My Agent Told Me To Make A Blog

Considering my recent major career change, I suppose some explanation is in order. Turns out, when you're an animal doctor, you have to see sick animals all the time. Who'd have thought? The animals aren't too much of a problem, though. Sure, instead of unconditionally loving every dog I see, I now think about why they'd make a terrible patient (too fat / fearful / no manners / land shark / awful veins / cancer factory), and I think of potential pets in terms of life span, but if all I had to do was treat pets in a vacuum with no client contact, I'd be quite content. Clients suck. They either make me angry or sad. If they're reasonable people who love their pets, then I just end up heartbroken that their pet is dying. The rest of the time, it's arguing about money, facepalming at the lack of compliance with my instructions, re-explaining concepts twenty times, and giving advice I know will be ignored. For example, my favorite appointments used to be ...

More than half of my clients proudly tell me they've switched their pets' food to "grain-free." This is often in conjunction with a bit of puzzlement at how the pet's allergic skin or intestinal issues haven't resolved yet. Even my mother's vet told her to try grain-free for their little dog's weepy eyes. Guess what? It didn't help. Because it doesn't help. Because it doesn't matter. There's no science-based evidence that grain has effects on pets. It's a big fad in humans, and anyone with Coeliac disease will tell you how aggravating it is that healthy people cling to it as this trendy superfood type deal (though it's also made gluten-free products much more mainstream and available, so that's a plus). So already, the benefits of grain-free are largely exaggerated even in humans. In pets? Nada. In the grand tradition of vet students, I slightly threw out all but the most essential of my notes, so I no longer have specif...

"But we feed them the exact same amount!" - One cat is a bowstring and the other is a basketball. Two cats who are littermates, live in the same house, and eat the same food, can still turn out as completely different creatures. Mr Lazy-Bones will plump up no matter what you do, and because of that he'll get all dandruffy because he can't reach his backside to groom it. Mr Anxiety-Face will run around constantly and wind up lean and mean, but maybe also pee all over the house and sneeze a lot, because he's always so worried about everything. Two dogs who are the same breed, go through the same training, and interact with the same people, can still react very differently to new people. Ms Happy-Go-Lucky always runs up and sniffs and wags her tail, and Ms I-Don't-Trust-Anything always hangs back and trembles. You can argue about nature vs nurture, I suppose. The nurture component is still there--it's why Mr Lazy-Bones has access to enough food to turn ...

Exciting plots are all about unexpected twists and complications. Just when it seems things are going right, boom, a new problem for the characters to deal with, or a game-changing revelation. Some general writing advice suggests that if you get stuck, throw a wrench in the scene and see what happens. Vet medicine involves plenty of wrenches, too. Maybe it's helped me developed the skill of dealing with the wrenches, but I imagine most jobs do. It sure gives good fodder for creating the wrenches, though. Smooth day? Dog fight or car crash arriving in ten minutes. Classic symptoms? Diagnostic tests negative for the suspected disease. Seen a few guinea pigs and rabbits? How about a sick sugar glider. (Staff: "I didn't even know that was an animal.") All of these can be turned into plot devices: Smooth day? Dog fight or car crash arriving in ten minutes. - Finally solved a plot problem or resolved an argument? Explode something in the room. Classic sympto...

Surviving vet school required developing some skills I'd previously lacked. In undergrad, I never really needed to study--go over the notes once or twice before an exam, and I'd be all set. In vet school, on the other hand, they piled knowledge into your brain, and when that was full, they started stuffing it into your ears and your nose and your throat too. You physically run out of time in the day. For instance, reviewing my notes from small animal medicine--reading through each lecture once --took a full 12 hour day before the exam. To compensate, I had to make myself study, properly. Third and fourth year involved many 8-hour days of lectures (all new material) interspersed with 8-hour days of labs. If you didn't keep up, you'd get buried under an ocean of notes at the end of the week/month/semester. So I forced myself to keep up. I'd sit in the library before going home and read over the notes from every lecture each day. Every lecture. Every day. I'd ...

Last time, I talked about how grief shows up in different ways and in different situations. There's the sudden loss of an unexpected death, the crushing of hope when an improving patient takes a turn for the worse, and the grief of choosing when to say goodbye. Characters can encounter all these types of grief as they live through the plot--and what I want to talk about today is how the individual personality of the character influences their behavior. Everyone experiences and manifests grief in different ways. During a euthanasia, I always do the same things. I come in and tell them about the sedative. "It makes it calmer on then, gives you a few extra minutes to say goodbye, and then we come back for the final injection." They get a few minutes of privacy, then I explain it's essentially an anaesthetic overdose, and what they can expect during their pet's final moments. Then we find a vein, I ask if they're ready, and other than the occasional complicatio...

