Marion and her Matchmaking Dogs - Marion Lennox on her Oct 11 Book of the Month

I’m an unashamed animal nut.  I have been since I was knee high to a grasshopper, which was around the time I realised our battered old dog adored me.

I was born on a dairy farm.  We had serious farm dogs who stuck with my Dad and did farm stuff.  Sandy, though, was a big, weird, sandy-coloured stray, abandoned in our home paddock just after I was born.  Cows made him nervous, his size made the cows nervous, so Dad left him to us.

Sandy adored me and I adored him; simple as that.  He might be useless as a farm dog, but as a kid’s dog he was beyond price.  My Mum tells the story of putting my playpen on the back lawn and Sandy going ballistic.  She came outside to find Sandy was alerting her to a tiger snake, slithering its way to her baby. Sandy was big, clumsy, slobbery, and he won a place for all time in our family.

Then can I tell you of Buster?  My sister, aged ten, was taken to the hospital to have her teeth x-rayed.  The waiting room was packed. My sister’s appointment took forever, so she went out to the car to fetch a book.  Instead of a book, she came in bearing Buster.  

Buster had also been dumped, thrown from a moving car.  He was a scrap of a skeletal fox terrier.  He was bleeding, shivering, close to death, and my sister hugged him and wept..   C… c… can we keep him, Mum?

Every eye in the waiting room was on Mum and of course she caved.  Buster stayed with us for fifteen years.  He only had to shiver and he had my family at his beck and call, but he gave back love in spades.  Even Dad loved him, though he wasn’t all that great with cows, either.

Animals have always been a part of my life and a part of my writing.  As I write this, Mitzi, my schnauzer, is at my feet.  She and my cat supervise my writing, ensuring I don’t spend too long without exercise.  Sometimes my cat even helps my writing.   He hops on my keyboard and lo, I have a page.

Ffffffffffffffffggggggggggggggghhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhjttttttttttt44444444444444…

It’s great.  You can fix a bad page, but you can’t fix a blank page, right?

Then, when I finish writing for the day, Mitzi and I head for the lake, the hills, the beach, and we walk our legs off and plan our next day’s plot.

So finally, with all this animal editorial input behind me, I decided to write a series based on dogs.  My Banksia Bay books consist of four romances so far:

Abby and the Bachelor Cop
Misty and the Single Dad
Nikki and the Lone Wolf
Mardie and the City Surgeon

They have a theme.  Banksia Bay’s Dog Shelter.  A van full of stray dogs.  A traffic accident, dogs scattering to the four winds.  Each dog ending up in the midst of a romance.

My Banksia Bay dogs are a weird mix of all the dogs I’ve known and loved.  They all deserve fabulous homes, which means a man and a woman, some loving, some laughter, and a deeply satisfying happy-ever-after.  

I hope you agree that I’ve given my strays – Kleppy, Ketchup, Horse and Bessie - heroes and heroines with love and laughter enough to deserve them.   Write to me at www.marionlennox.com and tell me what you think.

By the way, I haven’t yet decided just how many dogs were in my van.  Do you want more?

Nikki and the Lone Wolf / Mardie and the City Surgeon by Marion Lennox is out now!