Chris Grabenstein: The Dog Finished My Homework

Chris Grabenstein and I went through the same Book Promotion 101 workshop earlier this year so we’d know what to do when our debut books came out this fall–and, yes, guest blogging’s one of the tips we picked up! Believe me, I’m more than happy to help, because Chris is a fun guy: I like him a lot, and I think you will, too. His novel, Tilt A Whirl, is the first in a series of mysteries set in a coastal New Jersey town with a seedy amusement park, so during the lunch break, I told him, “Dude, you totally have to call the next one Wall of Death.” Turns out the second one will be Mad Mouse, but I’m positive he’s going to come around to my way of thinking eventually… Before he turned to novel writing, Chris worked in advertising—was hired by James Patterson, in fact—and invented Trojan Man.

A lot of writers mention their dogs in their bios. I guess it helps foster a romantic notion of the writer as this dreamy, solitary soul crunching through the leaf-strewn forest with his faithful companion in a perfect L.L. Bean moment of authorial contemplation. I find it corny and swore I’d never mention my dog in my book jacket bio if I ever got published.

Then Buster, my Beagle-mix mutt, came up with the idea for my first murder mystery, Tilt A Whirl.

Well, not the idea—the structure.

He’s the one who first said, “You need a Watson!”

Now before you assume I share certain character defects with the Son Of Sam (i.e., I take my marching orders from a talking dog), I should let you know that Buster doesn’t actually speak. What he does is require three to four walks a day, varying in length from 20 minutes to a full hour. He forces me to ruminate.

And so, on that fateful afternoon, as we strolled the uneven sidewalks surrounding the American Museum of Natural History, Buster, per usual, stopped at every tree pit to sniff, inspect, and read the messages left behind by other dogs. Sometimes he contributed to the conversation with the lift of his own hind leg.

As you might guess, this dogwalk took a long time. And so my mind wandered. I daydreamed. I already had the lead character for Tilt A Whirl: John Ceepak. A by-the-book, straight-arrow cop who will not lie, cheat, or steal nor tolerate those who do. He was based on people I knew. A New York City firefighter. A Baltimore county paramedic. A group of MPs who had served in Bosnia. All of these guys were modern knights who live by a strict moral code. Ceepak would be the hero of my police procedural. A good man sent to find the truth in a world sent spinning by bad lies.

But, as Buster pointed out on numerous walks, “Ceepak can’t be your narrator!” He knew that the first-person voice-over of an Eagle Boy Scout like my imagined Ceepak could quickly become tedious, maybe even annoying. “It would be like Sherlock Holmes narrating his own adventures!” Buster, my muse, cried out silently. “You need a Watson!”

The walk suddenly stopped. I whipped out a 3-by-5 note card and a Sharpie pen. Buster, per usual, waited. “Ceepak is partnered with a young cop,” I jotted down. “His opposite. A kid who takes a part-time summer job with the police in a busy tourist town because he wants to impress college girls and needs beer money….”

I filled up three or four note cards. Buster decided to sit down and pant.

“The kid has an attitude. Think Bill Murray in Stripes. He and Ceepak start with only one thing in common: a love of Bruce Springsteen music….”

Buster spied a chicken bone, tugged on the leash.

I wrote down the book’s opening on a purple note card: “‘Some guys have a code they live by. Some guys don’t.'”

Buster yanked me toward the chicken bone. The walk resumed. There were more trees to sniff. Maybe more note cards to scribble on.

I am writing this on the thirteenth anniversary of Buster’s Freedom Day. Not his birthday; I’ll never know when that was. September 12, 1992 was the day I “rescued” him from an Animal Shelter in Edison, New Jersey, paid ten dollars, and took him home. He’s been helping me write ever since. First commercials, now books.

It’s why you’ll find Buster mentioned in the acknowledgements to Tilt A Whirl. Next we’re hoping to do an L.L. Bean photo shoot together. Maybe the cover. Buster, I’m certain, will be the one to come up with the idea for our pose.

29 September 2005 | guest authors |