My first novel, The Dogcatcher, is now available from DarkWinter Press. It’s an occult horror/dark comedy about a municipal animal-control officer whose Upstate New York community is being terrorized by a creature in the woods. Here’s a (spoiler-free) behind-the-scenes account of the project’s creative inception and development; how it’s responsible for my being blackballed in Hollywood; how the coronavirus pandemic challenged and ultimately elevated the story’s thematic ambitions; and how these characters hounded my imagination—forgive the pun—for no fewer than fourteen years.
The Dogcatcher is on sale in paperback and Kindle formats via Amazon.
In the spring of 2007, I came home from L.A. for a week to attend my sister’s graduation at Cornell University. My first occasion to sojourn in the Finger Lakes region, I took the opportunity to stay in Downtown Ithaca, tour the Cornell campus, visit Buttermilk Falls State Park. I was completely taken with the area’s scenic beauty and thought it would make the perfect location for a screenplay. Only trouble was, all I had was a setting in search of a story.
CUT TO: TWO YEARS LATER
Binge-watching wasn’t yet an institutionalized practice, but DVD-by-mail was surging, and my wife and I were, as such, working our way through The X-Files (1993–2002) from the beginning. Though I have ethical reservations about Chris Carter’s hugely popular sci-fi series, I admired the creative fecundity of its monster-of-the-week procedural format, which allowed for the protagonists, his-and-her FBI agents Mulder and Scully, to investigate purported attacks by mutants and shapeshifters in every corner of the United States, from bustling cities to backwater burgs: the Jersey Devil in Atlantic City (“The Jersey Devil”); a wolf-creature in Browning, Montana (“Shapes”); a prehistoric plesiosaur in Millikan, Georgia (“Quagmire”); El Chupacabra in Fresno, California (“El Mundo Gira”); the Mothman in Leon County, Florida (“Detour”); a giant praying mantis in Oak Brook, Illinois (“Folie à Deux”); a human bat in Burley, Idaho (“Patience”).
But the very premise of The X-Files stipulated that merely two underfunded federal agents, out of approximately 35,000 at the Bureau, were appropriated to investigate such anomalous urban legends. I wondered: If an average American town found itself bedeviled by a predatory cryptid—in real life, I mean—would the FBI really be the first responders? Doubtful. But who would? The county police? The National Guard? If, say, a sasquatch went on a rampage, which regional public office would be the most well-equipped to deal with it…?
That’s when it occurred to me: Animal Control.
And when I considered all the cultural associations we have with the word dogcatcher—“You couldn’t get elected dogcatcher in this town”—I knew I had my hero: a civil servant who is the butt of everyone’s easy jokes, but whose specialized skills and tools and, ultimately, compassion are what save the day.
But it was, to be sure, a hell of a long road from that moment of inspiration to this:
When the basic concept was first devised, I wrote a 20-page story treatment for an early iteration of The Dogcatcher, dated August 25, 2009. That same summer, I signed with new literary managers, who immediately wanted a summary of all the projects I’d been working on. Among other synopses and screenplays, I sent them the Dogcatcher treatment.
They hated it. They argued against the viability of mixing horror and humor, this despite a long precedent for such an incongruous tonal marriage in commercially successful and culturally influential movies the likes of An American Werewolf in London (1981), Ghostbusters (1984), Gremlins (1984), The Lost Boys (1987), Tremors (1990), Scream (1996), and Shaun of the Dead (2004), to say nothing of then–It Girl Megan Fox’s just-released succubus satire Jennifer’s Body (2009). (I knew better than to cite seventy-year-old antecedents such as The Cat and the Canary and Hold That Ghost; Hollywood execs have little awareness of films that predate their own lifetimes.) I was passionate about The Dogcatcher, but it was only one of several prospective projects I was ready to develop, so, on the advice of my new management, I put it in a drawer and moved on to other things.
CUT TO: TWO YEARS LATER
In 2011, a colleague and close friend, Mike, was establishing himself as a versatile editor of short films, features, documentaries, DVD featurettes, and proof-of-concept reels. He was eager to move into directing. Over lunch on the Universal backlot one afternoon, he asked me, “Whatever happened to that project you told me about—The Dogcatcher?” I explained it was languishing in a drawer. He asked if I might take the first act of the story and write it as a self-contained short-film script. He would shoot it, we’d shop it around, and—who knows—maybe we could secure funding to do it as a feature-length film? Sounded great!
CUT TO: TWO YEARS LATER
By 2013, I’d been through several drafts of the Dogcatcher short, and we were no closer to rolling cameras on the project. To make a long story short (which has, admittedly, never been my specialty), both of us were under increasing pressure, both professionally and personally, at that point in our lives. Hollywood had never really rebounded from the 2008 Writers Guild strike (still hasn’t); it had only morphed into the IP–industrial complex, nigh exclusively devoted to catering to nostalgic Xers and mainstreaming geek culture.
As such, selling original material or setting up projects without preexisting brand awareness had become all but impossible. The old “script,” if you’ll forgive the hackneyed metaphor, had been thrown out. The industry was operating by a new set of rules that had yet to be codified. Everyone—and this includes managers and agents—was struggling to adapt to the new landscape, which was somehow even less creatively hospitable than the old one.
A storyboarded sequence from the “Dogcatcher” short film that was not included in the novel 
A storyboarded sequence from the “Dogcatcher” short film that was not included in the novel 
A storyboarded sequence from the “Dogcatcher” short film that was not included in the novel 
A storyboarded sequence from the “Dogcatcher” short film that was not included in the novel 
A storyboarded sequence from the “Dogcatcher” short film that was not included in the novel 
A storyboarded sequence from the “Dogcatcher” short film that was not included in the novel 
A storyboarded sequence from the “Dogcatcher” short film that was not included in the novel 
A storyboarded sequence from the “Dogcatcher” short film that was not included in the novel
That was not where two creatives wanted to find themselves in their mid-30s. Mike and I had met a decade earlier, working together in the postproduction department of an indie film that was shooting up in the redwoods of Marin County. In the intervening decade, we’d networked, honed our craft, and paid our dues… but both our careers had stalled.
Meanwhile, we’re watching everyone we grew up with back home climbing the corporate ladder, having kids, buying homes… and we were no further along professionally for all our initiative and effort and sacrifice. Tempers eventually flared… and the project collapsed. So did the friendship. I was devastated on multiple fronts.
Determined to salvage something from the wreckage, I figured I would just write the rest of the script, since I already had a first act, and shop the project to prodcos and the studios through my representation. (Again: I did not fully appreciate how seismically the industry’s protocols and priorities had shifted by then.) However, my managers and agents didn’t care for the finished screenplay any more than they’d responded to the initial treatment four years earlier, and they obstinately refused to take the project out to the town.
I was furious. My relationship with them, which had already been under severe strain for at least a year, was now irreversibly poisoned. By 2014, I had permanently—and rather acrimoniously—parted ways with my representation, and immediately thereafter found myself blackballed in the industry. Overnight, my screenwriting career was finished.
Picking up the pieces of a shattered career is not easy, especially on the downslope to middle age. Despite everything, I was still passionate about storytelling, but I had grown so sick of taking notes (read: marching orders) from know-nothing managers, producers, and development execs, producing draft after draft after draft for months on end, only to lose the fickle producer’s attention or for my management to decline at the eleventh hour to take the project to the spec marketplace. I reasoned if I made the switch from screenwriter to novelist, at least I’d be able to write what I wanted to write, the way I thought it should be written. As horror-movie maestro John Carpenter once bluntly put it:
“I’m here for a short period of time on this earth, and, by God, I want to do it the way I want to do it. And it may not be what you like and what you want, but fuck you.”
Robert Rodriguez, “John Carpenter,” The Director’s Chair, season 1, episode 1, directed by Robert Rodriguez, aired May 10, 2014, 44 min.
So, over the next five years, I wrote a few manuscripts—a zombie outbreak–cum–prison break novel, then a magical-realism novella—and got zero traction on either. Like the film industry, publishing had its own tricky barriers to entry, I discovered. But what else could I do save keep trying? By 2019, I’d started thinking about The Dogcatcher again, wondering if there wasn’t a way to perhaps do it as a novel…
It wasn’t exactly a no-brainer. The original screenplay had been written in the spirit of a slapstick buddy comedy: What if Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Seth Rogen were dogcatchers? That sort of thing. Trouble was, banana-peel humor, which is all about timing—through performance and editing—thrives in cinema but can’t credibly be made to work in literature. So, the whole thing, save the fundamental premise, was going to have to be reconceptualized. I was determined to do it.
That wasn’t the case with most of the other projects I’d developed. I had reams of old scripts, treatments, and story ideas from my screenwriting days I thought I might turn into novels at some point, but the fact was, I’d lost interest in most of them. As Mad Max and Witches of Eastwick director George Miller once reflected:
“There are many stories of which I was very passionate, and I have screenplays half-written, or fully written, that I was really, really keen on. But as time goes on, you finally ask yourself the question, Do you really want to do it? Does it feel relevant to you? And it’s interesting, the ones that fade away.”
