Tag Archives: Loose Dogs

Chick lit, Women’s lit, and Fiction’s Dark Arts

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moon

“It is no longer a passion hidden in my veins: it is the goddess Venus herself fastened on her prey.” — Racine

One of the odd pleasures about writing fiction is that you don’t always know what you’re doing until after you’ve done it.

There are parts of the mind (the parts that Jungian psychologist Robert Johnson refers to as the Shadow) that meddle with your fiction behind your back.

You have little or no awareness of the meddling as you write.

You’re too focused on all those conscious tasks that require your attention. The characters, the plot, your deadlines, your typos . . .

But then you re-read what you’ve done and there it is, like the smudgey remnants of an alien footprint — an alien footprint that also seems disturbingly familiar. Continue reading →

#Amediting

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garter snakes

No, these are not rattlesnakes. They are garter snakes. But you get the idea.

Dream a couple  nights ago.

Rattlesnake infestation.

But I was handling it, in typical “made sense at the time” dream logic: I was picking them up (no, not with my hands! with a stick!) and . . . putting them into books.

Large, thick books, they were, with the pages partially scooped out in the middle. Plenty heavy enough to contain a rattlesnake.

And as it happens, I’m editing Loose Dog — and one of the things I’m doing is fleshing out a couple of the characters a bit more.

Which means I’m making them more human.

Which means I’m showing a bit more of how slithery they can be.

Get into the book, you slithery character, you ;-)

Incidentally, I’m also working on the plotting.

I can show that here without the use of random nature photos, because I use stickies to help me visualize the relationship between plots and subplots.

Here’s what the book looked like a couple weeks ago.

I’d front-loaded the backstory about my protag’s relationship with her ex-fiance (blue stickies on the left). Decided that didn’t work — gave away too much too early.

Another weakness in the plot was that too much of my main counterplot (protag breaks up a dog fighting ring) was clumped at the end (orange stickies on the far right).

Here’s how it looks now.

So.

More slither.

Plot a bit more mixed up.

Progress, I think . . .

I am editing. Loose Dog.

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So I’ve got this novel, you see.

I love the concept. It’s a first person novel, narrated by a woman who is an animal control officer.

And she’s got problems.

Man problems, for starters. Her ex-fiance has shown back up in her life. And here, she thought she was completely over him.

Before you know it, she also ends up with dog problems — particularly when she stumbles on evidence of a dog fighting ring that is out of her official jurisdiction but very much on her conscience.

I first drafted Loose Dog several years ago. Shopped it to exactly one agent, who requested a full, but eventually passed on it.

I should probably have kept pushing, but instead I set it aside and wrote Libby, and a bit after that Can Job.

And you know what? That was the right decision. Because what that one agent told me is that Loose Dog was well-written but needed work on pacing. So I focused on improving my plotting, and as you can see from my Amazon reviews, plotting is one of the things readers like about my novels.

So now I’m back to Loose Dog, and my first New Year’s resolution for 2012 is to tweak it until I absolutely love it.

Get ready, world :-)

UPDATE: Out now…

You know you’re from Upstate NY When . . .

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Central new york state

Beautiful, isn’t it?

Okay, some of these kinds of forward-by-email jokes are kind of lame, but this one is spot-on — it HAD to be written by someone who actually knows rural Upstate.

Some of them really zinged me — just spot on: 4, 10, 22, 24, 36, 43, 45, 51, 61, 64.

And of course, 30. Because even after years of being gentrified by Rochester ‘burb living, I am proud of having Chenango County roots — I have a better grasp on reality for having grown up there, if I do say so myself :-)

[P.S.: a LOT of my novels are set in upstate New York! The French Emerald (free serial to read online!) starts in Rochester but zigzags all over the state–and part of the plot includes a Revolutionary-era Upstate NY mystery. Loose Dogs is set in Rochester. Dark Chemistry features a “fish out of water” dilemma when a Southern California girl gets stuck in a little Upstate NY town and guess what–ends up liking it ;) — please check them out if you enjoy novels!]

Enjoy!

1. Your idea of a traffic jam is 10 cars waiting to pass a tractor on the highway

2. “Vacation” means going to Syracuse for the weekend

3. You measure distance in hours

4. You know several people who have hit deer more than once

5. You often switch from “heat” to “A/C” in the same day

6. You stay in your house most of the summer because you aren’t used to the heat

7. You drive at 55 mph through 10 feet of snow during a raging blizzard without flinching

8. You see people wearing hunting clothes at social events

9. You install security lights on your house and garage but leave both unlocked

10. One of your neighbors constantly has bonfires

11. You carry jumper cables in your car and your girlfriend knows how to use them

12. There are 7 empty cars running in the parking lot at the supermarket at any given time

13. Your idea of a huge party is one with lots of cheap beer and some people you go to school with

14. Driving is better in the winter because the potholes are filled in with snow

15. You think sexy lingerie is silk pajamas from wal-mart

16. You know 4 seasons: almost winter, winter, cold, construction

17. It takes you 2 hours to go to the store for one item even when you’re in a rush because you have to stop and talk to everyone in town

18. At least 6 people that you see a day have beards and stains on the front of their shirt

19. Cows are just part of the scenery

20. You or someone you know has a car that sounds like a big truck and can barely make it 20 miles yet no one says anything about it.

