Howdy all!

This is going to be a digression from my usual longwinded discussions of deep psychoanalysis in historical wonkomances, to bring you something a little lighter for the holidays. Pictures are copyrighted, so you’ll have to LOOK HERE to see what I’mma be talking about. Go ahead, look at them, take your time.

Okay, everyone back now? Everyone stopped snort-laughing tea and coffee on the screen but feeling vaguely guilty about it? Good!

You may be asking yourself, what do these poor stop-motion’d creatures have to do with wonkomance, Del? They have been caught at their most ignoble, through a means of study not found in nature. Surely these photographs, catching rare micro-moments we could never isolate with the naked eye, have nothing to do with the dogs’ noble natures and inherent animal beauty?

Do you know any dogs? Because if you were thinking any of that, you don’t really know dogs. But if you do, you already know that with those pictures, Carli Davidson has captured the true essence of the dog: full-on derp.  And she’s done it by slowing things down to a point where we can examine minute details we wouldn’t normally be able to see. She’s uncovered the constant inner derpiness of dog-ness by breaking it down into its hilarious component parts, moment by goofy moment. And what she has done visually, good wonkomance writers can do with words.

At the heart of wonkomance lies the fundamental idea that people are screwed up. All people are; if you applied high-speed photography to our psyches, even the most put-together individual doing the most natural thing in the world would have moments of such extreme WTFery that people would…well, go WTF? The good wonkomance is like that high-speed camera, capturing minutiae that would ordinarily get lost in the bigger picture, taking us into people’s lives and minds to get at the fundamentally ridiculous nature of us all. Catching people at their worst. And it’s delicious, as scrumptious as looking at barely recognizable flop-skinned hounds caught at their most ignominious.

He looks so sweet and innocent…but he likes to load up his jowls from the water bowl and then find somebody to slime.

Inside every dog you see, no matter how elegant they may look, there’s one of those train wrecks waiting to happen. Just add water and snap a photo at the critical moment. And inside every romance character there is wonk to be found.

Hope your holidays are filled with good cheer, great juicy reads, only the amusing kind of interpersonal wonkery, and (if you like them) happy, derpy dogs. I  know mine will be; I have a big-jowled lab mix myself (as well as an elegant old setter mix), and my sister has three Basset hounds who are hilarious just walking around. Good times for everyone!