A fine excuse for smoking a cigar is walking the dog or maybe it’s vice versa. Nonetheless, when you’re so engaged, given the two of you travel a familiar route, your mind has the opportunity to engage in other useful pursuits. You might consider the taste benefits of the jalapeno burger from Carl’s Jr. Musing it’s only called that because they sprinkle on some of those chilis and slap a slice of pepperjack cheese on that bad rascal. I mean, how hard is that?

As you go on, failing yet again in blowing smoke rings, hopefully your introspection goes deeper, like what about those pages you wrote today? Say your protagonist has reached a crucial juncture in the story, and there’s a need to impart information to the reader. As you puff away, and, in this case, Mitzy, the family’s Chow-Labrador mix, is sniffing bushes and getting twisted about a squirrel chattering in a tree, you consider it couldn’t hurt to be a bit more deft in how you handled that passage. If it’s too plodding, that takes your reader out of the story. But it can’t be so breezy as to be even more obfuscating and nubilous.

A stroll with the pooch while enjoying a robusto is not confined to worrying about what you’ve written, but what you have to write as well. There’s nothing like a deadline to provide proper motivation. And there’s nothing like the news of the day to provide the raw meat for your sausage factory of a mind –- to mangle a metaphor.

Take for example our vice president lighting up a fellow hunter with some buckshot. Or the soldier who survived his tour of duty in the Middle East and came home to see his teenaged daughter sing the Star Spangled Banner in the school choir. Subsequently he’s out on a walk in the park with the second wife, and is jumped and killed by a robber, and the women is wounded. Turns out the wife planned this poor bastard’s death with her new boyfriend, the purported mugger.

Ruminating about the machinations between men and women and hunting, while cleaning up after you dog as a good neighbor should, might lead one to the David Mamet film, the "Edge." Alec Baldwin’s character is having an affair with billionaire Anthony Hopkins wife, and homeboy suspects as much. Seems to me there’s a part when they’re out hunting, and the tension is whether one of them will shoot the other. This example highlights the tenant that the story is always about the backstory. What has happened among our main characters before they got to that fateful moment? Those ingredients are what adds richness to the narrative and builds the suspense for the proper payoff.

The real world serves as the inspirational springboard for our fiction. Richard Price’s book Freedomland was inspired by actual incidents and he used them to probe our national beliefs on race and gender. Ripping a story from the headlines as the cliché goes is easy, it’s using that as the stimulus to dig down, to probe and to unflinchingly prick at the open wounds, that’s the hard part. Because in so doing, you have to put your own feelings about sensitive matters on the examination table. But that’s what a writer does if their work is to have resonance.

This then brings me to predator drones. How’s that? Well, Dick Cheney reminds us of the hunt for WMDs (and those who wield them) which takes us to Iraq, which brings us to Unmanned Aerial Vehicles. There’s a scene toward the end of the film "Syriana." George Clooney’s somewhat crazed burned out spy, Bob, is trying to warn the reformist oil prince on a highway in the desert. Meanwhile in the black room thousands of miles away, the hush-hush types are zeroing in on the prince and his caravan, this one guy working a joy stick while the secret boys watch the prince and Bob on a monitor screen. That’s how the "pilots" operate a predator drone, with a joystick, a keyboard and the image the camera mounted on the plane sees.

A couple of years ago a Hellfire missile was fired by a predator drone decimating a particular car in Yemen. This was an assassination of Quad Senyan al-Harthi, an al Qaeda leader believed to be behind the bombing of the USS Cole. Naturally nothing is foolproof, and innocents have lost their lives via these pilotless sorties. And the drone operators admit to a certain emotional disconnect given their toughest challenge is eyestrain.

Death by remote control then gets me thinking about this original Star Trek episode, "A Taste of Armageddon." Two warring planets fight via computers that calculate loss, and people on the corresponding planets report to disintegration chambers to be zapped out of existence as battle casualties. A nice, civilized way to conduct a war, eh? But Captain Kirk –- he of space-hardened wisdom and lust for green-skinned women -- breaks the Prime Directive, and disrupts this process so the horror of real bloodshed will bring these people to the bargaining tables.

Rounding the corner, heading for him, thoughts about science fiction lead to its more outlandish cousin, fantasy. What if my dog suddenly turned her head and speaking in idiomatic English, suggested ways I might improve my work?

Seems as she lays by your chair each day as you push that rock of writing uphill at your keyboard, she’s had the opportunity to read your drafts. And as she has little to worry about save that squirrel that taunts her on our walks, has thought about where they story went off track.

Ah, but my semi-useless dog is wagging her tail and my cigar is finished. Back in the crib, she doesn’t dart to the office to dictate her story notes, but to her water bowl and then to lick herself. Well, writing is meant to be a lonely job, isn’t it?

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