Kyle Buchanan, Blood, Sweat & Chrome: The Wild and True Story of “Mad Max: Fury Road” (New York: William Morrow, 2022), 57
The Dogcatcher was an outlier—a story that had never, in the decade since it was conceived, loosened its leash on my imagination. The concept was creatively fertile and commercially viable, and I knew the precise characterizations of the two heroes, Frank and Waff, as well as the particular dynamic of their odd-couple friendship in my soul. Those elements had never changed, through each successive iteration of this project: the treatment, the short-film script, the feature-length screenplay, and now the novel. They were my North Star. It was everything else I only had to now figure out…
On New Year’s Eve of 2019, I sank my last drink of the season, then resolved to spend the winter breaking the back of the project. I used the opportunity to dramatically restructure the plot. The earlier screenplay featured the cryptid crisis getting out of hand at the first act break—around page 25—because I’d felt pressure to raise the stakes maximally as early as possible, given how BIG movies had become with the preeminence of superhero cinema. This time, I’d tell the kind of story I respond to: a slow burn, one that’s more interested in setting up the community and its ongoing dramas before all hell breaks loose.
In other words: The reader should be fully invested in the characters. That a monster at some point shows up to complicate matters only sweetens the deal.
So, I studied the structure of Jaws, and decided the first half of the story would have our protagonists reacting to a series of deadly wildlife attacks in and around town, and the second half would be more of a proactive hunt for the mysterious predator. The stakes would raise—and the plot would morph—at the Midpoint, not the Break into Two. That gave me plenty of narrative real estate to properly set up the principal and subordinate characters, their relationships, their emotional arcs—all of which would be necessary since I couldn’t rely on sight gags to carry the story.
That’s how I spent the winter of 2020: studying antecedents in my genre, outlining with index cards, refining the plot and character arcs—all the left-brain strategic stuff. My plan was to “go to pages,” to use screenwriter’s parlance for officially commencing a first draft, on Monday, March 16, 2020. That was the week I would both end my alcohol fast—yay, St. Paddy’s!—and type “Chapter One.”
Well, the world certainly went to the dogs that week, though not the way I’d intended.
I found it very hard to work The Dogcatcher that spring, preferring instead to write a series of introspective essays on this blog—“Forget It, Jake, It’s Tinseltown,” “What Comes Next,” “The End: Lessons for Storytellers from the Trump Saga”—as a way of trying to make sense of all the sociopolitical upheaval of that miserable summer. The Dogcatcher, a lightweight horror/comedy, seemed so inconsequential and out of touch with everything happening on the news and, in some instances, out my window: the COVID deaths; the BLM protests; the MAGA motorcycle caravans. And by the time I was ready to turn my attention back to the project, my wife and I had moved from our 20-year home of Los Angeles to our hometown of New York. Another unexpected plot twist.
Back in the Bronx—not that far, as the crow flies, from the Fingers Lakes setting of my story—I was able to step back from the recent social and political turmoil and begin, in some rudimentary way, to process it. And when I resumed work on the manuscript, I was surprised to find how often the events of the past year were asserting themselves, against my preconceived notions, into the narrative. Though the premise was conceived long before 2020, and the novel outlined immediately prior to the pandemic, the story seemed to want to exist in post-COVID world.
I obliged. One of the wisest things a writer can do, sometimes, is to refrain from imposing his will on the narrative, and instead be open to what the story wants for itself. Sometimes even a proudly disciplined “plotter” like myself has to let the right hemisphere of the brain take over—to trust in my creative intuition—and allow the alchemical part of the artistic process to do its thing. I do all my intellectualizing in the outlining phase, and then I get to confidently feel my way through the story as I draft it. (I resume the applied analytics once it comes time to edit.)
Since virtually all The Dogcatcher’s main characters work in either local government or academia—the animal-control officer (the hero), the animal-care technician (his sidekick), the mayor (his father), the chief of staff at City Hall (his brother), the head of HR at City Hall (his sister-in-law), and the university’s resident forensic veterinarian consulting on the case (his romantic interest)—it became impossible, even arguably irresponsible, for the story to not have something to say about the role of public institutions and credentialed expertise in an emergency, both of which were under assault from no less than the podium in the White House Briefing Room at the time. Rather than being rendered irrelevant by the current events that coincided with its writing, The Dogcatcher actively engaged in real-time conversation with those sociopolitical happenings.
Maybe that was the right call and maybe it wasn’t. Time will tell. All I know is this: If the novel had insisted on existing in an apolitical or ahistorical reality, it would’ve just been a “creature feature” about a monster on the loose. And maybe that alone would’ve been enough to entertain readers, but it wouldn’t have been sufficient to sustain my interest writing it for the two-plus years it took to bring to fruition. To be sure, I wanted it to be fun—a spiritual successor to the kinds of horror/comedies that had directly inspired me as a young adult—but I also insisted it reflect the prosocial values I’ve promoted on this blog the past many years.
In that way, The Dogcatcher was written in response to so many of the pernicious narrative tropes I’ve come to find so vexing. I staunchly refuse to put yet one more story out into the world valorizing a solitary tough-guy antihero who knows better than all the short-sighted plebians in his orbit that have somehow failed to heed the warning signs only he has the perspicacity to see, who then has to step in and save those everyday dummies from themselves. Fuck that shit.
Animal Control Officer Frank Antony, our titular hero, is a gentle, compassionate man who considers himself but a member of the community, not its go-it-alone guardian angel. Refusing to conform to either of our favorite reductive masculine archetypes, Frank is neither a “highly skilled specialist” nor a “middle-aged manboy.” He’s “merely” a competent professional—an honorable public servant doing the best he can with what he’s been handed. Throughout the story, he works in nonviolent—though not always noncontentious—cooperation with other officials and academics, all of whom share a good-faith interest in resolving the crisis du jour. No one is smarter or more capable than anyone else in this story. Instead, they pool their intellect and combine their talents in pursuit of a positive outcome for all—even the carnivorous cryptid at large.
That’s my kind of hero. And The Dogcatcher is my kind of novel: equal parts occult horror, buddy comedy, family melodrama, love story, and community dramedy (the city of Cornault draws inspiration from both Ithaca, New York, and Stars Hollow, Connecticut). It’s wholly representative, for better or worse, of my creative sensibilities and idiosyncrasies. As such, it was consciously conceived as a rebuke to recent trends in supernatural fiction, in which cathartic storytelling has been supplanted by mythic worldbuilding.
As I’d been trained to understand it in my 20s by a mentor, a screenwriter who’d been staffed on Buffy during its first two seasons, a story predicated on a magical conceit isn’t about that conceit. Rather, the “magic” that animates the story is valuable only insofar as it gives us insight into human nature we wouldn’t otherwise have if not for the storyteller’s creativity. This is true of ghost stories from A Christmas Carol to Poltergeist, teen-vampire trailblazers The Lost Boys and Buffy the Vampire Slayer, demonic thrillers like Rosemary’s Baby and The Exorcist, and even the alternate-reality scenarios of Sliding Doors and The Midnight Library, or the time loop of Groundhog Day. In all of those instances, the “magic” that allows for the story to happen is both explicitly defined and limited in scope.
In other words: The author sets the rules… and then plays by those rules. And, ideally, has some fuckin’ fun! This is magic, after all!
Alas, too many contemporary storytellers refuse to be restricted by such old-school precepts. I mean, if you’re dealing with the supernatural, then anything goes, right? In series like A Discovery of Witches (both the novels by Deborah Harkness and their TV counterparts) and the stultifyingly dreary Mayfair Witches (AMC’s recent adaptation of Anne Rice’s literary trilogy), the magical conceit isn’t there to serve the characters, but rather the characters are in service to the conceit.
Narratives like those are composed of scene after scene after shapeless scene—almost exclusively in needlessly underlit rooms where only the dust motes show any sign of life—in which the characters talk staidly about being witches/vampires. Or think about being witches/vampires. Or brood about being witches/vampires. Or ponder obliquely defined, puzzle-box prophecies about their occultic heritage as witches/vampires. They alone carry the melancholic burden of a mystical birthright that makes them party to a supernatural coven hiding in plain sight—one that none of us blissfully ignorant “normals” have managed to notice! Christ, it would be insulting if it wasn’t so goddamn boring.
The characters in such “stories” have no lives, no interests, no responsibilities, no relationships, no preoccupations outside of being immortals. They have nothing else to do with their (unlimited) time but talk in circles about subjects bountiful in Gothic portent yet maddeningly short on specifics that might actually elucidate or advance the plot in some meaningful way. And they certainly have no sense of humor about any of it! It’s all. So. Gravely. Serious.
