Jennifer Crusie's Blog, page 168

This Is A Good Book Thursday, December 27, 2018

Since this is the last Good Book Thursday of 2018, how about posting The Best Book You Read All Year? I mean to go back through the comments on the Thursday posts to get a reading list for 2019–Murderbot is obviously one of them–but let’s go with your top read, just to simple things up. If somebody else has already mentioned your book, go ahead and post it again; the more times a title is posted, the likelier it is we’ll give it a shot. And then you can talk about what else you read this week or whatever else you want to.

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Working Wednesday, December 26, 2018

I’m still hammering away at the book. Ten days until I have to send it off, and of course, the closer I get to the end, the more I realize it’s rubbish. Sigh. No, it isn’t. It’s brilliant. Well . . .

Quick, tell me what you’re working on so I can stop obsessing about this.

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Merry Christmas, Argh People

I know for a lot of people the solstice holiday is over or upcoming, but since Santa knows no religion (and is not necessarily white, Megyn), I wish you all a wonderful celebration-of-your-choice. With presents.

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Happiness is . . . oh, dear God, it’s almost Christmas

Happiness is being with your family on the holidays if you love them and can relax with them and they make you feel warm and loved in return.  Fot others, happiness is not being with family and feeling warm and safe at home.  And there are those (I suspect the majority) who split the difference.  I truly hope whatever holiday of yours came or is coming your way this year, it was a happy one.  And if it wasn’t, hang in there, it’s almost over.  Only eight more days until a brand new year.

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Cherry Saturday, December 22, 2028

It’s Date Nut Bread Day.

Usually I’m all in on baked goods, but this one is fraught.  For starters, dates are too sweet for me.  And then there’s the bad flashbacks to the Christmases of my youth when the stuff was everywhere along with an egg nog I wasn’t allowed to have that had some guy’s name on it, a name I am now unable to recall.  My German family was full of heavy drinkers who didn’t like each other, so our dinners seethed with starch and repressed anger, and then there was date nut bread for dessert.  Although there was also pumpkin pie and I still like pumpkin pie, and I love nut bread in general, so maybe it’s just the dates after all.

Happy holidays.  

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Thoughts on Fixing An Unlikable Heroine

Several people mentioned having a hard time connecting to Nita, aka an unlikable heroine. So I watched a recommended romcom last night, thinking that maybe I just had to get back to my romance roots to remember how to write a protagonist people wanted to read about. I picked one that wasn’t about a successful business woman leaving the city to find love in a small town with a moppet adjacent because, dear god, there’s a limit to that plot, plus I’ve lived in small towns all my life and they are not Mayberry or Stars Hollow, they are Amityville.

Sorry, I digress.

The one I watched had an interesting premise and came recommended (either the AV Club or Jezebel, can’t remember which), but it was godawful, mostly because the heroine was so vile I wanted her to die alone. So then I went back to a June 2018 romcom that I had liked, also about an ambitious woman in the city who did not have an adjacent moppet, to see what made me root for her, all in hopes that I would see a way to making Nita a heroine readers wanted to spend time with. (Spoilers for two romcoms ahead.)

The awful heroine movie is No Sleep ‘Til Christmas, and the premise is that Lizzie, the heroine, can’t sleep and it’s screwing up her life right before Christmas season which is her busiest season (she’s an event planner) and also the month before her huge, expensive wedding to a sweet, handsome surgeon who’s crazy about her. Then she does a cute meet with a poor but honest bartender who also can’t sleep, and it turns out when they’re with each other, they both get a good eight hours of shut-eye. They start meeting on the sly to sleep together, and because they’re no longer sleep-deprived, they become successful at their jobs and evidently fall in love subconsciously, since the vast majority of the time they’re together, they’re unconscious.

In the rom-com that I liked, Set It Up, the heroine, Harper, is also a moppet-free ambitious professional in the big city. Bedeviled by an impossible boss, she meets a nice guy who is also bedeviled by an impossible boss, and they decide to fix up the impossibles so they’ll have time to pursue their own lives. Struggling to keep their bosses’ romance going requires that they talk to each and cooperate, which is a believable path to getting to know each other and inevitably falling for each other.

