Jennifer Crusie's Blog, page 177

This Is A Good Book Thursday, September 6, 2018

I’m getting burned out on mysteries, so of course that’s when the NYT publishes an anonymous op ed explaining why the USA is going down the tubes.  The big mystery is who wrote it?  I don’t care.  If you’re going to hide under a bush shouting bad things, you have no credibility, and this opinion is from somebody who believes everything in the op ed.   Anonymous accusations: I hate ’em.  So I re-read Pratchett’s The Truth and felt better when William defeated his treacherous old father, the narcissistic and arrogant traitor.  Good does triumph over evil, I’m sure of it.  I just wish Good wasn’t taking the long route.  And then I wrote some more of Nita’s story, and let’s face it, I’m brilliant.  (This conviction comes and goes, so I’m enjoying it while it’s here.  Stay tuned for “I Suck At Writing and Should Eat Worms and Die.”)

So what did you read this week?  (Something you wrote counts.)

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Working Wednesday, September 5, 2018

How can it be September already?  And how can it be September and still be this hot?  I’m confused.  Still September is September so this week I am embracing fall cleaning and  once more diving into the mess that is my home plus the mess that is my book.  After a splendid Monday writing–3500 words by the time I went to bed–Tuesday was nada because I suddenly had Qualms about the whole story.  I find that Qualms are not conducive to getting any kind of real work done, so my goal for today is to become Qualm Free.  And also clean house and write.  

What are you doing?

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Argh Author: Melissa Yi’s Death Flight

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Our Melissa Yi has a thriller coming out Sept 6, and it sounds like a nail-biter.

A Killer Flight With No Way Out

When Dr. Hope Sze flies to Los Angeles to reunite with her soul mate, she expects Botoxed blondes with Brazilian wax jobs, not terror at 35,000 feet in the air.  Yet on their way home, with 1000 miles to go and nowhere to land, she and Dr. John Tucker must strive to save one man’s life.

Hope and Tucker have no surgical equipment. No surgeon on board. And, as first year family medicine residents, almost no experience.  But right this second, they’ll try anything.

Especially Hope, because minutes before, she might have accidentally helped to kill the man gasping at her feet.

You can pre-order Melissa’s book here

or go here to learn more about Melissa.

And her’s her book trailer!

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Perception is Happiness

One of my favorite truisms is “Perception is reality.”  That is, how we perceive something becomes Truth in our minds, even though the person standing next to us perceives the same thing differently and therefore is standing in a different reality from us.  In the same way–according to this happiness book I’m paging through– perception is happiness or misery.  Or as the book put it, “It’s not what happened, it’s how you think about what happened.”  I can look back at all the mistakes I made, all the people who treated me badly when I was younger and think, “What a gormless victim I was, shame on me,” or I can look back and think, “Damn, that girl was a survivor who never quit fighting.  Go, Young Jenny.”  The first one makes me resentful and ashamed and miserable.  The second one makes me want to go back and high five that kid and tell her how proud I am of her.  I like the second one; it makes me happy.  I can look out at the meadow that is now my lawn and be ashamed because I haven’t mowed it in months, or I can look out at it and see the butterflies and the bees and the bright yellow wildflowers that have taken over my hedge and think how much more beautiful it is than lawn.  I’m going with the butterflies.  I can look at Nita and think about how weird it is and my editor is going to freak and my career is probably over, or I can look at it and think it’s more than half done and it has some of the best writing I’ve ever done and it’s a good book, damn it.  Yeah, I’m going with “It’s a good book, damn it.”  Perception is happiness.

How did you perceive happiness this week?

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Cherry Saturday, Sept. 1, 2018

September is Read A New Book Month.

There are people, I realize, who ask “Why would you read an old book?” but they are not of our tribe.  Rereading a great book is one of the great pleasures in life.  Reading a new book, on the other hand, is fraught with possible disappointment.  It takes a brave person to read a new book.  I read a new book last month.  It was one of those books I wasn’t sure about all the way through, but I never stopped reading.  It came THIS CLOSE to being something I’d recommend and then went off the rails at the end, possibly in part because it was setting up a sequel I probably won’t read.  Then I went back to re-reading Catherine Aird.  But inspired by Read a New Book Month, I am going to go back through the recs here and read some new books, probably starting with The Goblin Emperor.  That gets a lot of love here.

