Book Review: The Dog Walked Down the Street

As part of my New Year's Resolution I dedicated myself to reading more books about the publishing industry and about writing novels. I would have said for every novel I read I have to read one non-fiction, but I want this resolution a bit more open ended. If I gave myself a one to one relationship, I doubt if it would have lasted a month.

Nevertheless, I have just finished The Dog Walked Down the Street by Sal Gynn.

It is a very short, book about how to deal with the work of finishing a book, finding an angent and the process of being published. Lot's of snippets and adages, such as:

Novelist James Lee Burke, Pulitzer Prize Nominee and winner of Two Edgar Allan Poe awards, started writing fiction in college. His English professor returned one of his stories with a "D" and the remarks, "Your spelling is an assault upon the eyeballs. Your penmanship makes me wish the Phoenicians had not developed the alphabet. But I couldn't give you an F because you have so much heart."

"The dog walked down the street" has all you'd want from a sentence, but needs a bit more to give color and show it importance in the story.
So much better is "The spindly, dun-colored mutt staggered along the broken sidewalk."

Books are made of words, but you have too many in this sentence. "Down the street on the 13th of May in the year that Roosevelt died (Franklin, not Theodore), a spotted dog with a limp (which bespoke years of wandering, looking for a master who, oddly, disappeared the night of his high school graduation) was seen walking by a third grade teacher and his twenty-nine students."

All in all, it was inspirational, and there was a nugget or two of worthwhile in it.