Dog Boy

Author's Note

I'd like to thank everyone who has taken the time to read my story, especially the members of my discord server, who've been crucial in helping this revision get to the level of quality that it is. Over the course of six months, it went from an alright story I would say to a pretty good one.

Dog Boy started with some stories that I had read in the past. The Goosebump's book My Hairiest Adventure was one of these, as well as a story I found on Deviant Art a number of years ago, called something along the lines of "Walking in Dog's Paws" - a bit of homage to it can be found in the footprints on the story's cover. While when I first read these stories I enjoyed them to some degree, they both had things that I didn't really like the direction of. Why is the transformation over in such a brief moment "off-screen" in the Goosebumps book? Why in the Deviant Art story, does our protagonist have to be the only one that changes? (That story also was never finished, which doesn't help).

Further, I've seen a lot of stories involving transformations online that are just the transformation. All that is present is a setup, the transformation, and some kind of tacked on ending, where the transformed individual runs off, having been punished for their misdeeds, or runs off happily. This is done so clean cut. No one knows the person disappeared, it is never addressed, or the entire universe changes to one where the person was always in their transformed state.

This to me, is not the interesting draw of transformation stories. If we look to a notable film with a transformation, Brother Bear (which probably was one of the things that made me a furry) Kenai has to face the awful reality that his brother sees him as a ravenous beast that must be killed. Further, Kenai is struck with having to face his own weaknesses and wrongdoings. It is not a perfect film by any means, but it understands why transformation can be such a powerful symbol in fiction, and why it has existed since we began telling stories.

That was the kind of story that I wanted to write. While I have read many nice pieces of short transformation fiction, I wanted to write something as much about the internal transformation of the characters as outward one. 

My first draft of Dog Boy was on furaffinity, and totaled only 38 chapters. It was not terribly well revised - I didn't even check for spelling and grammar errors before posting the chapters - but it was a decent enough story, and with such a drought for long form transformation fiction, I found a lot of people who enjoyed it. That draft I finished about a year ago, in March of 2022.

While I did like the story somewhat, I felt that I could do better. Besides getting a better version of this story out there, it would also be a way to further improve my writing skills. I also in this new version, wanted to get this story to other sites than just furaffinity.

And now I stand on the other side, after many months of reworking the plot, completely tossing out the original first chapter, cutting out many things... but at the same time, I fleshed out some characters a lot better. I improved the conflicts, Matt and Jackie's relationship, and actually had a tone transition near the end of the book rather than whiplashing the reader straight to action like in the first draft.

The story is not perfect, you can obviously see some story issues here and there, some character motivations may feel off - but I was able to make something that people enjoyed, and was able to create serious moments that people resonated with, which for a piece of online transformation fiction is a pretty respectful feat I'd say.

Now, I've talked a lot about transformation fiction, and what it means to me. I want to briefly touch on the transformations in me. When I first started writing the first draft of Dog Boy, we were still somewhat in the pandemic. My life wasn't honestly in the best of shape, and I enjoyed writing stories as a form of escapism. In the year and a half about since then however, I've felt my life reorienting in better directions. With that however, I feel like I need to do some active reorienting.