Legalese: This is a work of fiction. Any similarity to actual persons [or dogs, cats, goats, or camels], now living or dead, or actual events, is purely coincidental.

Plainspeak: I want to make it very, very, (did I mention very?) clear that none of the characters are based, even loosely, on any real person I know.

In other words, Looser Island does not exist.

Fans of The Muppet Christmas Carol may remember how Gonzo (aka Charles Dickens) begins: “The Marleys were dead to begin with. This one thing you must remember, or nothing that follows will seem wondrous.”

Here’s my version: What the Dogs Know and the related stories are works of fiction. That one thing you must remember, or nothing that follows will be fun.

This is especially important to me now that one of the islands is my home. All of the episodes of Who Laughs Last were originally written more than twenty years ago, when I knew no one. The chapters have been updated to reflect current societal issues i.e. cell phones and social media are now part of the story, problems with the ferries have been added, etc.*** But the basic storyline and characters remain exactly as they were first written.

The stories are set in the San Juan Islands and, on the Canadian side, in the Gulf Islands, each of which has been renamed for the story. There are so many marvelous islands in the archipelago, and limiting myself to just one would have been impossible. 

There have been moments that imprinted themselves on my heart, and they wound up in these stories.

For instance, several years ago, while visiting Lopez Island (before moving here permanently), I drove by a couple who were, as far as I could tell, walking their goat.

On a leash.

I know nothing about that couple - or their goat, but a story spun itself out of that single encounter. (The story of Liam and Geena - “the new hippie couple” - and their daughter Daisy, and their goat Gafr, appeared in 2022’s What the Dogs Know.)

And my spirits have been lifted by glimpses of a delivery person who sings joyously while driving around on the islands, who occasionally tosses a dog biscuit out the window at passing dogs. That, too, wound up in 2022’s What the Dogs Know. (The rest of that book has been taken down, but you can still read the first half of Chapter One introducing Missy the Delivery Gal on this website). The driver’s name isn’t “Missy” (as far as I know), there is no Hairy Horde (as far as I know), and there was no miserable childhood (as far as I know). I don’t even know if the driver likes Third Eye Blind . . .

A beautiful inn near the ferry landing on Orcas captured my fancy, and I worked its fictional owners into a chapter. In my imagination, the owners had lots of children and livestock and other jobs beyond running the inn. (Because I saw so, so many children on the grounds; and because the surrounding area includes many farms; and because by then I knew one truism about life on the islands is that almost everyone holds down multiple jobs). After I had written the stories, and after we moved to one of the islands, I discovered another beautiful inn on “my” island, run by a family with . . . lots of children and livestock and multiple jobs. The owners are now friends, and I can assure you that neither they nor the Orcas inn owners “are” the Breckenridges I invented for these pages.

Then there was the visit to San Juan Island, when I drove past a field with, incongruously, a camel.

I now know her name was Mona, may she rest in peace. Thus was “Norm” born, the cheerfully combative camel who ruined an Easter Parade. Norm shows up in Who Laughs Last, but Norm bears no resemblance to Mona, other than belonging to the same species—and the series does not take place on San Juan Island. Because . . .

. . . The Dogs of Looser Island stories are fiction.

For some fascinating background on legal disclaimers, check out the post Disclaimers: More Interesting Than You Think

*** In a couple of cases I had to change the name of a character after I met a person who bore that name!

#dogstories #ilovedogs #looserislanddogs #thedogsoflooserisland