Jennifer Crusie's Blog, page 184

This Is A Good Book Thursday, June 14, 2018

I’m on a P. G. Wodehouse binge because I was getting too dark in my own novel and because it’s summer and in the summer, the best place to laugh is Blanding’s Castle.  Also you have to love an author who replies to his critics this way:

“A certain critic – for such men, I regret to say, do exist – made the nasty remark about my last novel that it contained `all the old Wodehouse characters under different names’. He has probably by now been eaten by bears, like the children who made mock of the prophet Elisha: but if he still survives he will not be able to make a similar charge against Summer Lightning. With my superior intelligence, I have outgeneralled the man this time by putting in all the old Wodehouse characters under the same names. Pretty silly it will make him feel, I rather fancy.”

That’s the way I feel about people who say, “Why is there always a dog?” or “Where was the dog?” or “Why dogs?”, I just never realized Bears Will Eat Them.  Also the people who say, “Well, it’s not Shakespeare . . .”  Did the cover say, “Another great piece of Renaissance drama from Jenny Crusie”?  No?  BEARS.

Also, when Millicent drops into her chair in Summer Lightning, he describes her like this:

“She looked like something that might have occurred to Ibsen in one of his less frivolous moments.”

I think that says it all.  I also tried a New Adult romance because Krissie said they were interesting and this one was free, but I gave up a third of the way in.  I like plots in my novels.  Then I tried something about a housewife assassin and gave up a couple of pages in because the protagonist seemed unlikely to succeed at balancing her responsibilities to her children while posing as a prostitute to kill a Russian mob boss.  My suspension of disbelief was not willing.  I also circled back to another Miss Marple because those are soothing.  Mostly, though, I just worked on Act Two.  

So what did you read this week?  Any keepers?

 

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Working Wednesday, June 13, 2018

I will get pictures of my work up on Instagram this week, I swear, but until then I give you something much, much better: Karin Pfeiff Boschek’s pie art.

I don’t see how anybody could cut into these, they’re that beautiful.

So what did you make this week?

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Nit-Unpicking

First, thank you all VERY much for the feedback.  It’s enormously helpful, and I have made the changes noted.   Never apologize for nit-picking, that’s practically the definition of copy editing.

Beelzebub and the Dinosaurs:

The dinosaurs died 66 million years ago, so that joke goes.  It’s what Lani calls a vestigial tail; when you’re writing a first draft, throw-it-at-the-wall-and-see-what-sticks draft, stuff like this gets in as a throwaway.  Then you look at the facts and throw it away.

But I need to get a throwaway in there that establishes Beelzebub as a screw-up.   I have now learned that the Holocene Era started about eleven thousand years ago when the glaciers began to pull back and forests sprang up (we’re still in the Holocene Era).  Eleven thousand years is still too many, I need something that happened around five or six thousand years ago.  (Do not google for “six thousand years ago” because you get those cousins of the Flat Earthers, the New Earthers who have decided that the Earth was created six thousand years ago because . . . I have no idea why.  I didn’t actually read the stuff I found on that, just marveled at the blindness of the anti-science people.)  So mammoths (too close to “Mammon”), mastodons, and giant sloths disappeared during the early Holocene.  

The giant sloths piqued my interest and there’s evidence they were around five thousand years ago.  Also “giant sloth” is funny.  I’m not sure I can get it to work, though.  Six thousand years ago, the chicken was domesticated, the Sahara Desert formed thanks to an “aridification event,” and the Minoan Culture began on Crete (Beelzebub created the Minotaur?),   None of these has the impact of dinosaurs as a disaster.  I did look at flood myths, and they’re at about the right time, but the historical backstory is too obscure (Lake Agassiz, anybody?)..  SO I’m still looking for a disaster.  (Funny, usually those find me on their own.)

The Buttons

Don’s note about the centuries made me go back to my notes about the Button family.  Like this:

“Josiah began his persecution of demons in 1684 after reading Cotton Mather’s 1684 essay Illustrious Providences. (“Mather, being an ecclesiastical man, believed in the spiritual side of the world and attempted to prove its existence with stories of sea rescues, strange apparitions, and witchcraft. Mather aimed to combat materialism in New England.”)  Josiah executed fourteen “demons” between 1684 and 1686 before he shot the son of the local magistrate and was arrested for murder even though the body of the magistrate’s son couldn’t be found after being laid out in the ice house, and Josiah pointed out that demons always returned to Hell after being killed, so he really wasn’t a murderer at all.    They had to let him go, but then they found the body in the woods (Josiah hid it when it didn’t disappear) and he hanged for that.”

