Jennifer Crusie's Blog, page 213

I Love This House

Setting is really important to me, both in fiction and in real life, and Atlas Obscura sent me a link to the perfect Crusie house this morning. I’ll never be able to use it in a book because it would take 30,000 words to describe it. The short article points out some of the phallic shapes, but completely misses the vaginal window and the fallopian tube front door. And the Eve figure is fantastic, pretty much what I’m hoping every Crusie heroine feels like at the end of the story.

That’s Eve on the left. I don’t know who Debbie Downer in the center is supposed to be.

The door pull is a hoot, too. Imagine grabbing that every time you came home.

SORRY. I thought I’d put the link in.

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Act One, Part Two: Scene Sequence: Bringing the Team Together

So the first part of Act One is two parallel scenes: Nita vs. Button and Nick vs Vinnie. Or, if you will, two determined drunk people against two determined sober people. In the first scene, Nita wins because she convinces Button it’s important to get out of the car and investigate. In the second scene, Nick wins because he terrorizes Vinnie into giving him information. And both winners want the same thing: To find out what’s going wrong on the island and get the person who ordered Joey’s death. The scenes are parallel, but they’re not identical.

The key to parallel scenes is to make them enough alike that they feel as if they belong together, that they’re part of a whole, but keep them different enough that people don’t feel as though they’re reading the same scene with different people. Then having introduced two powerful (hey, they won) protagonists, it’s time to bring them together while developing the plot. In this case, the plot is complex enough that introducing their relationship is going to take more than one scene. In fact, it’s going to take a scene sequence.

A scene sequence is a set of scenes defined by an opening and closing that are a unified whole, linked by a conflict and goal that shift slightly because the PoV character shifts. Scenes Three through Six of Nita can be summed up by “Nita enters a bar” and “Nita leaves a bar.” But they can also be described as “Nita enters the bar to find out what happened to Joey, meets an extremely suspicious character, and interrogates him, confirming her suspicions that there’s something wrong there.” The scenes shift back and forth between Nita and Nick, but Nita is always the focal character.

The key to handling those shifts is they have to happen organically, not just because you want another charater’s PoV. In this sequence, we start in Nita’s PoV–it’s her sequence–then shift to Nick when he gets a phone call and leaves the group. If he stayed with the group, it would be an awkward shift, but because he takes the phone and moves into another part of the bar, there’s enough of a break in setting that it justifies the shift. That is, scenes shift because of a change of time or place; that how readers are trained to interpret white space. Nick’s scene is over when he hangs up the phone and moves back to Nita because he sees her doing something he wants to stop and hangs up to join her again; when he hangs up on Belia, his antagonist, that conflict is over and the scene is over. The sequence then shifts back to Nita and stays with her as Nick joins them and only ends when Nita passes out, effectively ending her PoV. The scene then has to shift to Nick, who keeps the PoV until Nita walks out of the bar, ending their conflict and the scene sequence. It’s tempting to just shift to a PoV character whenever you want the other person’s PoV, but to keep the sequence coherent, there has to be some reason for the shift, something that ends the previous scene and requires white space and a new scene without breaking the flow of the scene sequence:

Transition: Nita enters the bar in the last lines of the previous scene.

3. Nita vs. Vinnie: Nita tries to find out what’s going on, aware of Nick but dismissing him to get to Vinnie while he’s drunk and vulnerable, just as Nick is merely curious about her in the beginning. As the scene progresses, they become aware of each other as out-of-the-normal, and their focuses shift.

Transition: The phone rings and Nick physically moves away to talk to Belial.

4. Nick vs. Belia: Nick gives Belia orders while watching Nita, and including orders to investigate her. His PoV but the focus is on Nita.

Transition: He sees Rab join Nita and hangs up to go back to them before Rab does something horrible.

5. Nita vs. Nick: She talks to Rab first, but she’s asking about Nick, investigating him now, so when he joins them, she interrogates him directly.

Transition: Nita passes out and takes her PoV with her.

6. Nick vs. Nita: She’s out for the first part of this but he’s still focused on her, trying to figure out what happened, ordering the boys to investigate; then she comes around again. His PoV, but the focus is on her.

Transition: Nita leaves and the scene sequence ends.