Contrast that with Rice’s Interview with the Vampire, in which Louis and Lestat at least attended soirées and operas. They’d argue about household responsibilities, and how to raise their daughter. And Lestat, if not Louis, wasn’t without humor about their immortality (“Life without me would be even more unbearable!”). They didn’t sit on some secretive vampiric council where all anyone ever talked about was being a vampire. (If anything, anytime Louis broached the subject, Lestat just as soon shut it down, preferring to revel in the pleasures of eternal life over waxing existential about it.) Shit like Discovery and Mayfair, by comparison, is absolutely ponderous, to say nothing of pointless—the kind of thing What We Do in the Shadows lampoons so brilliantly and laugh-out-loud hilariously.
I acknowledge there’s a devoted audience for self-serious, mythopoeic urban fantasy, but it ain’t me. I ache for street-level, one-and-done stories, and for supernatural fiction in which the magic is accessibly straightforward, not purposefully Delphic—where it’s the seasoning, not the meal. The Dogcatcher is not “Book One of the Animal Control Chronicles.” Rather, it’s just one book—the one and only book about these characters and the strange events that happen over a five-day period in the fictional-but-not-fantastical Finger Lakes community of Cornault, New York.
Such is the type of story to which I responded so powerfully as a kid: a standalone supernatural fantasy that’s less concerned with what happens than who it happens to, and that doesn’t take its own speculative premise too seriously—that doesn’t mistake perpetual sullen angst for genuine emotional depth. Ghostbusters and The Lost Boys and The Witches of Eastwick and Teen Wolf (the Michael J. Fox original, I mean) all had as strong a sense of humor as they did the uncanny. Hell, Fox Mulder may’ve been a paranoid conspiracy theorist, but even he wasn’t above playfully poking fun at his work and himself.
Where have those kinds of contained genre stories and emotionally relatable characters gone, I wonder? I recall the summer I was sixteen, when Buffy the Vampire Slayer opened in 1992, I caught sight of this poster in the subway—
—and thought, “That’s the cleverest thing I’ve ever heard of!” Just off the one-sheet, I totally got the mix of adolescent humor, occult horror, and comic-book action the movie was going for. But it was written off as idiotic, not clever, owed to its silly title and premise. (As if it weren’t in on its own joke.) It would take at least another half-dozen years before the celebrated TV reboot fortified Buffy’s place in the cultural canon. I know how Buffy must’ve felt! The Dogcatcher has definitely drawn more than its share of blank faces when I’ve pitched it over the years…
But Suzanne Craig-Whytock of DarkWinter Press “got” this project from the get-go. She understood exactly what I was going for, shared my enthusiasm for the story, and helped make it the best version of itself. It took fourteen years, but the project finally found its “forever home.”
And as fate would have it, my old friend Mike—the very first person to see the narrative potential of The Dogcatcher—reached out to me a few months ago, quite out of the blue. We picked up right where we’d left off a decade earlier; our bond is as deep and as strong as it ever was. So’s our creative partnership, which has resumed rather fruitfully.
It’s hard to put into words how fitting that is. Not only because this project, which I salvaged from the ashes of our friendship and my career, should come full circle just as Mike and I came back into one another’s lives, but because, at its heart, The Dogcatcher is about a pair of “hetero lifemates” who bicker endlessly as a (juvenile) way of expressing their mutual affection, and who’ve stood steadfastly by one another when their families and even their communities didn’t support or understand them. As it dramatizes their trajectory from zeroes to heroes, the story makes an impassioned plea to not poison the years ahead with animus over the mistakes and misunderstandings of the years behind. Animals don’t live in the past, and neither should we. We can choose forgiveness. We can all find our way home.
But, to be certain, The Dogcatcher also has its share of dismembered limbs and spilled viscera, if you’re into that kind of thing! And really: Who isn’t up for a good monster yarn every now and again, especially at Halloween?
In that sense, as much as it is a fangs-on-flesh thriller, The Dogcatcher is an earnest, aspirational fantasy—what the kids today call “cringe.” So be it. As long as it’s the kind of project my former literary managers would’ve advised against writing, that’s good enough for me. Like I said: It’s my kind of story. Here’s hoping it’s your kind of story, too.
The Dogcatcher is available in paperback and Kindle formats from Amazon. If you do happen to read the novel, you would have my everlasting gratitude were you to leave a starred review on Amazon and/or Goodreads. (And in the event the book ain’t your cuppa tea—I get that—please know I’d rather have a lukewarm two-star review than no review at all, so critical candor is preferable to polite silence. One of the great benefits of my tour of duty in the Hollywood trenches is that my personal feelings are entirely impervious to criticism of my work, so be assured I will not obsess vengefully over any bad reviews like the late Apollo Creed compulsively rereading his hate mail!)
Only one more day.:-) Congratulations on tomorrow’s release of The Dogcatcher. I have no doubt it’ll be witty and action-filled and that everyone’s gonna love it!
Thanks, Vera! You know, we can only write the kinds of stories we would like to read — and hope others respond to them. Given the long road The Dogcatcher and I took together, to have gotten to this point is the victory. If the book is favorably received, that’s wonderful — but it’s just a bonus. I got where I’ve been trying so hard to go, and that’s what I celebrate today. Thanks for being the first to join the party!
Mazel tov on getting your book published!
Another mazel tov on getting to tell your story YOUR way. Good or bad, it represents your vision and yours alone. You know better than I do how important that is
I just ordered it. It looks like the sort of book I’d like even if I didn’t know the author
You said this isn’t planned as the start of a series. If you like the reception and/or get another idea in this vein though, would you write a sequel?
And who knows, maybe someone in Hollywood will want to make this book into a movie…
Aw, thanks for that, Dell. That means a lot coming from you, given how supportive you’ve always been of this blog and my work.
Indeed, this is the story — and the book — I wanted it to be. That John Carpenter quote says it all. Mainstream success is nice — I imagine — but it doesn’t hold a candle to creative autonomy. I’d take the latter over the former any day.
And thanks for ordering a copy! I truly hope you enjoy it. I’m certain you will see a lot of the themes and notions we’ve discussed here over the years reflected in the story.
Much like The X-Files, there is no shortage of cryptids I could have this character come into conflict with. But the problem with a Dogcatcher sequel — and it’s a problem that afflicts many sequels — is that there’s nowhere left to take these characters emotionally because the backstory has all been used up. You will see when you read it that every main character has a fully fleshed-out backstory that is directly relevant to their emotional arc. By the end, all the backstories have been aired, and all the characters — the ones that survive, that is! — have completed their transformational arcs.
I would never close the possibility of a sequel or spinoff of some kind — inspiration can only flow through an open mind — but I think it’s unlikely I’ll ever have anything more to say about these characters. (Maybe I’ll do a short story about one of them, if the novel proves popular enough.) Creative considerations notwithstanding, I also have a much better sense now of how much work goes into conceiving, outlining, writing, revising, editing, and formatting a project like this. It’s absolutely unholy! When I hold that 300-page block of pages in my hand, I can’t quite reconcile how much time and attention went into producing it (and that’s not even taking into consideration this particular project’s earlier permutations).
Given that expenditure of resources, I’d rather invest my creative energies into new projects. A more commercially savvy author would be so happy to have a franchisable character/concept, but that’s not how I wish to spend my creative capital. I have to invest my time and attention judiciously. If I’m lucky enough to live, say, another thirty years, I’ll probably be one of those authors with only half a dozen titles on my bibliography. And I have too much to say about other subjects to linger in the same storyworld for years on end. But…
If you’d asked me this past spring if I would have a book published this year, I would have assured you of the 0.0% chance of that. So, who knows what the future will bring.
As for Hollywood: That institution appears to be on the verge of collapse. We’ll see if a new system emerges from its ashes… or if the same old dysfunction persists. Either way, conversations are underway with some of my contacts there…
For those unaware, an original short story by dellstories will be featured in the forthcoming release Mighty: An Anthology of Disabled Superheroes, edited by Emily Gillespie and Jennifer Rossman, available in both paperback and eBook.
You could always take your own advice, and completely change the structure, like Alien and Aliens
But one advantage of creative autonomy is that YOU get to choose when the story is finished. You do not have to stretch it out beyond its useful life
You said : (T)he creative mandate for any sequel, prequel, or spinoff, Diana, should be the same as the one for any story period: Is there a premise here that justifies its own narrative?
And you and you alone get to decide that
–
Thank you for boosting Mighty: An Anthology of Disabled Superheroes, and thank you again for generously agreeing to beta-read it pre-publishing
One reason I especially wanted your feedback is because you are NOT a fan of the superhero genre in general. I wanted that outside view. Most of my other beta-readers were superhero fans
Again, congrats!
