Mutts have always been part of my life. Out on walks I would get asked, now and then, “what is she?” or “what breed?” My answer was usually “mutt” or “found dog.” Then, after the goodbyes, strolling home, I’d noodle on a smart-ass answer to the question.
In 2021, toward the end of a beach day, a late-afternoon storm rolled through and cleared the golfers off the course near our rental. A perfect chance to let our dog Pen roam a wide-open fairway or two. I cut her loose, and while I watched her work the squirrels up trees and the rabbits into the palmettos, a response, a breed, came to mind.
Pen and I went back to the rental. After dinner that night I registered spacklerdog.com and tried to draft a chapter or two. It did not go well. Over the years I worked out pieces of the story but could never get them into words. More exactly: it took far too long to lay down a sentence, a paragraph, a chapter, that felt “perfect” enough.
How it was made
This book is written with Claude, an AI model made by Anthropic. It started in March 2026, in a chat window. The deal from the start: my ideas, Claude’s help with the crafting.
The story is mine: what happens, who these people are, what they say. The dogs are modeled on Pen and on other family dogs. Most of the ideas come to me on walks with Pen, and I dictate them as they come. Some scenes I write myself, start to finish.
Claude keeps the record. Every ruling, name, date, and who was in which room goes into a set of files. Claude checks new work against those files before a line gets written, flags any conflict, and I decide. It does the research: Cambridge, New York in 1980; the monks of New Skete and their dogs; the coast of Fife; what a diesel Land Rover needs before it will start. Then it writes a plain first draft from my beats.
Getting a story out of my head and onto a page — “externalizing” it — is something I’m not good at. Baggage for another day. I could not have done this without the help.
As of October 8, 2026, roughly 80% of the scenes are devised and drafted. New chapters drop as they’re ready.
— Barkeep
