James S.A. Corey's Blog, page 16

Dogs Project: Part Seven

What is the Dogs Project?

"You're looking for a dog?"

The man behind the counter seemed amused, but Chartlie couldn't guess why.  Outside, the street traffic was thick.  Cars and busses and pedestrians locked in the perpetual daily struggle of lunchtime at the edge of the business district.  Inside the pet shop, birds shrieked and complained and puppies yapped.  The display cages ran down the wall, little rooms the size of closets with stainless steel bowls for food and water, oversized cushions to rest on, and in each one at least one dog.  The walls facing the shop's main room were thick plexiglass, claw-scratched and pitted but clean.

"Thinking about it," Charlie said.

The days since Dickens left had been much like the days before, only a sense of isolation had grown up where there had only been guilt before.  He'd found himself looking at pet shops and animal rescues online like he was testing too see whether a wound had healed by pressing on it.  More and more in the past week, he'd found himself daydreaming at work or at the office, thinking how he could have done things differently or telling himself that it was the change that had made the difference.  A new dog would never know what kind of person he'd been before, and so wouldn't be disappointed in who he was now.

"You thinking more companion or protection?" the man asked as he came out from behind the counter.

"I . . . I don't know," Charlie said.

"Had a dog before?"

"Yeah," Charlie said.  "Always.  Since I was a kid."

"Me too," the man said.  He was a few years older, with graying stubble and jowls.  His eyes were dark brown approaching black, and he seemed almost dog-like himself.  "My mother had a dog before she had me.  There's pictures of me when I couldn't walk yet, dragging on old Hannibal's ears."

Charlie felt his gut tighten a little at the idea.  A baby, soft-skinned and awkward, a dog standing over it, yellow teeth and black eyes.

"Must have been a sweet animal," Charlie said.

"Hannibal?  Hell yes.  He was great.  The whole time he was alive, no one broke into our house, it wasn't a great neighborhood.  But no one messed with our place."

"I meant with you.  When you were a kid."

In the cell nearest them, a small terrier lifted his brown-and-tan head, looking at them with curiosity.  The man chuckled.

"Oh, he kept me in line, all right," the man said.  "I pushed things too hard, he's let me know.  Didn't take and crap, that dog."

Charlie walked slowly along the wall, looking in at the dogs as he passed.  An Australian shepherd with one pale blue eye barked and wagged and barked again.  A bloodhound cross, eyed him with an expression of permanent sorrow built into its breed like a poker face.  Charlie couldn't guess what it was thinking.  Or what it would do if it were free.  The room was feeling oddly warm.  Sweat dampened his neck.

"Nothing in this world will love you like a dog," the man said with the air of repeating something everyone knew, everyone agreed on.  "Loyal.  Best protection there is.  Better than a burglar alarm, you know that?  And anyone messes with you, dog'll be right there beside you."

"Yup," Charlie said.  Unless, he thought.

But most dogs were good.  Most never bit anyone.  Most were everything that the salesman said.  He counted the cells.  Two, four, six up to fifteen.  So if Adam was right, about three of them would be predators.  A dozen good dogs and three predators.

"You feeling all right?" the man asked.

A bulldog sat by the plexiglass, looking out.  It's flat face with the loose, black lips and lolling red tongue looked insectile and obscene.  In the corner of his eye, Charlie caught a sudden flash of motion, but when he turned, the animal was behind its glass wall.  Thick-shouldered, wide-faced, its tail cutting through the air behind it in pleasure.  For a moment, it was the hound with its permanent smile, and Chalie's throat was tight.

"Seriously," the man said again.  "You all right?  You're looking kind of pale."

"I've always had dogs," Charlie said. "You know?  Always."

"Yeah," the man said, but his voice was polite now, distant.  He'd seen something in Charlie that he knew wasn't right, even if he didn't know what.  Charlie pushed his hands deep in his pockets and nodded.  In their cages, the dogs licked themselves and slept and barked.  Twelve of them were probably fine.  Good dogs.  Most of them.

"Thanks," Charlie said.  "I've got to think about it.  Talk to the landlord.  Like that."

"Sure," the man said.  "No trouble.  We'll always be here."

We'll always be here, Charlie thought as he stepped back into the reassuring press of human bodies of the sidewalk. He hadn't meant it as a threat.

——————————–

Daniel here.

Well, we're in the home stretch now.  This was originally slated to be the scene of Charlie getting barked at in the street and no one noticing, but when it came time to do the thing, I felt like it made more sense this way.  Go see about getting another dog, fail, get barked at ton the way back to the office, then the final talk with Adam about how there's not an end, not a catharsis, just a survival day-by-day until you can get callused.  And then that last scene — which is pretty clearly going to be when he's waiting for the bus for the first time — and the closing image of fear going forward permanently and without end.

That's really what makes this a horror story for me.  If we killed Charlie at the end, it would almost be cleaner than just saying "and then he was always scared and alone forever."  And in that sense, it's grimmer than the source it's based from.  Lots of folks get raped and go on to lead full, meaningful lives rich with love.  And maybe someday Charlie will get there too.  Just not in this story.

The thing I've been wrestling with is this:  I'm wondering about present tense.  There are a couple places in the project so far where I've reached for it.  Present tense is really great for giving a story a sense of isolation and disconnectedness.  (Normally people say it gives a sense of immediacy, but that's crap.)  On the one hand, I think it would fit well with the tone of the story.  On the other hand, I'm not sure how it would work with the flashback structure we've got on the attack.  I'm guessing the flashback will kill it, but it's still floating around in my head as a possibility.

I'm also getting pretty near the point when I have to put upon some friends for a quick-and-dirty critique.  I've only got three scenes to go.  Probably it's time to start figuring out who I can owe yet another one.

Malice, Rape, and the Curry Rule

So, because of a few conversations and at least one dreadful and graceless shouting match I've been having and/or spectating one place and another online, I've been thinking more about my idiosyncratic attitude toward writing about sexual assault and its aftermath.  (And, yeah, poking along on the Dogs Project is part of that.) I tried to make my position clear way back when I posted about why I was consciously not including rape in my urban fantasy series, but I think I've found an example in the world that gives a good illustration of what I'm getting at.

No, not that Mali . . . No. Wait. Yes, exactly that Malice.

And so, a movie review.

Let me begin by saying how reassuring it is to me as a writer to see brilliant people stumble.  A cast filled not just with first class actors, but first class actors of whom I'm actually fond: Alec Baldwin, Nicole Kidman, Bill Pullman.  A script by Aaron Sorkin, one of my all-time favorite screenwriters, second only to Tom Stoppard.  Malice came out in 1993, and I have to say, it failed for me.  Badly.

The main plot involves a man figuring out that his wife and their friend the doctor are running an complex grift.  (Protip:  If your cunning criminal plan begins "Step One:  Go to medical school and become a top-flight surgeon" you may be overthinking it.)  There are machinations and reveals, and red herrings and complex subterfuge all written in Sorkin-esque brilliancies and delivered with a weird awkwardness (with the exception of one line by Baldwin, which was a perfect delivery, and so stood out like an emerald in gravel).  But that's not what I wanted to talk about.