I’ve sometimes thought it might be fun to take one or more of the characters from The Dogcatcher and feature them in another story of an entirely different genre, much the way I suggested would’ve been a more interesting direction for the Scream series to take: Maybe Sidney could’ve been the protagonist of a romcom, or Gale a political thriller, or Dewey a buddy-cop comedy? You know? Something like that could potentially interest me.
I will say, one of the elements from this story has already appeared in two other pieces of (as yet unpublished) fiction I’ve written. That Out of the Bottle novella I referenced above (which is intended to be part of a collection of short fiction) is about a 12-year-old boy in 1988 who orders a pair of “X-ray specs” from a comic-book advertisement, and through an act of magic, they become functional. At the coda of the story, we meet him again, aged 20, when he returns to the town where those strange events occurred. He runs into someone he used to know, and when she asks him where he lives, he tells her he’s upstate at Cornault University. And that was written prior to the Dogcatcher novel (though I already knew the name of the city from having previously developed the project as a screenplay).
And in my WIP, The Lost Boys of the Bronx, the father of one of the titular boys is an economics professor at Cornault University’s “satellite campus” in New Rochelle. So, it’s possible that Cornault could become my Castle Rock — a setting, partial setting, or place that is referenced across many unrelated pieces of fiction. You’ll see when you read the book that I went out of my way to make it feel like a very lived-in place, populated with all sorts of characters that are involved in their own lives, businesses, and personal affairs, much the way Stephen King developed Derry with geographical and cultural specificity in It. Even though Cornault is only referenced in Spex and The Lost Boys of the Bronx, I could definitely see myself revisiting the city in another story someday.
As for superhero fiction: That’s obviously a topic I’ve covered in many, many other essays on this blog. I would say the post that most accurately reflects my feelings on superheroes is “Superman IV at 35.” I just very firmly believe they were meant to be simple children’s entertainment, and that we’ve kind of irreversibly corrupted those characters and stories for the most part. I think Adam West’s Batman series and Dick Donner’s Superman: The Movie are the finest screen adaptations of comic books ever produced — and I don’t just say that because they were the first things I saw as a five-year-old. I truly believe that series and that movie got it exactly right. For me, West will always be the best Batman, and Christopher Reeve the definitive Superman. And I keep a special place in my heart for Lynda Carter’s Wonder Woman and Bill Bixby/Lou Ferrigno’s Hulk — and even Nicholas Hammond’s Spider-Man and Jackson Bostwick’s Captain Marvel. And of course I adored Super Friends and Spider-Man and His Amazing Friends. Everything beyond that, though — and to some extent that even includes Tim Burton’s Batman — leads us down a road I find very problematic.
That said, the superhero as a mythic archetype resonates with audiences for a reason. There have always been superhero stories, going all the way back to the Epic of Gilgamesh. Those stories have endured because they resonate, and they have something to teach us about being human. Batman and Superman and Wolverine, et al., have nothing left to teach us. To the extent that they inspired the imagination of 20th-century children, they were useful and valuable, but those characters and concepts have been overexploited to the point of creative depletion. They exist now solely to sell merchandise. Furthermore, they represent outmoded values: Tony Stark and Bruce Wayne are literally heroic technocapitalists! It’s time to retire them and reinvent the superhero for this unprecedented new era. Based on the one story in Mighty I’ve thus far read — yours — that project’s creative impetus was to take the superheroic archetype and tell new stories that challenge cultural preconceptions rather than encourage nostalgic yearning. That I have no problem with.
Thanks for the congratulations, Dell! Back atcha, bud! I love that we have so much tangible creativity to celebrate this coming holiday season!
Great timing for the release, Sean. I bet you’re thrilled to have your debut novel (almost) out. Best of luck with this!
I’m overjoyed, Jacqui — thank you! And yes, Suzanne at DarkWinter and I both agreed this book should be available for the Halloween season — not just because it’s a monster story, but because it is specifically set in the autumn! I’ve always loved Halloween, and I’m excited to have my very own scary story available for this coming spooky season! Thanks so much for your support!
It was wonderful to read about this book’s journey and gain some insights into your thoughts behind it. I’m eager to read it, Sean. I should have it finished and reviewed for my October 2 post. 🙂 Congrats again on the accomplishment. Now I’ll start asking about the next one Lol
Thank you, Diana! No one offers more thoughtful reviews than you, so I will look forward to that. I just hope you enjoy it for your sake! I appreciate what it means to spend your hard-earned money and precious time on someone else’s work, and I feel such an obligation — as storytellers do — to make that worth the readers’ while.
I’m making slow-but-steady progress on the next book, a novel-length adaptation of “The Lost Boys of the Bronx,” and I’ve got my fingers in some other projects that I’m not yet ready to discuss publicly. Suffice it to say, I expect the next few years to be creatively fecund.
Congratulations on the release of ‘The Dogcatcher’, Sean. What a tale of writing travails. It’s a tough enough task without the politics of Hollywood and friendship fallout.
Love your story documenting your ultimate success with the novel. This really caught my attention: “One of the wisest things a writer can do, sometimes, is to refrain from imposing his will on the narrative, and instead be open to what the story wants for itself.”
It reminds me of something Carl Hiaasen said when asked how he develops his crazy plots. He said that after he starts a story, he has to let the characters walk about on the pages for a while to see where they want to go.
Dave!
Thanks so much for the support! My fellow Climate Reality Leaders really carried me through these past five years, whether you all know it or not. When I trained with Vice President Gore in 2018, I was still licking my wounds from the collapse of my career, and I desperately needed to get out of my own head. In the Climate Reality Leadership Corps, I found a fellowship that really helped me reprioritize. Hollywood taught me about commercial imagination, but Climate Reality taught me the value of moral imagination. Everything that’s happened to me over the past five years is in that book, in one way or another.
I am a meticulous plotter; I use the tools of Christopher Vogler and Blake Snyder (which I discussed at length in “The Road Back”) to help me break the back of my stories. And I figure out the personalities of all my main characters on what’s known as a Character Diamond, a tool that was developed by screenwriting guru David Freeman. (David offers a very brief overview of the Character Diamond in this video, and I discuss it a bit more in “The Case for Craft,” my very first blog post.) All of that groundwork is an essential part of my creative process, hence the reason it took me the entire winter of 2020 to outline The Dogcatcher.
I do all that not with the intention of rigidly adhering to the outline, but rather to give myself a roadmap that will allow me to take detours when inspired, with the confidence that I can always find my way back to the interstate. In the process of drafting any piece of fiction, you are invariably going to find that something that worked on the beat sheet or corkboard needs to be reconceptualized once you’re actually writing the scene. Or sometimes the characters just suggest better ideas! They take over after a while, you know? And you should let them. One of the major characters in this story was originally conceived as a kind of secondary villain — a jerk who does not learn his lesson by the conclusion. But in the process of drafting the manuscript, that character seemed to want to be redeemed. They kept pulling me in a different direction from what I’d always envisioned. So, I gave them a shot at redemption, and the story is better for it, I would say.
It’s the trickiest aspect of creative writing — knowing when to intellectualize and when to operate instinctively. And that balance is going to be different for every writer. My process works only for me. I can recommend helpful tools, but every writer has to figure out for himself how to best use those tools. As the writer/director of Desperado and Spy Kids once said:
I imagine that’s why I enjoy discussing process so much — because it’s different for everyone. It’s interesting to learn what works for other storytellers — what facilitates their creativity. That was why I wanted to write this essay — to offer an inside account of the creative development of The Dogcatcher, for anyone who may be interested.
Thanks for popping by, Dave! Always nice to get a visit from you!
Sean
Hello Sean,
I haven’t read this blog entry yet (at least not beyond the first paragraph) and don’t plan to until I’ve read the book. I know you said it was spoiler-free, but I want to come to it 100% fresh, and I think knowing how something is made before I experience it diminishes the fun.
Congrats on getting it published. I’ve got it in my Amazon cart and will get it with my mid-month paycheck in October. If it comes in soon enough, I might be able to slip it in with my spooky-month reading which would be cool since it is a horror novel. Do you sell autographed copies?
Also, I couldn’t find this on Goodreads, not even with the ISBN numbers.
Good luck!
-Pierce
P.S. Is there a way to get notified when there’s a reply to these comments? I clicked the “Notify me of new posts via email” box, but I don’t think that applies to that.
Hey, Pierce!
This essay was intentionally designed so it could be read either before or after the novel without spoiling it. It works as a promotional teaser if you haven’t read it, or as an added-value supplement if you have. So, if you’d rather wait until after you’ve read the novel — just so you can experience the story with the freshest possible eyes — I 100% support that. The essay will be here for you when you’re ready to read it, and the comments never close. I’ll respond to any feedback.
I tell you what: Why don’t you send a private e-mail to seancarlinhq[at]gmail[dot]com with a mailing address or a P.O. box, and I will send you an autographed paperback copy free of charge, all right? I know what a booklover you are — your thoughtful reviews on Goodreads are top-notch — and I really appreciate that you’ve taken an interest in this project. Think of this like an ARC… minus the “A”!