21. At least fives times in your normal travel day you will pass or be passed by a beat-up, old ass car that has had an attempted pimping out, such as a brand new oversized spoiler on a rust covered trunk, spinning HUBCABS, or everyones favorite, the performance exhaust on a car running on barely three cylinders.

22. You know that the phrase, “Goin up ta,” applies to going north, south, east, or west, up or down in elevation, and pretty much any other way you can travel.

23. The smell of freshly spread cow manure doesn’t bother you.

24. Its perfectly normal for your life’s aspirations to be working for the county.

25. Getting “dressed up” means tucking your shirt into your jeans and putting on clean work boots.

26. Holloween costumes are always designed around a snowsuit and winter boots.

27. You appreciate the delicacy known as Croghan Bologna, and serve it at all social gatherings.

28. On the same platter as the Croghan Bologna is a selection of flavored cheese curd, which you also love.

29. You know damn well that the verizon guy didn’t walk through your town going, “can you hear me now” because reception is, at best, limited.

30. Your proud of your redneck-ness and where your from.

31. You can name everyone you graduated with.

32. You know what 4-H is.

33. You ever went to a party that was held about 20 miles down a deserted dirt road.

34. You used to drag “main.”

35. You said the ‘F’ word and your parents knew within an hour.

36. You schedule parties around the schedule of different police officers since you know which ones would bust you.

37. You never went or thought about going cow-tipping.

38. School gets canceled for a sports team going to State

39. You could never buy cigarettes cause all the store clerks knew how old you were.

40. When you did find someone old enough to buy smokes for you, you had to drive down country backroads to smoke them.

41. You never missed a Homecoming parade.

42. You still go home for Homecoming.

43. It was cool to date someone from a neighboring town.

44. You had a senior skip day.

45. The whole school went to the same party after graduation.

46. You can’t help but date a friend’s ex.

47. Your car is always filthy from the dirt roads.

48. You think that kids who ride skateboards are weird.

49. The town next to you is considered “trashy” or “snotty” when it is just like your town.

50. Getting paid minimum wage is considered a raise.

51. You refer to anyone with a house newer than 1980 as the “rich people.”

52. The people in the big city dress funny then you pick up on the cool new trend two years later.

53. You bragged to your friends because you got pipes on your truck for your birthday.

54. On Fridays, anyone you want to find can be found at Main Street or the Dairy Queen.

55. Weekend excitement involves a trip to RiteAid.

56. Even the ugly people enter beauty contests.

57. You decide to walk for exercise and 5 people pull over and ask you if you need a ride.

58. Your teachers call you by your older sibling’s name.

59. The closest “cool stores” are at least 45 miles away.

60. The local phone book has only one yellow page.

61. You leave your jacket on the back of the chair in the
cafe, and when you go back the next day, it’s still there, on the same chair.

62. You don’t signal turns because everyone knows where you’re going, anyway.

63. You call a wrong number and they supply you with the correct one.

64. You have to name six surrounding towns to explain to
people where you’re from.

65. Driving to the party on a four wheeler is quite normal.

66. The town population increases by one-third when the universities go on break.

67. When somebody says “Thats billy fucillo HUGE” you know exactly what they are talking about

68. You laugh your head off reading this because you know it’s true and then forward it to everyone in your address book, which is actually half your town.

Pitbulls & Profiling

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In a New Yorker article, Malcolm Gladwell examines how municipalities deal with the problem of aggressive dogs. Interestingly, he draws on what we’ve learned about policing of humans (what New York City has done, for example, reduce its crime rate) to make the case that banning a specific breed is the wrong way to reduce the incidence of dog bite.

The article surveys the data about what breeds of dog have been involved in fatal dog bites, and concludes that the reason pitbulls have made the news so often in the past few years is that more people own them:

The kinds of dogs that kill people change over time, because the popularity of certain breeds changes over time. The one thing that doesn’t change is the total number of the people killed by dogs. When we have more problems with pit bulls, it’s not necessarily a sign that pit bulls are more dangerous than other dogs. It could just be a sign that pit bulls have become more numerous.

But who owns these dogs? Here we get to the real crux of the issue. The strongest predictor of viciousness in a dog has far less to do with the dog, and an awful lot to do with the owner:

In about a quarter of fatal dog-bite cases, the dog owners were previously involved in illegal fighting. The dogs that bite people are, in many cases, socially isolated because their owners are socially isolated, and they are vicious because they have owners who want a vicious dog. The junk-yard German shepherd’s which looks as if it would rip your throat out and the German-shepherd guide dog are the same breed. But they are not the same dog, because they have owners with different intentions.

When I was doing research for my novel Loose Dogs — the protagonist is an animal control officer who breaks up a dog fighting ring — I was given a tour of the kennels that Rochester Animal Services use to hold stray dogs they’ve picked up. It’s not unusual for over half of these dogs to be pit bulls, or pit bull mixes.

You know what else? If these dogs — the pit bulls — aren’t claimed, they are put down — the city won’t offer a pit bull for adoption. I can’t say as I blame them. They don’t want to be in the business of offering the type of dog that attracts the wrong type of owner.

But it still breaks my heart.