So each scene has a protagonist, antagonist, conflict, and arc, but so does the sequence: Nita’s investigating, Nick’s stonewalling, they’re both suspicious of each other and struggling with each other, so that all four scenes combine into that one struggle that begins when Nita enters the bar and ends when she walks out. That’s what makes a scene sequence: Each scene is complete on its own, but the sequence is also a complete narrative arc. Just like scenes are mini-stories, so are scene sequences.

If you’ve forgotten those four scenes, here’s the truck draft rewrite.

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Act One, Part Two: Bringing the Team Together, Done in a Scene Sequence

So the first part of Act One is two parallel scenes: Nita vs. Button and Nick vs Vinnie. Or, if you will, two determined drunk people against two determined sober people. In the first scene, Nita wins because she convinces Button it’s important to get out of the car and investigate. In the second scene, Nick wins because he terrorizes Vinnie into giving him information. And both winners want the same thing: To find out what’s going wrong on the island and get the person who ordered Joey’s death. The scenes are parallel, but they’re not identical.

The key to parallel scenes is to make them enough alike that they feel as if they belong together, that they’re part of a whole, but keep them different enough that people don’t feel as though they’re reading the same scene with different people. Then having introduced two powerful (hey, they won) protagonists, it’s time to bring them together while developing the plot. In this case, the plot is complex enough that introducing their relationship is going to take more than one scene. In fact, it’s going to take a scene sequence.

A scene sequence is a set of scenes defined by an opening and closing that are a unified whole, linked by a conflict and goal that shift slightly because the PoV character shifts. Scenes Three through Six of Nita can be summed up by “Nita enters a bar” and “Nita leaves a bar.” But they can also be described as “Nita enters the bar to find out what happened to Joey, meets an extremely suspicious character, and interrogates him, confirming her suspicions that there’s something wrong there.” The scenes shift back and forth between Nita and Nick, but Nita is always the focal character.

The key to handling those shifts is they have to happen organically, not just because you want another charater’s PoV. In this sequence, we start in Nita’s PoV–it’s her sequence–then shift to Nick when he gets a phone call and leaves the group. If he stayed with the group, it would be an awkward shift, but because he takes the phone and moves into another part of the bar, there’s enough of a break in setting that it justifies the shift. That is, scenes shift because of a change of time or place; that how readers are trained to interpret white space. Nick’s scene is over when he hangs up the phone and moves back to Nita because he sees her doing something he wants to stop and hangs up to join her again; when he hangs up on Belia, his antagonist, that conflict is over and the scene is over. The sequence then shifts back to Nita and stays with her as Nick joins them and only ends when Nita passes out, effectively ending her PoV. The scene then has to shift to Nick, who keeps the PoV until Nita walks out of the bar, ending their conflict and the scene sequence. It’s tempting to just shift to a PoV character whenever you want the other person’s PoV, but to keep the sequence coherent, there has to be some reason for the shift, something that ends the previous scene and requires white space and a new scene without breaking the flow of the scene sequence:

Transition: Nita enters the bar in the last lines of the previous scene.

3. Nita vs. Vinnie: Nita tries to find out what’s going on, aware of Nick but dismissing him to get to Vinnie while he’s drunk and vulnerable, just as Nick is merely curious about her in the beginning. As the scene progresses, they become aware of each other as out-of-the-normal, and their focuses shift.

Transition: The phone rings and Nick physically moves away to talk to Belial.

4. Nick vs. Belia: Nick gives Belia orders while watching Nita, and including orders to investigate her. His PoV but the focus is on Nita.

Transition: He sees Rab join Nita and hangs up to go back to them before Rab does something horrible.

5. Nita vs. Nick: She talks to Rab first, but she’s asking about Nick, investigating him now, so when he joins them, she interrogates him directly.

Transition: Nita passes out and takes her PoV with her.

6. Nick vs. Nita: She’s out for the first part of this but he’s still focused on her, trying to figure out what happened, ordering the boys to investigate; then she comes around again. His PoV, but the focus is on her.

Transition: Nita leaves and the scene sequence ends.