I wanted this grim, secretive Puritan family that not only persecuted demons, they were fairly lousy to the women in their family.  So I did a list of the female Buttons:

Button wives and daughters  were named 

Be Fruitful (1670-1694 (23 at birth of son, 24 at birth of daughter and death)

Fear (1694-1720) (26 at birth of son, 26 at death)

Silence (1720-1756) (26, 36 at death)

Comfort (1746-1816) (28, 70 at death)

Hopestill (1774-1845) (26, 71 at death)

Prudence (1800 1883) (83 at death)

Patience (1826 – 1900)

Charity (1850- 1925)

Martha (1875 – 1950)

Florence (1902- 1980)

Shirley (1930-2011)

Kimberly (1962)

Chloe Button (1988) 

The idea was that the Puritan grip on the Button family would have begun to loosen over the centuries so that Button could be unaware of her legacy in the 21st.  But I also sort of (I don’t spend a lot of time thinking about the Buttons) wanted Button’s grandfather to be a semi-survivalist, preparing for when the demons invaded, talking about how humans weren’t having enough babies and insisting that his grandchildren be given Good Christian Names.  So I’m thinking about renaming Chloe as Patience.   Patience Button is just a good name, plus it would be a good reason for her to ask to be called Button.  Maybe her name is Patience Comfort, so she’s really stuck with Button.  Also, Max can get a lot of mileage out a trigger-happy Patience.  Then her brother would be Josiah.  (I don’t think her brother shows up in this story, but he has to exist.)  

I think Patience is just a better name than Chloe for this character.

And then there’s Act Two, which has two sex scenes (bleah) that are important to the story so they have to go in.  Maybe I’ll go out for lunch and diagram them (quietly) while I eat.  There’s a thought.  And then I have to cut five thousand words from the first act some of you just read before I cut five thousand words from the second act.  Because I am wordy.

I can do this.  Nothing but good times ahead.

 

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Laugh Happy

I’m a big fan of laughing as a path to happiness.  

Psychology Today explains:

“Laughter just might be the most contagious of all emotional experiences. What’s more, it is a full-on collaboration between mind and body. Although laughter is one of the distinguishing features of human beings, little is known about the mechanisms behind it.  Scientists do know that laughter is a highly sophisticated social signaling system, helping people bond and even negotiate. Interestingly, most social laughter does not result from any obvious joke . . . Although laughter is not generally under voluntary control, yukking it up has numerous health benefits: It releases tension, lowers anxiety, boosts the immune system, and aids circulation. Contagious convulsions are anything but frivolous.”

Happiness is not frivolous, people.  Yuk it up.

 

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Cherry Saturday, June 9, 2018

Today is Knit-in-Public Day.which I choose to see as Crochet-in-Public Day or possibly as Weave-in-Public Day, or Fiber-Craft-in-Public Day and what I want to know is, does anybody actually need a special day to craft in public?  Is knitting an essentially private occupation? (No, knitting circles have been around forever.)   Do people run away screaming when I dig out my crochet hook at the dentist? (No, they ask questions.)  Do the cops show up and say, “Now, now, none of this”? (Depends on what you’re knitting.)  I could see National Knitting Day or Internation Crochet Week just to celebrate the craft, it’s the “in public” part that baffles me.  Of course, I’m an easy baffle.  

Get out there and flash your fiber, people.

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Questionable: What Do Editors Do?

Diane commented on Tuesday:

I’m asking this in all seriousness, but what do editors do? I’ve heard authors talk about working with their publishers’ editors. Do they read and make alterations? Because it seems like you are doing so much analyzing and rewriting. What is it that editors are doing?

They do a helluva lotta things including deal with the editorial boards, the marketing department, the PR department, the author, the author’s agent . . . but I think you’re asking specifically about how editors edit a manuscript, right?

The simplest answer to your question is that it’s really rude to give any kind of editor a text you know isn’t right because it means you’re shoving off work that you can do and leaving it to her to fix things in the way she thinks best, which is possibly not the way you wanted.  If it’s broken, fix it before it gets to her.  I always know my editors (Jen and the copy editor) will find mistakes I can’t see, so I need fix the ones I can see, so they can see the text clearly enough to make it better. If I slow them down with a lot of stuff I can fix, I’m hurting their ability to edit. That’s just dumb. If you work with professionals, you should be professional.

A longer answer involves more caveats because editing is a very personal relationship because editors, like writers, comes in all degrees of usefulness and outlook.

For example, there are the editors who are just clueless. I had one who added adverbs to my book. I threw the fit heard all over North America, the adverbs came out, and I got a new editor.  Another editor tried to tell me that nobody in the Midwest would know what potstickers were. Another one barred coq au vin because Midwestern readers wouldn’t know what that was.  Sometimes you have to be firm.