And then I analyzed why I loved and rooted for Harper and wanted Lizzie to end cuddled up to her money and alone.

First Look:
• The first scene No Sleep is Lizzie with her fiance and his mother. Lizzie is half asleep because of her insomnia, but even drowsy, she’s not happy about how close her fiance is to his mom. Then there’s a montage of sleeplessness, but really the first scene is enough. Mom is nicer than Lizzie.
• The movie begins with a montage of harried assistants doing horrible things for their bosses, and then getting out at the end of the day, finally free. Except for Harper, who watches them all go wistfully, stuck at work because she works for a boss-zilla who has just demanded a second dinner. Harper orders dinner while she runs back and forth across the office to add steps to her boss’s Fitbit, all of which tells the viewer that Harper is harried, hardworking, and determined to do well. Also she has this story she wants to write about senior Olympics that she really wants her boss to publish because it’s so important . . .
• Nita’s first look is drunk in a place she’s not supposed to be with a new partner. The drunk part is definitely putting people off, so as much as I hate it, that’s going to have to go. I’ll think of something.

The Cute Meet:
• Lizzie literally runs into Billy when she is driving aimlessly through the streets at 3AM and he’s jogging at 3AM, both because they have insomnia. Yeah, she hits him with her CAR. But he’s just fine (no, he’s not, he bounced off the hood if her CAR), so they yell at each, blaming each other for the accident.
• Harper meets Charlie when she doesn’t have enough cash to pay for boss-zilla’s dinner so he pays for it and then takes it her; desperate, she talks him into splitting the order into two dinners, which he does, although he lies to her about the pickle. Her last words to him are, “You’re a monster,” but he is eating the pickle he lied about, so it’s warranted.
• Nita meets Nick in the bar and knows instantly that he’s not real; he’s not impressed with her until she drinks five shots of scupper and only passes out briefly. I think it works, and I like the throwaway line about neither of them belonging anywhere, so I’m leaving that in place.

Vulnerability.
• Lizzie is a hugely successful event planner based on the way she spends money like water; she also has complete power over her professional life and her love life. Her big problem: her insomnia is making her . . . I don’t know. Inefficient? Cranky? Selfish? Unfortunately she’s still those things after she starts sleeping through the night, so sorry, still not likable. Plus, the minute I saw Lizzie splashing money around to solve her problems and planning on dropping a bomb of money on a big fancy wedding, I drew back. This chick has it all and she’s still bitchy and demanding?
• Harper is an assistant at the beck and call of her abusive boss, and has a terrible love life. She’s trying to keep her boss happy, an impossibility, while writing at night, hoping her boss will give her a chance to publish one of her articles. The minute I saw Harper staring in fear and frustration at her computer screen as she tried to write, I felt a bond. Harper is not perfect, in fact, she’s kind of a doormat, but she’s a plucky doormat.
• Nita has troubles–something in very wrong on the island she feels responsible for–but she’s not coming across as vulnerable, so I don’t think readers worry about her. I can up the threat to her job, Jason can do that, but I also need to up her fear quotient. Argh. Vulnerability is so key to any character but especially to a protagonist and especially in the first scenes. Must cogitate on this.

Goals:
• Lizzie wants a successful career throwing big expensive parties and a big expensive wedding, and she’s getting both. She also wants a good night’s sleep, and nothing is working, and she’s worried her insomnia will screw up the things she’s already getting, the infamous “I don’t want” negative goal. It doesn’t help that there’s no time spent on why she can’t sleep aside from her daddy was never around when she was little (does not explain the insomnia or why it’s only happening now) or that all the obvious solutions are hand waved away (yes, Virginia, there are pills that will knock you on your ass no matter how traumatized you are by a Wound from Your Childhood).
• Harper has a dream that someday she’ll be a great writer, a great journalist like her boss, and she’s willing to go through all of the trauma and delayed gratification and work to achieve that dream, which right now is focused on finishing her senior Olympics story and getting it published by her boss. Extra points for not having a ridiculous Wound from Childhood.
• Nita also does not have Wound from Childhood, so that’s something, but her goal to keep the island safe is too unfocused, I think. And it needs to be clear in that first scene which means ARGH given everything I’ve already discovered, I’m going to have to rewrite that first scene from scratch. DAMN it.