So each scene has a protagonist, antagonist, conflict, and arc, but so does the sequence: Nita’s investigating, Nick’s stonewalling, they’re both suspicious of each other and struggling with each other, so that all four scenes combine into that one struggle that begins when Nita enters the bar and ends when she walks out. That’s what makes a scene sequence: Each scene is complete on its own, but the sequence is also a complete narrative arc. Just like scenes are mini-stories, so are scene sequences.

If you’ve forgotten those four scenes, here’s the truck draft rewrite.

Also, I need a favor. Can somebody go to the website, hit the “About” menu, go to “Works in Progress,” slide across to the “Discovery Drafts” tab and from that to the August 2016 draft, and tell me if it still opens? I had to do some housekeeping and I may have lost that link, but I can’t tell on my computer because it’ll open anything I have on the site, even if it’s in draft form.

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Your Moment of Dog, March 14, 2017

So today at about 9:30, I opened the front door to the expected blizzard. I shoveled a path to the driveway and then quit before I had a heart attack. Yes, it was still snowing, but it’s easier to shovel a foot of snow at a time than it is to shovel four, and this stuff isn’t supposed to stop until eight tonight. We’re getting two to three inches an hour. You do the math.

The dogs do not do math. I went inside, yelled, “Outside!” (their favorite word next to “Cookie!”) and Milton and Mona raced through the door.

“YAY, we’re outside!”

“Wait a minute. Where’s the grass?”

Then Milton discovered I’d only shoveled to the end of the patio.

“Is this a joke? Is this one of those human jokes? ‘Cause you’re laughing. NOT FUNNY.”

“Forget this. I’m outta here.”

“Nope, nope, nope.”

If you’re wondering where Veronica is, Veronica does not do nature. It’s tacky and there are no soft blankets or electric mattress pads, plus there’s all that annoying wildlife she has to bark at. It’s exhausting. She’ll go out if there’s a cookie involved, but then she’s at the gate, looking at me like “Really, you think I’m going to stay out here with the lowlife squirrels and birds. INSIDE. NOW.” If she had a tin cup, she’d be dragging it against the bars of the picket fence.

We’re all inside now. Mona is snuggled down into plushy blankets. Milton is under the plushy blankets in order to be closer to the electric mattress pad. Veronica is smug, dry and warm and not coated with snow. All is well.

Except for me. I’m gonna have at least another foot of snow to shovel. And then there’s the driveway. It’s a good day to stay inside.

(For those who worry, I have four dozen bottles of water, a huge stack of firewood, three recharging batteries for my electronics on full charge, and enough food for the apocalypse. The power will undoubtedly go out shortly, but this is not my first blizzard. No worries.)

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Act One: The Beginning or The Transition from the Stable World Done in Parallel Scenes

Nice post title, huh? Well, I needed something that summed up this first chunk of Act One.

So the opening scene of any story should be (if I’m writing it, your mileage may differ) the transition from the stable world into the unstable. That doesn’t mean that everything is hunky dory at the beginning of the scene, there can be a lot of trouble, but it’s the usual trouble, nothing new, the protagonist’s world is still working the way he or she expects it to. And then Something Happens that turns the stable world into an unstable one.

So in the beginning, Nita is sick and drunk, but that’s nothing extraordinary, people get sick and drunk in the real world all the time. She has a new partner who doesn’t approve of her, but again, no red flags that the world is suddenly going to be different. But then Mort tells her Joey’s dead and the Devil’s in the bar, and while she doesn’t believe him about the Devil, she knows that all the little things that have been telling her that something bad is going on have just become concrete. Now she has to find out what’s happening because her safe island is no longer safe. This is the day that is different.

Nick’s been pulling together all the reports from his agents and spent the day looking into Vinnie’s bar and the island in general, which is what he does, and he’s inexorably closing in on finding his agents and closing the gate; that’s his normal world. Then Joey’s killed and he knows that means there must be something bigger going on. He pushes harder, trying to keep Rab from destroying the island while interrogating Vinnie, alert now that he knows the island is not the safe space it seems to be. Then Nita walks in. This is the day that is different.

So that’s what these two scenes have to set up, two people determined to do their jobs which in this instance is “keep the island safe,” realizing that today is different and things are much worse than they’d thought.