Read a new book this month, Argh People.  Then show up on Good Book Thursdays and tell us about it.

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The Other Discovery Draft I’m Keeping

It’s way too short, it’s missing a lot of information, and it ends abruptly (Discovery Draft!) but this one stays, too, with much rewriting in it’s future.  There’s the scene in the apartment with Lily, then the non-scene with the marriage chat, and then Nita goes to work and this stuff happens.  Can I get some agreement now that marriage chat has to go because nothing happens in it?  Thank you.

************************************************************************

When Nita had gone to work, Nick sat down at the table, exhausted. 

Well, not exhausted.  You’re dead.  Just overworked.

He let his façade drop to conserve energy, pushed away the last of the food cartons, and pulled out the three records he was most interested in.

Rab came through the door and screamed.

“What?” he said, and Rab turned away his hand over his eyes.

“Façade!”  Rab said. “Façade!”

Nick put up his façade again.  “Fine.  Façade. You’ve seen me as a skeleton before. What’s wrong with you?”

Rab looked at him cautiously and then came into the room. “Dude, you are changing.”

“Dude?” Nick said.

“Sorry, archaic slang.”  Rab stole another look at him  and shuddered.  

“Rab.”

“You have juicy parts,” Rab said.  “Like . . . organs.”

“Organs.  No.” Nick got up and went into the kitchen and yanked open drawers in the new cabinets until he found the knives. 

He pulled out a knife and stabbed himself in the arm.

Nothing.

“No blood,” he said, showing his arm to Rab. 

“I know what I saw,” Rab said.  “Do notdrop that façade around Nita.  Or me.  Or anybody.  And stop stabbing yourself, that’s going to lead to tears.”

“Rab, I’m dead,” Nick said, but Rab was still talking.

“Bad flashbacks to beginning human anatomy class.  They had these pictures on acetate that started with the skeleton and then did the organs and then did the vascular system and then did the muscles–”

“Rab.”

“You’re on the organ acetate,” Rab said.  “There was a lot of pink . . . things . . . attached . . .”

“Rab.”

“Your skull is pretty much the same except you have eyes.” Rab shuddered, looking away.  “You know, it’s gonna take me awhile to forget that.”

“Get me a mirror,” Nick said.  “Big enough that I can see my body.”

“There’s one in the basement,” Rab said.  “I’ll send Jeo up with it.”

“Jeo?”

“I’m gonna need some time,” Rab said and left.

Anatomy Of Human Body Organs Male Human Body Male Anatomy Anatomy Of Human Body Organs Male Anatomy Of – Anatomy Of Diagram

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This Is A Good Book Thursday, August 30, 2018

We’re coming up on the end of summer in the Northern Hemi, folks.  Then it’s serious back-to-school time.  I’ve been plowing through everything Catherine Aird wrote, classic mysteries that are full of digressions.  She can get two pages out of a single line of dialogue because she muses on things practically between each word.   You can do that in omniscient, but it’s starting to drive me buggy.  Not that I had far to drive to get there.  

So what are you reading?

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Working Wednesday, August 29, 2018

We’re having a heat wave here in NJ, so I’m working inside today: writing Act 3, cleaning the kitchen (no seriously this time), setting up my new office, trying to get the mini-split to work before I call in the pros.  Oh, yeah, and putting up the Working Wednesday post which I forgot last week.  Sorry about that.

What’s on your agenda?

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A Discovery Draft I’ll Keep

I feel guilty showing you the marrige discussion scene only to tell you it’s too bad to keep; that seems rude.  So here’s a discovery scene I will be keeping.  I’ll cut the hell out of the first chunk of this, the stuff before Nita gets out of the shower, that’s just me following my nose again, but after that the scene works until the end.  It needs an end.  It’s also going to need tightened, of course, because it sprawls (discovery draft!) but once there are two people with conflict in the scene, it moves story and shows character change, so it’s legit.