Best Friends and Family:
• The people around Lizzie pretty much do what she tells them to. Her best friend (?) is her assistant, who mainly exists to worry about Lizzie, and who gets dismissed a lot, comic relief made flesh, except why she’s friends with Lizzie is beyond me; I’m assuming it’s because Lizzie pays her. Lizzie meets Billy’s best friends when she goes to demand he do something for her, and she insults them. She’s also bitchy about her fiancé’s mom, who appears to approve of her and be excited about her wedding and even goes to bail her out when Lizzie get arrested for threatening a bus driver who refuses to let her ride for free. The best line in the whole movie is at the end when Mom tells her, “I should have left you in that jail cell.”
• Harper has a best friend who is also her roommate, a BFF for life, absolutely supporting and loving and not comic relief. She also has a full life of her own, getting engaged early on to a guy who also thinks Harper is great, and Harper at no point makes their engagement about herself, she’s just delighted for them. And when Harper meets Charlie’s roommate, they laugh and bond, excellent foreshadowing for the future.
• Nita has just met Button in the beginning, but they’ll build a professional relationship and have each other’s backs. The people Nita is close to are her brother and sister, who clearly love her, approve of her, and support her, and she clearly loves them, too. Sandy and Daphne at the diner are good friends, and the people Nita interacts with have respect for her as a cop, and Nita attaches to Rab pretty quickly and then to Jeo, and then to Max, so that Nick’s cohorts become Team Nita pretty fast. I think I’ve got this one covered.

Conflict Resolution:
• When Lizzie hits a snag, she lies, she browbeats, she use people. Worst heroine scene ever: Lizzie threatening a perfectly nice bus driver with her shoe because the driver won’t let her ride for free. When life gives Lizzie lemons, she throws them at innocent bystanders.
• When Harper hits a snag, she brainstorms and solves her own problems, often fixing things for those around her, too (Charlie’s boss gets his dinner). She gets exasperated with Charlie, but it’s for legitimate reasons, and she never threatens him with her shoe.
• Nita’s reactions depend on the snag; she doggedly pursues her investigations, but she does melt down when she finds out the supernatural is real and Nick can smite. I think that’s a point for vulnerability, and it also makes her more human (irony), but it’s important that she cowgirls up pretty fast, and insists she’s fine even while her head is exploding. I think this part works.

The Relationship:
• I have no idea why Lizzie and Billy fall in love. She’s a Type A control freak/snob and he’s a slacker who can barely find his shoes. The story makes a pass at trying to say that she inspires him to get organized and he shows her the beauty of not planning, but it doesn’t work. She insists on calling all the shots in their relationship, she’s awful to his friends, she co-opts him into her lies to her fiance even though one of Billy’s few assets is that he’s an honest guy, and in the end she goes back on her promise to be a silent partner in his bar. This relationship is doomed because Lizzie is awful.
• Harper and Charlie, on the other hand, bond over their shared horrible work experiences, which leads them to decide to fix their bosses up with each other so they can get some downtime, which leads them to problem solve, cooperate, and work together to keep that plan going, which leads them to fall in love. Because of the way she handles herself in the partnership, Harper deserves her HEA.
• In Act One, Nita meets and investigates Nick, and in Act Two they form a partnership and work together to investigate, forming a bond, so I’m good there. Then in Act Three, Nick does the multiple personality thing, and Nita sticks with him, even though the Nick she knew is gone and he has no idea who she is. It’s that unconditional love bit; the idea that you stick no matter what. I’m happy with that. Then Act Four is . . .

