THE SILENT BOOMER RUNS AFOUL OF THE CRITIQUES

A friend of mine, Carl, told me it would happen, and it finally happened. I took a solid piece of writing, Pavlov's Other Dogs, to my writing group, and my female critiques didn't get it and didn't like it. It was working at so many levels, even I surprised myself when I rediscovered it amongst some old writings of mine. One woman did catch the correct feeling from the work. She said it was "disturbing" and that was exactly how it was meant to strike readers. So I succeeded in that.

Poor Pound Puppy

Basically, the tale dealt with discipline and abuse. It was about a housewife house breaking a mongrel mutt from the pound to the point that the dog was conditioned to believe (learned) that abuse was play. In the end the young dog was so berserk, she put him down. She drove him crazy. The sarcastic distance of the embittered narrator whose offhand remarks reveal a man damaged by abuse himself escaped his critics. They were disturbed that the narrator referred to the pound puppy as an "ex-con, so to speak". They wanted a sympathetic orphan dog and sympathetic and undamaged narrator. They wanted, I fear, a straightforward tale of maudlin woe that they could feel sorry about. In sum, they were more interested in the fate of the mongrel dog than they were about the son and stepson who the mother/stepmother had also "housebroken". She trained one with excessive and unlimited love and the other with stern discipline, and one became a drug addict while the other struggled with alcoholism, but all of that human knowledge is left out of the tale so that the tale doesn't become another "poor me" tale of human abuse. 

The tale no doubt has some flaws I cannot see because its beauty blinds me, but not one of the critiques gave the story an overall approval rating. Instead, to be kind, they stuck with small details. The negative effect of their comments was considerable upon this poor writer's spirit, no matter how mightily he wagged his tail. Two did ask if the young dog couldn't be made more sympathetic. One wanted the tale told from the dog's point of view. An interesting theory I did consider, but then I'd lose the ironic tone of the damaged narrator overarching the whole affair. In fact, I was not fully aware of his damaged spirit until the critics rubbed my nose in it. For that interesting information, I give the critiquing a hearty thumbs up.

We learn in spite of ourselves!