This was also the first film appearance by Gwynneth Paltrow, who had a blink-and-you-miss-her role as an undergraduate who on a campus that was being used as hunting ground for a serial killer.

You'll notice that I didn't mention a serial killer in my plot synopsis.  That's because the subplot was really just an aside.  The movie asked us to pay lots of attention to Bill Pullman's betrayal by his wife, and the intricacies of medial malpractice while there's a serial killer stalking the freaking campus.   My experience as a viewer was "Who gives a crap about medical malpractice?  You have a serial killer on campus!  Let's take care of *that*."

Which is to say, they put something in that overpowered the main story and then  tried to treat it as minor.

My curry rule is this (as I've stated it elsewhere), once you add some curry to your dish, you're making a curry dish.  You can say it about really good fresh garlic too.  It's almost impossible to add something that strong and compelling in and not have it be central to the experience.  Malice failed, in part, because it took something more compelling than its own story and tried to use it as background.  I think sexual assault is like that in prose fiction.  I think you can write about rape if you're writing about rape (and even then, go with God, because it's a terrible and complex subject) or if it's not what you're writing about, you can pass over the subject lightly, but including it as a side-note seems doomed to fail.

In the urban fantasy series, I've intentionally touched on things that I think relate to the problematic relationship between women and power in the culture, and while there's a lot of overlap in subject matter, I'd like this to be a pleasant, somewhat escapist experience so I don't want to go there with that story.  With Dogs, I'm specifically trying to take on one aspect of the aftermath of sexual assault.  It's not that I don't think rape should be written about or thought about or considered.  It's very much that I think it defines the work in which it appears — it's pretty much all anyone says about Thomas Covenant anymore — and so if that's not central what I'm writing, it's a mistake to include it.

Other folks, clearly, have different views.  But I think I'm right.

The Dogs Project: Part Six

What is the Dogs Project?

Back home, Charlie sat at the little kitchen table for a long time, his hands on his thighs.  His mind felt empty and raw.  Sandblasted.  Dickens didn't come near, didn't press his nose into Charlie's lap.  Instead, he curled up on the couch where he wasn't supposed to be and looked away.  The sun shifted, the angles of the shadows growing thinner, the light turning darker and red.  Near sundown, Charlie became aware that his bladder was screamingly full, pulled himself up to standing, and made his way back to the bathroom.  He sat on the toilet, head in his hands.  Guilt and shame and a bone-deep exhaustion made the early evening feel like midnight.  If it hadn't been for the autonomic demands of his body, he'd have sat still as a stone until morning.

He took a shower, the hot water making his skin pinker, the pale scars white by comparison.  When he got out, he stood in front of the mirror for a long time, his gaze tracing what damage could be seen.  The bedroom clock told him it was just past seven, and he had to check his phone to convince himself it was true.

Dinner was a frozen serving of butter chicken run through the microwave until the apartment smelled rich with it, a glass of ice water.  There were sitcoms on TV, so he sat there, letting other people's laughter wash over him, and joining in by reflex.  By the time the evening news came on, he felt almost like himself again.  Still fragile, but himself.  He cleaned the dishes, put on some music.  He needed to get up a little early.  He was going to take the bus, and he wanted to leave a little extra time to walk there.

Dickens hadn't moved except to shift from time to time.  Charlie knew he should have made the dog get down from the couch, but that little breaking of rules seemed important; an apology for the shortcomings of the afternoon.  After all, if one pattern had changed, maybe they all had.  Maybe everything was up for grabs.  Charlie finished cleaning, put a bowl of food down for Dickens, and listened to the soft sounds of the dog eating.  He wasn't looking forward to the walk that would follow.  It was cold outside now, and dark.  When the little steel bowl was clean, Dickens walked over to the leash and looked up at him.

Charlie hadn't meant to hesitate, but it was there.  That little half-beat that marked the difference between enthusiasm and reluctance.  Dickens sighed and went back to the couch.

"No, hey," Charlie said.  "Come on, guy.  It's walk time."

Dickens hopped up, curling himself in toward the armrest with his tail tucked under him.  Charlie picked up the leash.

"Come on.  It's okay.  We'll just go and —"

His fingertips touched the familiar fur of Dickens' back.  The little dogs whipped around, teeth snapping.  Charlie took a fast step back, staring down at Dickens.  The world seemed to go airless.  The small tufted eyebrows showed resentment and guilt.  Grief.  Or maybe they didn't and Charlie was seeing them there because he'd have seen them anywhere, everything in the world a sudden mirror.

"Okay," Charlie said and put the leash back where it belonged.  "All right, then."

Dickens sighed and turned away again, muzzle to the armrest, back to the room.  Charlie went to the bathroom in silence, brushed his teeth, changed into the old sweats he used for pajamas.  He didn't sleep for a long time, and when he did, it was a thin, restless kind of sleep.  He woke in darkness to a dry sound.  It came again.  Claws, scratching at something.  Once, and then a breath, and then again.  It wasn't the sound of any activity, just a message.  He got up, walking out the front room.  Dickens sat in front of the door, one forepaw lifted.  As Charlie watched, he scratched again, then turned to look up, sorrowful.  Charlie felt a thickness in his throat.

"Hey, guy," he said, pretending not to understand.  "What's up?"

Dickens scratched the door.

The moment seemed to last forever until it was suddenly over.  Charlie turned the deadbolt, pulled open the door.  The street was blackness with occasional dull orange streetlights.  It smelled like rain coming and the chill of autumn.  Dickens licked the top of Charlie's foot once, then trotted out, claws ticking against the pavement like hail.  Charlie watched until Dickens went into the pool of light under one of the lamps and into the darkness on the far side, then closed the door and locked it again. He understood that Dickens wouldn't be back in the morning, and that he wouldn't look for him.  There would be no Lost Dog flyers posted, no trips to the pound to look through cages for the familiar face.  The world was broken, and he and Dickens had both been wrong to expect the old pieces would still fit.

In the morning, he called for a taxi.

————————————————

Daniel here.

At this point in the process, I've lost any sense of what the overall experience of reading it is likely to be.  I'm pretty much going by the outline and a vague sense of what feels right coming next.  I figure there will be plenty of time to look at the overall piece when it's done.  I notice that the taxi keeps showing up — probably too much, but that's fine.  I can find the right mention or two in the finished draft and kill off the others.

Looking at this scene, I was thinking a lot about flat and round characters.  Specifically, Charlie's a pretty flat character.  He doesn't do anything that particularly surprises us.  What I'm expecting to see from him is pretty much what I see.  Writers get a lot of encouragement to make round, fully-realized characters, and sometimes that is what's called for, but I don't think this is one of those times.  There are also flat characters that are very popular and do exactly what they're intended to do.  Sherlock Holmes, ferinstance, is the king of all flat characters, and he's been brilliantly successful.

Part of what makes a flat character useful, I think, is the invitation to the reader to fill in the blanks.  I remember what Scott McCloud said in his analysis of comic books about simplified faces being what it feels like to have a face (and so easier to identify with) and realistic faces being what it's like to look at someone else (and to easier to see as not-self).  I wonder whether flat and round characters aren't sort of like that.  Charlie right now is pure in a way that I don't think he would be if I filled in all his blanks — more relationships, what his job is, his background, what city he's in, what color his hair is, what color his skin is, und so weiter.