The HEA
• Lizzie leaves her honest, loving fiance at the altar to undoubtably ruin Billy’s life, starting by hitting him with her car again. I could spend days on this dumb ending, but then the writer doubled down by doing a one-year-later denouement in which Lizzie and Billy are in bed about to go to sleep when a baby cries, and they both say, “Not it.” Yes, the last scene is both of them refusing to take care of their child.
• Charlie tells her he loves her. Harper, who is not stupid, tells him she loves him, too. They kiss. There is no dumb one-year-later scene because Harper doesn’t need a one-year-later scene; we’ve watched her establish a solid relationship with a good guy and it’s going to work out for them because they’ll make sure it does.
• Nita goes to Hell to get Nick back. It’s a rom-com run, but I’m okay with that, mostly because it’s such a button on Nita’s I-can-and-will-do-anything-to-take-care-of-the-people-I-love character.

So I rewrite the first scene, and then read through and work on Nita’s vulnerability. I can do that. Argh.

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This Is a Good Book Thursday, December 20, 2018

This week I’ve mostly been reading the news which, if you’re an American, is like an advent calendar: Every day we open a door and get a new investigation for our President.  We’re up to seventeen now.  Couldn’t happen to a nicer guy.  I also re-read a lot of Heyer for comfort, but that involved skimming.  I love her romances, but she does tend to over-explain and in some cases spend too much time with characters I don’t care about.  Which I believe was also some of the feedback I got on Act One, so I’m in glass houses territory now and I’ll shut up.

What have you been reading?

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Working Wednesday, December 19, 2018

The clicky part of my trackpad went out and my entire life passed before my eyes along with the entire book I have to finish by Jan. 4.  I found an old mouse until I can get this fixed and ordered a new laptop so that in the future there will always be a back-up machine because the thought of not being able to get to my work was horrifying.  I’m also almost finished with part one of the History of Trees shawl, which means the easy part is over and now I’m going to have to start looking at charts and counting stitches.  Of course, the boring part is over, too, but sometimes boring is good.  In crochet.  Not in books or life, although I did not need the excitement of a non-clickable trackpad.  My god.  It was the like my own private apocalypse.

How’s your work week been going?

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Act Two Is a Little Long . . .

And then there was Act Two.

Usually Act One is the hard part to get right and then the rest of the acts fall into place, but this time Act Two is doing so much heavy lifting that it ballooned to 44,000 words.  Should be about 28,000, although that’s not happening.   Still, a chunk of this has to go (about 14,000 words maybe?)

 My ax is getting a workout this week.

So my plan for this novel was that Act 1 would be Nita’s stable world coming undone and her need to save the island, Act 2 would be Nita still trying to save the island with the new knowledge about the supernatural and her place in it, Act 3 would be Nita having to deal with the New Nick after the poisonings, and Act 4 would be Nita kicking ass on Earth and harrowing Hell to save Nick.

Two problems.  One is that those four are not a progression.  The thread in One, Two, and Four  is Nita trying to save the island, although Four has two focuses.  Three and Four are Nita trying to save Nick.  Pick a lane, Jenny.  Then there’s the genre which I only care about in terms of focus again: This isn’t as much a woman’s journey book (see Faking It, Maybe This Time) as it is a romance (see Welcome to Temptation).

So that means that while Nita’s goal is still going to be “save the island,” the juice of the story is Nick and Nita, two isolated people finding each other and connecting.

So Act 1 is Nita and Nick meeting and establishing a tentative relationship, not quite a partnership but close, Act 2 is the partnership and jockeying for power, Act 3 is trying to find each other  emotionally again as Nick loses his memory and becomes human, and Act 4 is them finishing their jobs on Earth and in Hell on their own and then the big finale when Nita goes to Hell to join Nick and gets her HEA (did you have any doubts?).

As I said, Act Two should be around 28,000 words, give or take a couple of thousand.  It’s at 44,000, probably because of the lack of focus. Also, I really love the sound of my own voice.  There are two possible ways to fix this.  

One is to cut 16,000 words, possibly moving some of them to Act 3, which at the moment is about at the length it should be so that just moves the problem on down the road.

