The Professional Dog

a children's alphabet of dogs with jobs

Mar 05, 2024

Here's a 48 page children's book, an abecedarian art album titled “The Professional Dog”, containing handmade portraits I created of my friends' dogs in alphabetical order by my friends’ professions along with an adjective in a sentence about each dog.

This book idea was inspired by sleepless night I had in August of 2021 full of unpleasant thoughts. To stop the unhelpful thoughts instead of “counting my blessings”, which is a vague question (I prefer SOCK questions), I count something specific. It's still counting my blessings but I use a version of a Victorian era game called The Minister's Cat, where a player goes through the alphabet listing adjectives describing a cat. For example “The Minister's cat is adorable, beautiful, cute…”. Or when I play my version in the middle of the night, I use alphabetical adjectives to describe a “blessing” like geographic places, art supplies, books, music, theater plays, restaurants or vegetables… listing anything pleasant in alphabetical sequence.

So during my sleepless night in August 2021 I went through the English alphabet listing friends and their professions in alphabetical order by profession and, of course, thinking fondly about my friends: my friend Leslie is an Accountant, Pat is a Botanist, Kim is a Chef… and so on through the alphabet. I think I fell asleep around Peggy is a Guitarist.

Over the next few days, during the day, I realized I could go through the entire alphabet naming professions and friends. I also realized almost all of these friends currently had dogs or had had dogs in the past. Perhaps I could do an album of portraits of their dogs?

Long story short I contacted all of my friends, got permission to do a portrait of their dog, got reference photos… and over the next months I wrote and illustrated a children's book "The Professional Dog”. You can access a printed copy here. A free ebook version is available via Storyberries.com here. A downloadable version is available for newsletter subscribers at the bottom of this newsletter. Here's a peek at the printed book.

This downloadable 48 page ebook will be added to my index page of 13 currently available ebooks all of which were 100 percent organically hand created by me for subscribers. Here below is the downloadable book The Professional Dog and I hope you'll enjoy it! Thank you for being here! Look, no paywall! Whee!! (I trust that if you can support me somehow you will.)