I hadn't planned it that way, but it's how it's working out.  If it looks later like I'm wrong, I can do another draft  with more concrete details and idiosyncratic, personalized behaviors and reactions.

I feel I should also note that this particular scene was written when I was really, really tired.  I was up until almost 2 last night, and up again before 7 to start making coffee.  I spent the day at a coffee shop while the Darling Child was doing a thing for President's Day, and I did this and a bunch of work on the next Game of Thrones comic book script (I'm finishing up issue 12 of 24 right now).  Tonight, I'm gong to try to get a few hundred words on a short story or one of the novels, but I'm thinking an early bed would also be good.

The Dogs Project: Part Five

What is the Dogs Project?

The week passed slowly, old patterns slowly remaking themselves in slightly altered forms.  He took himself to the lunch bar at the side of the fancy steakhouse across from the office.  Meetings became more and more comprehensible as he put together what he'd missed during his time in hospital.  His still-healing wounds bothered him less; he found ways to move and sit and stretch that worked with the new limitations of his body.  Every morning and evening, he allowed himself the luxury of a taxi home, swearing that this would be the last, that he'd get back to being responsible with his money next time, and then changing his mind when the next time came.

He hadn't thought to dread Sunday until Sunday came.

The late morning light spilled in through his bedroom window making spots of of white too bright to look at on the bed.  The night before had been a movie streamed off the Internet, a couple rum-and-cokes, and a bag of Crackerjacks for dinner.  Between that and skipping his evening stretches, his body felt tight and cramped, the complex of scars in his belly and down his thigh pulling at his healthy flesh like something jealous.  Lolling at the edge of sleep, he smelled the hound's rank piss, but the illusion faded as he came to himself.  Dickens lay at the foot of the bed, black eyes focused on Charlie.  Even perfectly still and trying not to disturb, the delight and excitement showed in the little dog's eyebrows and the almost subliminal trembling of his body.  Even then, the penny didn't drop for Charlie until he sat up and Dickens leapt off the bed and ran, claws clicking against the wood, for the front door.

It was Sunday morning, and Sunday morning had always been the dog park.  Charlie rubbed the back of his hand against his eyes as Dickens raced from the front door to the bedroom to the door to the bedroom.  Dread spilled in his chest like ink, but he pulled himself up from the mattress and forced a smile.

"Yes, I know," he said to Dickens, capering at his feet.  "I have to put some clothes on, right?"

Dickens' bark was high and joyful.  Charlie brewed himself a cup of coffee, showered, pulled on his sweats and sneakers.  Without meaning to drag things out, he still didn't reach for the leash until almost one in the afternoon.  Cool air tightened Charlie's skin, and the trees that lined the streets were giving up their green for red and gold and brown.  It wouldn't be many more days before some wind came and knocked the dry leaves into the gutters, but they still held on for now.  Dickens strained at the leash, choking himself a little with eagerness.  Charlie focused on breathing, staying calm.  They'd gone to the dog park hundreds of times.  This wouldn't be any different.  He'd take Dickens through the gate, let him off the leash, and wait, visiting with the other people there or reading the news off his phone, while the dogs ran and jumped and chased each other.  Then, eventually, Dickens would trot back to him, scratch at his shin, and they'd go back home together.  The same as always.  The same as ever.

Half a block from the park, the first sounds of barking reached him.  Charlie's body reacted like a sudden onset of the flu; his hands went cold, and he started to sweat.  Nausea crawled up the back of his throat.  Dickens, tugged at the leash, pulling him on, and he set his teeth and forced one foot ahead of the other until they were at the gate.  Inside, half a dozen animals ran in a pack over the grass and mud.  Red tongues lolled from mouths filled with sharp, ivory teeth.  Muscles bunched and released along the flanks of a doberman pinscher, the animal's claws digging a the turf, throwing bits of mud and turf behind it.  They were all so fast.  Their barking was joyful and rich and inhuman. Bestial.  Charlie's vision dimmed at the sides.  Narrowed.  His heart was tripping over too fast.  His breath shook like a storm.

Dickens scratched at the green-painted iron gate, both forepaws working too fast to follow, then looked back at Charlie, expectant.  Confused.  Charlie gagged, the taste of coffee and vomit at the back of his mouth.  He stepped back, dragging Dickens with him.

"Come on boy," Charlie said, the words shuddering.  "Let's go.  Let's go home."

Dickens set his feet on the sidewalk, head low and pulling back against the leash.  Charlie yanked harder than he'd meant to, and the little dog sprawled.  Dickens' eyes registered surprise, then confusion, then hurt.  Charlie turned, his teeth gritted tight against the nausea, his arms and legs shaking, and pushed for home.  After the first few steps, Dickens stopped pulling back on the leash, but he didn't dance or caper anymore.  Just walked along behind, his gaze never rising above knee height.

————————————————–

Daniel here.

I was up *way* too late last night at a dinner in Santa Fe.  I'm tired and sleepy and probably mildly dehydrated.  But actually, I'm feeling pretty good about the story.  My impression at the moment is that Charlie and Dickens are both sympathetic, innocent, and irreconcilable, which is pretty much what I'm looking for.  I think the double-long scene before leads gracefully into this one, and this should lead well into the next, where Charlie and Dickens break up.  I've tried to mention a few times before now that Dickens is upset and hurt by what happened and all the things that used to be joyful have been taken away from him too.  Not Charlie's fault, not Dickens' fault.  Just the way it goes.

Now the whole damn story is an extended metaphor.  I know that because I'm writing it, and you know that because you're reading these posts, *but* when someone comes to the story fresh, I don't want it to be obvious or preachy.  So yes, when I'm thinking about Dickens, I'm thinking about a rape victim's nice-guy boyfriend.  When I'm thinking about going for a walk or a run at the park, I'm thinking about intimacy and sex.  And hopefully — hopefully — none of that will seem explicit or on-the-nose in the final draft.  As long as I can get the emotions right, where they came from won't matter.  The story will still work.  I'm writing a story here, and if it turns into a sermon, I've blown it.

I remember an anecdote I heard about Nabakov writing Lolita.  I don't know if it's true or if I'm even remembering it right, but the way I heard it was that Nabakov had heard a story about someone trying to teach a gorilla how to make art.  Primate research.  And the first thing that the gorilla drew were the bars of its cage, and that was the inspiration for Lolita.  Doesn't show up anywhere in the book — and shouldn't.  If it informed his vision, it did its job.

The Dogs Project: Part Four

What is the Dogs Project?

"Hey," Adam said.  "Sorry about that."

"Well.  Can't say you didn't warn me."

"They mean well."

"I know," Charlie said.  "And I appreciate the thought, it's just . . ."

"Yeah."

Adam stood, neither in the room nor out, his expression friendly.  The moment stretched just a little too long.  If Charlie wasn't looking to talk, it wasn't an invitation.  If he did want to, then it was.

"They didn't find them," Charlie said.  "The dogs who . . . They never found them."