Yes, I know those aren’t the scenes you read before. This is why we analyze and rewrite, people. You think I do this stuff for fun? Okay, yeah, I do it because it’s fun because I’m a wonk but also because it makes a much, much better book. How much better? If you go to jennifercrusie.com and click on the About tab, and then click on “Drafting Nita Dodd,” you’ll find drafts for the opening scene from February, April, August and December of 2016 and then this truck draft from March of 2017. Why anybody would want to read five drafts of the same scene is beyond me, but you can skim the first one and then read the latest one to get an idea of how far we’ve come. I mean, I’m impressed, and I wrote this stuff.

Writing is rewriting, people. Never forget.

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Cherry Saturday: 3-11-2017

Today is Oatmeal Nut Waffle Day. And I object.

I don’t object to oatmeal nut waffles, I’m sure they’re tasty and good for you. I object to this insanely specific day. I can go along with Waffle Day or World Nut Day, maybe even Oatmeal Waffle Day, but when you get down to a double-modifier, you’re just being ridiculous.

Bottom line: Eat whatever waffles you want. The Waffle God will still be appeased.

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Light Twenty Stakes . . .

Buffy the Vampire Slayer debuted twenty years ago today.

I cannot believe I almost missed this anniversary.

If you’ve never seen this show, binge it immediately.

If you have . . .

Angel or Spike?

Best episode?

Fave line (SO MANY GREAT LINES)?

Which they would be because so many of them were written by Joss Whedon:

r

This is in my top five TV series of all time forever (along with the UK Life on Mars) because she saved the world. A lot.

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Act One: The Synopsis

One of the things that charting an act can do (once you’re at the truck draft stage) is give you the synopsis of the act. Yes, I know synopses usually are for entire stories, but if you think of each act as a story in itself (and I do), then an act synopsis is a huge help because if you can tell yourself in one paragraph the plot of an act, you can hold the shape of that act in your head as you revise. A discovery draft is “this happens, and then this happens, and oh look what just showed up, and then this happens and wait this happened earlier, and . . .” It’s incoherent because it’s not supposed to be coherent, it’s supposed to be creative and free and anything goes.

The truck draft has to be coherent.

So I can divide my story into scene sequences and transitions and find parallels and generally make sure it looks right as a diagram, then label the parts and make a list of the labels. Like this:

Nita and Nick begin investigation by dealing with partners/minions.

What happened to Joey?

WTF? Is going on?

Nita and Nick meet for breakfast.

Nita and Nick go to work.

The Supernatural is real and we’re in a lot more trouble than we thought.

That looks like word salad, but I know all the stuff underneath it, so that’s an outline for a synopsis for me. Then I have to flesh out that outline, looking to see what’s really there in those sections, and that’s where the real clean-up happens.

For example, the diagram showed me that the first two scenes were parallel transitions from the stable into the unstable, aka story. Except they weren’t parallel. The last pass on the first scene you read still had Mort tricking Nita into coming to the crime scene because I wanted an explanation for Nita wearing pajamas. That’s discovery draft stuff and perfectly fine. But it’s not fine for a truck draft because it takes away Nita’s agency. Looking at the first two scenes as parallels, I like it that Nita is lively and drunk and Nick is dead and sober, but I don’t like it that Nita is a dupe and doesn’t get involved until Joey is mentioned (YES, I KNOW MANY OF YOU MENTIONED THAT, I REMEMBER) and Nick is on point the entire time. Nita has to have a reason to go to somebody’s else’s crime scene.

It took me awhile but I realized that there has to be a clear indication, no, a clear statement, that Mort called her in because he thinks this is proof of something she’s suspected all along: something hinky is going on. She has to say to Button, “I’ve had a bad feeling about this all along, little things have been making me uneasy, and now there’s this. I have to get out of this car to investigate.” That gives Nita the same thing Nick has: a specific goal as she enters the scene. This is August Wilson’s “Start after everything but the action is finished.” With this scene, Nita’s vague suspicions become concrete and she goes into action.