**************************************************************

When Nita woke up the next morning, Nick was back at the table, going through Rich’s ledgers.  She squinted at him over Stripe’s back.  No five-o’clock shadow.

Well, of course not.  Dead Men Don’t Grow Beards.  It sounded like a noir novel.  Maybe she could get him a fedora while he was on Earth—Mr. Praxis probably had one—and make him say, “I won’t play the sap for you, sweetheart” before he left.   That made her laugh, and he looked up front the ledgers.

“Good morning,” he said, as if life were normal.

“Good morning.”  She sat up and stretched, and Joyce sat up and stretched with  her, too, just like always.

Normal.

He closed the ledger.  “Breakfast?”

“I need a shower first.  I smell.”  She looked at her hand where Jeo had bandaged it.  “Like blood and sweat and baph and . . . “

“Bathroom’s that way,” Nick said, nodding toward the back of the apartment.   “I’ll take Stripe out and then we can go eat.”

“Take your time,” Nita said.  “I’m gonna need a long shower.” 

Nick whistled for Stripe and the dog slid off the bed and fell over.  Then he picked himself up and staggered off after Nick, who patiently held the door for him when he got confused in the kitchen.  It was funny and warm and normal and . . . she struggled to find the right word as the sun poured in the big bay window and warmed her bed.

It was homey.

Not my home, not my bed, she told herself as she stretched again, annoying Joyce, but the truth was, she liked the apartment better than her house.  It was full of light and it was clean and spare and efficient. Something to aspire to.   And Joyce seemed to like it.

Maybe she could talk Vinnie into renting it to her when Nick went back to Hell.

The last part of that thought was depressing, so she got her black jeans off the floor and a clean black T-shirt and underwear out of the closest garbage bag and went to the bathroom to get ready for work.  The bathroom needed a few things like tile on the gutted walls and towel racks—and towels, she thought and went back to get her terry cloth robe from another bag—but it was clean and the shower worked and Rab had put a kitty litter tray in there for Joyce, so that was taken care of, and she could stand under the blessedly hot water and try to accept the revelations of the day before, one at a time, letting the water wash over her as she processed her new reality

After fifteen minutes, Nina turned off the water, still a little shaky.  Maybe processing everything should wait until later.  Maybe it’d be better to believe one unbelievable thing at a time.

She got dressed and went back out into the apartment, only to stop in the archway when she saw a naked redhead in her bed. 

The woman said, “Hello, lover,” and rolled over, smiling until she saw Nita in the archway. 

“Hi, Lily,” Nita said.

Lily sat up, holding up the comforter to cover her nude body.  “Well, this is embarrassing.”

“More puzzling,” Nita said, wondering how Lily had gotten into the apartment and undressed in such a short time—well, that had been a long shower—and much more important, why Lily was there.

Joyce leaped on the bed, and Lily raised her eyebrows, but after a moment, Joyce curled into a ball and went back to sleep, and Lily went back to smiling at Nita.  “I thought it was Nick in the bathroom.”

“The two of you close, are you?” Nita said.

“Well.”  Lily pulled the covers around her.  “Yes.”

Nita smiled at her.  “Gives a whole new dimension to ‘boning’, doesn’t it?”

Lily looked startled, but then the door opened and Nick came in carrying paper bags and a drinks carrier with two giant cups of orange juice and an equally large tea, followed by Stripe, who was looking geriatrically perky.

“Good walk?” Nita said to the dog as Nick put everything on the counter.

“Short walk,” he told her.  “But effective. I got take-out from Sandy’s  since I wasn’t sure you’d be ready to face a crowd . . .” His voice trailed off as he followed her nod to the bed.  “What are you doing here?” he said to Lily.

“Oh, Nick,” Lily said, batting her eyelashes at him.  

Nick looked at Nita.  “What is she doing here?”