And sometimes you have to be really firm.  There is one publishing house that shall be nameless that liked all its romances to fit a certain approach to the genre. Writers that naturally fit in that approach became superstars. Writers that didn’t naturally fit there had a hell of a time. A friend of mine who was a brilliant writer was just broken there by over-editing which included an editor going in and making changes to her story over her objections that made it fit their company romance story. She quit writing a decade ago, and people are still asking what happened to her. (A controlling editor happened to her.)  I know another terrific writer who quit until she got her confidence back and then went to another publishing house that cherished her for who she was.  She’s still writing brilliant books today.

When I mentioned this to my current editor, who is a dream (Jennifer Enderlin at SMP), she said she had authors who told her that if there was something she thought should be changed in the text to just change it. In other words, authors also come in all degrees of outlook toward editing. So editors like Jen adapt; she’d never change anything in my text, but I get plenty of notes which are freaking brilliant. I think I’ve disagreed with her maybe three times in the all the years we’ve been working together and she was right all three times. I tend not to disagree anymore.

So here’s what Jen does for me. She reads through the story and marks any places that trip her up, that aren’t clear, that are disturbing enough to throw her out of the story, any places that she starts to skim. She asks questions about what she doesn’t understand as she goes through (as in “Why does she think everybody hates her? They’re all nice to her”). She circles words she doesn’t know (she knows a lot of words, but I know more) because they’re likely to throw a reader out of the story. (Example: I used “seraglio” in Wild Ride, but I kept it anyway.). She talks about what things in the story mean, if that’s what I meant to convey. (Example: there was an undercurrent in Faking It that Tilda’s father had sexually abused her that I had to shift some language on because that wasn’t at all what I’d intended.) She really digs deep, and she puts it all in an editing letter. I read the letter and let it sit for twenty-four hours so I can get past the natural desire to defend what I wrote, and then I make the changes I agree with and we talk about the other stuff. Usually on that stuff, we just talk about a way to fix it that satisfies us both, but she always lets me have the last word.

The other kind of editor is the copy editor who goes through and finds all your grammar and punctuation mistakes and any factual screw-ups. You have to be VERY careful with copy editors because sometimes they’re right, but the change they want is wrong for your text. I still loathe the copy editor who put italics into Welcome to Temptation that made my heroine sound like an idiot. I did catch the copy editor in Bet Me who tried changing “being into becoming” to “becoming into being;” her way is logical but not chaos theory. Mostly, good copy editors save my ass every time.

In the end, if there’s a screw-up in your book, it’s your fault, not your editor’s. So you make it as perfect as possible, and then turn it over to them and follow their advice to make it even better.  

Good editors are worth their weight in gold, rubies, diamonds, and plutonium.

Good questions to ask if you’re editing/critiquing somebody’s manuscript:

What must be kept.  What really works here, the parts that make you want to read them again, that give you insight into characters, that provide action and suspense . . . you know, the good stuff.  Tell the writer what those are so she won’t cut them.
What needs work.  There’s stuff in there that’s slow, boring, too long, but it’s important to the story so the writer can’t cut it, she or he has to fix it.  Explain why it needs fixed but don’t tell her or him how to fix it.  That’s the writer’s choice.
What should be cut.  Sometimes stuff gets in there that just doesn’t belong, especially things that have become the writer’s darlings.  Other times the writer feels the need to explain something that’s unnecessary to the story.  Sometimes she just goes on too damn long in a scene.  Tell her those things need to go because they’re clogging up her story.

And then don’t feel bad if she disagrees or ignores your advice.  Your her editor, not her mother, she doesn’t have to listen to you.  But she should thank you profusely because editing is a bitch of a job.

(If you need practice editing/critiquing, you can practice on this and then ask questions in the comments.)

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This Is A Good Book Thursday, June 7th

I had forgotten how funny P. G. Wodehouse is, but I had never noticed what a great plotter he was.  I’m reading Leave It To Psmith for the first time, and that plot is like a Chinese puzzle box.  You just don’t notice it at first because you’re laughing so hard.  I just had to put down the iPad because the noxious Baxter, stalking our heroine in the dark to find out where she hid the necklace she didn’t steal, trod on the golf ball that FreddyThreepwood had left in the hall and fell down the stairs: 

“. . . he took the entire staircase in one majestic, volplaning sweep.  There were eleven stairs in all separating his landing from the landing below, and the only ones he hit were the third and the tenth.  He came to rest with a squattering thud on the lower landing, and for a moment or two the fever of the chase left him.”