The other is to go to a five act story, adding a turning point in the middle of the hellaciously long second act.  

I don’t have any problems with doing the second solution as long as the story needs it; there’s nothing sacred about four acts for a novel.  The problem is, I don’t think it needs it.  Act Two is a thematic whole, two one-of-a-kind beings finding a connection that Act Three then tests.  There’s nothing in Act 2 that acts as a turning point, it’s just Nick and Nita working together and growing closer and falling for each other.  That’s crucial, but the turning point comes when they’ve finally established their connection and Nick loses his memory and they have to start over.  Act Two can’t be arbitrarily split into two parts.  It’s a thematic whole.

So Act 2 is Nita’s meltdown, followed by working with Nick at the cabin, followed by that breakfast scene where Lilith shows up and Nita copes with the new normal, followed by pulling the team together (Jeo, Rab, Button, Max) and looking for hellgates, talking to the grandmas, getting the wedding license, going to the club, Nita taking Stripe out, and then breakfast where Nick gets poisoned.   This is also the place where the Button/Max subplot takes off.  

The things I think are essential: Nick helping Nita through her meltdown, Nick and Nita working together at the cabin (first beat of partnership progression), then pulling the team together, Button and Max’s subplot, Nick and Nita working together at the club (second beat of progression of the partnership), Nick and Nita in the apartment afterward (third beat of the progression), the bit with Stripe and Nick’s poisoning.

I can cut back the breakfast scene in the apartment, but I think it’s necessary not just for plot purposes (Lilith) but because it shows how easy Nita and Nick are together at that point even though they don’t really know anything about each other.  That’s where the proposal scene is, too, and that becomes a plot point.  The grandmothers are important for getting Nita’s background in because that explains a lot, but I’m betting they’re the Hotels of Act Two.   I might move them to Act 3, which will put that Act over, but I really like the different Nicks in Act 3 and I think 1934 Nick could have a good time with those grandmas.  I can elide the marriage license in a paragraph.  

What I’m looking at now is an act progression that’s maybe 38/32/30/10, which is within contract bounds and that still gives me the turning points I need, although it takes a good long time to get there, and that worries me.  I do not like my turning points being that far apart.   Must cut more.

So this week is Jenny with an Ax.  Good news: Act Three still needs some work but is at 22,000 right now and moves along a nice clip, full of snappy patter and action.  Act Four is under 10,000 and is pretty much done, so that’s good, no drawn-out climaxes.   So really it’s just the first 80,000 words . . .

Argh. 

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Decoding Critiques

A very long time ago (twenty years maybe?) I read a manuscript by a friend.  Well, I read the first 160 pages before I gave up.  I handed it back to her and said, “I quit reading at page 160 because nothing new was happening, it was the same damn thing over and over.”  And she said, “But that’s when it gets really good.”

I think that’s tattooed on my brain now because, of course, I say the same thing when people suggest that every word of my first act is not genius, GENIUS I tell you.  But I really thought of it this time because I was going through Act 3 and thinking, “Okay, now this is getting good.”  That’s only 84,000 words into the novel.  I’m sure readers will stick with it that long to get to the good stuff.

 Just kidding, I’m getting out my ax now.

There are two difficult things about reading critiques.  One is that they’re telling you that parts of your baby are ugly, and there’s nothing you can do about that because the truth is, parts of your baby are ugly.  So you let the feedback rest for at least twenty-four hours so you can get past the knee-jerk my-baby-is-not-ugly response, and then you look to see what you’ve got. This is also when you fight back the urge to explain what people didn’t get (if you’re not going to stand in every bookstore and explain that to everybody who buys the book, explaining it now will not help) and to rationalize why things are in there in terms of what you need for the book (if the reader doesn’t need it when she encounters it, you don’t need it either). 

Having fought back all the knee-jerk stuff and accepted that yes, those parts of your baby are ugly, it’s time for the second hard part, translating feedback into action.  