Yes, I am aware the book hasn’t yet been listed on Goodreads, and the publisher is working on that. Hopefully soon. What I plan to do is use the Kindle Notes & Highlights feature to create an “author’s commentary,” kind of like what Simone St. James did for The Sun Down Motel. I’ll offer little pieces of trivia about specific scenes and whatnot. For fans of horror novels and movies, there are a lot of Easter eggs in the book. But not like Marvel Easter eggs — hyperlinking to other entries in the mega-franchise, I mean. These are just little references that will reward eagle-eyed readers who catch them, but won’t disrupt or diminish the impact of the story for those who miss them.
The Follow Comments feature is activated, so there should be an option to do that on the comments form. But WordPress has been subjected to a series of updates/upgrades lately, and sometimes when that happens, little features like that one can be accidentally “left behind” until the oversight is brought to the attention of the WordPress administrators. So, I’m not exactly sure what’s going on with that right now — I see that I’m only getting a Notify me of new posts via email box when I open up a new comment — but I’ll look into it. Thanks for calling it to my attention.
Rest assured, though, I always respond to comments — always. Sometimes I can’t get to them right away — much like the convo you and I are having on Goodreads — but I never forget to reply… eventually!
Thank you for your encouragement, Pierce! It means a lot. This is an exciting time for me, for sure. Send me that e-mail and I’ll get you a copy of the book in time for the spooky season!
Sean
Thanks, Sean; you’re a pal! I sent you an e-mail. Let me know if you didn’t get it; I’ll check back over here from time to time if I don’t see a reply from you in the next few days.
-Pierce
Hey, Pierce!
I got your e-mail and I’ll reply tomorrow! Thank you! My plan is to get that signed copy out to you this week…
By the way: The book is now officially listed on Goodreads. You’re a lot savvier about that platform than I am; if you happen to know of any relevant Listopia lists I should submit the book to, please share those suggestions!
Sean
Woops, I just now saw this since I don’t get notifications. However, I see there’s a new option to get notices about new comments, so I’ll see what happens. Anyway, I do spend a ton of time on Goodreads, but I never use the Listopia feature, so I’m afraid I can’t be much help. There is a “New horror for your Halloween reading” list you can try, but that might be an older one.
I finished the book, and am working on my review, and then I plan to jump back over here to read this blog post to see what I missed.
Hey, Pierce!
Yes, it appears the WordPress comment form has recently been updated (with new interface options), so the confusion of the past few weeks ought to be behind us now. It wasn’t you… it was WordPress. Like any platform, it has its idiosyncrasies. But overall, it serves my blogging needs well.
No worries about Listopia. Just figured I’d ask. I’ve done a little exploring through that feature and I think I better understand how it can be used to help generate word-of-mouth.
Hey, thanks again for reading and reviewing the book! I’m grateful for the time and attention you invested in The Dogcatcher. Much appreciated, amigo!
Sean
P.S. Loved your recent review of the Superman IV novelization! Your book reviews are so damn good — really fair and thoughtful — I could see you being a very successful book blogger. I’m looking forward to The Dogcatcher getting the full Jason Pierce treatment!
Hello Sean,
The review is done now, and I did indeed give it the “full Jason Pierce treatment.” (Be careful what you wish for, ha ha.)
Also, I couldn’t reply to the latest comment (maybe because it’s too narrow due to the indentation?), so I had to reply to the penultimate one.
I’m glad you enjoyed the Superman IV review, and thanks for the praise! If it weren’t October and I weren’t trying to get my annual Halloween flicks and shows in, I might rewatch it soon since it’s been a few years. Maybe in November.
-Pierce
Pierce!
If only every author received an open-minded read and meticulous, thoughtful review as you honored me with on Goodreads. Thank you! A writer always wonders how a reader responds to their work: what resonates with them; what doesn’t necessarily work for them; etc. Your review is a real gift to me, because it gives me a rare window into how a connoisseur of horror (and lover of literature in general) might receive this story.
(Quick aside: The comments on this blog are only enabled to go five levels deep; beyond that, a new thread is required. As you rightly identified, the indentation gets narrower with each new nested comment, so at the recommendation of WordPress, I cap the replies at five. But I absolutely welcome anyone to start a new thread if they have more to say!)
Congrats on being the first reader to catch the fact that Waff is a fan of Tombstone! He actually quotes the movie on two separate occasions in The Dogcatcher. Since Tombstone is a story about male friendship — about platonic love between men — and Waff is arguably the Doc Holliday to Frank’s Wyatt Earp, I thought it fitting he would be a fan of that film.
There are indeed a ton of historical, literary, and cinematic allusions in The Dogcatcher, but they’re weaved in subtly — little Easter eggs a reader will either catch or they won’t. Aside from an occasional “Team Jacob” joke and naming the dog General Zod, I mostly refrained from having my characters directly reference pop culture in their dialogue. Whereas the inclusion of pop culture–savvy characters was so fresh when it was done in The Lost Boys, and was later used to innovative effect in the original Scream and the Buffy TV series (to say nothing of the indie cinema of Quentin Tarantino and Kevin Smith), it’s now just very lazy and hopelessly clichéd. When I catch a few minutes of an Askewniverse movie or an episode of Buffy on cable now, I find the self-consciously “clever” dialogue to be rather grating and emotionally hollow. I wanted my characters to speak as if they weren’t completely obsessed with all-things pop culture. If anything, whenever a movie or TV show is explicitly mentioned (like The Walking Dead or The X-Files), it’s usually a critical comment by either Jessie or Nick, both of whom share my disdain for Hollywood (the industry).
The characters aren’t specifically based on anyone I know in real life — except, perhaps, myself. Frank represents my love of animals; Waff shares my annoying sense of humor. I also identify with Nick because he is in an emotionally healthy marriage with his college sweetheart, and Jessie expresses a lot of my own conflicted feelings about Los Angeles (even though I don’t relate to her cynicism). I will say I was lucky enough to have three best pals in childhood, all of whom are still close friends to this day, and though Frank and Waff’s personalities aren’t based on any of those friends, their interpersonal dynamic — the often frank and profane ways in which they speak to one another — is modeled after my real-life friendships, indeed.
As for that “clipped” writing style you mention: That’s an artifact from my screenwriting days. Stage direction in screenplays is often written in that same staccato manner. I acknowledge a little of it goes a long way, and it’s certainly fair to suggest I may overuse it on occasion. I tell you this only to say it is a conscious stylistic choice that I admit carries the risk of alienating some readers, something I noted in my book review of screenwriter Michael Mann’s Heat 2.
Hopefully this response to your wonderful review offers a little added-value insight into the creative inspiration and development of the project. I’m happy, by the way, to answer any questions about the book either on Goodreads, here on the blog, or via direct correspondence. Just ask!
Thank you again. And Happy Halloween to you!
Sean
Sounds like a great story. I bet it’s a real page-turner.
Thank you, Anneli! I will be genuinely curious to see how readers respond to The Dogcatcher. I wrote the kind of story I would like to read, and that’s all we can do. I will say that despite the novel being named for the protagonist, there are half-a-dozen major characters who all have emotional arcs of their own, so this isn’t a one-joke premise that wears out its welcome after a hundred pages. It’s like Ted Lasso in that sense: The story is named for one character, but it’s really about the community to which he belongs. So, ideally the various plotlines — the cryptid crisis, the buddy comedy, the love story, and the family melodrama — will keep readers turning pages to see how all those elements tie together!
Hi Sean!
Wow, this sounds soooo interesting. I’m so glad you finished it. I hope it brings much joy and fortune.
What a kind thing to say! Thank you, Lena! Your support is greatly appreciated. The Dogcatcher has already brought much joy to me; I hope any readers who spend their money, time, and attention on the book partake in that joy. That would be the most fortunate outcome I can envision.
I’m sure it will! I can’t wait to read it myself! I hope you don’t mind if I share the post and book cover to my own facebook group. If you don’t like the idea, I’ll understand completely.
Please! By all means: Spread the word! What a favor you’d be doing me, Lena! Thank you.
I’m not on Facebook, but I am happy to engage with readers or prospective readers of The Dogcatcher either here on my Goodreads author profile; I’d be delighted to answer any questions or receive any comments about the book. Also, through the end of October, we’re running a Goodreads Giveaway — ten signed copies of the book — for anyone who may be interested.
Thank you, Lena. I appreciate your support.
I will definitely advertise!
Much obliged, Lena!
What made you decide to go with Dark Winter press?
Because just like my buddy Mike all those years ago, Suzanne completely “got” this story from the get-go. (She is an author of this kind of genre fiction herself: supernatural horror with a sense of humor.) She expressed enthusiasm for the premise, she saw the idiosyncratic humor in it, and she was such a great editor. She never tried to rewrite the manuscript the way she might’ve written it, but rather valued my voice — that the way I was telling the story was as vital as the story itself — and worked with me to make it the best version of itself while preserving its singular voice.