“No idea.” Nita took the bags.  “Is there French toast?”

“I told Sandy to send everything.” Nick scowled at Lily. “And extra syrup.  Has she done anything horrible?”

“Just tried to make me think you had sex with her.  I told her to bone away.”  

“You are not helping.”  Nick turned back to Lily.  “How did you get here?”

 “The boss sent me,” Lily said, looking cautiously at Nita.

Demon, Nita thought, opening one of the bags.  Well, that made sense.  “Would that be Satan?”  

Lily turned on Nick.  “She knows?”

“She knows more than you do,” Nick said.  “Go back to Hell, we’re handling this.”

Lily studied him.  “You’re not even a little bit tempted by me?”

“I’m dead,” Nick said.  “You know that.  What are you doing here?”

Lily stood up and dropped the sheet.

Her body was magnificent.

“Nice façade,” Nita said, opening the bacon as an antidote to jealousy.

Jeo came through the door holding a sheaf of papers.  “We need–” he began and then he saw Lily, naked in the archway.  “Whoa.”

“We don’t know why, either,” Nita told him.  “Did you have breakfast?”

“Going there now,” Jeo said, trying not to look at Lily. “Why is she here?”

“That is the question of the moment.”  Nita opened a box that had French toast.  “We’re eating in this morning.  Would you like to join us?”

“No, he would not.” Nick took a giant orange juice out of the drinks holder.  “Daphne’s next door.  He does not want to join us.”

“No, I do not.” Jeo turned for the door.

Lily looked at them all in disbelief.  “Whatis this?”

Rab came through the open door with more papers.  “Okay, I think I’ve got this–”  He stopped at naked Lily.  “Hello.   Nice body. Kind of wasted here.”  He looked at Nick.  “It’s not cheap stocking a bar.  Are you sure you have the money for this?”

“Yes, I have the money,” Nick said. “No, I don’t want to stock a bar.”  He took a piece of bacon from the box Nita was holding.  “Do you want breakfast?”

“I’ll go next door,” Rab said, looking from Lily to Nita and back again.  “It’ll be more restful.  Nice to see you again, Lilith.” 

He shook his head, and he and Jeo left, and Nita frowned at Lily. “Wait.  Lilith?  TheLilith?  Adam’s first wife, the demon who causes nocturnal emissions?”

Lily closed her eyes.  “That’s my mother.”

“That’s Lilith Prima,” Nick said.  “This is Lilith Secunda.”

“Oh, your mother.” Nita thought about Mitzi.  “We should form a support group.”

“Do we have plates?” Nick said, looking around the gutted kitchen.

“We don’t even have cabinets,” Nita said.  “Where would we have plates?”

Nick went to the door and yelled down the stairs, “Rab! Plates, please!”

“And cabinets,” Nita called after him.

“We’re not going to be here long enough to need cabinets,” Nick said, coming back for more bacon.

“I might be,” Nita said.  “I like it here.  It’s sunny. But it needs cabinets.”

Nick opened another carton.  “Toast?”

“You know, if we had a toaster, we could make our own and it would be hot,” Nita opened another carton and offered it to him.  “Eggs?”

“We need plates,” Nick said frowning.

Lily put her naked hands on her naked hips.  “What is wrong with you people?” 

“I missed lunch yesterday,” Nita said.

“Do not get between this woman and food.” Nick picked up a piece of bacon.

“Also,” Nita said to Lily,  “you are obviously up to something, which you will either tell us now, or we’ll find out later.  What I will not do is tell anybody that you’re a demon.  They wouldn’t believe me anyway.”

“I need to talk to you,” Lilith said to Nick.

“We need forks,” Nick said.  

Nita passed him a plastic fork from one of the bags.

“No,” Nick said.  “I need a realfork–”

Rab came through the door with three china plates with silverware piled on top.  “Take these back to Sandy’s when you’re done,” he said and left again.

“We need a kitchen,” Nita yelled after him.  “Well, I need a kitchen.”  She raised her voice again.  “And tile in the bathroom!”

