Jennifer Crusie's Blog, page 217

Krissie’s Wild Fire

Krissie just sent me this:

“Glorious Krissie (aka Anne Stuart) is coming out with a spicy new book, WILDFIRE, on Valentine’s Day, but until then Goodreads is offering a chance to get an early copy for free.”

I’m not sure what the details are–my eyes, they are still blurry–but hey, give it a shot.

Gorgeous cover, too:

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Talk Amongst Yourselves . . .

It’s taking longer for my eyes to come back than I’d hoped, so I’m going off the computer for awhile. If I don’t post much this week, it’s not because I don’t love and respect all of you. It’s because my eyes hurt and I’m a wimp.

Oh, here’s something I’d like to know: What do you want to see on Argh this year? Not making any promises, but you know me, if you leave it up to me it’ll be talking about television shows and moaning about writing Nita.

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Cherry Saturday: 1 – 14 – 2017

Today is Dress Up Your Pet Day.

I’m assuming this was started by people who sell pet clothes. It sure as hell wasn’t started by pets.

Here at Squalor on the Lake, it’s Saturday and it’s cold so I’m staying in bed and not getting dressed at all. Milton, Veronica, and Mona will have to decide for themselves.

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Questionable: How Do You Organize Your Computer Files for a Book?

Brooke asked:

“How do you keep all your notes and changes and drafts organized? I’m guessing you don’t overwrite each draft entirely. I’m getting stuck in the weeds and confused by my not-clearly-marked files.”

Organization. Ha.

Here’s where I am right now with my Nita folder:

Taking a break now to clean that up . . .

Here’s what I need:

• Easy access to the files I’m working on right now: (Nita’s January Drafts, etc.)

• All the files I’ve written that I might need to go back to in order to get something I cut or lost: Nita Drafts.

• Notes I’ve made including pictures, floor plans, e-mails from experts, cut-and-paste from internet sources, etc.: Notes

• Pieces of actual scene (not notes about scenes) that came to me and that I needed to get on the page before I forgot: Pieces

• My Curio files, which include plot notes, collages, and anything else I need to mind map: Nita’s Curios

So now the folder looks like this:

Here’s what the folders look like open (except for the Notes folder):

And here’s the Notes Folder open:

So it’s still a mess, but it’s an organized mess. Plus I have learned through sad experience never to dump any file until the book goes to press. Once I know the pieces are slotted into the drafts, I’ll dump those, but otherwise, I keep everything just in case, until I have the actual book in my hand. Then I start dumping files.

You want to see a real disaster, check out my Fiction Folder:

And that’s just on this computer. God knows what’s lurking on the other two.

I am not the person to follow for organizational advice, but this is how I do it.

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Six Drafts

Two of my least favorite questions in interviews are “How long does it take you to write a book?” and “How many drafts do you do?” And of course the answers are “As long as it takes” and “As many as I need,” which is no help to anybody. I think the fastest I ever wrote a book was six weeks (Anyone But You). The longest? Well, if I ever finish You Again, that’s already taken me over a decade. I know there are people who do several books a year, books that people love. I assume those people get a head start: they’re natural storytellers, or they’re obsessive about story, or they don’t care about all the stuff that trips me up that has nothing to do with writing a good book. They’re born writers. I was born to crochet and eat chocolate.

But the thing is, it doesn’t matter why those writers can do that. I can’t. There’s no point in gnashing my teeth about it. This is the path I was given as a writer, and just like those speedy writers would not be improved by slowing down, it’s a disaster if I try to speed up. (Really, I’ve tried.) What helps me to accept that is looking at my process (as much as I have a process; that sounds so organized). It goes like this:

The Idea.

This isn’t actually a draft. Call it a pre-draft. I get an idea. I want to do my version of The Turn of the Screw. I want to fix a story I’ve seen (like Lucifer) or read and in the process of trying to fix it, a new story emerges. A character from a previous book keeps showing up in my brain (Davy, Alice, Courtney). But most often it’s a woman in a situation: a woman who’s trying to come back from a divorce (Anyone But You, Fast Women), a woman trying to save her family (Tell Me Lies, Welcome to Temptation, Faking It), a woman living an inauthentic life who hits the Day That Is Different and tears everything up and starts over (Crazy for You, and then all of them, really). Sometimes it’s even a genre or a project idea: I want to write a four-book mystery series that will really be a four-volume romance novel. I want to write and alt history series based on fairy tales. I want to write my own Thin Man couple. And then I noodle with that idea, just to hear the voices.

