Brian Plummer was an eccentric dog breeder, hunter, ratter, and ferreter. He was also something of a dog historian and was somewhat prone to romantic flights of fancy.
He is most famous now for founding a strain of terrier that bears his name.
But he was into far more than that.
He bred a shaggy merle strain of lurcher, tried to recreate the Medieval hunting alaunt, and used Cavalier King Charles spaniels to hunt rabbits.
If you read his books, he was deeply into the romance of the British working class, especially its rural working class, the one so exemplified by the highwayman and the poacher.
If he was not a puppy millier, then he was a very high volume dog breeder, and it is very doubtful that he had a full grasp on how to breed for the absolute best dogs in all his strains.
You simply can’t get that level of knowledge when you’re doing so many different things at once. The truth is even those who have specialized in a breed or type often have no clue what they’re doing.
However, I’m fairly certain that if my id were allowed to go unchecked, I’d probably be something like Mr. Plummer.
I’d be recreating all sorts of esoteric breed types: English Old Southern hounds, St. John’s water dogs, and wavy-coated retrievers are just a few I can imagine!
Plummer was a popular writer, and to perfect one’s writing skills, one must remove one’s self from the arena a bit. There must be detachment from the way things actually are in order to explain them to others, but in that detachment, Plummer detached himself from the way all the serious working dog people were operating.
This is why every lurcher person will say that Plummer was a great writer but his ideas were next to useless.
But I’d like to see these guys write some good dog stories.
Writing is a skill people simply do not appreciate. Writing good stories requires as much work as breeding the fastest lurcher.
You ain’t lyin’ brother!
She’s playing with you, ha ha ha ha ha.
I’m sure that Richard was instantly reassured by Plummer’s statement that if she meant business she would have to the bone.
Who says people don’t appreciate writing? If you try the transition to trying to make a buck off selling books, you’ll find writing style is everything.
Btw, no offense intended, nothing personal, but your writing is great at the sentence level, but the concept of a paragraph seems to be absent. That works in a blog or a drama. Not sure it will work in a book.