Adam stepped in the room, sat in the chair beside Charlie's desk.  Charlie's fingers hovered over his keyboard, then folded into fists and sank slowly to his lap.  A telephone rang in someone else's office.

"It bothers you," Adam said.

"I keep thinking about how they're still out there, you know?" Charlie said.  "I think maybe the pound picked them up and put them down and never knew they were the ones.  Or maybe they were a pack that was just moving through the city and didn't really belong here.  Or maybe . . ."

"Or maybe they're still out there," Adam said, speaking into the pause.  "Maybe they belong to people in the neighborhood.  Maybe they're sleeping on one of your neighbor's couches."

"Like that," Charlie said.  He felt his hands shaking a little, but he couldn't see the tremor.  "I don't know how we do it."

Adam took breath and let it out slowly.

"You get people, you get dogs," Adam said.  "Strays, yeah.  But pets.  People love their pets.  Seriously, there are probably more dogs in this town than cars."

"I know.  I've had a dog my whole life.  At least one.  It's not like I expected them to—"

"That's not what I meant," Adam said.  "We've always lived with predators.  Before dogs were dogs, they were wolves.  I mean, that was a long-ass time ago, but they were wolves.  I don't know how they decided to hang out with us and we decided to hang out with them, but we've being doing it since before they were dogs.  Maybe before we were humans.  I saw this thing one time that said how we'd never have gotten above hunter-gatherer without digs to help with herding.  We breed for the nice ones, except when we don't.  And no matter what, some of them are always predators."

"Yeah," Charlie said.

"Most of them aren't though.  Most dogs go through their whole lives and never bite anyone.  Bark, maybe, make noise, but actually do the thing?  And how many therapy dogs are there, right?  Seeing-eye dogs.  Companion dogs.  Even just good pets.  Dickens.  Most dogs are good."

"About how many, do you think?"

"I don't know.  Four out of five?"

"So for every ten dogs you see . . ."

"Yeah.  A couple."

The air conditioner hummed.  Someone walked past Charlie' door, bitching about the copy machine.  On the street, a truck lumbered around the corner, it brakes screeching metal against metal.  Adam leaned forward, his elbows on his knees.  Charlie was afraid the man would reach out, touch his shoulder or his knee, but Adam only waited.

"I don't know how we do this," Charlie said again, more softly.

The afternoon the worst.  The pain ramped up a little, but worse than that, Charlie's mind seemed to fall into a haze.  The documentation he was working on seemed to mean less and less, sentences and paragraphs running into each other without any two ideas connecting.  The graphics didn't fit the allotted spaces, and Charlie couldn't remember how to resize them.  He tried to walk to the bathroom without his cane, which turned out to be optimistic.  Everything felt too hard, too forced, like something he should have been able to do, and couldn't.  By three o'clock, the exhaustion robbed him of anything resembling productivity.  He sat at his desk making a list of everything he had to do instead of doing it.  Eventually the hour hand moved far enough that he could go home without it feeling like a rout.  He called for a taxi.  Between the fare coming in and the one going home, the day was almost a financial push.   Next week would have to be different.  He'd feel better.

At the apartment, Dickens leapt and bounced, running in a tight circle they way he had since he was a puppy.  Charlie collapsed on the couch, closed his eyes.  When he heard claws scratching at the front door, he shifted his head, opened his eyes.  Dickens looked at him, at the door, at him again.  He needed to go for a walk.  It was almost more than Charlie could stand.

————————————

Daniel here.

So, you see what I did there?  It was an honest mistake.  The outline called for this scene (the fourth one) to be Charlie taking Dickens to the dog park and the talking-to-the-coworker thing to be the next scene.  But I switched them in my head.  IN this case, the outline was wrong.  That happens a *lot*.  You can ask Ty.  We always start off the Expanse books with an outline, and by halfway through the book, we've pitched it out and remade it at least a couple of times.

I think that the folks who refuse to outline are concerned — some of 'em anyway — that the outline will be come a kind of contract.  That because you say the fourth scene will be this and not that, you've somehow bound yourself.  That's not my experience.  For me, the outline in a way to start thinking about the overall structure, but it's only a tool.  I'm the boss here.  If I get in and it becomes clear that the summary-narrative-laden first day back at work needs a little dialog to leaven it, and that the best way to do that is swap scenes four and five, then of course I'll change the plan.

I'm mostly pleased with this scene.  It got the most dogs are good idea stated out loud without — I think — being too preachy or obvious.  It restated that the taxi's not a long-term solve.  We get to see Dickens trying to live with the same habits and patterns he and Charlie had before, and Charlie having been changed to the point that the past doesn't apply anymore.  We have Charlie's discomfort with the attack's being acknowledged to anyone except Adam.  I think we're more or less on track.

That said, it's Sunday, I didn't sleep well, and I'm tired as hell.  From experience, I suspect that the scene won't show the fact — that the overall quality of the writing hasn't *actually* taken a nosedive just because I desperately want a nap.  But the beautiful thing is that even if the dialog is lumpy and ham-handed, this is a first draft.  I can fix it later.

The more I look at it, though, the more convinced I am that Adam should be a woman.  It's not just the subtext of intimacy either.  There are sentences that would just work better if I could use a less ambiguous pronoun.  Like this:

Adam stood, neither in the room nor out, his expression friendly.  The moment stretched just a little too long.  If Charlie wasn't looking to talk, it wasn't an invitation.  If he did want to, then it was.

becomes

She stood, neither in the room nor out, her expression friendly.  The moment stretched just a little too long.  If he wasn't looking to talk, she wasn't offering.  If he did want to, then she was.

If I could use he and she, I wouldn't have to keep putting in names to clarify which he I was thinking about.  Plus which, in the next-to-last scene when Adam's supposed to lift his shirt and show his scars, the sense of exposure is more pronounced if it's a woman doing it.  The idea of having no women in the story at all wasn't a bad one, but it's causing me more trouble than it's worth.

I've also been wondering — along those lines — what would happen if I made Charlie a woman and kept Adam male, but I think that wouldn't work.  It still adresses my pronoun problems, but it feels like it would betray my subtext.  Anyway, I'm going to finish up with both the boys, boys and fix it in the rewrite if that seems like the Right Thing.

The draft's not quite half done, and we're going to be just over 4000 words at the end of next scene, so I'm expecting this to land between 8000 and 9000 words when we get to the end.  That's about where I want it.

The Dogs Project: Part Three

What is the Dogs Project?

The effort of going home exhausted him.  The effort of being home.  Charlie had spent weeks in his new nightmare life, and all his things waited for him, unchanged.  It was like walking into his room in his parents' house and finding all his things from high school still where he'd left them.  The artifacts of a previous life.

Adam had stacked the mail neatly on the dining table.  Charlie sat there, his new aluminum cane against his leg, and went through them, envelope by envelope.  Dickens capered and danced and brought his old fetch toy, a ragged penguin.  Charlie only had the energy to toss it half-heartedly across the apartment a few times, and Dickens seemed to recognize his lack of enthusiasm.  The little dog hopped up on the couch with a sigh, and rested his head on his forepaws for the rest of the evening.