A lot of them stop there. I do a couple of thousand words and think, “Nope,” and go somewhere else, especially if the idea did not start with my protagonist talking in my head. It takes too long to find the right protagonist. Ideas are a dime a dozen; a talkative protagonist is gold. (If you want to know what idea drafts look like, go back to the beginning of the Lucifer posts last January when I started putting up character notes and the first scenes, just to get a feel for things.) But if the idea sticks, I begin drafting.

1. The Discovery Draft

Once I’ve got My Girl babbling in my head, I start writing things down. Scraps of conversation. Thoughts she has. I don’t plan anything, I just keep writing to see what shows up. That’s usually when she tells me what her job is because she always cares about the job she’s doing; and her best friend because I can’t wrap my head around a woman who doesn’t have a friend (Nita’s is Mort until Button shows up); and what she’s struggling with, although often in the beginning, everybody around her is struggling and she’s just fine because I like her, so fairly soon in the discovery process, I have to throw a rock at her.

And then because she talks to people, I find her relationships. Some of them show up fully formed like Mort; Nita’s twin was always going to be close and supportive and a good guy. In the beginning, they’re defined by their relationship with her but as I write and rewrite, the different shades and sides of the character show up–Mort didn’t believe in demons in the first draft, then he did, and now with the last drafts I’m doing, I know why he believes. Button was just a foil for Nita in the first draft, cute and fluffy in contrast with her scary and sharp, but then as I drafted, she became so much more to me, her back story emerged, not as something that explained anything she did now but as an integral part of the plot.

This is why it’s called a Discovery Draft, it’s the part of the process where I’m discovering the story. The first draft of any scene is bare bones, just getting the scene down on the page, not worrying about conflict or antagonist. As Nora Roberts (and many other writers) have said, I can fix a bad page, I can’t fix a blank page. But then as I go back, Stuff happens and I discover the book that’s cooking in my reptile brain. I remember doing a rewrite of the first scene of Welcome to Temptation, and Amy said, “You just feel that way because of Davy, that’s very sisterly of you,” and I thought, Huh,they have a brother, and kept writing. I used to call these drafts “Don’t Look Down” drafts because of a story Ron Carlson had told about writing, but I labeled a draft that once, and Bob said, “Great title,” and now it’s on a book, so now I just use “Discovery Draft.”

There are a few guidelines I follow in Discovery Drafting, among them the idea that all characters and settings and subplots have to at least be referenced in the first act/first third of the book, but that’s just something I check as I go along. I don’t obsess over it because the book takes huge shifts during this phase. I was way over 40,000 words in the first act until I stood back from it for a moment and realized that I’d put the turning point in the wrong place. It’s still 38,000 words, which is way too long, but I can fix that later, this is Discovery Draft.

My discovery drafts generally run anywhere from 60,000 to 100,000 words which means they’re not finished draft; parts of the book are still missing. That’s okay because this phase is just to discover the characters and the shape of the book in general. Every time a character interacts with another character, both characters change. Every time something happens, the characters in that scene change. Every time a character talks, I learn something news. And while I’m doing all of this, stuff pops up that I have to research. Like what would happen to $260,000 invested at 5% compound interest in 1934 and then reinvested at 8% in the boom in 1969. Like Cotton Mather. Like demon names. Like portraits of Italian men in the 1400s or mugshots from the early 20th century. None of this stuff is deep research,none of it takes longer than fifteen minutes (thank you, Google), but each piece slots into the Discovery Draft. And at some point, I have the shape of the book. I have the protagonist and the antagonist, I have the community and the setting, I have the conflict and the climax. And that’s when I start to rewrite in earnest, to make the unpublishable Discover Draft into something that it’s fair to ask people to read.

