MY AH-HAH MOMENT...

or How I Created a Dog Character & Gained an Author Logo

As a reader, I gravitate toward books featuring animal characters, such as Lilian Jackson Braun’s Siamese cat mystery series. As an author, I give my hero and heroine pets whose actions often affect the plot. My Ah-hah Moment was realizing how easily animals can reveal a soft side to the hero and/or heroine’s personality they might otherwise shield from the world.

Consider an outwardly cold and distant Alpha male hero who adopts an abused dog. If he can love and nurture a battered animal, the hero obviously has a heart. And the heroine will be additionally motivated to break through the hero’s emotional defenses. This trick of using an animal to humanize your protagonists is referred to by Hollywood screenwriters as “petting the dog”. A great example of this is the Jack Nicholson character in the movie, As Good As it Gets. The way he bonds with his neighbor’s scruffy dog gives viewers hope for a happy ending to his relationship with the movie’s heroine.

When I plotted my comic romantic suspense, At Her Command, I wanted to add a DEA drug-sniffing dog that wasn’t your typical German Shepherd or Doberman Pinscher. I chose a Chinese Crested hairless dog, a breed most commonly associated with the World’s Ugliest Dog contest. The unusual-looking, twelve-pound Smokey plays an important role in both the book’s central mystery and the romance. And my hero goes from thinking the dog resembles a rat on steroids to bonding with the tiny canine crime-fighter.

Smokey proved such a scene-stealer, I developed a caricature of him for my logo on my business cards, PR materials and Web site (www.MarciaJames.net). And my work-in-progress features a frou-frou female Chinese Crested named Rainy, that is the pampered “baby” of my ambitious, no-nonsense lawyer heroine. I look forward to exploring the comic possibilities between Rainy and the tough-guy hero, who owns a “man’s dog”, a large black Labrador Retriever.

Something tells me the descendents of Smokey and Rainy will be making appearances in my books for many years.

-- Marcia James

At Her Command

4 Stars, RT BOOKreviews