In the morning, Charlie took Dickens on a quick walk around the block, then fed the dog, fixed himself a cup of coffee and a piece of toast, and called a taxi to carry him to work.  The indulgence wouldn't work as an everyday occurrence, but for his first day back to the office, he didn't wan't to push.  And, secretly, it meant one more day before he had to walk down past the strip mall, past the parking lot.  Better to spend a few dollars and treat himself gently.  There would be plenty of time to face unpleasant memories later, when he had more strength.

As soon as he sat down at his desk and turned on his computer, guilt pressed against him.  Eight hundred unread emails tracking back to that day.  Messages from people he'd worked with for months or years with subject lines like THIRD ATTEMPT and I'M RUNNING OUT OF TIME HERE.  His morning wove itself out of apologies and lists of deadlines that had already passed.

The physical therapist had given him exercises to do throughout his day, gentle stretches that would help to keep the scars from adhering where they shouldn't, would get him back as much range of motion as possible.  It wouldn't be all it had been, but most.  Probably.  Enough.  He had his toes on a thick hardback book to gently stretch the reattached tendon when Michael from bookkeeping popped his head in the office door.  Charlie felt a flush of embarrassment that bordered on shame.

"Charlie.  You got a minute?"

"Sure," he said, pushing the book under his desk with a toe.  "What's up?"

"Little thing," he said, and ducked back out.  Charlie took up his cane and followed.

It could have been worse.  It could have been the whole staff.  Instead, there were just four of them: Michael, Robin from HR, Mr. Garner, and Adam.  They didn't half fill the breakroom, and the little tray of cupcakes with one frosted letter on each, spelling out WELCOME BACK.  Everyone smiled.  The sweetness of the cakes went past mere sugar into something artificial and cloying, and Charlie got a cup of the bitter work coffee to make it bearable.  Mr. Garner joked about how badly things had fallen behind without him.  Robin said it was all just awful without ever quite saying which it she was referring to.  Adam stayed politely quiet, a sympathetic look in his eyes saying I warned you they were going to do something.  Charlie sat on the metal folding chair, nodding and smiling and trying to be touched and grateful.  When it was over, he went back to his office, leaning on the cane more than he had before.  He could feel the sugar crash coming and the coffee left him jittery.  Probably the coffee.

He tried to catch up on the email, but it was too much.  In the end, he composed a little canned response that he could copy into the page whenever he needed to.  I'm very sorry for my late reply, but I have been out of the office for a medical situation and have only just returned.  Please rest assured that my full efforts and attention are on this issue, and I will be back on track shortly.  It wasn't even a lie, quite.  The bland, conventional business-speak would have annoyed him before.  He'd hated the insincerity and falseness of etiquette that everyone knew was just etiquette.  Now, it felt safe and familiar.  Something happened, but it was over now.  He was moving on.  He was putting it in the past.  Everything that had happened could be put in a the box marked "medical situation" and the lid nailed shut.

——————————————

Daniel here.

I actually went a little past this when I first wrote it, and put in "Sorry about that," Adam said. which is probably the first line of the next scene.

So here's another bit of questionable advice:  "Show, don't tell."  Sometimes summary narrative's a fine thing, and I've chosen to use a bunch of it here.  We're watching Charlie feel disconnected from his life, and one way to do that is to pull back.  We've just had two scenes that were really rich in sensory detail, and now I'm pulling back a couple degrees.  I expect the next one — Talking with Adam — will be easing back into immediacy, but by using summary, I can cover a lot of territory in a little time, and most of it's stuff we don't need to know.  I still can't tell what Charlie's job is, and I'm pretty sure I don't care.

My Darling Wife used to work for this fella — nice guy — who always said whatever he was talking about was the top priority.  Her point was that if everything's a priority, nothing is.  I think that holds true here too.  If I covered all the aspects of Charlie's life in the same level of detail — even if the detail is striking and immediate — it dulls the edge of the parts that I want sharpest.

This is also the first scene we've had that doesn't end on a conclusive note, but just oozes into the next one (part of why I sort of started the next scene first time out).

It may also be of interest that I haven't had enough sleep and my kid's home sick from school, and — I think as a direct result — I'm feeling dispirited about this story in particular and my writing career in general.  I'm not fishing for reassurance and I'm not reading comments, so don't feel obligated to tell me I don't suck.  I'll get some lunch and a good night's sleep and think I'm the bee's knees.  I just thought I'd point up how little my feelings about writing are about, y'know, writing…

The Dogs Project: Part Two

What is the Dogs Project?

[NOTE FROM THE MANAGEMENT: The scene following this is part of a horror story.  It's violent, unpleasant, and possibly triggering.  You have my permission to skip it.]

It had happened on the walk from his apartment to the bus stop.  The morning air was clean and crisp.  The leaves of the trees still held the rich green of summer, but the morning chill was autumn clearing its throat.  Running late, Charlie trotted along the familiar streets the way he did every morning. Past the corner deli with its hand-drawn signs, past the dog park where he'd take Dickens to run on the weekends, past the little strip mall with the head shop that never seemed to be open and the laundromat that always was.  There was a meeting scheduled for ten o'clock and the quarterly reports needed to have the numbers crunched.  Charlie's mind ran ahead of him, preparing for the day ahead.

The dogs started following him at the park, and at first, he saw them but didn't particularly take note.  There were three: a buff-colored hound with long, loose ears and a joyful canine smile; a dane cross, broad-jawed and tall; and a bull terrier whose white fur was so short that the pink of its skin showed through.  They were facts of the landscape, like the grass pushing up from cracks in the sidewalk and the smell of garbage from the dumpster.

As Charlie cut across the parking lot, one barked, a high, happy sound.  The dane ran in front of Charlie, blocking his way.  When he tried to walk around it, the big dog shifted into his path again and growled, and Charlie thought it was being playful.  Running claws tapped against the pavement behind him.

Even when the first bite tore into his leg, the pain blaring and sudden, Charlie didn't understand.  He reached for his calf, thinking that something had gone wrong, that there'd been some sort of accident.  The bull terrier leaped away from him.  Blood reddened its muzzle, and its tail wagged.  Charlie tried to walk, but his foot wouldn't support him, the tendon cut.  Bitten through.  The fear came on him like he was waking up from a dream.  The parking lot seemed too real and suddenly unfamiliar.

"Hey," he said, and the smiling hound lunged at him, yellow teeth snapping at the air as Charlie danced back, lost his balance, fell.  A white minivan drove by, not pausing.  The bull terrier jumped forward, and Charlie tried to pull his foot away from it.  The dane cross stepped over to him, bent down, and fastened its teeth around his throat.  The thick saliva dripped down the sides of Charlie's neck, and for a moment, all four of them were still.  When Charlie lifted his hand toward the dane's muzzle, it growled once, faintly — almost conversationally — and the jaw tightened.  You live if I let you live.  Charlie put his hand back down.

The attack began in earnest, but he didn't get to see it happen.  The only thing in his field of vision was the side of the dane's head, its sharp-cropped ear, the curve of its eye, and beyond that, the clear blue of the sky.  Teeth dug into Charlie's leg, into his arm.  One of the dogs stood on his chest, its weight pressing down on him, bit deep into the softness of his belly, and then shook its head back and forth.  The pain was intense, but also distant, implausible.  Intimate, and happening to somebody else.  It seemed to go on forever.