“Do you realize there’s a white power group on this island killing demons?” Lily said.

Nita felt Nick freeze beside her.  “What?” he said.

Lily nodded, looking satisfied at the response. “There’s a white power group on this island that’s targeting demons.  They meet after Stitch and Bitch at the Historical Society.”  She picked up the underwear she’d dropped by the bed and began to get dressed. 

Black lace, of course, Nita thought as she watched her, but Lily did look spectacular in it.  She turned and Nita saw a small tattoo of a black cat above her right buttock, the same black cat that was on the Sadie’s Demonistasign.

Maybe Sadie was handing out temporary tattoos?  It was cute.  If she’d been sleeping with somebody, she’d have asked for one.  Kind of wasted since the guy she was staying with was dead.  “Nice tattoo.”

“White power?” Nick said, still mostly concentrating on the food.

“Yes,” Lily said, fastening her bra over her C cups.

“You really did a nice job on that façade,” Nita said.

“What façade?” Lily said.

So of course that’s the way you really look.  Nita sighed.  “Look, we have no racial problems on this island.  Nobody’s dumb enough to piss off Sandy and Daphne and Dom, let alone . . .” She stopped.  “Wait, they’re targeting demons?”

“Yes.”  Lily put on her shirt and buttoned it over her ample rack.  “Marvella and the Witherspoons are their leaders, and they poisoned the doughnuts.”

Nick sat down at the table with the plate he’d just filled. “They poisoned demons.  How do they even know there are demons on the island?”

Lily shrugged, which did nice things for her shirt, and then picked up her pencil skirt and stepped into it.  “All I know is, they were thrilled when Button showed up at Stitch and Bitch last night, and the white power meeting was after that.  They thought she’d be killing demons for them.” Lily looked at Nita.  “She doesn’t believe in demons.”

“No.” Nita sat down across from Nick.  “She has no idea she’s from a family of demon-killers.”

“And you haven’t told her,” Lily said, sliding into her heels.

Four inch heels at least.  You can’t chase bad guys in those, Lilith.  “I had a very full day yesterday,” Nita said.  “I’ll catch her up today.”  Nick gave her a plate of eggs and French toast, and she took it, realizing belatedly that the Devil had just handed her breakfast.  “Thank you.  I like a full-service Master of the Underworld.”

“Otherworld.” Nick picked up another piece of bacon. 

“There’s somethingwrong with you,” Lilith said to Nita as she put on her jacket.  “Do you know who he is?”

“Dead fifteenth century son of a pope who became the Devil’s fixer and is now the Devil’s heir.”

Nick handed her a fork and Nita cut into her eggs. 

“Unbelievable.” Lily went past them to the door, snagging a piece of bacon on her way out.

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Banter Is Not Story

A famous screenwriting guru once said that every scene had to have conflict or be funny.  I threw his book against the wall.  I don’t think being funny is enough of a justification for a scene in the movies, but I know it’s not enough for a novel because while moviegoers watch, novel readers participate.  You can be a passive watcher, but you can’t be a passive reader.  And that means that at a subconscious level, a good reader is going to try to make that scene fit into the puzzle of the story.  I think good readers can keep a lot of plates spinning in a plot as they read through, but if there are still plates spinning at the end, they’re going to feel unsatisfied.  So every scene, in my humble opinion, must be crucial to the story, must fit into the plot arc and character arc, and must stop spinning at the end, must finish the puzzle.  Anything that doesn’t fit is going to be a broken plate, an extra puzzle piece.  That’s bad.

In my discovery drafts, I write anything, but in the rewrites, I look at a scene and ask, “How does this move the plot, develop character, deepen theme, escalate the tension?”  Sometimes a scene doesn’t do any of those things but I don’t cut it because it feels like it might become something, because I feel it’s important in a way I just haven’t seen yet.  Those often get cut in the end anyway, but sometimes they turn out to be the softball scene in Welcome to Temptation, that started off as snappy patter and turned into Phin making Sophie officially his girlfriend in front of the whole town.  It arced the relationships and deepened the hatred that the antagonist had for Sophie, spurring her to up her attacks.  It pushed into the open the conflict between Phin and his mother.  And it finished the Dillie/Sophie subplot; Dillie chose Sophie as her new mother before Phin did.  Oh, and it underscored the mother theme.  It didn’t do all of that in the first pass because I was just getting the words on paper, but by the time the rewrite was done, it was pulling its weight and multi-tasking like crazy.

