Jennifer Crusie's Blog, page 119

HWSWA Point of View

Point of View is up on HWSWA.. We disagreed (big surrprise) on something Bob calls “omniscient translucent,” which I maintain does not exist, so there’s a second post that details our trying-to-be-polite discussion of it outside of the chat.

This is a Good Book Thursday

I am reading Beyond Tidy: Declutter Your Mind.

Unfortunately, it turns out I’m a mental hoarder, and there are only narrow pathways through my brain. At any moment now, a pile of miscellaneous thoughts is going to cascade down and bury me. Otherwise, I’m good.

How’s by you? Especially what did you read this week?

Working Wednesday

I installed a window air conditioner.

Okay, it wasn’t that difficult, but I managed to get it from my driveway to the bedroom, smack the ancient window frame up so it would fit in the opening, add the side vents, screw in the supports and plug it in. I’m very proud.

What did you work on this week?

Happiness is Having Nothing Scheduled Tomorrow

Back in Normal Days, I used to stay off the roads on the weekends. During the week I’d make appointments, have meetings, go out for groceries, etc., but I’d stay home on the weekends because that’s when people who were stuck at work all day would go out. I figured I’d just cede my space on the roads, in lines, and in building to them.

Now it’s the New Normal and weekends don’t really happen anymore and I never go anywhere. I was just lying here with the fan blowing on me and three dogs snoozing and realized I have a fridge full of food since I cooked like a demon yesterday, all my errands done, and a full blesses Sunday to lie out under the trees nd watch the sunlight filter through, while the bushes rustle with baby animals–lots of fawns and baby bears on the roads these days so we all drive slow since they’re all idiots about cars–and the birds flit about mindlessly and every now and then a chipmunk darts through the greenery. I have plenty I should be doing, but nowhere I have to go and nobody I have to talk to. Pure Bliss.

What made you happy this week?

HWSWA: Relationships

I just had a bizarre experience. I realized I didn’t have a digital copy of The Cinderella Deal, so I went to Amazon to get one. That sucker is $10.99. Who the hell is going to pay $10.99 for a book that’s twenty-four years old? It’s my book and I’m not going to pay that much. WTF, Bantam?

In other news, there’s a new post up on HWSWA, this one about relationships. Strangely enough, Bob didn’t want to talk about relationships. Character descriptions, sure; motivations, sure, but the topic of the week? Not so much. So the discussion is pretty much Bob introducing new topics and me trying valiantly to get everything back to writing relationships. He only does it to annoy because he knows it teases.

Then he made up a new kind of point of view and I thought he was joking and made fun of it. Until we did the PoV discussion (coming up next week) and it turned out he was serious, and AAAAAAAAAAAARGH.

I now remember why we stopped doing He Wrote She Wrote.

The new relationship post is HERE.

Hope Is the Thing With Feathers, or At Least Fairy Wings

I started reading Sarina Bowman’s The Year We Fell Down, about a college freshman with a spinal cord injury , and when this first-person narrator meets her roommate for the first time, she says . . .

“. . . a little specter of hope had alighted on my shoulder. And this feathered, winged thing had been buzzing around for weeks, whispering encouragements in my ear. . . . Now, facing [my roommate] in the flesh for the first time, my little hope fairy did a cartwheel on my shoulder.”

She has a little Hope Fairy. I rolled my eyes. (Yes, I am a bitch.)

But as the story progressed, the Hope Fairy became less twee, showing up nineteen times in the course of the book to help the narrator undercut the anguish of her situation, and I started to pay attention to what Bowen was doing with her.

Corey, the protagonist, was a star in high school hockey, center and captain of her team, daughter of the coach, living a life dedicated to speeding across the ice with a stick. But as the story opens, she’s in a wheelchair, facing the knowledge that she will never get back on the ice. So she externalizes her hope, evicting it from the rest of her feelings because there’s no place for it in her life.