The dane growled again, shifting its grip on Charlie's neck.  Its breath warmed Charlie's ear.  The smell of its mouth filled his nostrils.  The voices of hound and terrier mixed, growls and yips and barks.  Violence and threat and pleasure.  Something bit into this foot, and he felt the teeth scraping against the small bones of his toe.  A pigeon flew overhead, landed on a power line.  Another bite to his belly, and then something deep and internal slipped and tugged.  The dogs had chewed through the muscle and were pulling out his intestine.

I'm going to die, Charlie thought.

And then it was over.  The grip on his throat eased, the assaulting teeth went away.  Charlie looked down at the slaughterhouse floor that his body had become, the ruins of his blood-soaked clothes, the pink loop of gut spilling out onto the asphalt.  The hound with its friendly face and permanent goofy smile trotted to his head and hitched up its hind leg.  Its testicles seemed huge, its red, exposed pizzle obscene.  Urine spattered Charlie's face, thick and rank.

Then they were gone, pelting down the street away from him.  They barked to each other, their voices growing softer with distance until they were just part of the background of the city.  Charlie listened to his own breath, half expecting it to stop.  It didn't.  Another car drove by, slowed, and then sped away.  He felt a vague obligation to scream or weep.  Something.  The pigeon launched itself from the wire above him and flew away, black against the bright sky.

Some time later, he thought to pull the cell phone from his pocket and call 911.  The blood made dialing hard.

————————————–

Daniel here.

It would be really cool if there was a way to know that this story was working.  Usually, it's a pretty good sign when I start having some kind of somatic reaction while I'm writing something.  This one, I was aiming for that, and I got there.  Not full on nausea, but a little lump at the base of my tongue.  That's happened before when I was writing things.  I've also made myself cry and laugh.  I've got a weird job that way.

I had to make a real effort on this one not to take the language over the top.  It's really tempting to start throwing in a bunch of abstract adjectives like horrible and terrible, but they don't mean much.  Instead I tried for a lot of concrete, specific images and evoking as many direct sensory experiences as I could.  The dane's breath against Charlie's ear, ferinstance.  I hadn't planned to have the cars going by at the beginning and end of the attack, or the pigeon.  I think the sense of help being nearby but not helping worked out pretty well.  For some reason, the pause after the dane gets Charlie's neck — when Charlie puts his hand back down — is important to me.  Not sure why that's true, but it is.  Also, I got to put in the dog park that comes up later in the story, so that's already established.  I am strating to wonder what Charlie does at the office.  Clearly, he's white collar, but beyond that, I got no clue yet.  If it's important, I'll put it in, but my guess is it doesn't matter.

One of the weirdest pieces of advice writers get when they start learning is "Write what you know."  I've been doing this for decades now, and I literally don't know what that phrase is supposed to mean.  I am one of the 90% of men who hasn't been on the bleak end of sexual violence.  I've also never been mauled by dogs — nipped on the ass by a doberman when I was maybe eight, and that's it.  Clearly I don't know from experience anything important in this scene.  Does that mean I shouldn't have written it?  I have books set in fantasy lands that never existed and in futures that won't be like that if we ever get there.  Are those somehow immoral writing, because these days, they buy my groceries.

My best guess is it's an admonition to limit your imagination to things you've experienced because otherwise you get the details wrong, and God forbid that ever happen.  More useful advice would be do your best and understand sometimes you'll get some details wrong.  Imagination's a muscle.  Gets stronger if you use it.

But back to the scene.  My job with that one was to make it awful enough that the rest of the story makes sense.  I honestly don't have any idea whether it works for that.  I'm in the middle of the project, and I have no perspective.  And I didn't expect to.  I'll take a look at it when the whole thing's together and I've had some cooling off time.  Until then, I'm withholding judgment, except that I'm glad that scene's done.

The Dogs Project: Part One

What is the Dogs Project?

 

"Well, you've used a lot less morphine today," the nurse said, tapping the feed with his thumbnail.  "Keep this up, Charlie, and we'll have you out of here by the weekend."

"Go dancing," Charlie joked.

"That's the spirit, my man."

The nurse adjusted something in the suite of machines beside the bed, and the low, chiming alert stopped for the first time in an hour.  The sounds of the hospital came in to fill the void: the television in the next room, the murmur and laughter of nursing station shop talk, monitor alarms from all along the ward, someone crying.

"I'll get you some more ice," the nurse said, taking the styrofoam cup from the little rolling bed table.  "Be right back."

Charlie tried to say thank you, but it was hard to focus.  His mind didn't feel right, and his body was a catalog of pains that he didn't want to associate with.  They'd saved his toes, but in five days, he'd only glimpsed the complication of red flesh and black stitching that was his leg.  The muscles of his abdomen were compromised.  That was the word the surgeon had used, compromised.  As if there had been some sort of agreement, some give-and-take.  The fluid draining from his gut had moved down, feeding deep, bloody bruises down both his thighs and filling his scrotum until it swelled up to the size of a grapefruit, the skin tight, hot, painful and discolored.  Strangely, the punctures on his neck where the dog's teeth had held him were the least of his injuries, and the quickest to heal.

The nurse stepped back in, put the cup where it had been.  Firm white foam holding crushed white ice.

"Up and around in no time," the nurse said.

"You bet," Charlie said and lifted the cup to his lips.  The cold comforted him.  It was like a water-flavored sno-cone: a kid's treat with all the sweetness gone.  He remembered something about the ancient Greeks thinking the afterlife was like that, just the same as life, but with all the sensation and color turned to gray.  That's how he knew he wasn't dead.  The pleasures might all be gone, but the pain was exquisite.

The nurse left again, and Charlie thumbed the morphine drip.  A few seconds later, the pain lost its edge, and the tightness in his throat went a little softer around the edges.  He closed his eyes and let the nightmares come play for a while — dreams of formless dread and shame, more like an emotional cold sore than a real dream — and when he woke, Adam was there. Sandy, thinning hair.  Sun-scarred face.  He was wearing a lumpy flight jacket that made him look like he had a massive pot belly.

"Hey," Charlie said.

"Hey, bro.  You're looking better."

"This is better?"

"There was some room for improvement," Adam said.  This was what they did.  Joked, like if they laughed about it, nothing would have happened.  It felt dishonest, but Charlie didn't have words for the things that wanted to be said.  Even if he did, he didn't want to put it on Adam.  No one else from the office had even visited.  "I got your mail in.  Pretty much just bills, ads, and credit card applications.  Figure it's all stuff that can wait."

"Thanks for that," Charlie said, pulling himself slowly up to sitting.  His crotch shrieked in pain, and for a moment he thought the skin around his scrotum had popped open like an overcooked hot dog.  It only felt that way.  "How're the salt mines?"

"Everyone's looking forward to getting you back in," Adam said.  "There's a collection to get you a welcome back present, but don't tell 'em I spilled the beans."

"Just glad they remember who I am."