Hell, there were instances in which I was the one suggesting cutting lines of dialogue, or even entire paragraphs/passages, and she made the case for keeping them! She reminded me why I’d written some of that stuff in the first place, and why it was important to the story. That’s a great creative partner — someone who not only checks your creatively questionable instincts but affirms your better ones. That’s what every writer needs, especially over the months and years it takes to bring a project like this to fruition.
Working with Suzanne was the exact opposite of every experience I had in Hollywood, where I was subjected to endless ego-driven notes for months on end, only to ultimately “improve” the material into a failure. Every draft Suzanne and I exchanged brought the manuscript closer to perfection, and she moved quickly and decisively — she didn’t see the need to drag the process out any longer than absolutely necessary. It felt so great to work with a partner who loved the project as much as I did, and who wanted to get it out into the world sooner than later.
She was patient with my perfectionism, too. Near the end, I got very prejudicial about the manuscript — both the content and formatting — because this is my baby. For 14 years, these characters have existed almost exclusively in my own imagination, and here I was about to send them out into the world! I’ve been a professional writer for 25 years next month, and yet this would be the first occasion in which I would finally see my fiction published or produced. So, I exercised my separation anxiety by scrutinizing every goddamn word/sentence/paragraph, and she never said “Enough!” LOL. I think I speak for us both when I say we have a product we’re really proud of.
And The Dogcatcher seemed right at home given the brand she’s looking to establish with DarkWinter Press. That’s all I’ve ever wanted for the projects I’ve written and the animals I’ve fostered: for them to find a loving home. The right home. The Dogcatcher and DarkWinter Press — an idiosyncratic debut novel and a scrappy indie startup — were made for each other. This is a good pairing.
In a reply to a comment by cathleentownsend in the Mariachi Trilogy post you discussed good editing. One thing you said:
When we read a piece of material, our impulse is to rewrite it to conform to exactly the way we would’ve written it. That’s not what a good editor does. A good editor asks: What are the author’s creative intentions for the material, and how do I best help her realize those intentions to their fullest creative potential? In other words: You aren’t there to rewrite the material in your voice, but rather to help the author tell the best story possible in her voice. You’re gut-checking her, not rewriting her. That’s all. Save your voice for your work. You know?
I replied:
A good editor doesn’t dress you in their clothes. But they’ll help you choose which of your own clothes you should wear, and make sure your shirt has no stains and your fly is zipped
All of that is why truly productive creative partnerships are so crucial and so rare. When you understand the stars that have to align for two artists with compatible sensibilities to come together — the Lennon-and-McCartneys of history (not that I am in any way putting myself in that category) — you better appreciate just how special that is. There has to be shared interest in the project, mutual respect, and a willingness to compromise. I came to all of our editorial sessions very opinionated. I knew what I wanted, down to the granulars. But I also knew which issues were resolutely nonnegotiable for me, and which ones I was flexible about. So, I didn’t demand my way on every creative decision.
And there were also instances where I didn’t always assume my take was the correct one. I knew Suzanne wanted the best for the manuscript, and I trusted her instincts. So, on occasion, when we had a respectful difference of opinion, I said, “I’m not really sure anymore, and I’m just going to have to trust that she’s seeing this more clearly than I am.” And I was always glad I did. And she always treated all of her suggestions as exactly that: suggestions. She was always willing to talk it out.
When those elementals come together — creative compatibility, shared interest, mutual respect, and a willingness to compromise for the good of the project — that’s when the artistic process is a delight, even when it’s exhausting. I’d been through so many bad experiences in my career, but I had an instinct that a relationship with DarkWinter was going to be a productive one. It’s nice to occasionally be proven right!
Sean, I loved this book from the first moment I read it and I’m so thrilled that we were able to bring your vision to life!
Well, you got this baby across the finish line! And when you appreciate what a marathon this project was — its tumultuous 14-year development, as detailed above — you understand why I was so grateful for your enthusiasm, support, and partnership. I’m so excited for someone other than you or me to experience this story! Thanks for everything, Suzanne.
Congratulations on your book release Sean. Perfectly timed for the spooky season. 🙂
Thanks, Debby! That was the idea — release it in time for Halloween! That’s why Suzanne worked so quickly and decisively this past summer to have it ready. The book is now listed on Goodreads, where I know you’re active. Furthermore, I have an author profile on the platform now, so you’ll be able to access my blog posts from there, as well. Have a Happy Halloween season, Debby!
I just wrote a little literary doodle for The Dogcatcher. This takes places immediately after the book
Three notes:
1. This is NOT official! This is NOT canon! This is fan-fiction that did NOT actually happen (not that Sean is obsessed w/ canon, of course)
2. This has MAJOR spoilers for the book. Please read the book first
3. I provide no context in the story. If you haven’t read the book, you probably won’t understand who the characters are or what is happening
To avoid spoilers, Sean is hiding this story behind a hyperlink
Click here to read Responsible
And thank you, Sean, for letting me play w/ your toys
I cannot believe I inspired my first piece of fan fiction! I love it! Thank you for that, Dell! “Responsible” is written in the same spirit of the source material, too — the same sense of playfulness.
Fun fact: Waff is pretty much the only character in the story whose name has no coded meaning. “Steven Marco Polo Pollywaffle,” a.k.a. “Waff,” was truly just the silliest name I could conjure. The names of all the other characters, major and minor (save a handful I named after real-life friends), are either historical, literary, or cinematic allusions — they all offer a “clue” to either that character’s personality or the precise nature of the mysterious cryptid. Not Waff. That’s because with Waff, what you see is what you get. He’s not putting up a false front to protect himself from the world.
It really warms my heart that these two characters and their friendship spoke to you so directly. Frank and Waff’s particular dynamic is directly inspired by my own boyhood friendships, a subject I am exploring in my WIP, a fictionalized adaptation of “The Lost Boys of the Bronx.” No one’s ever said it more succinctly than Stephen King: “I never had any friends later on like the ones I had when I was twelve. Jesus, did you?”
Semi-spoiler. I mention the ending, but I don’t think it ruins the surprise
Sean, if you want, you can delete this or put it behind a tag like you did Responsible or whatever
You’re better at this than I am, but I want to see if I can figure out which STC genre your book is. I don’t think you’d mentioned it anywhere
MITH seems obvious, but it doesn’t feel right. Although Frank is hunting the monster, it doesn’t seem like the monster itself is what’s tossing the main obstacles at him
Whydunnit? The monster’s real identity is unknown. But Frank isn’t investigating that angle specifically. And the solution doesn’t come from HIM solving it. Also, while much is unknown about the monster, Frank doesn’t need most of those details to fight it. We don’t even learn everything anyway
Superhero? Nah. While Frank has some great qualities that help him save the day, the story seems to emphasize that he alone can’t succeed. It takes a community
And the others don’t fit unless majorly contorted, if then
Except one
Institutionalized
Frank’s main issue are the friction w/ his family and the lack of respect his job gets. In fact, I could argue that most of the main characters have issues w/ their communities, including Waff and Jessie
These issues have to be resolved one way or another for the story to have a satisfying ending
>…virtually all The Dogcatcher’s main characters work in either local government or academia…
Let me know if I’m completely off base here
I appreciate your spoiler alert, Dell, but spoilers aren’t anything that concern me. As I’ve discussed, “spoilers” are corporate engagement tactics designed to keep audiences consuming each new offering in a media franchise in real time. Good stories don’t need them. What’s the spoiler in Jaws? In Heat? In E.T.? Back to the Future? A Few Good Men? Raiders of the Lost Ark? Scent of a Woman? Home Alone? Die Hard? Dances with Wolves? Beverly Hills Cop? Blade Runner? The Exorcist? The Godfather? The Karate Kid? Halloween? What crucial plot point about any of those movies would “spoil” the experience of watching them if known in advance?
Now, there are definitely surprises in The Dogcatcher, but I’m the one who has consistently been surprised by how many readers didn’t see them coming! And I think that’s because I did what I set out to do: I made those characters and their personal dilemmas sufficiently engaging that readers aren’t trying to “outsmart” the story. They’re just enjoying it. (I also tried to make Cornault one of those fictional towns you wish you could visit, like Stars Hollow in Gilmore Girls, Portwenn in Doc Martin, and Three Pines in the Gamache books.)
Having explicitly borrowed the narrative structure of Jaws, I always viewed The Dogcatcher as Monster in the House. The central dramatic conflict is that there is a predatory cryptid on the loose in this town, and the characters (all public officials) are trying to figure out how to stop it before anyone else gets killed. That’s the conflict that opens the story, and it isn’t conclusively resolved until the final pages.
