and leaving for other parts when you crawl in there... it is all of those things. And noisy sweaty chase and fraught with... well, wee wee wee...

Sausage is a boy. So is his brother, Bacon. They both put their heads and entire forequarters into the pig-feeding drum and you can examine this fact to your heart's content and your ears assault (they fight over who is getting most. VERY noisily. They eat like... pigs. That's it pigs. Male pigs. Boaring their way in).

The two little pigs have a house of corrugated iron. Very Australian :-).

Stardogs - my first adult independent new release as an e-book (paper will follow. It all takes a little time) is finally up on Amazon. Given a small period of the non-intervention of Finagle, Murphy and all my normal disasters, Smashwords will be next, followed by Createspace. I'm hoping this model - which brings me a far far larger share of what you pay for that book 70% instead of 20% will help to pay for life's little essentials. I mean self-sufficiency is all very well, but you see what happens when I don't get coffee? And if readers are good enough to the coffee deprived to buy via the icon... I get another few percent of the purchase price from Amazon. It doesn't cost you any more.