So first I go through and find the things that a majority of people agree on, like things to cut–Hotels (18 people said so), Bad Ass Socks (6),  Aliens/Alf Flashback (4)–and cut them.  If they’re important, I’ll put them in later.

And then I look at the things that taken together mean something that’s not mentioned directly but that needs fixed.

NITA:
Nita’s not working for a lot of people (“all over the place”) and since she’s my protagonist, that is not good.  Comments: Nita needs to meet Nick faster, Nita’s drunkeness is off-putting, takes too long for her to accept the supernatural, lack of emotional involvement.

One of the problems with Nita is that her character shifted in the three years I’ve been writing this sucker.  What I’ve ended up with is a woman who desperately wants to be normal and just isn’t.  That kind of woman does not have psychic gifts because she’d repress them, so no more seeing blood on guilty peoples’ hands.  That’s also the reason (once I put it on the page) that she rejects the supernatural.  So she’s practical, hardworking, and repressing her emotions, especially her anger.  A woman who is repressing her emotions is tough to make sympathetic, so it’s going to have to be in the way she interacts with people (she’s a good person) and in her vulnerability (which I have to put on the page).

As far as getting her and Nick together, I’ve cut 2,000 words out of the first two scenes, so that gets us to the meet faster, but I still want those first two scenes in there to set up expectations and to establish the two worlds that are about to collide.  The 2000 word cut took the first two scenes from about 6000 words to 4000 words, so that’s a third of the opening.  That should have some impact.

NICK:
I didn’t get a lot of feedback on Nick, possibly because his low emotional affect is pretty common among heroes.  Somebody pointed out Nick’s comfort with the number of demons born on the island seemed odd, but I think that’s more a function of my not developing the back story of demons on the island (not in the book, in my notes) than it is a function of Nick’s character.  I think I’ll leave Nick as he is for now since nobody tripped over him, although I will have to put back a part I’d cut before that had him going after the mayor.

BUTTON:
Some people found Button annoying, but I like her, so while I’m scaling back her criticisms of Nita, she’s still going to be exasperated and career-driven.  I cut a lot of the “new” repetition and made it clearer that she’s driving (although it said right there that she was in the driver’s seat, people). The shootings are a problem. Understandably, people find a cop who shoots people unamusing, but it’s integral to the story, so I think I’ll make it clearer that the three she shot were committing violent crimes, and leave everything else in there since her propensity for shooting demons is a big part of her plot.

SUPPORTING CHARACTERS:
This is where a lot of the world-building takes place, since there are so many groups colliding in this plot: cops, criminal demons, Nita and Nick’s team, good demons, the Pure Island bigots, victims, criminal humans, good humans . . .

I also cut back the use of italics in some of the dialogue (4 people said to do that).

A lot of people said Jason could be cut, but he’s necessary so I just have to make him more interesting.  I’m ambivalent about Jeo and Daphne, but I can cut that back.  People said that Vinnie should be more freaked by Nick getting shot, but Vinnie’s drunk and upset about Jimmy, so I can see him being slow to put it all together; he’s described as red-faced by both Nick and Nita, not sure if that parallelism or repetition.  Belia’s phone call stays and so does the short scene with Max, although I cut them both back; I’m think the objection here is more that it’s not Nick and Nita than it is an objection to Belia and Max.  I need to make it clear that Rab and Jeo just got to the bar that morning; they’ve been at Motel Styx which Rab says later. Is Joyce the cat necessary? Not if she’s not useful later on, I think.  She humanizes Nita, but right now she’s not doing much.  

OTHER STUFF:
Three people said there was too much exposition, too many characters in Part One, and I cut a lot of it.   Others said there were too many characters in the breakfast scene, and that’s a problem because I wanted the diner to seem crowded with Nita’s responsibilities, a microcosm of her life.  So that one I’ll have to cogitate on.  And I need to get a better grip on my police organization and hierarchy, which I don’t really care about but which does have to be plausible.

And that’s where I am right now, have slashed the first part and ready to move on to the rest of Act One.  I’m still looking at comments as I go and VERY grateful to everybody who played along, so thank you all very, very much.

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