Coffee with a canine: Steve Hockensmith & Amy

Today's featured duo at Coffee with a Canine: Steve Hockensmith and Amy.

The author, on how Amy came to join his household:

It was fate. My daughter had been begging us for a dog for quite a while, but I’d resisted out of deference to my beloved old cat Izzy. I wasn’t going to force a 17-year-old cat to deal with a dog all of a sudden. After Izzy finally passed away last summer, I gave myself a few months to grieve. Then I gave in. We knew we wanted a small-ish dog -- we have small-ish children and a small-ish house -- so we monitored the websites of various rescue societies hoping to find a candidate of the right size. We came close a few times, but nothing ever worked out. Finally, frustrated after months of web-surfing, my wife said, “Why don’t we throw the kids in the car and just go to the pound right now?” So we drove to the SPCA facility in Oakland, started to go inside...and bumped into a volunteer taking Amy out for a walk just as we arrived. Amy was the perfect size, cute as the dickens and sweet with the kids. So...[read on]

Hockensmith, on his new e-book, My Dog Needs Surgery:

It’s a collection of mystery stories and humorous essays that I’ve written over the years. But Amy was the inspiration for the collection. She has a condition called luxating patella that affects her hind legs. Basically, her knee caps don’t like to stay in her knees, which (as you can imagine) doesn’t feel so great. It can also lead to debilitating arthritis. Luxating patella can be corrected surgically, but Amy doesn’t have the money for it and unfortunately neither do I. So the collection’s called My Dog Needs Surgery and it’s available as a 99 cent ebook via Amazon, Barnes and Noble and Smashwords. If I sell enough downloads, Amy can get her surgery sooner rather than later. Not that I’m trying to hold my dog’s health hostage to drum up sales. I’m not National Lampoon!

Steve Hockensmith is the author of Dawn of the Dreadfuls, the best-selling prequel to Pride and Prejudice and Zombies. He also writes the “Holmes on the Range” mystery series. He lives in Alameda, Calif., with a grown-up person, two non-grown-up people and a semi-grown-up dog.

Writers Read: Steve Hockensmith.

My Book, The Movie: Dreadfully Ever After.

Read--Coffee with a Canine: Steve Hockensmith and Amy.

--Marshal Zeringue