It’s Raining Dogs

My Afterwords on Bucket List. I'm turning into a literary veterinarian.

So, check this out:

I’m only on story XXII, but I have already featured dogs in starring roles eight times. I’m not good at math or calculators, but that’s quite a hit rate. Who do we got? We got…

1. Tripod, the three-legged greyhound in The Knuckleball Artist that gets stuck in the right-field doggy-door flap and terrifies the town of What Cheer with his little wet nose.

2. Mr. Steiner’s beloved Lowchen Puccini tethered to the school flagpole in Solomio.

3. The wolves howling at the moon in Luna are, at the very least, “dog-adjacent.”

4. Clothesline’s one friend in the world, Shep— a German Shepherd stolen from an old widow then returned to her outhouse before the tramp’s death. Curiously, Jack London also involves returning a dog to its rightful owner. Bucket List-ish.

5. And Bucket List’s Lord in the oh-so-thinly-veiled auto-fiction-first-none-of-this-has-actually-happened-yet story. If I am to pass first, may I have provisioned a mutt named Lord for my wife. Not in a hurry to find out.

But wait… because behind the scenes there are even more dogs on the way!

6. The Best Man: An upcoming, light-hearted wedding story (struggling to be written for months) has a dozen St. Bernards, including one that flies ceremoniously off a cliff. If those dogs that story ever sees the light of day, you will get to meet them with their adorable little pickle jar whiskey barrels. One little Saint Bernard puppy for each bridesmaid. Writing comedy is really, really hard. Humblingly difficult. “Burn it in the fireplace, this sucks” level difficult. This is even with twelve dogs, a miniature golf resort, a pregnant bride, an old woman’s marble-grinding walker, and a Zorb. The funniest thing about the entire story is that five months ago the writer thought it was “humorous.”

7. And finally, for the last month, I’ve been working on Stay, a story about a man and a pug on a sailboat. An adventure story! I’ll say this much: for the same reason you don’t want to drift away from your spaceship like the astronaut in The Gondolier, you definitely don’t want to fall off your Beneteau five miles out from Tampa all alone except for a small, sniffling pug. Next month.

“The Dogs of 100 Stories” Stack-ranked for Bark:

1. Wolves

2. Tripod

3. Lord

4. Puccini

5. The Saint Bernard puppies

6. Shep (younger)

7. The pug (Not applicable, no bark)

Stack-ranked for Bite:

1. Wolves

2. Shep (older)

3. Lord

4. Tripod

5. Puccini

6. The Saint Bernard puppies

7. The pug (Not applicable, no bite)

Stack-ranked for One Writer’s Affection for Them:

1. Tripod

2. Lord

3. The pug

4. Puccini

5. Shep

6. The Saint Bernard puppies

7. Wolves

For a guy who’s never owned a dog and spent the morning on the co-op board insisting we shouldn’t allow dogs into our building, he sure wants to make friends with a Writer’s Best Friend.

Long story.

Oh, and Two Last Things:

1. I’m looking for hypothetical dog names for a future story. Any reader help appreciated! Explanation very helpful. I don’t have any specific story in mind, but another dog story seems inevitable at the rate I’m pumping out canine content. A good name from a reader and a charming or heart-breaking explanation might inspire me. Send me your childhood dog name, the name of your neighbor’s dog, something you always thought would make a good dog name. Send me something…

2. Aaaaand… the big request… does anyone have an interesting photograph they can send me that I can make up a story about? Note: please don’t have it be of anyone you care about! If I go in some unflattering direction, I don’t want to be making fun of your late mother-in-law. If I get a picture that works, your picture will be in the queue.

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