Which brings us to banter, the “funny” justification for a scene.  Banter is like sugar, it makes the plot go down easier.  But also like sugar, if that’s all there is and there’s too much of it, it can smother the taste of the more important stuff.  (A little sugar in a lot of tomato sauce is piquant; a lot of sugar in a little tomato is a mess.)  I have a particular problem with this because I love dialogue; if I had my choice I’d write radio plays.  So my first drafts are always dialogue heavy, sometimes just dialogue.  The problem with dialogue is that it’s often just people chatting.  It might be clever dialogue, but unless it’s doing something, it’s just chat.  That becomes filler, and if you’ve constructed a good plot and then the reader hits filler, she’s going to skim that looking for plot.  It’s similar to the problem with sex scenes; if there’s no plot there, it doesn’t matter how funny/sexy/well-written something is, the reader is trying to put the plot puzzle together, make every piece fit, and this thing doesn’t.

So when I hit a scene like the marriage discussion scene which popped up after another discovery draft scene in which big things did happen, I look to see what’s in there (nothing important) and if any of the chat could mean something I just haven’t seen yet (what’s this whole marriage thing about?).  I wrote this scene because the one before had huge implications and then everybody left Nick and Nita alone in the apartment with breakfast and I knew I wanted a breakfast scene.  Momentum carried me there, not story.  

To decide if I want to keep it, I look at scene basics.  It’s Nita vs Nick because it’s in Nita’s PoV and there are only two people.  So what’s the conflict?  There isn’t any.  They do discuss solving Nita’s cash flow/job insecurity with marriage, but they don’t struggle over it.  Nita isn’t against it and Nick isn’t for it, they’re just explaining things to each other so they can understand the situation.  That’s actually a good thing for a relationship plot, they talk to each other and listen, but that also happens in just about every scene they’re together in for the rest of the book, so this scene can’t rest on that.    

Okay, how do the characters change?  They don’t.  Nick is changing, but it’s not really demonstrated in this scene.  I can up the emotional content, but the scene that really nails Nick’s change comes right after this one, so this isn’t needed. And Nita’s changing, too, but the scene before this shows that because she wakes up after her day of traumatic new knowledge and says, “Okay, this is the new normal.”  The previous scene makes that clear.  This one just sort of continues it.  It’s an empty scene between two strong ones.  I don’t need it.  

Fine, how does this move plot?  Uh, it doesn’t.  If they decide to get married, it would do that, but that’s all it would do.  I think the problem is that I haven’t set up that Nita has money troubles because she doesn’t; she’s not rich by any means but she has a job and she lives within her salary.  The worry is that she’ll lose her job, and that’s foreshadowed by Button’s notebook, but it’s not something she’s truly worried about.  Marriage is a solution to a problem she really doesn’t have.  And I don’t see how making it a problem adds to the rest of the story.   It doesn’t make sense: she’s a good cop, people on the island like her, her dad’s the mayor, there’s no reason to fire her.  She’s going to give the department a reason to fire her shortly, but at the time of this scene, it’s just not a problem.  So the whole marriage conversation is a solution in search of a problem.  Meanwhile, there’s actual plot going on around it that needs the story real estate this is taking up.  A scene has to earn its place in a story.  This scene is freeloading.

Snappy patter is not story.  It’s like sugar in tomato sauce, salt on french fries, it adds a lot, but if that’s all there is, it’s not only not satisfying, it’s actively off-putting, ruining what it’s supposed to enhance.  Read in just one scene, empty banter is fun.  Read in conjunction with a hundred thousand words of story, it’s a waste of a reader’s time.  

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