On the intercom, a professionally calm voice announced code seven in the pediatrics lobby.  Code seven meant someone was dying.  Someone was doing worse than he was.  He felt a pang of guilt for taking the bed space, the doctors' attention.  It wasn't like he was dying.

"Brought a surprise for you," Adam said with a grin, and unzipped the flight jacket.  "Had to smuggle him in, right?"

Dickens head popped out, nose black and wet and sniffing wildly.  His expressive eyebrows shifted anxiously back and forth, but he didn't bark or growl.  When he saw Charlie, he tried to scramble out of the half-zipped jacket, his legs and paws flailing wildly.  Adam grunted as he lifted the dog up and set him gently on the bed.

"Hey boy.  Did you miss me?" Charlie said, trying to keep the tone of his voice gentle and happy, they way he would have with a child.  Dickens looked up at him, eyebrows bunched in worry, then at Adam, then back again.  The sniffing sounded like hyperventilating.  "It's all right, boy.  It's okay."

But the dog, hind legs shaking, only looked around the room, distress in his eyes.  Distress, and a question he couldn't ask and Charlie couldn't answer.

————————————————————————

 All right.  Daniel here now.

The thing about first drafts is they're first drafts.  Not everything about them is what you intended, and not everything about them is what's going to wind up in the final piece. That's what work-in-progress means.

The point of this scene going in was to give a sense of how busted up Charlie is, get enough curiosity about what happened to pull folks through to the next scene, where I'm going to tell them.  That's actually kind of important to make clear: There's always a temptation to withhold what's really going on in the mistaken belief that builds tension.  It doesn't.  It builds confusion and impatience.  It's much more suspenseful for the reader to know as much — and sometimes more — than the characters and then be worried about what's coming next than to have them doing things the reader doesn't have enough information to put in context.

Reading it over right now, fresh off the skillet, I'm starting to question whether Adam should be a guy.  My impulse going in was to have no women at all in the story, with the idea being that men would take the metaphorical role of women and dogs the metaphorical role of men.  A story about rape without women or sex.  The problem I hadn't seen is that Adam is an essentially friendly, supportive, nurturing character, and when you have two men being supportive and gentle, all of a sudden there's a question about their sexuality.  (This feeds into a long an angry rant I have about the men's movement, which I may go into another time, but I'm trying to stay focused here.)

I'm okay in general terms with Charlie and Adam reading as queer, except that I want my straight male brethren to really identify with Charlie.  I don't want to give anyone the easy out of thinking that the kind of victimization, loss, and fear we're playing with here is the province of queer men and women.  Ideally, queer men and women reading this story will find it a source of comfort (the way it is when people acknowledge and talk about painful but taboo subjects), but the audience I'd most like to reach are straight guys who hadn't thought about this before.  Which is to say, people like me.

I don't know what happens is Adam becomes Audrina, and I'm not going to do anything with it yet, but that's what I'm thinking about.

Also, I wonder what happens if I leave Charlie nameless.  That would be hard to do, especially if there aren't any women so that all the pronouns are stuck at "he", but it might make the character a little more universal and easy to identify with.  Or it might not, and I might be getting to clever for my own good and just making it harder for myself.

Also, I'm writing this on Scrivener for Mac, then cutting and pasting it into WordPress, if anyone wondered.

Dickens is named Dickens because it turns out I'm writing this scene on Charles Dickens' 200th birthday.

The Dogs Project: Outline

What is the Dogs Project?

I have this thing about wordcount.  Anyone who's worked with me can tell you about it.  It's idiosyncratic, and usually when people find out how it works, they start looking at me funny.  But for outlining a story, it's a wonderful little kink to have.

Usually, I can do something in about 750 to 1000 words.  The way I'm thinking about Dogs, it's probably a novelette which puts it anywhere between 7500 and 17500 words.  So when the time came to make the outline, I figured I was looking at about ten things happening start to finish.  Now I knew what the last one was — the guy with the big dog saying "nice doggie" over and over.  Which only begged the question of what the nine things were that happened before.

This is a horror story; the mandate is to present a malefic universe.  I know I'm not going to end things in a conclusive, satisfying way because the ending scene gets its power from the uncertainty and also because pretending I had a solution to the underlying subject feels cheap and disingenuous.  I know that the well I'm drawing from is sexual violence and its aftermath with particular focus on the paradox of most men being good people, and there still being a lot of predators.  I also know I don't want to have any of that be explicit in the final text.  One of the things that Orson Scott Card said that actually made sense to me (and he and I agree on essentially nothing) was that if a story's about something, you never use the word.  In this case, I don't want there to be a rape or any sex or — and this was a decision I wasn't sure about, but I think I'm going to roll this way — women.  What I'm trying for here is a translation of how I imagine it would be to live in that world into a different context where that dread is fresh and shiny and new.

And I've got nine things to do it in.  Here's what I came up with:

1) Protagonist in hospital, recovering from having been mauled.  His work buddy shows up to visit, bringing the protagonist's dog along.  The dog is visibly distressed by the whole thing.

The idea here is that the scene give the reader a good hook — here's a guy who's in pain, and people who care about him.  We also set up the "good dog" who we'll be taking away from the protagonist later.

2) Flashback.  The protagonist walking through the park and being attacked by dogs.

This is the scene I'm already dreading.  I have to traumatize the protagonist and the reader enough that all the stuff that comes after makes sense.  I have some ideas about what would make this particularly unpleasant and visceral. I think one of the dogs should have a very friendly face.  I think the attack should begin with the guy thinking that the dogs are playing.  I think the worst of the attack will be when he's on the ground and one of the dogs has its neck around his throat to keep him from moving.  At some point, the protagonist needs to believe he's going to die.  It won't be like a real dog attack, because I'm not aiming for realism here.  And at the end, I'm pretty sure one of the attacking dogs pees on him.  The rest of the story is going to stand or fall on whether this scene does its job.

3) The protagonist goes back to work

This may be a fairly short scene.  We see the work buddy again, we watch the protagnost trying to get back to normal with the sense that it's not really working.

4) The protagonist tries to take his dog to the park

Our guy and the good dog head out to the dog park where they always used to go, but the guy can't do it.  He sees the other animals and freaks out.  The good dog is confused and hurt, trying to go have fun the way he used to, and having his treat taken away (even though poor good dog didn't do anything wrong).  Hopefully, there's a growing sense here of claustrophobia and sorrow and resentment.

5) Talking with the work buddy (1 of 2)

I think it'll be time to take a break from the horribly emotional stuff here, step back, and see our protagonist actually having a moment's connection with someone.  This is also where I get to put in the idea that most dogs never bite anyone.

6) Losing the dog

The protagonist at home at night and his dog sulking.  When he tries to cajole the dog into being playful, the dog snaps.  At the end of the scene, the dog does and scratches at the door to be let out, and the protagonist lets him out, clear in the knowledge that the dog won't come back and the protagonist isn't going to go looking for him.  The metaphor here — in case y'all hadn't picked it up — is of the nice guy who can't handle that his lover's been raped.  From a narrative perspective, this has the advantage of putting my character in even more pain, and also it frees him up to start looking for a new dog (and deciding if he even wants one).

