2024 UPDATE: I’ve released the entire Dogboy series for free on this website. You can access it here, or by clicking the graphic below. Enjoy!

I was thinking about my Dogboy book series the other day and thought it was worth going over the history of the project.

Dogboy started as a short story for my college Creative Writing class called Primitive Hearts. The teacher encouraged us to channel our childhood into our work, and I decided to use a time in my childhood when I snuck out of the house in the middle of the night in a homemade superhero outfit as the inspiration for a story that was basically “Home Alone with a child superhero.” I also incorporated some “sense memories” from the trauma I suffered as a kid in an abusive household into the finale.

Despite the types, I got a decent grade, so I developed the short story into a comic book pitch (since lost) that got some attention and a meeting, but no buys.

In 2005, I used the comic book pitch as a jumping-off point for a screenplay called The Fantabulous Adventure of Dogboy.

A few things carried over in the screenplay: the initial suburban setting and late-night adventure at the neighborhood basketball court, the phsyically abusive uncle and the bullies, and Dogboy’s “gosh gee willikers” attitude. It never got made, but it did get me meetings that led to my first screenplay option for Horsepower Declining, which also never got made.

When Nanowrimo 2012 came around, I used the time to adapt the screenplay into the first Dogboy Adventures book Den of Thieves.

If you’ve read the screenplay above and the book, you’ll recognize some basic plot points, but I spent a lot of time rethinking the concept and beefing up small details to use them throughout the five books I planned out. I still owe the readers one, actually. Again, it starts in the suburbs, there’s a real jerk of an uncle, and Dogboy is equal parts enthusiastic and naive.

By the time I put the pen down on Eye of the Scarab, he finally felt like a fleshed-out character. In fact, that might be why readers are still waiting on Book 5… He kind of solved everything already. I have a plan, and I fully intend on completing the series someday, once the world stops blowing up and everything.

Part of me thinks maybe I should start over again one more time. Maybe Dogboy will finally blow up as an audio adventure, or a cartoon show, or a series of billboards placed throughout downtown Philadelphia. More likely though, I’ll write the last book before long and finally put this puppy to rest.

If there is any lesson to take away from this, it’s that sometimes your best ideas take a long time to turn into something you can be proud of. I liked Primitive Hearts and The Fantabulous Adventure of Dogboy well enough when I wrote them, but skimming over them this morning, I can see all the lessons I still hadn’t learned; all the flaws and bits of awkward phrasing.

I’m glad I stuck with it. I’m really proud of the Dogboy Adventures book series that grew out of that old college assignment with a million typos.