THE TYPING BROKE OUT AND WE WERE HEADED TOWARD A 3-DOG NIGHT

Our First Day of Autumn 2023 edition of Let Sleeping Dogs Lie & Napping Cats Nap is typed in celebration of the season, the animals and the love we have for them. 
Who is “we”? I think you know who you “we” people are. It’s y’all 'n' us, too. (I slipped into that “y’all” in honor of all our dogs and cats and other critters. Don’t they make our hearts and lives merrier!)
That cellphone camera sure made it a lot easier for you to show off your dogs and cats, didn’t it! No more waiting at a mall parking lot photo stand to see if you fouled up the film, right? [LARRY ASIDE: I may not have seen one of those parking-lot film spots since watching a re-run of Back To The Future. Think one of ‘em is preserved at the Smithsonian? They were such a part of America! Now, back to the future of this edition.]
You may have discerned that in the opening photograph that there are three dogs. [LARRY ASIDE: That was taken last Wednesday after I got home from a routine but essential lab test. Time-after-time I’ve proven to be humanoid, just FYI.]
Most of my days are spent in an office chair near these three dogs and a cat and computer keyboard. 

There is a clicking to a computer keyboard that some souls find calming enough to surrender to the phrase: Let Sleeping Dogs Lie. 
I cite, for example, this photo from the home office of readlarrypowell.com.
These three dogs are not show dogs. They are all Dallas rescue dogs. Free dogs. The big white dog with the wonderfully tan accents is Wendy — my street-tough funspouse Martha rescued her. That large dog who, with proper lighting is brown, is Dudley the Angel, a Border Collie/Chocolate Lab mix who wandered up one Christmas season. And the smaller white dog on the bed is Porche Noel., a starving, injured and terrified dog who showed up on our front porch one Christmas. She’d found a home. That's her snoozing on our bed, er, her bed, her lawyer tells me.
In my home office, as I begin typing in my lickety-split newsroom-reporter-on-deadline-style, these older dogs will nod off. As they have done in that first photo.
I fear, of course, that my hands on the keyboard have a way of putting them to sleep. The attempts at fiction REALLY put them to sleep. And, in case you are having trouble nodding off and have turned to my prose to help you find restful slumber, here are some titles being worked on by me and my veteran office cat, William Powell (handsome boy left). He might nod off, too, now and then. 
Let’s see what we’ve got in the “needs a publisher” stage of literary product:
The Quiet Litter of the Contrary Cats. (It’s about a feline family that functions as a clever British spy team — code-named Double O Mews. [We’re working on some way to pay tribute to the actress Honor Blackman it. Bond fans will get that joke.]
A Lonely Dog on a Christmas Porch (That one’s being crafted by my personal dog, Porche Noel. She squeezed through the burglar bars on the porch gate, ate all the feral cat buffet we put out twice a day, and then was too “wide” to force her way back through the bars. She was home! That's her in her writer glasses.)
The Book of Canine Manners This is Dudley the Angel’s authentic first-person discussion of the challenges of living in a house where the dog’s manners are exquisite and the humans have challenges. We think it’ll run about 200 pages and include photos of humans, their tongues hanging out of their mouths as they fall into a recliner-induced spell of slumber. Don’t tell us you’ve never been there. (This is Texas. Sleeping Texans snore and gurgle.)
What I’ll Do As President. Wendy’s plotting this one. She has some Washington connections and has never been arrested, indicted, impeached or learned to drive.
The Dog Who Could Bark ‘Waxahachie’ Porche sees that as her science fiction title involving space travel, federal budgets and the irrational ambitions of dogs when it comes to communicating with humans.
And we’ll sort of close with a note about my Office Cat William Powell. He’s got a book working in honor of the upcoming World Series championship of the Texas Rangers. It’s called “Quick As a Cat” and explains that in all the rules of Major League Baseball, there is no rule against a cat playing catcher. Fiction? Nope. William’s on the roster in the post-season. Check it out.
Porche, in the meantime, has acquired publishing rights to that opening photo and she wants to use it on the cover of her baseball book, The Day The Home Team Wailed : It Was a Three-Dog Night.
[DEAR READERS: Send photos of the slumbering critters you love (and the animals’ bios) to [email protected] and we’ll feature them in our weekend edition of “Let Sleeping Dogs Lie and Napping Cats Nap.” If you do not send us such items, we will be forced to outline the movies we are under contract to write, i.e., The Cat Who Shaved Lassie and My Dog Found Bigfoot and Now They Are Friends. Casting is incomplete on that film. Just a hint to any of you actor-types.
— Offer Publishing Contacts by emailing [email protected] and put GIT RICH QUICK in the subject line. —