So there’s another rewrite. But once that’s done, the rest falls into place, and I get this synopsis:

Nita is called in by her brother Mort to an investigation of a shooting that confirms her suspicions: there’s something wrong on her island. Nick is in the middle of an investigation when a shooting makes him suspect that there’s a lot more going on than his original problem. They both need to know what happened to Joey, in part because they both liked Joey, but in the main because they think there’s something very wrong on Demon Island, and it’s their jobs to stop it. That suspicion is only heightened when Nick realizes that Nita isn’t completely human and Nita realizes somebody is trying to kill her. They meet by accident at a diner for breakfast several hours later and try to get information from each other while having deep suspicions about each other. That breakfast makes them go out to investigate not just Joey’s death but each other, in the course of which they find out that things are even worse than they’d thought: Nick finds out what Nita is and Nita finds out that several people on the island are terrified of Nick. Then Mort calls Nita in on a missing persons case and asks her to bring Nick because he’s the last person to talk to the missing, and the result of that investigation makes it clear that the supernatural is real, Very Bad People are doing Very Bad Things, and Nita and Nick are the only ones who can stop them.

To be clear, that’s a synopsis, not a blurb, it’s not supposed to be fancy. It’s just the story I need to tell in that act.

Which means I can whip that truck draft into shape now (yes, I’ve written all of that, what do you think I do when I’m not posting here?) because I know exactly what that part of the story is. I’ll probably still discover things as I write, I’ll definitely cut some things because they don’t fit that plot, but this is the point where it’s all downhill in this act, the story is launched, all the characters and subplots are introduced, and at the turning point, we have a brand new story. That’s a third of the book right there, folks. And the fun part is, the last three acts are all action (which is what the last three acts always should be, escalating action).

Of course, once the truck draft for the whole book is done there’ll be another revision to make it all fit together, but this is what happens in Act One.

Stepping back to analyze what you have, including diagramming it out, can clean up a lot of the garbage left lying around after your discovery draft party is over. Discovery drafts are a good time, full of wild insights and leaps of imagination, but then in the cold light of day, it’s time to clean up, and that’s when you need an outline or a diagram or whatever you prefer to show you the shape of what you’ve written.

It’s snowing outside, cold and beautiful, and I’m curled up in a lot of quilts with a lot of dogs and my laptop. It’s a good day to fix a first act.

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Act One: The Big Picture

As has probably become painfully clear, I’m one of those writers who has to see what she’s written to see what she’s writing, the fictional equivalent of “How do I know what I think until I see what I say?” This makes the writing process long and convoluted. I have tried to streamline it (I wrote three books with an outline-first Green Beret), and it does not work for me (I think the Green Beret is now in therapy because of those three books). This is how it works for me, and there’s no point in wasting time trying to find a way to not waste so much time.

Which means that more than a year after I said, “I’m not going to write this book,” I’m only about half done and I’m still trying to figure out exactly how this book works. So it’s Big Picture Time.

Bob has this theory that I think explains our different work processes: he has to do spreadsheets because he’s a Big Picture Guy and if he has spreadsheets, he can keep his eye on the details, while I am a Detail Woman so I need collages to keep my eye on the Big Picture. This is the reason my discovery drafts are full of details–she’s psychic! green doughnuts! Dag and Daphne!–that taken together do not fit into a Big Picture. They don’t even fit together. So once I get to a place where I can look at a big chunk of text, I need to pull back and do a Big Picture analysis. And since I think of each of my acts as a story in itself, now that I have Act One in the truck draft stage, I can do that.

The first thing I need is a picture of Act One, so I break out Curio and

1. Make a list of all the scenes in Act One in the order they happen.

2. Move Nita’s (and Button’s) scenes to the left and Nick’s (and Max’s) scenes to the right.

3. Move the scenes that Nita and Nick share to the center.

4. Figure out which scenes are scene sequences and put a blue box under those.

5. Figure out which scenes are parallel and put a yellow box under those.

6. Put in the turning points both soft and hard.

7. Label each scene sequence with an overall description of where the story’s going in that section.

8. Stand back and look at the Big Picture.

Which is this:

The blue boxes, as I said, are scene sequences, scenes that clump together because they’re closely related. They’re stories within the story of the act that is in itself a story in the larger story of the book.

So that next set of three scenes is the Bar Story: once Nita enters the bar, she sets the bar scene sequence in motion. She begins to question Vinnie about Joey’s death, but her attention is really on Nick so it’s Nita vs. Nick. When the phone rings and he walks away, the sequence shifts to him because he’s moved out of the group although he’s still right there in the bar, now it’s Nick vs Belia, also investigating Joey’s death. Then he sees Nita and Rab getting chummy and hangs up to go back to the bar. The termination of the phone call with Belia is a termination of the scene with Belia, but the scene sequence is still running because Nita is talking to Rab and Nick joins them, Nita vs. Nick. Then Nita passes out, which means the scene loses its PoV.