Bowen does a nice job of personalizing the hope avatar. When Hartley, the love interest, finally makes his move and Cory hesitates, the Hope Fairy shows up, “wearing black lace lingerie, and a pout on her face. Don’t panic now, she insisted. This was just getting good.” When that crashes and burns and all hope of a relationship is lost, the Hope Fairy adapts, “fluttering between chapters of my calculus textbook, spouting theorems. She put on a tiny pair of glasses and perched on the lid of my travel coffee mug. Even better she didn’t mention [Hartley’s] name. Not even once.” She shows up in Corey’s water polo game wearing a bikini and on a New Year’s Eve spent alone in a sparkly dress, and when Corey duct-tapes her mouth shut because she really can’t bear to hope any more, the Hope Fairy flies in at the last moment, just as Corey is telling herself that there’s no reason to hopes again, rips off the duct tape, and yells, “Yes, there is!”

Yeah, I became a fan of the Hope Fairy. But I still thought it was a hokey move until I remembered Dr. Garvin from Agnes and the Hitman, the avatar for Agnes’s burning rage. Pot, meet Kettle. Or at least, Dr. Garvin, meet the Hope Fairy. Agnes isn’t the kind of woman to conceptualize a Hope Fairy, she’s in her thirties and enraged, not hopeless, but it’s the same thing: take an emotion you can’t handle and make it the Other so you can argue with it, try to defeat it, tape its mouth shut, and finally accept it.

And that made me look at the damn Wound concept again.

Corey’s story Wound isn’t a metaphor, so I have no objections to it (my dislike of the Wound in the Past That Explains Everything has been made clear in other places). Her injury is real and recent–she fell eight months ago, and her spinal cord is irreparably damaged–so it’s part of the story in the now, and dealing with it is an ongoing problem for her in the now–physical therapy, trying to find people who don’t see her wheelchair first, getting to a second floor dining hall that has no elevator–complicated by the guy across the hall from her who’s on crutches because he got drunk and fell off a climbing wall, sidelining him from his place on the college hockey team. But Hartley is going to recover and skate again; Corey never will. Enter the Hope Fairy.

New Adult stories (protagonists 18 to 29) are not really my reading taste; I like older, bitter, grumbly, wiser characters (write what you know). But I’ve been deliberately reading in this genre, trying to see how much romance novels have changed (not that much actually and much of it for the better) and I was really caught by this one, rereading it several times, trying to figure out not why I thought it was good–that would be the writing–but why I kept going back to it.

And I think it’s the Hope Fairy.

Okay, not the Hope Fairy exactly, but the character of Corey Calahahn who is looking at a future she can’t bear, and so externalizes her hope in a ridiculously frivolous avatar, the embodiment of how ridiculous hope is in her situation. She can’t scream and cry and break things: this is her life from now on. But she can wall off hope and make fun of it, using the mental focus that made her a force on the ice to survive living off the ice. There’s no big move at the end where the Hope Fairy turns to her and says, “You don’t need me any more, Corey, you’re fine now.” Corey’s never going to be fine. But at the end she’s good, safe and loved and happy, and that’s enough.

So I apologize to Sarina Bowen for rolling my eyes when the Hope Fairy showed up. Her character created a ridiculous, cutesy, sparkly, probably unicorn-loving avatar for an emotion that was fraught with fear and doubt that she couldn’t believe in it anymore, and used that to deal with the incredible pain that believing in the future was going to bring her. I think that’s brilliant.

(Dr. Garvin was a good move, too. I’m just saying.)

I highly recommend The Year We Fell Down.

This is a Good Book Thursday, July 16, 2020

I’ve been reading a lot of New Adult romances lately, female protagonists 18 to 29. The genre has a really different feel, but it’s interesting. I can definitely recommend Sarina Bowen’s The Year We Fell Down (see other post from today for more on that).

What are you recommending this week?

Working Wednesday, July 15, 2020

Well, obviously, I have not been working on this blog. SORRY. But I’m getting my act together now for sure. Probably.

Tell me what you did this week. Let me succeed vicariously.

Happiness is Zoom and People You Like

Krissie and I did a Zoom chat on collaboration last night with Amy Andrews in Australia, so that was two of my favorite people laughing with me. It would have better to be in Australia laughing with Amy, but for right now, I’ll take Zoom and the faces of people I like a lot.

What made you happy this week?

HWSWA

The new He Wrote She Wrote Again post is up. This one’s on relationships and community.