If you've got any questions--
I don't know what the format of these things is.
Are we happy to try to answer that?
I got the material for it from two very diverse places.
I spent a year, about a year teaching
in a statement of profit and program type thing
in Bedford-Stuyvesant in New York.
And I got an awful lot of the medical material
from a year I spent doing some cardiovascular research on dogs
after I got out of college.
And they were experiences some nine years apart.
And I always had it in my mind when
I decided I wanted to write full medicine.
I always had it in my mind that I'd
like to do something with the animals
and that a very vibrant kind of metaphor
when you begin to think about it.
And it never got put together right for me
until that experience.
And one day, they simply fell together
and it was a gift from God type thing I suppose.
Do you develop the dogs at all?
Oh, yeah.
The dogs are about a half of the book.
The dogs go in number throughout the book from about 27
all the way up to 93.
And every one of them because of the nature of the experiments,
they're all experimented on to death.
Every one of them is killed off except number 93
who becomes a--
he's a boxer dog.
I hope that fulfills the metaphor.
But he-- nothing seems--
is an incredible dog actually because nothing
seems to bother him.
They do all kinds of things on this one dog
and he simply survives them and he shows the scars.
But his energy, and his enthusiasm,
and his desire for affection from Billy Peoples
is never diminished.
And he-- Billy Peoples at the end of the book
simply leaves the dog there and nobody knows its fate.
I couldn't kill the dog off, you know.
But there's-- the metaphor of the dogs is--
I wouldn't call it heavy handed but it's an obvious,
It's an obvious metaphor.
I think most of them have a kind of individual ones--
have kind of human characteristics from time
to time not swiftly in that but--
[INAUDIBLE QUESTION FROM AUDIENCE]
So far as I know, the first of next year.
Depends on how the blue one does.
Well, they told me an hour, and it's an hour.
Thank you all very much for coming, I appreciate it.
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