2. The Truck Draft

At the end of a Truck Draft, I have a complete book,all the pieces in place. I may find out later that I need another scene or two for clarity, I will definitely find things that need to be cut, but by god there’s a whole story there, and if a truck hit me, Jen could publish it. It wouldn’t be a great book, but it’s a complete and coherent story. This is the juggling plates part of the rewrite, where I keep all the characters and subplots spinning, or the meshing gears part of the rewrite where I make sure that every character reacts to every event, even if that character isn’t on the page or doesn’t have a PoV. It’s where I fill in the blanks, and diagram act progressions and check word counts obsessively. How fast is this act? Is it faster than the last act? Why are they having this converation? Can I cut it? I love this bit but is it just extra stuff that the plot doesn’t need? Can I cut this character? What does this piece I put in automatically in the Discovery Draft mean? If I’ve been hanging on to it this long, it must be important, figure out why. (The baseball scene in Welcome to Temptation was one of those.) This is also the Kill Your Darlings draft; I’m looking to make the book as perfect as I can get it because the next draft involves other people reading an entire book, taking hours out of their lives to tell me what’s not working, so I have to take out everything I know isn’t working first so I don’t waste their time. (Note: If you give a book to a reader, and the reader says, “This part isn’t working,” and you say, “I know, I just didn’t have time to fix it,” you’re going to Writer Hell. You do not squander your reader’s time.) This is also the edit where I go through and take out all the adjectives and adverbs I can (because strong nouns and verbs are better) and the edit where I go through the book one time for each major character, tracing where he or she is physically and emotionally in the story so there are no breaks or abrupt shifts in that person’s story, remembering that every person in my book thinks the story is about him or her. Basically, this is the be-all-you-can-be draft.

3. The Beta Draft

So now I ask people I know and trust if they’d like to read a book. And then I hand it over and work on other things while they read it. That can be awhile, sometimes up to a week depending on how busy they are, and then they send the book back and I read what they have to say, and I DO NOT DO OR SAY ANTHING FOR TWENTY-FOUR HOURS. Because my first inclination is ALWAYS to defend what I did. After twenty-four hours, I generally can see the wisdom in their objections and also have an idea of how to fix the problem. Even if I don’t agree that it’s a problem, it’s a simple fact that a reader tripped over that part, so other readers are going to do that, too. Is that something I’m okay with? Ninety-five percent of the time, I change it. There are a million things in my book that some reader somewhere is going to trip over; if I know of one and it’s an easy fix, I fix it, so that it’s a million things minus one now.

4. The Jen Draft

And then I send it to my editor, Jennifer Enderlin, who is a saint, and she sends back an editing letter, and we talk about the book. I love this part. Jen is a genius and a friend and a fan and at this point, practically a collaborator. She has never changed a word of my text, never told me how to rewrite something, she just says, “This isn’t working” and I look at it through her eyes and we talk about it and I change it. The few times I’ve said, “I don’t think so,” she’s said, “Fine,” and then it turned out later she was right, so I generally do not say “I don’t think so” any more. And then I do another rewrite, and it’s a big one because by now I have some distance on the book (not enough, but some), and I send it back, and she may send another letter or she may just send it to copy edit.

5. The Copy Edit Draft

Jen gives strict instructions to my copy editors to never change the text, so I get my copy edits full of notes in the margin. Copy editors vary widely; the good ones catch the mistakes, the bad ones try to write the book for you. I remember sending one copy edit back with “IF YOU WANT TO WRITE A DAMN BOOK, WRITE YOUR OWN” in red ink on the front. I do some big changes in the copy edit which is why people who sell ARCs (advanced reading copies) make me crazy; they’re not selling the finished book, they’re selling a early draft. Then I send the copy edits back and much later I get the galleys.

6. The Galley Draft

Galleys are pages that show the book typeset and ready to go. If I change more than 10% of the book, I have to pay for the changes, but since ten percent is about ten thousand words, I can usually make the changes I need within that limit. This is a polish draft, a tidying-up draft, and oh-my-god-I-can’t-believe-I-didn’t-see-that-before-now-draft. I spot most of those changes because I’m looking at the story in a new foramt–not on a computer screen, not in typescript on a print-out–and that makes the story new again. Plus the galleys take awhile, so I’m usually in another story by the time I get them, so I’m not blinded by being immersed in that world any more.

