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Diamond Dogs Audio Cassette – Audiobook, September 1, 2000
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherBrilliance Audio
- Publication dateSeptember 1, 2000
- Dimensions4.25 x 1 x 7.25 inches
- ISBN-101587880717
- ISBN-13978-1587880711
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Product details
- Publisher : Brilliance Audio; Unabridged edition (September 1, 2000)
- Language : English
- ISBN-10 : 1587880717
- ISBN-13 : 978-1587880711
- Item Weight : 5.6 ounces
- Dimensions : 4.25 x 1 x 7.25 inches
- Customer Reviews:
About the author
Alan Watt is an L.A. Times best-selling author and screenwriter as well as consultant to some of Hollywood's top writers and producers. He has won a number of awards for his writing including France's 2004 Prix Printemps (best foreign novel) for Diamond Dogs. He is also the writer/director of the award-winning feature film Interior Night.
Alan Watt first taught a summer screenwriting workshop at UCLA in 1998, and has been teaching and lecturing on the creative process in L.A. and at colleges around the country ever since. He spent three years teaching storytelling to inner city high school students through the non-profit arm of Spoken Interludes.
He founded L.A. Writers' Lab in 2002 as a place for writers to deepen their craft by learning to marry the wildness of their imaginations to the rigor of story structure. He has taught everyone from award-winning authors and A-list screenwriters, to journalists, poets, actors, professional athletes, war veterans, housewives, doctors, lawyers, television showrunners, and anyone else with a story to tell.
In 2010 he created The 90-Day Novel Press to publish books on writing, which includes Amazon's #1 bestselling book on writing, The 90-Day Novel. Mr. Watt is also the founder of Writers Tribe Books, a publisher of literary fiction. And you may, perhaps, recognize him from his three lines as the hotdog vendor in the "Chinese Gum" episode of Seinfeld.
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After spending a large amount of time following Watt's advice on writing, which seemed solid or I wouldn't have bought the 90 day novel, I decided I needed to read Diamond Dogs. Yes, I can be a bit backward. A normal person would purchase a book on writing after developing admiration for an author's work.
It's been a while since I literally couldn't put a book down; Diamond Dogs meets that overused description. I read and read and didn't want to stop. At first I thought it was a short book, because the percentage-complete indicator on my Kindle climbed alarmingly fast. But Diamond Dogs is a full length novel.
Now, here is something to think about. Diamond Dogs, the Kindle version I read, has a lot of typos. I'm not good at picking these things up when reading for pleasure, but there seems to be a problem with name capitalization. For example "It was a shock when grace Daly started screaming." Or when the protagonist's football coach keeps yelling at him, but the name is never capitalized. This happens so often I assume it must be intentional. I know its distracting.
I found myself wondering if this smattering of lowercase names was a stylistic abuse of grammar I'd just never seen before. There are also some formatting issues, lines that go mid sentence into a new paragraph and whatnot.
This isn't an indie book. It won France's 2004 Prix Printemps (best foreign novel).
So there are typos. (I'm not bothered by typos, especially if the story is good. It's just annoying that indie authors get abused for this kind of thing, but traditionally published authors don't.)
There is also a lot of what writing coaches call "telling," or so it seems on the surface. Yet, I couldn't stop reading. The "telling," much of it back story, is artfully done and mixed with visuals and action, so perhaps that is why it works so well. There's still a lot of telling. Read it and see.
Diamond Dogs is a dark book. The protagonist is not likable. His father is worse. The Las Vegas segment gets a little too weird, but the story stumbles free of the blind alley just like the characters do and no serious harm is done. And some of the Las Vegas build up and pay off is crucial to the story.
I'd recommend this book to friends.
I wish there were more novels by Alan Watt. I'd read them.
It turns I like his writing prose, his descriptions, the grit in his tone. The structure of Diamond Dogs is its weak spot. It jumps back and forth a lot; from present to past events; jumping between relevant plot points to irrelevant anecdotes of random characters. It sounds messy, but the author somehow keeps it all cohesive enough. The anecdotes are a brief paragraph or so in length and actually are where all the character development occurs. The actual plot line is simple; the past events and side conversations are more interesting.
The main character is a teenager who commits vehicular manslaughter by accident and his father helps him by hiding the body. The story perspective is in 1st person, which is a good fit for this kind of story. At times, the kid's inner monologue turns angsty, confused, guilty, borderline suicidal, blames others, and pretty much turns "emo". But it's reasonable because a high schooler will be all those things if trying to hide a serious crime. It just gets a little repetitive at times, whining and tripping about the same things.
I give it a solid 4 stars for good character development, believability, and decent prose.
K. Kris Loomis is the author of Three Modern Shorts: The Funeral Home Stories and several other short fiction collections.