I am setting forth on a new adventure and working on putting together a book proposal. I have been honored to be part of several humor and parenting anthologies but writing an entire book is a whole new ballgame.
When putting together my proposal for prospective agents, I will be highlighting several examples of my work, one of which will be this previously unpublished treasure that my mom discovered while cleaning out her garage. Don’t be surprised if you someday see this 1980 classic, “The Dogs that Never Stoped Loveing,” on the NYT Bestseller list, (or back in the bottom of a box in my attic.)
Enjoy this exciting, sneak peek. As they say in the monster truck ads, “you’ll pay for the whole seat, but you’ll only need the edge!”
With no further ado, I present….
My 2nd grade teacher, Mrs. Imel, was kind enough to edit my spelling errors for the book cover. If you look closely, you’ll see the poor woman had to hand-write the o’s since we lived in the ancient time of typewriters.
I still live by the proofreading rule, “when in doubt, add an ‘e'”. BTW – You’ll soon find out just how literal this title really is.
Disney “Lady & The Tramp” copyright lawsuit pending.
This is when things start heating up. It’s like a barely-weaned-puppy version of 50 Shades of Grey.
Well, that escalated quickly.Holy shit, this passage has SO MANY LEVELS! First of all, yes, the math does add up to the 62 pups referenced on the previous page, thank you very much. Also, despite my fondness for over-using e’s, I managed to nail the spelling of “seizure”. But, enough patting myself on the back…..What in the actual hell?!? How did my teacher see earlier drafts of this masterpiece and not pull me aside and suggest, “maybe not so much with the parental-abuse and seizures.” I have a feeling my mom slept with one eye open after I brought this home.
Awww, that’s nice – the ungrateful pups were glad Lady didn’t die. But she barely has time to recover from her seizure before her family is ripped apart by a home-wrecker named………CLIFF?!? Sorry, Tippy. Looks like even 62 pups worth of lovin’ isn’t enough for Lady. But you know the ole saying, “If they’ll do it with you, they’ll do it to you,” – Just ask the Bulldog that “got next to” Lady after Cliff ditched her. I really like my use of the “unreliable narrator” here. We’ll never really know if Lady was “forced away” or “ran away.” Perhaps it was a little bit of both. SO MANY LEVELS!!!!
I would like to edit this first sentence to be, “50 were boys and 50 were girls….but NONE of them were Tippy’s!” Hahahahahaha! How much drama can one 8-year old cram into a fourteen page story? There’s love, torture, infidelity, kidnapping, seizures, an unnatural amount of birthing and now CAGES! I think it may say a bit about how much “Hart to Hart” and “Fantasy Island” I watched in the 80s. A bonus, available in only the original copy: some 40-year old glob of mystery substance on page 11. Maybe it’s cookie dough, maybe it’s a booger….but you should definitely Purell-up if you touch it.
It’s all nice and heartwarming that everyone mysteriously woke up to open cages on Christmas, but that’s only because we don’t really know WHEN they got PUT IN the cages! Maybe it was Labor Day (of course, every day is labor day for Lady.) Also, feel free to insert a joke about how much Lady enjoys a room full of “Bonse” here.
Notice, I never wrote, “The End’ AND there are eight more blank pages left in this book. Lady & Tippy have so many more stories to be told. If I can pack this much action into 241 words, imagine what I could do for Lady & Tippy in a full 50,000 word novel!
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