It helps if you know what a tick Baxter is and what a sweetheart Eve is, but still, writing visual slapstick is really difficult.   I don’t know what’s so damn funny about “the third and the tenth” but it is.   But still what I most marveled at is the plot, which is based on stealing a necklace and then replacing it, and because the people who want the necklace stolen (for good purposes) are so benignly inept, a cast of thousands ends up trying to steal the damn thing and then playing Keep Away with it.  So. Much. Fun.

I also read a terrific YA, Withering by the Sea, full of beautiful drawings and bizarre events and a dastardly villain and singing cats and a girl heroine beset by three Awful Aunts.  It was so good I bought the sequel, which is equally charming.

What did you read this week?

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Working Wednesday, June 6, 2018

It is now definitely summer which means I now definitely have to get my plants in, some of which are transplanted wildflowers that are growing in the old driveway that I use as backup parking.  I’m torn between tick-preventative tear-out-all-the-wildflowers-and-grasses and bird-and-bee encouraging leave-everything-grow.  I think it’s going to be leave them for the birds and the bees and do perimeter mulching.  Decisions.

What are you making this week?

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A Clouded Manuscript

I divided the first act of Nita into four parts (not chapters, we talked about this, remember?) and then Caryn suggested TagCrowd, and I ran all four parts through that to look at word frequency. That was illuminating.

The original reason I wanted a word frequency list was to see what words I was overusing and the clouds did that for me:

I knew I had a problem with “looked,” but I hadn’t realized I had a “frowned” addiction or “going” (there’s a speech tic for you).  “Think” was a surprise, so I’ll have to a search for that.  I thought that “thought” was not a problem, since it’s the interior version of “said,”  but Krissie is making me look again.  “Dead” is in reference to Nick, and I had a suspicion I was hitting that too hard, or at least repeating the same word too much.  And “really” should probably just go (damn adverbs) except when Nita’s using it in dialogue as sarcasm (“Really?”).  The interesting thing is that most of the problems disappear in the fourth part; that’s Nick’s trip to hell, and then Nita, Nick, and Mort going out to the Nature Preserve to find Forcas.  In other words, once I get the story up and running, the word overuse slims down.

Here’s the comparison of Part 1 before and after the edit:

I lessened but didn’t completely get rid of “looked” and “going,” and keeping some of the “dead” stuff was necessary because of Nick and the shootings, but I did manage to get “frowned,” “really,” and “think” back to insignificant usage.  So progress. 

The other helpful thing here was the repetition of names.  

In theory, Nita’s name should be the largest, then Nick’s, then Chloe/Button, and then Max or Rab.  Nita’s name is the largest until the fourth part, but Nick’s name is larger there because half of that part is in Hell so no Nita.  When I did a cloud on just the Nature Preserve part, Nita’s name was largest again.  Button disappears in Part 4, but again, that’s just Hell and the Nature Preserve and she’s home sleeping for all of that.  Plus Max shows up here finally and occupies the place she’d hold.  The same thing happens to Rab; while he’s a steady supporting character throughout the first three, he’s not in Hell or the Preserve so he disappears in Part 4.  If that really bothered me, I could pretty easily add him or Button to the last part, but there’s no real reason, and I like it that the end of first act zeroes in so strongly on Nita and Nick.  The big surprise was Vinnie; he takes up as much space as Button does in parts one and three.  I need to look at three anyway, it’s bloated, but I can see where Vinnie’s stuff is probably where the ax will fall.  

So that’s where I am with Act One.  Moving on to revising Two now.  I actually think One is ready to beta, which is amazing, but I won’t know until all four are done.  I’ve stared at it for too long now; I can’t see the places where it drags, where readers will start to skim.  It’s the thought that the answer might be “All of it” that keeps me awake nights.

But the clouds have been a help, so thank you very much, Caryn.

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No, We Were Not Hacked

A commenter took us down.

Someone who shall be nameless enabled comment notification (you get an e-mail every time there’s a comment) and then decided she didn’t want the e-mails and so marked them as spam over and over and over . . . 

Our web host shut us down because it thought we were a spam site.

That meant that Mollie had to deal with the web host, who was rightly protecting the net, while trying to get the commenter to stop marking e-mails as spam.  She lost a good chunk of her weekend because of this, and of course, we lost the blog for the better part of two days.  So comment notification has now been disabled.  

The only information of yours we store on here are your e-mails/ISPs so you can comment without waiting for approval, and of course, we don’t sell the e-mail list, so no worries about the shut-down on your end.  On our end, we’re still fuming and trying to make sure it never happens again.  Please, if you’re having a problem with e-mails from this site, which you shouldn’t have because we never send any, LET US KNOW.  Don’t mark them as spam unless you want Argh to go under again.

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