The next scene is the end of that scene sequence and the beginning of another that is Nick vs. Rab and Nick vs. Dag, dealing with a lot of new information and trying to sort it out while dealing with personal revelations about Dag and Rab. Meanwhile Button and Nita are doing the same thing: the new information is that somebody’s trying to kill Nita and the personal info is about Button. The resolution of those two scene sequences throws Nita and Nick back together at breakfast because they each have questions for the other.

Then they split into two scene sequences again, both doing detective work trying to put the puzzle together. Nick’s sequence is broken because his setting changes from the island to Hell, but he’s trying to solve the puzzle all the way through. When Nita and Nick meet again, she’s been looking for him and drags him into her investigation which turns out to be the key to his investigation, and that’s the scene sequence that leads to the climax where Nita has to accept that the supernatural is real.

So diagramming scene sequences is a way of taking a lot of scenes (twenty-one) and organizing them into nine narrative units that make sense as a story.

But not all scenes are part of a scene sequence. Sometimes they’re single scenes that act as transitions. Look at the first two scenes: they’re Nita and then Nick in their stable worlds (kind of) talking to partners/minions and getting ready to attack a problem. Those scenes are transitions from their stables worlds into the story; in each scene they get info that blows up the stability of their world, launching them into the attack in the next scenes in which they’re against each other, and that struggle becomes a scene sequence because it’s all about that same struggle, linked, not just by time and setting, but by goal and intent. Then the next single scene is the breakfast scene which pulls both halves of the narrative back together and motivates Nita and Nick to separate to solve the problem, so the breakfast scene is a transition.

But those first two scenes also have a yellow box because they are related. They’re not a scene sequence, they’re not related to each other by setting or intent, but they are related because they’re parallel. That is, Nita’s scene is about Nita, drunk, dealing with a subordinate who’s getting in her way, Button. And Nick’s scene is about Nick, sober, dealing with a subordinate who’s getting in his way, Rab. The parallelism in the foundation of the scene sets up the conflict–Nita’s a wild card, Nick’s stable and emotionless–while setting up the ways that Nita and Nick will connect–both leaders (they both win their conflicts), both dedicated to their jobs of solving problems, both focused for the moment on the same problem.

The key to making parallel scenes work is to not hit the parallels too hard. You don’t want readers noticing the parallels consciously. This becomes a problem for me in the other set of parallel scenes, the Nick vs. Satan and Max vs. Mammon scenes. Nick is Satan’s fixer just as Max is Mammon’s. Both scenes follow the same rough outline:

1. What the hell am I/are we doing here?

2. You did WHAT?

3. Yells.

4. Gets slapped down, wins anyway.

5. Goes off to fix the screw-up.

That’s too on the nose unless the contents of the scenes are vastly different, and to a certain extent they are. The problems the bosses have created are very different, and the solutions are very different. But I still think they’re too parallel, hitting the reader over the head with “See? See? I’m doing something structurally clever here!” Yeah, I don’t want to do that.

So that’s what I’ve been working on: the parallelism in the first two scenes, fixing the breakfast scene because along with everything else you all pinpointed, it needs to be a better transition, and then trying to fix the Nick/Max parallel pair of scenes. After that it just a rewrite on the last sequence to make it stronger, and I’ve got the first act done, one third of the book.

I love this feeling when I get to the truck draft stage. It means there’s really a book there. Three more acts to go . . .

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Dreaming Blurbs (Rev.) (Rev. Again) (Rev Again)

I woke up this morning with one of those She/He blurbs in my brain. I have no idea, it’s not dreamwork, the last thing I did before I fell asleep was work a crossword. What was interesting about it, as I fought my way awake (very slow waker-upper here), was how it pointed out the weaknesses in the story. It’s not a good blurb, but evidently the Girls weren’t interested in good blurb, they were shrieking at me to fix my protagonist.

Here’s the bad blurb:

She’s a detective of indeterminate origin.