Does it straddle a line with “Fantasy Whydunit”? Arguably yes. The same could be said of Tim Burton’s Sleepy Hollow. In that movie, the police constable (Johnny Depp) is trying to both stop a monster and solve a mystery/unravel a conspiracy. I think Scream, as well, has elements of a Whydunit. But at the end of the day, the problem that animates all those stories — and Dogcatcher, too — is how do the characters stop the monster from racking up its body count? So, they’re ultimately all MITH. By contrast, a Whydunit is more concerned with restoring justice, whereas a MITH is about restoring safety.
You could even make an argument that Dogcatcher adheres to the conventions of Fool Triumphant (the opposite of Superhero), because we have a fool (an underestimated hero), at odds with an establishment (an incorporated city that doesn’t see the need for Animal Services), who achieves transmutation (he proves his value and turns everyone around to his way of seeing things). These things are happening in the story, and they are what (I hope) give it emotional resonance, but ultimately the conflict that drives the narrative is the out-of-control crytpid and the imperative to confront/capture/kill it, like the shark in Jaws.
What I hope this demonstrates, Dell, is that the Save the Cat! story classifications — which I think are an absolutely invaluable resource for storytellers — are a tool to help us tell stories, but not a formula for telling them. Viewing The Dogcatcher as MITH helped me figure out the structure and pace of my plot, but the story itself — the particular dynamics of that community, the relationships between those characters, the traumas that have caused pain/strife in their lives, the transformational arcs they endure — comes straight from my life experiences. As I said in the essay above, I would’ve gotten bored writing the book had I not used the opportunity to say something about the pandemic, but long before that element was added to the story, I gave tremendous thought to all those characters’ backstories and emotional arcs. I didn’t want the subordinate characters exclusively supporting the straight white male protagonist on his heroic journey. Everybody had to come to grips with some character flaw or psychic wound or personal limitation, and all the characters (usually inadvertently) pushed each other to grow emotionally, like counterparts in a Swiss watch. I put a shitload of care into getting that right.
And it isn’t easy. People laugh at me when I tell them Dirty Dancing is one of my favorite movies, but I could teach a fucking class on its masterful screenwriting and visual storytelling. No fewer than five characters arc in that movie: Baby, Johnny, Dr. Houseman, Penny, and Lisa. And you could look at Dirty Dancing and make a case that it’s “Family Institution,” because it’s about Baby learning to be a mature woman and not a daddy’s girl (she goes from “Baby” to Frances), but the central dramatic question that drives that story is: Will Baby and Johnny be together at the end? So, it’s Buddy Love.
My point is, good stories should be ambitious, and they can speak to several universal truths at once: our desire to survive (MITH), the roles we play in our families and communities (Institutionalized), our pursuit of justice (Whydunit), the ways in which we are misunderstood/underestimated (Fool Triumphant), and the ways in which other people “complete” us (Buddy Love). A single story can comment and offer insight on all those aspects of the human experience, absolutely.
What it can’t really do (except in antiplot movies, but that’s another subject) is serve multiple masters — that is, it can’t have more than one central dramatic conflict. Accordingly, what the STC! tools do is give us a way of keeping our narrative focused. I recall the fourth season of Project Greenlight, where the contestant/director was so proudly anti-structure, and the movie he wound up making, The Leisure Class, was a fucking mess that didn’t know what it was trying to be (Fool Triumphant? Institutionalized?) or say.
So, my advice is always to mindfully select a classification, study the appropriate antecedents, and structure your plot in accordance with the conventions of that genre. A story doesn’t have to be original, it only has to be fresh. And the way you produce something fresh isn’t by throwing out conventional narrativity — that’s where all those Pulp Fiction knockoffs went wrong — but by fleshing out the characters and the world of the story with observational details and emotional truths that come straight from your unique experience.
And, ideally, all of those idiosyncratic flourishes are echoing or undergirding or otherwise developing the story’s controlling idea (a.k.a. theme). In that sense, my “Theme Stated” beat is right there in the novel’s epigraph. That’s the controlling idea of The Dogcatcher in a nutshell, and all the plot points and character arcs were conceived and executed with that firmly in mind. I always knew what I wanted to say with this story, and STC! helped me say it, I hope, effectively. So, for me, the question I ponder isn’t Will readers know what genre it is?, but rather: Does it have meaning for those who read it?
And no one is a bigger geek for storytelling craft than me, but that’s what the Master Cats, in all of their messy attempts at reverse-engineering, have never understood: There’s a very personal and human element in a good narrative that can’t be neatly codified or classified, it can’t be condensed into a course or manual and sold. Good stories come from someone’s soul, and they bear a piece of that soul. They are a synthesis of a person’s beliefs, experiences, and worldview. The tools — or “formula,” if you like — can help us express those things, but it can’t give a story its soul. That only comes from a writer who is willing to practice emotionally honest storytelling, and who is up for a little creative experimentation — both of which I tried to do when I was writing The Dogcatcher. I took a risk when I incorporated COVID into the story so integrally, and I certainly made zero attempt to conceal my progressive politics. I don’t know if those things help or handicap the story I was trying to tell — that’s not for me to judge — but I do know that without them, The Dogcatcher is yet one more monster-on-the-loose thriller, and who cares less? After spending a quarter century trying to write stories that were all things to all people, I wrote this one all for myself. And look what happened: It’s my first published work.
So, my advice to aspiring writers can really be boiled down to this: Master your craft… and tell honest stories.
Congratulations on your book! It looks so good, and I enjoyed reading the story behind the story. 🙂
Thank you, Kymber! I can see from your own blog you are an aficionado of fiction in general and horror in particular! I love it! The Dogcatcher is what I would call — and others have called — “light horror.” It was written in the spirit of the supernatural comedies grew up on, like Ghostbusters and Gremlins and Tremors and The Frighteners. I ache for those kind of old-school monster-mayhem stories, and I have a hunch others do, too. For them, The Dogcatcher is my Halloween treat!
So you really did it! Congratulations, Sean! Something to be really proud of, I think. I hope it brings you and your wife much joy!
Thanks, Lena! I take supreme satisfaction and joy from having written the story I wanted to write, and from having found a partner in DarkWinter that wanted to be in the Dogcatcher business. After 25 years, it’s nice to finally see a project realized. If the book finds readers who happen to enjoy it… that’s icing on the cake!
I haven’t spoken much about my wife’s contributions to this project — aside from, to use Waff’s phrase, moral support — but she read early drafts and offered some invaluable story notes. Case in point: As originally conceived, the Widow Conliffe was a caustic old lady who had a combative relationship with Frank (you can see a little evidence of this in the partial storyboard sequence above, where Waff yells at her rather rudely).
My wife suggested there was an opportunity to portray an elderly woman who was neither the “warm-and-grandmotherly type” nor the “mean old biddy.” She said, “Why don’t you have it so Frank will always make time for her, because she actually values Animal Control?” I thought it was a great idea. It allowed for a different kind of comedic interplay, and it also gave me an opportunity to show Frank as a competent professional. So, those scenes were rewritten accordingly. Waff’s dialogue was altered so that he was no longer rude to Old Lady Conliffe, merely irreverent, which I thought was truer to his character, anyway.
That’s just one example of how my wife helped make The Dogcatcher the best possible version of itself.
Thanks, Lena! I appreciate your kind words and wish you a Happy Halloween!
Um, I’m mad that I’m late to this party.
But I just ordered and will continue the party soon enough.
I know what a journey this has been, Sean, and I am both extremely happy for you and extremely proud of you for seeing this through.
You won’t be surprised when I say that I’m equally excited about your reconnection with Mike and your new connection with Suzanne. Good people make these moments all the better.
Erik!
I’ve had you on my mind. I know we’re overdue for a get-together!
And new partygoers are always welcome! The launch of The Dogcatcher hasn’t been a single celebratory occasion but rather a series — or season — of little happy moments.
Creative collaboration is a double-edged knife. When you’re working with the wrong people, it is a miserable and usually unproductive experience. But when you’re working with the right people — those who share with you a mutual sense of trust, respect, and belief in the material — it’s joyous. So, in that this project brought both new colleagues (like Suzanne) and old ones (like Mike) into my life, it was well worth the trials of the past 14 years. And it’s fitting, too, because the story has a very prosocial — pro-community — message. This is a funny time, because I am finally, after 14 years, putting this story behind me… but I’m taking the (re)new(ed) friendships into the future. I’m excited about new projects, one of which I am even currently working on with Mike…
I hope you enjoy The Dogcatcher, Erik! Thanks so much for supporting the project. Be sure to come back this way once you’ve read it and share your thoughts!
Sean
You can count on it.
Congratulations on the release! I read the sneak preview, or whatever it’s called, and did a rare thing, which was to buy it based on that alone–which at that point all you get is the writer’s voice and a rough idea of the genre. Then I got the Covid, and that combined with my slow reading practice means I’m still in the middle, but enjoying it immensely. That’s another rare thing–books not read in a quick time frame for me become more prone to inner criticism as I go along, but not so here.