7) Protagonist on the street, getting barked at.  No one else reacts.

So now that we've taken away the protagonist's companion, I'm going to make him feel a little more threatened and hypervigilant.  We'll have a scene — probably on his way to work — where a dog barks at him, and he has an anxiety attack.  But no one else seems to pay any attention, so he tries to keep his reaction hidden.

[grr.  numeral eight, close parentheses, not ]The pet store, failing to get a new dog

Our protagonist in a pet shop, thinking that what he needs is a new dog.  Maybe a bigger one, that can also offer some protection.  We go in with him, talk to the shop guy, look at the dogs available for adoption, but our guy keeps seeing the new pets as possible predators, and he winds up leaving without getting a dog.  Chances are, he'd get a good dog, but the consequences of being wrong are too awful.

9) Talking to the work buddy (2 of 2)

We're almost to the end here, so it's time to start wrapping up.  I figure it'll be a conversation about how to feel safe around dogs, with the work buddy pointing out the trade-offs in each one.  Yeah, you could carry a gun, as long as you never want to go to a bar, a bank, or a courthouse.  Yeah, you could do some martial arts class thing, with the understanding that dogs are always going to be faster and bite harder than you will and they hunt in packs, but sure.  We'll find out that the work buddy was mauled when he was a kid (I'm thinking by a family pet).  When the protagonist asks how long the fear lasts, I think the work buddy will say something along the lines of "It never goes away, you just figure out how to work around it."  I don't know the details on that, but I figure I can put it together when I get there.

10) good doggie good doggie good doggie

I don't know if I can really use a subway car.  I mean, seriously, what's a Great Dane cross doing wandering around the subway on its own, right?  But I could put him at a bus stop by himself, maybe around twilight.  Have the dog show up, sit on the curb.  Huge animal.  Massive and young and strong.  Probably some scars on its ears.  Not growling or anything.  No expression on its face, or maybe that little smile dogs get sometimes.  The feeling of threat starts ramping up, and the story ends.

So like that.

Come back next time, and I'll take a swing at that first scene.

The Dogs Project: Where do you get your ideas?

What is the Dogs project?

So the standard question that writers always get asked is "Where do you get your ideas?"  And a lot of times it's said in this tone of voice that is just loaded with impression that getting ideas is the impressive thing that we do.  This confuses and frustrates writers — by which I mean me — for several reasons.  First off, the part that I struggle with isn't the having ideas part, it's the making the ideas not suck in practice.  Having ideas is the easy part, figuring out how to deliver them is more than a lifetime's work.  But the second part is that the question isn't usually answerable in any satisfying way.  "Oh well, you know, I read a lot and things just kind of come together in my head and then I get excited about them."  That's exactly true, and sort of anticlimactic, right?

So anyway, I spend a certain amount of time hanging out on the Westeros forum, and there was this long-running sturm-und-drang conversation that spilled out over two threads about depictions of rape in fiction.  I came into it late, and a lot of it fel into the tl;dr category for me, but I was grazing it some.  For long-time blog readers, I've built my own opinions about sexual violence in fiction, which mostly comes down to two general guidelines:

1) The Curry Rule

When you put a little curry in the recipe, you're now making a curry dish.  The flavor overpowers whatever else you were up to.  When you include rape in your story or novel, it overpowers whatever else you were doing, and you're now writing a story about rape.

2) Working on the Slant

I respect the existence of things like Irreversible, but — for me — writing about sexual violence in a straightforward, realistic way is too hard.  Part of my job it to get the folks reading my stuff to have more or less the experience I wanted them to have, and when I'm taking on a subject that's that powerful and personal and — frankly — idiosyncratic, I'm going to trigger powerful reactions that the text itself can't channel.   Plus which, any realistic depiction of an act of sexual violence — especially when written by a man — is suspect.  There are too many "condemning" depictions out there that are also inviting the reader (or viewer) to get a little excited by what the villain is doing.  Plus which, I don't like it, which makes it hard to do well.  So instead, when I'm dealing with issues that touch on rape — like fer example ownership of one's own body — I reach for literalized metaphors.  If I wanted to talk about someone feeling trapped in the past by some kind of trauma, I write stuff where I can have someone trapped in the past by some kind of trauma.  Ta daa!

But anyway, I'd grazed on some of the Westeros forum conversation, so the issues were kind of on my mind.  That reminded me of a study I'd read about — and now can't find a link to — that was talking about rape on college campuses.  Always a difficult subject.  So this particular study gave a questionnaire to what I assume was a statistically significant population of college guys, and asked about ther sexual history in a way that didn't include things like "Ever raped anyone?" but did have stuff like "have you ever had sex with a partner who was too intoxicated to respond to you" and "have you ever continued with a sexual act after your partner has indicated they would like to stop".  The results in the report I read was that about twenty percent of the guys answering the questions copped to having committed some form of rape.

If you haven't already guessed, I'm one of the eighty percent on this issue.  I'm pleased to consider myself a feminist.  My best friends for most of my life have been women.  Ask any nice guy you know, and my bet is you'll find the same thing.  There's a kind of guilt that comes from getting lumped in with the twenty percent, and there's also a resentment at being made to feel guilty for it.  Now we can talk all day about whether that's justified or whether all men are tacitly complicit in a rape culture, and maybe someday we will, but the thing that struck me about that study was that it seemed to me that it justified both sides of the argument.  Assuming the stats are right, a room of a hundred men has around twenty predators in it, and most men are good men.  Eighty percent, more or less.  Four in five.

That paradox seems really important, and not particularly obvious.  I am neither a straight woman nor a gay man, so I'm not really in a position of trying to find love and companionship and sexual gratification from a pool of folks where two out of ten possible lovers is a predator, and good luck telling which ones.  I'm one of the nice guys who spent a lot of time wondering why girls seemed so skittish.  After all, I'd never do anything bad, right?  In fairness, this isn't the first time I'd had an insight like this, but putting some numbers to it made it seem a little more concrete.  Anyway…

Now about the same time all this was bouncing around the ol' noggin, the Darling Child and I watched a PBS special called Dogs Decoded.  I will now pause to thank PBS, and encourage all y'all to give generously to your local PBS station.  Folk do some good work.  And one of the things that came out of that documentary was how long-standing and deep the connection between humans and dogs is.  They're literally the animal best able to communicate with us.  They're not much for sexual gratification (if your experience if different on this, please I don't want to know) but if you wanted to pick a way to find love and companionship, that and a little fur is pretty much what dogs are made of.  Unless they're bad dogs and they maul your kid to death.

The image came to me — I can still see it — of a man sitting in a subway car.  The only other thing in the car is a massive dog sitting on the seat across from him.  The dog had blank brown eyes, and it isn't doing anything threatening.  The man is repeating the words "good doggie" over and over, hoping that it's true.

And that's where I got my idea.

Come on back tomorrow, I'll tell you what I'm planning to do with it.  And just a reminder, until the project's done, I'm not going to be reading or responding to any of the comments.  If you have an opinion or judgment you'd like to share, feel free.  Ty's still moderating things.  When I don't answer, I'm not blowing you off any more than I am everybody else.