This is a subject most people understand on an intellectual level, but experiencing it for yourself gives you a deeper, emotional understanding. And when I say "experiencing it for yourself," what I really mean is, "being involved in the grieving process of other families multiple times a week." A lot of times, the first thing people say to me upon learning my profession is, "I don't think I could put down animals." (Seriously, that's the first thing most people think about). Truthfully, that's the end of the story, and that's often not a very hard step. When people bring pets in for euthanasia, they've made the decision, processed and come to terms with it, can allow their family member to pass with peace and dignity, and get to see the passing in a way that I feel provides a fair amount of closure. There are much worse situations to deal with... 1. When the pet is diagnosed. Often, owners are expecting bad news. They know their p...

The transition from recent graduate to actual vet who sounds like they know what they're doing is a lot about how you present yourself. Far and away the biggest thing I've had to work on is how I talk to clients. In vet school, they spend years teaching you how to handle complicated medicine cases, how to diagnose things and interpret imaging... and if you're lucky, you get a few hours of practice sessions with actors and oral exams with clinicians to work on your client communication skills. Sure, they taught us about it, but it's not like a few hours of practice is going to prepare you to smoothly speak to clients from all walks of life, 8+ hours a day. And oh, I've botched my interactions and explanations so horribly. I've confused people by talking them in circles, I've misspoken during highly charged emotional situations, I've forgotten to ask or explain important details and needed to call people up after the fact. I never realized how big a di...

In vet school, they taught us some basics about communication and how to get through a consult. A minor part of that was a mention of paralanguage. Paralanguage; noun the nonlexical component of communication by speech, for example intonation, pitch and speed of speaking, hesitation noises, gesture, and facial expression.  In vet exam rooms, the idea is how you portray yourself. Acting interested, engaged, sympathetic, professional. Interestingly, I find paralanguage exists in writing, too. Obviously, in writing, you don't have speed, intonation, or pitch. But the more I critique, the more I find the author's attitude and personality makes it onto the page.  "Speed of speaking" comes through as sentence length and paragraph breaks. "Intonation" comes through with choices of punctuation. Even more subtly, sometimes it shows when an author is confident or knowledgeable--or not. I've read manuscripts from friends who are always self-guessing th...

Scientific writing and creative writing complement each other in some ways, and totally contradict each other in others. When I'm reading or writing, I completely switch my brain over depending on what I'm doing, and don't even think about it. In vet school, I did a lot of technical writing. Sure, I was working on my first novel when I had the chance, but most of my time was spent working on assignments, case studies, and medical records. As an actual vet, I still read a lot of journal articles and textbooks. And there's some definite differences in scientific writing. Things Not So Good For Creative Writing 1. Passive Voice This one always really sticks out to me. Research is meant to be objective, and so it's generally described as such. It's standard and expected to use passive sentences so you can avoid saying "we" or "I": "The culture was incubated at room temperature" or "A neurological exam was performed." I...

In the exam room, I see a very personal, private facet of people's lives. It's also only one piece of an intricate picture. In some cases, people tell me a lot about that larger landscape. Sometimes, it never comes up, and I'll never know. But people are always complex, and a person's entire life experience contributes to the decisions they make. There are two ways to look at this. 1. Outside In There's so much to people you don't know. When people make the difficult choices with their ill pets, there are "obvious" factors--finances, likelihood the treatment will be a success, what the animal's quality of life is like. Then there are the hidden factors: the pet that's the last link to their dead mother, the child who's away at college, or an overseas spouse. A final straw in a string of recent losses and bad news. Someone who has the same terminal diagnosis as their pet. I only see the one thread of their life: how are we going to w...

Once, while I was talking to a writer friend about how she was stuck at a point in her plot, I found myself asking questions uncannily similar to those I ask at work. Now, I wasn't asking if there had been any sneezing or coughing, but the process was the same: try to narrow in on the problem, but also cast a broad net to pick up on any other potential red flags. In essence, I was trying to diagnose why she was stuck. This got me thinking. Could I apply the skills I learned in history taking to my own writing? In vet school, they taught us a series of bullet points to hit when gathering history. I'm probably missing some, but I still run them through my mind during every appointment. What happens if we apply it to a writing problem? I may have to be a bit loose with terminology, but let's see what kind of questions we can come up with. Onset: Did the problem come on acutely or gradually? Is it something that happens suddenly and all at once, like a transition th...