Best of luck to you, and thanks for the read.
Roy! I’m honored! Thank you! I hope you enjoy the book — that it enhances your Halloween spirit! Please come back when you’re finished and let me know what you thought of it…
I hope your case of COVID was a mild one, and that you’re on the mend now. I just made it through a second bout with COVID myself. The first time around — last Christmas — the only symptom I had was a slightly (barely) sore throat; this time it was more akin to a moderate head cold. On the bright side, at least we have grace-period immunity for the next 12 weeks, which means it’s unlikely COVID will disrupt the holidays for either of us. That happened to me last year… and it sucked!
You know the old saying: What doesn’t kill you makes you tired and achy for 4-6 weeks. A friend is visiting us from Europe and has severe jet lag–still doing better than me! (All whining aside, I’m doing pretty good finally, almost normal, which is normal.) Fingers crossed on our free ride! Happy Halloween.
Be patient with your body as it recovers, Roy; give it the time it needs. We treat COVID like an everyday thing now — which I suppose it very much is — but this virus knocked the whole world on its ass (and continues to disrupt life as we know it, if not quite as severely as it once did). To be sure, we are all still very much processing the collective trauma of 2020, whether we are consciously aware of that or not. In that sense, getting (re)infected with COVID isn’t merely about feeling crappy for a week; it’s a direct reminder of the fear and uncertainty and loss we all experienced that first year of the pandemic.
That was a theme I integrated into The Dogcatcher: Every character’s life was directly impacted by the coronavirus, each in its own way, and none of them have quite established a new status quo. The pandemic certainly — and demonstrably — altered the course of my life. And I suppose one of the tricks to navigating a post-pandemic reality is choosing to recognize the trauma we carry around — the unacknowledged form of “long COVID” that afflicts all of us — and extending ourselves grace when we feel inclined to “complain” or “whine” about it. This thing messed with our heads — in ways we’ve yet to come to terms with. Anyone who dismisses COVID as “another bug” — and I have friends who do exactly that — isn’t acknowledging its broader sociocultural repercussions. Recognizing those — making a conscious allowance for our own unprocessed PTSD — is nothing short of an act of vital self-compassion.
Well said. That’s a perspective I hadn’t quite gotten, but I see what you mean. We’re all in a hurry to move on, at the risk of a good resolution that makes sense to each of us.
We live in a culture that encourages automatic and accelerating behaviors. Note how every time you finish watching a movie or TV show on a streaming service, the next-episode autoplay countdown immediately commences, putting pressure on you to make an instantaneous decision. When we take a look around, we see how everything in modern society is calibrated to encourage mindless and insatiable consumption. The celebrated sci-fi/horror director John Carpenter made an excellent movie about this called They Live (1988).
I’m absolutely convinced the reason so many people drive angry is because they’ve learned to never feel as though they’re getting where they’re going soon enough; they are literally driven to reach their destinations as quicky as possible, without ever pausing (braking?) to ask themselves why it’s so goddamn important to be there at all, let alone right now. Is there any more potent metaphor for automatic and accelerating behaviors, the lifeblood of neoliberalism, than the automobile?
The pandemic offered us all an opportunity, however unwelcome and unfortunate, to slow down and reflect. I know many people who are now questioning their own learned automatic-and-accelerating behaviors. I know folks who’ve recently walked away from corporate jobs — from the security of a good salary and health benefits — because they could no longer justify to themselves working for a toxic boss and/or a company that only cared about extracting as much value as possible out of everything, including its employees.
But times are changing. Hell, as of this morning, 33 states have joined together to hold tech companies accountable for their role in monetizing automatic and accelerating behaviors at the expense of our mental health. I very much believe and hope the culture is “having a moment” right now — a renewed appreciation for slowing down and doing less; and a conscious rejection of the extractive mindset that has eroded both our ecosystem and our mental health. Like “Rowdy” Roddy Piper in They Live, we all see it now: We can’t keep going on like this.
As much as I enjoyed reading your entire post, I especially loved your description of your friendship. What a gift that is, to have lifelong friends you don’t need to see or speak with every day, but to know that person is always on your team (even if they’re trash talking you!). I pre-ordered your book and am embarrassed to admit I’ve not read it yet. This real world stuff is crushing me. Which is EXACTLY why I should get my butt to the couch for a day-long distraction. I’m even more excited to read it now than I was before reading this. I’m elated for your sudess!
Wendy!
Thanks so much for preordering the book! Suzanne and I are really proud of it. And having read this behind-the-scenes essay, you’ll better appreciate when you read The Dogcatcher what a long road the project took from the point of conception to the moment of publication!
The dynamic between Frank and Waff is based in spirit (if not always in specifics) on a few very close friendships I had in boyhood. On paper, there’s nothing compatible about these two guys, but they’ve stood by one another through every experience under the sun, from schoolboy tomfoolery to parental death to family dysfunction to romantic heartbreak. Through it all, they’ve carried each other, no questions asked or judgments rendered. That is a very rare bond.
As such, I’m one of those people who absolutely believes a truer sentence has never been written or uttered than this one from Stephen King’s The Body (the basis for Rob Reiner’s Stand by Me): “I never had any friends later on like the ones I had when I was twelve.” (I am currently writing about my adolescent friendships in a novel-length version of my 2020 essay “The Lost Boys of the Bronx.”)
The closest I ever came in adulthood to that kind of friendship was/is my relationship with Mike. Had he and I grown up in the same town, I know we would’ve been best friends. Even today, the kinds of conversations we have most closely mirror the things I’ll only say to my childhood pals — all of whom I’m still friends with (and who graciously shared their own recollections of our Lost Boys II adventure when I told them I was writing the account as a fictionalized memoir). I’m grateful to have him back in my life.
I read a lot about how women need healthy, supportive friendships with other women — and I absolutely second that — but I think it’s just as true of men, too. Men need healthy adult friendships with other men. Unfortunately, our culture encourages men (and boys) to see ourselves as “solitary heroes,” a subject I’ll be exploring in next month’s blog post, “No, Virginia, Die Hard Is Not a Christmas Movie.”
Despite being the titular character of my novel, Frank Antony is not a solitary hero, and the outcome of The Dogcatcher is dependent on all his allies making a meaningful and indispensable contribution to the story’s resolution. Such are my kind of heroes: flawed people doing the best they can, working in good faith for the common good. Those are the type of stories for which I’ve advocated, and they’re the ones I want to write.
That said, I very much hope you enjoy your visit to Cornault! Be sure to let me know what you thought of The Dogcatcher! I appreciate your support, Wendy. Have a Happy Thanksgiving…
Sean
Mythcreants has a podcast about unusual jobs in spec fic, so I made a comment about The Dogcatcher
Dell! That’s so awesome of you! Thank you! I actually went to Mythcreants this past weekend — I check on it every month or so — and noted a bunch of recent articles I need to make time to read, including ones on “Badass Protagonists” and “Worldbuilding Problems” that looked interesting.
One of the aspects of The Dogcatcher that made me want to write it — that really motivated my interest in the concept — was the fact that the hero was an Animal Control Officer. It’s not a profession you see portrayed in much popular fiction/entertainment at all. I mean, outside of Lady and the Tramp (1955), the only examples I can think of are Jim Carrey’s character in The Number 23 (2007) and John Witherspoon’s in the Friday movies (1995–2002), and in neither of those instances did the job have any real bearing on the plots — it was pure background detail.
Weirdly enough, as I was in the editorial phase on the manuscript, I became aware of not one but two sitcoms set at a municipal animal shelter: Strays (2021–2022), a spin-off from Kim’s Convenience, and Animal Control (2023–present), in which Joel McHale plays a character named Frank who is an Animal Control Officer. I recall saying to my wife at the time, “Wow, I guess Animal Control is finally getting the Hollywood treatment!”
Because the profession is largely unexploited in fiction, I knew I could do something new and interesting that you simply can’t do with cops and doctors and lawyers, because that’s all been done to dang death. And the fact that the Animal Control Officer, prior to Animal Control (and not counting The Number 23), had never been the protagonist of the story made it all the more irresistible to me. Making him the hero in a horror/comedy about a werewolf was just too rich a creative opportunity to pass up. It became the entire conceptual hook of the project, because who else is going to be called in to deal with a crytpid? It’s got the key ingredients for a fertile premise: logic and irony.
I hope you’re well, my man! The second installment of “Under the Influence” will be posting soon; it’s written, I just need a proofread on it, and it’s a very long piece. But hopefully I’ll have it up in September, and, barring that, definitely by October. Beyond that, I’m just trying to finish the last novella in my magical-realism trilogy…
Thanks again for thinking of The Dogcatcher! With Halloween season nearly upon us, I’ve been trying to think of ways to promote the book…