He’s the Devil’s apprentice.

Her partner is a trigger-happy cop

His nemesis is an Evil Henchman.

The Devil in Nita Dodd

They’re gonna save the world if they don’t kill each other first.

Again, terrible blurb, but hugely helpful in pinpointing the basic problems of the dynamic of the story.

1. Nita’s only interesting because of her ancestors.

That is, Nick and Max have interesting, active jobs and Button is pro-active with a gun. But the way Nita is described is just Geneology.com stuff.

2. There’s no tension in Nita’s relationships.

Nick and Max are opposite sides in Hell, so there’s tension there. Nita and Button are just partners, no tension or real relationship there. The women are both cops, the men are both (technically) infernal, so there’s implied tension between female and male, except that Button’s the onlyl one with agency in the blurb, Nita just exists as an end product, so she’s a blank again.

3. They’re not gonna save the world.

That part just sounds snappy. They’re not even going to save the island. Just defeat some awful people and change the island. Hmmm. “Change” sounds good. But not the world. We’re not global here. Maybe something more along the lines of “fight the good fight”? No.

It’s 7:30 AM and this is in my head. Rats. Back to work.

ETA:

So I looked at this from the point of view of goals:

Nick wants to close the gate and find his agents.

Button wants to further her career.

Max wants to protect his boss and not die.

Nita . . .

Nita wants to solve Joey’s murder. Why does that seem so . . . wimpy? Because it’s so cliche? Because it’s too close to vengeance which is a godawful motivator? Argh. IT’S TOO EARLY TO THINK.

Must cogitate.

ETA:

So after some still half-asleep cogitation, I have realized that I have ONCE AGAIN given my heroine a negative goal. That “wants to solve Joey’s murder” was just papering over the underlying goal which is:

To deny the existence of the supernatural.

I know this because the turning point at the end of the act is not when she solves Joey’s murder or gets a big clue that moves her forward, it’s when she accepts that the supernatural is real.

WHY DO I ALWAYS DO THIS???????

I mean, every damn time.

Okay, so regrouping. A lot of this is because I’m still fuzzy about what the antagonist is doing; not why the antagonist is doing it, but exactly what the plan is.

And after I said this weekend that the goal is absolutely not to save the island, I think it’s to save the island, politically. This sucker is turning into me venting about what’s happening to my country, which is not good because I don’t do political screeds. Rats. And apologies to whomever I disagreed with about the whole island thing: you were right.

Argh. Must have breakfast. Protein is good for the brain.

ETA:

Okay, still haven’t had breakfast, but answering Jane, I got this stream of consciousness:

I think she wants to keep the island safe because it’s her home; it’s the whole hero’s journey thing except she’s not leaving the island so it’s more of a discovery plot (well, detective) than a road trip. Her family is really woven into the history of the island, too, so there’s that. Tradition, roots, belonging, the whole thing, plus she really loves the place itself. One of the things I loved about having nine acres in Ohio was that I could leave eight acres completely alone for wildlife to own. I loved the idea of protecting that land. I can see Nita just wanting to protect the land and the people she’s grown up with, the traditions, even the amusement park. I think as an adult, Nita would have an excellent grasp of the symbiotic nature of the place being an island, the amusement park being the main form of income, and the isolation in the winter giving the community its core identity. I think she’s like the cycle of the seasons, the privacy of the winter and then the big party in the summer. I think she’d like knowing so much of the people, saying hi to them on the street, knowing how the island worked.

I think part of the problem of America in general is that we’re so damn big that we don’t have a national identity, aside from the stuff that Trump is dismantling. But in smaller groups, in small towns for example, we are fiercely connected by an identity, a common understanding of who we are. It’s what gives us a sense of belonging. It’s why I left my small town at seventeen; I did not belong there. But Nita belongs to the island and beyond that, in her mind, the island belongs to her. She’s there to protect it.

So I think the big picture of protecting the island would be the lens through which she’d view everything else. That is, she’d be upset by Joey’s death, but the thing that would chill her is that it’s another piece of evidence that the island is in trouble. Another portent, so I have to set up that there have been previous portents. Blood on the sun, a lion whelping in the streets . . . . And now Joey’s execution is another sign that’s something really wrong with her island.

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