And about damn time – I’ve been writing about writing for the past 7 years but didn’t have a scrap of fiction to share…until now.
Some context: the latest round of edits on Fool’s Gold slowed (further) over the summer due to burnout. I needed to get the creative juices flowing again, and what better way than with a short story? Something with a simpler plot and less time/emotional investment.
When I stumbled over evidence that Rudolf II had a pair of Mexican hairless dogs in his extensive menagerie I couldn’t resist playing with the notion of a yipping lapdog that turned out to be more than it appeared.
I queried through the fall. Of twelve publications, six rejected me, five didn’t reply, and one accepted. This, I gather, is par for the course. Persistence really does pay off!
My put-upon animal trader, Janek, is entirely made up. And goddamn, it was freeing to write a fully fictional character! No timelines or documentation to work around! I based his curmudgeonly attitude on Rowan Atkinson’s character Edmund Blackadder, a long-suffering servant to idiotic royals in a series of 80s British comedies. My logline for “The Zolo Hound of the Newly Found World” was “Blackadder runs a zoo”.
Laurenciana Pylmannova, however, was completely real. What little I could find of her was fascinating and still left me enough room to make up a personality.
Please read and let me know what you think, either here or over at Tall Tale TV.
Janek and Laurenciana WILL return, along with Felipe.