Beneath the Dial: The Origins of My Haunted Timepiece Tale

As you know, my debut short story collection, In Plain Sight, Unseen, will be released soon.

Following the positive response to my last post, where I shared notes on one of the stories from the collection, I’ve put together another for you.

Watchdog is a story about a poor Victorian boy, a magical item, a creepy antique shop, and a supernatural animal.

You can read it here:

👉 Watchdog

The boy in Watchdog is wandering the streets, and he has had his eye on a pocket watch in the window of an antique shop.

Let us have a look at the notes I made for this story, and see if there were any changes in the completed story.

Title

The title was only ever Watchdog. I don’t recall any other potential titles, and all this time later, Watchdog is still a perfect fit.

Story Ideas

As I did in my notes for Posed, I wrote the initial idea. It’s clear how I arrived at the name, Watchdog, from the following lines.

A short story about a werewolf who watches over a person. The person summons it using a watch given to them by a stranger.

I must note that Watchdog isn’t a werewolf story. Perhaps it is werewolf adjacent.

Then I started to think about the character, and what might happen in the story.

Shutting their eyes, the person can see through the wolf's eyes and channel their aggression through it.

This idea of animal companions and seeing through their eyes is something that features in the collection. However, I decided not to include the latter in this particular story.

Keep an eye out for my stories that do include therianthropy, though.

The character finds this out in a restricted section of a library that they had previously been denied access to in the story. OR, a boy passes a pawn type shop and in the window is a stuffed puppy. He goes in and is sold a broken pocket watch. The puppy is gone when he comes out.

It’s hard to see how I arrived at what actually became the story when I’m reading back through these. I’m almost doing word association with the watch and dog themes – spitballing. Jesus, it’s bad.

A ‘pawn type shop’ must have been a placeholder while I tried to remember the word antique!

He is then robbed of his money and has to sleep rough. The puppy snuggles up to him and they keep each other warm. It runs off in the morning.

The notes I’ve made so far about a puppy are only about a stuffed puppy. I don’t know how it’s snuggling up to him, so don’t ask.

If I squint, I can see the beginning of the idea of thieves being in the story. I can confirm that there are thieves in the story.

As for the puppy running off in the morning, that is definitely the birth of something similar to what the dog from the final version of the story does – with a fantastical twist.

He spots the thieves and clutches the watch when they corner him again. He shows them it is broken and worthless by winding it and the puppy arrives and attacks him.

Here are the thieves again. The last word, ‘him,’ I think should be ‘them,’ as in the thieves.

The concept of summoning the dog by winding the watch is relevant.

I believe that my thinking behind the thieves was linked to scuttler gangs.

Some things happen like he becomes a man and sees the thief with a scarred face and is threatened by him then he summons the dog to finish the job but there are witnesses.

‘Some things happen…’ is hilarious.

I must have been thinking about a time jump here to when the boy is a man. That’s quite interesting to read because I have been thinking about using this character again as an adult as part of a wider story I’m loosely planning.

Did you notice one of the thieves now has a scar?

Something else happens. He passes it on to his grandson.

There I go again, ‘Something else happens.’ How did I even end up with a story based on these notes?

Definitely a time jump since he’s got a grandson. Not something that happens in the story I wrote.

Final Thoughts

I think I must have used what I wrote in these notes as very loose prompts. The final version has some things from the notes, true. But I also abandoned a lot of what I wrote.

For example, the scars on the thieves, handing the watch down to his grandson, and seeing through the wolf’s eyes.

Below is the first post I wrote where I went over my notes for a post-mortem photography story titled Posed.