Jennifer Crusie's Blog, page 189

Contentment Pause

I have been thinking about contentment.

con·tent·ment  kənˈtentmənt/noun: a state of happiness and satisfaction.





Synonyms: satisfaction, gratification, fulfillment, happiness, pleasure, cheerfulness



I think contentment gets a bum rap because it sounds boring, but I think it may be the true goal of life, to look about you and think, “I built this life for myself and I am happy with it, not exhilarated or excited or enthralled, but just bone deep content with who I am and where I am.”  Or as Douglas Adams said, ” I may not have gone where I intended to go, but I think I have ended up where I needed to be.”  This could be because I am old, since I do believe you have to grow into contentment because you have to learn what gives you peace before you can find it.  If so, then growing old is a small price to pay for contentment.


 
What made you happy this week?

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Cherry Saturday, April 14, 2015, Okay, Fine, 2018

April is Garden Month and Decorating Month.  Or Winter Is Finally Over So Let’s Get This Place In Shape Month.  Or Screw It, Nobody Is Coming Over So I’m Going To Read A Good Book And Eat Chocolate Month.  No, wait, that’s every month.  

April is Unf*ck Your Habitat and Yard by Tidying Up and Death Cleaning Month.  Also, taxes are due Monday.

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This Is A Good Book Thursday: Can We Find Happiness?

My current rant is for book blurbs that end in questions: Can he save the woman he loves?  (No, she dies in the end.)  Will she learn to love again? (No, she becomes embittered and vindictive and a house falls on her.)  Is it possible for her to face her problems? (No, she’ll give up and go home to the town she swore she’d never return to and open a bakery-restaurant-B&B where she will become bitter and vindictive because there was a reason she swore she’d never go back, and she’ll die in the end.)   It strikes me there’s a reason there’s no blurb that asks, “Will Gregor Samsa find happiness as a cockroach?”  and also why I’m not asking “Can Argh People find good books to read?” Of course he can’t, and of course we can.  What did you read this week?

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Working Wednesday: Make Something Happy

 Well, the world is going to hell, maybe it’s time to make cookies.  Or hay while the sunshines.  Of just something fun.  Whatcha doin’ out there, Argh People?

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One Does Not Simply Walk Into Joy

I know, that’s a little sunshine and lollipops.  Imagine this guy saying it:

 

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Cherry Saturday, April 7, 2018

Today is National No Housework Day.

or as I call it, “Any day that ends in ‘Y’.”

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Hell Is a Company Town

You know how it is with world-building: One damn thing leads to another.

So the swearing question led me back to a world I’d sketched in as different parts of it rose up in the story: Hell is a company town.  That is, everybody there works for the Afterlife and the CEO is Satan.  They see themselves almost as zookeepers: there’s this huge preserve called Earth full of animals left to their own devices in their natural habitat  until they die, and then Hell sorts out what happens next.  If things go wrong, they send in agents to clean up the problem and then leave the humans to their lives again.  Demons aren’t intrinsically evil, they’re just like humans.  Some are terrible, some are great, most are just trying to lead full lives and have a good time after a good day’s work.  

So some of them work in Niflheim for Thanatos, where the dead sort out the consequences of their lives, and some work in the Elysian Fields, which is where the dead who decide they’re done with life go, and some of them work in Reassignment which is where the dead who choose reincarnation go, and some work in government, keeping the peace and enforcing the law both in Hell and on Earth and generally making the trains run on time (that would be Nick, Rab, and Jeo), and some run restaurants and groceries and sporting goods stores and all the other things needed for the support of a population that lives hundreds of years.  So you have demon doctors, and lawyers, and accountants, and teachers (low birth rate so small classes), and barbers and probably mimes.   It’s a parallel Earth with a much smaller population, dedicated to single goal–keep Earth free of its dead so it can keep evolving–and answering only to the Higher Power of the head office, known as Corporate, where God and the angels work, overseeing Nick’s Hell and all the other Hells for all the other inhabited worlds in the universe.  

But our Hell would have a real interest in Earth since that’s where their clientele comes from.  I could see them having a McDemon’s theme restaurant, making fun of McDonald’s.  Maybe looking at Earth fashions the way we look at folk dress, but co-opting the better stuff like jeans.  And the agents who go to Earth would need to know the languages–both Rab and Jeo have Earth Science degrees and they and Belia still take classes to stay current since Earth history whizzes by them ten times as fast as their own.  

Which made me wonder if demons wouldn;t adopt Earth curses and maybe screw them up, given the passage of time.  If it’s been five Hell years since they’ve been to Earth, “groovy” would seem like a reasonable thing to say.  And there’s translations screw-ups.   I come from Ohio, a state that pronounces Lima “Lye-mah” and Bellefontaine as “Bell FOUNtain” and Tibet as “TIB et” (street in Columbus),  so I know how a native population can screw up an original word.  The problem is, I don’t want anything cute or labored.  It has to be recognized as a swear word.  So “damnation” could be sounded out as “Dam Gnat Yon,” I suppose, but that seems a stretch.  I kind of like “dam nat,” though.  The other problem with that approach is that all the best bad words are one syllable: damn, crap, fuck, hell, etc. 

So I experimented:

 

     “Well, fruck,” Nick said, looking at his chair.  “Why didn’t we order these assembled?”

     Jeo frowned.  “What?”

