Our nephew’s dog had puppies. My wife Cheryl and son Sean went to see them. They fell in love with the runt of the litter.
He was such a little thing, half Labrador and half hound dog. He spent most of the visit curled up on Cheryl’s chest, sleeping.
They wanted to adopt him, so they called home to ask my opinion.
“It’s fine with me,” I said, “but what do you think Whiskers and Kabella will think?”
Whiskers was our four-year-old blue-eyed gray and white tom cat. Kabella was our black Labrador, nine years old at the time.
“Whiskers will have to adjust,” Cheryl said, knowing that the cat didn’t care for dogs, barely tolerated the one we had. “Kabella has never had puppies. Maybe she’ll be a good mother.”
We had to wait a month before the puppy was old enough to leave his mother. During that time we debated possible names.
Cheryl suggested “Cuddles” because he liked to snuggle.
“With a name like Cuddles,” I said, “every dog in the neighborhood will beat him up. He’s already the runt. We don’t want to add to his troubles.”
We searched for a more masculine name. “Skippy” was proposed and just as quickly discarded.
I don’t remember how we settled on “Scooter,” but we agreed that it sounded butch enough so that the neighborhood bully dogs probably wouldn’t tease him.
Finally, we brought Scooter home. He spent the hour-long drive curled up on Sean’s lap.
Cheryl had over-estimated Kabella’s maternal instinct. Mostly, Kabella ignored Scooter, but if he pestered her too much she quickly put him in his place. And if he dared to eat from her bowl, she sent him yipping away to the living room where he cowered behind the couch.
Whiskers was indifferent to the puppy, but Scooter already had a fully developed bark-at-the-cat instinct. He would bounce around yapping at Whiskers, who was more than twice his size. Whiskers would sit serenely and watch this macho display. Finally, bored, he’d lift his paw and cuff Scooter on the side of his head. The puppy would fall over, and Whiskers would stroll quietly away.
Scooter didn’t stay tiny for long. Soon he was bigger than Whiskers, but he’d long since learned to get along with his adopted brother. Although Scooter thought of the cat as his buddy, Whiskers interacted with the dog only when he had no other choice.
Cheryl and I would sit on the couch and watch Scooter chase Whiskers down into the basement. After a moment of silence we’d hear thumping on the stairs, and Scooter would charge across the room and down the hall with Whiskers in hot pursuit. Scooter was playing, but Whiskers was serious; like Kabella, he was establishing boundaries.
Kabella never got in touch with her maternal side. She was top dog in this house, and she never let this scrawny intruder forget it. They got along fine, but Kabella continued in her role as dominant dog even after Scooter had grown larger than her.
Whiskers also came to accept Scooter. As long as the new dog didn’t violate his space too aggressively, he was cool with it. Whiskers even tolerated an occasional rear-end sniff when he came in from outdoors; he understood that Scooter was just making sure he was the cat who belonged in this household, not an imposter.
Later, when Scooter was full-grown, we visited Cheryl’s family and met two of Scooter’s brothers. Cheryl’s sister had adopted them when they were puppies. We were surprised that both dogs had short legs and were a little chunky. They were closer to Kabella’s size than to Scooter’s.
The runt of the litter had grown into a lean, long-legged powerhouse who dwarfed his siblings. And Although Kabella and Whiskers challenged him from time to time, he had managed to fit in with his adopted family.
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I extend my heartfelt thanks to everyone who helped make yesterday’s launch of my short novel A Friend of the Family a success. Your downloads propelled it a long way up the top 100 most downloaded books in two of Amazon’s categories.
Editorial Comments: Keep Them in Perspective
When I was a novice writer I lived for editorial comments. Occasionally they came, scrawled on a standard form rejection slip, just a few words to let me know if I was on the right track, if what I was writing was any good. I would bet that most aspiring writers long for that coveted editorial critique.
Receiving editorial comments is great, but keep them in perspective. Fiction editing is a very subjective business, and what one editor doesn’t like, another might rave about.
I’ll give you a few examples from editorial comments I’ve received over the years.
“New Beginnings”
“Keeper of the Shrine”
MY NOTES: I took this story back to my Beta Reader, an English Professor at the University of Nebraska. He re-read it, and we decided that I should change the title (“Of Life, Death, and Spiders” seemed a bit pompous), but I shouldn’t touch the symbolism because we believed it was right for a story like this (and apparently two other readers at Prairie Schooner agreed.)
“That Time of Year”
“The Moaning Rocks”
MY NOTES: Unfortunately, by April Antithesis had ceased publication, so the story went out on the submission trail again. It garnered a wide variety of comments – mostly positive, some not, but most editors to whom I submitted commented on it. I published it finally in October Dreams: A Harvest of Horror. Also, note that Fantasy Macabre liked the “blending of legend and impending doom,” but Shadows wondered if the legend is “really necessary at all” because it “telegraphed” the ending. The part about telegraphing the ending may be true for some readers, but I know of one reader who was so startled by the ending that she threw the book across the room.
Also:
The point of all this is that editors are just readers, and stories strike every reader differently. As I hope I’ve illustrated with these editorial comments, one editor may like something about a story while another may dismiss the same thing. It is nice to get editorial comments because they are a window into how others - particularly, others who read stories for a living – view what you write.
But the best advice was given by the editor of Prairie Schooner in her comments on “Keeper of the Shrine:” “. . . I assume you’re sufficiently experienced as a writer to understand the comment in context.” If you have any questions about your work in view of an editor’s comment, take it back to your readers – and every writer should have a few readers he or she can trust to give honest feedback – and ask them if they think the the story might be improved if you followed the editor’s advice.
Some things you may choose to change, other things you may choose to leave alone. But take editorial comments in the spirit they are given: as one person’s reaction to your story. The next person’s reaction might be completely different.