     Rab kept working on his chair.  “That’s ‘fuck,’ sir, and it’s considered obscene here, so best not to use it.”

     “That can’t be right,” Nick set his chair upright and stared at it in disapproval.  “You need the ‘r’ or it doesn’t roll off the tongue.  Frucking chair.”

     “That’s the point.”  Rab put his finished chair upright.  “It’s supposed to strike the listener, not roll over him.  Or her.  That’s why it’s short with a hard vowel.” 

     Nick shook his head at his chair.  “From now on, we buy things assembled.”

     “You really put that much thought into ‘fuck’?” Max said to Rab. 

     “Earth linguistics.  English obscenities are often short with hard vowels.  Fuck.  Prick. Skank.  Cock.  Cocksuck–”

     “Got it,” Max said.  “That must have been some class.”

     “I still say that makes no sense,” Nick said.  “You want to get a fluid stream of curses going, and you can’t do that with all hard vowels—“

      The door opened and Nita came in.  “Let me tell you what a goddamned, sonovabitch clusterfuck of a day I have had,” she said, dropping her bag on the new chair.

     “Fine,” Nick said.  “Fuck this chair.”

     “I don’t know, I kind of like ‘fruck,’” Max said.

     “Suck-up,” Rab said.

     “That’s frucking suck-up to you, crocksucker,” Max said.

     “Fruck?” Nita said.

     “It rolls off the tongue,” Max said.  “Which also sounds dirty.”

     “This is what you guys do all day while I’m fighting crime?” Nita said. “Assemble chairs and make up dirty words?”

See, that’s trying way too hard, verging on cute (stop trying to make “fruck” happen, Jenny) although the possibilities for using “fruck” from then on in the book appeal to me, especially as an indication of team identification:

     “I don’t think–” Rab began, and then they heard Jeo yell, followed by a loud thump and then silence. 

     “That’s not good,” Max said, and followed Rab as he ran for the stairs, waiting for him at the bottom as Rab took the steps two at a time.

     Ten seconds later there was another loud thump.

     “Rab?” Max called up.

     Silence.

     Don’t go up there, he told himself. Whatever that is, it has nothing to do with you.  If something horrible has happened to them, that’s points to Team Mammon.  It’s us versus them.  I said I wouldn’t betray them, I never said I’d rescue them.  They’re probably fine. 

     The silence stretched on.

     “Fruck,” Max said, and started up the stairs.

Yeah,  I don’t think “Fruck” is gonna happen.

So maybe I just co-opt lesser known Earth curses, with the idea that demons who visited Earth used them and they caught on in small pockets of humans?  The father of my best friend in high school,, a genial guy, used to use “Hell’s bells,” as in “Hell’s bells, Hazel, when’s dinner?”  I have a great fondness for “Hell’s bells” because I remember Mr. McKenzie so fondly.  Plus people make up curses all the time.  My butter-wouldn’t-melt-in-her-mouth mama used “Cheese, pie, and crust” in place of “Jesus Christ.”  Yeah, that wouldn’t work, but I bet “Hell’s bells,” might.

And then there’s that “most significant cultural thing” idea, which led me to “smite,” the worst that could happen.  As in “Well, smite me, I did not see that coming.”  “Smite you, asshat.”  “Mothersmiter.”  Uh, no.  Although come to think of it, I have Max thinking, “Get smote, Ashtaroth” in the first act already, and that’s staying.  So there’s that.

As you can see, this still needs work so I’m still cogitating, but I gained much from the discussion on Tuesday, so thank you all very much.

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This Is A Good Book Thursday, the Spring Version, Damn It

I feel strongly it should be spring now.  Therefore I am reading sprightly romances (still on my Heyer kick) and gardening books like Composting for Dummies.   What are you reading?  

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Working Wednesday, April 4, 2018

Well, I completely borked the shawl I was making, so I left it a skinny scarf.  Some things you just can’t save.  I need to finish some of the project I’ve started (dozens of them) but I feel the yen to start something new.  

Must.  Not.  Start.  Something.  New.

What are you making?

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@#$%!*! and Other Problems

So I was struggling with something for the book and not getting anywhere, and I remembered that it’s been months since I made you freeloaders work (remember naming all the Demon Island businesses?  That was in December 2016.  Put down those umbrella drinks and cowgirl (or cowboy) up.  It’s time to earn your keep.

So here’s the problem.  People swear.  Demons are people, so demons undoubtedly swear, too.  But would they use our swear words?  Obviously different demons speak different Earth languages beside their native tongue of Demonaic, but for our purposes they’re speaking English because they’re in New Jersey.  I’m assuming “damn” is probably universal, but after that . . . 

So I have three questions.  

Since demon agents are required to have advance knowledge of Earth languages, they’d have knowledge of Earth slang (that’s actually stipulated in the book) and so would know Earth curses and obscenities.*.  Would they just use those, or under pressure would they use their own?  

2. If they use their own, what would they be? 

3. According to the (very brief) research I did, some societies do not swear.  Would it make sense that demons didn’t?

[*I wasn’t sure what the difference between a curse and an obscenity was, so I looked it up.  A curse invokes the name of God (you stipulate the god), and an obscenity is an offensive word or expression (you determine the offensiveness).  None of this matters that much, I’m just flashing my research.] 

I have no idea if I want demonbad words, but I know you’ll have opinions.  Let me hear them, damn it.

 

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