And I send the galleys off, and that’s it. The book isn’t finished–somebody wise once said that no book is ever finished, it’s just abandoned–but the world of that story is dead to me now, and any more tinkering I do can only hurt it. I’ll never write a perfect book, I just have to draft the story until it’s as good as I can possibly make it.

So that’s how many drafts I do. Six. I’ve been working on Nita’s book for a year now, and I’m technically still on the first draft. But, you say, you’ve seen a dozen drafts already. So how many drafts do I really do?

As many as it takes.

Admin Note: I’m going in for my second eye surgery Tues AM, so I may be absent until Wednesday.

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Rewriting Button

The first time I wrote Button’s scene, I wrote it in Nita’s PoV. But Button has a big role to play in this book, and I need her PoV, plus Nita’s PoV was just more drunk Nita learning things.

The second time I wrote Button’s scene, I wrote it in her PoV, but it was a just-get-it-down-on-paper version. That’s the one some of you read.

This is the third rewrite of Button’s scene, trying to add some layers to her characterization.

It’s not gonna be the last rewrite, either. There’s a lot more to Button that I already know about and I’m going to learn a lot more as I move through the book.

This is why I always laugh when somebody asks seriously, “How many drafts do you do?” “Oh, two, three thousand . . .”

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

Chloe Button was having a trying day, and she was only two hours into it.

She took a deep breath to center herself as she got in her car and then looked over at the woman getting into the seat next to her.

Her new partner.

Spooky Dodd.

Well, this is perfect, she thought. I’m partners with an insane drunk, and she’s still my best career option. She liked to think she had an open mind, Buttons were known for being open-minded to the point of lunacy, but she had a legacy to fulfill here. Clearly, lines would have to be drawn.

“Detective Dodd,” she began.

“Nita.”

“Nita. We need to talk.”

“Oh, good.” Nita rolled her head on the back of the seat and looked at Chloe, those black eyes still piercing and not a little scary. “Look, I know this has been bad. I know I’m drunk on the job, although in my defense, I didn’t know I was going to be on the job when I had the first four toddies. But something is very wrong back there, everything tonight has been very, very, very wrong. So while I understand completely why you might be upset, you’re going to have to either go with me on this, or ask for a new partner, which I would also completely understand. I’m going to have to annoy people to get to the bottom of this, so it’s going to get dicey. Really, get yourself a–”

“I don’t want a new partner,” Chloe broke in to stem the tide of drunken babble. “I want to partner with you. I applied to the force on this island, and one reason was that I wanted to partner with you.”

Nita stared at her, those black eyes narrowing under pointed brows. “Why?”

“Because you have an incredible arrest record,” Chloe said. “Because you’re a woman and I’m sick of working with men. But mostly because you’re psychic and I think that will give us an edge. I want to do well. I want to succeed. My family’s history in law enforcement goes back to the seventeenth century.”

“I’m not psychic.” Nita frowned. “Wait. The seventeenth century? Really?”

“That thing with Vinnie and his hand–” Chloe said, trying to get Nita to focus. “I need to know about that.”

Nita rolled her head again to look at the ceiling. “I had seizures when I was a little kid. I’d see things. Hallucinate. Now they’re just this feeling of nausea whenever I touch anybody.”

“Anybody?” Chloe said startled.

“Yeah.”

“Then how did you and Detective Witherspoon–”

“Lust trumps nausea,” Nita said. “Until, you know, the lust goes. Then you just want to throw up. Which I think is probably the same for everybody, more or less. Once passion goes–”

“Detective Dodd, are you really psychic?”

Nita looked at her again. “No, of course not. I’m probably not a very good cop, as you’ve seen tonight, but I’m a trained detective, so I’m good with details, and somehow the seizures combine with that so that when I touch somebody who’s guilty, I hallucinate blood. I am not psychic. I do not see into the future, I can’t read people’s minds, I have no idea what your deepest secrets are. There’s nothing supernatural about it.”

Chloe thought about it. Really this was better than psychic. This was almost logical. “Still very handy.”

“Yes,” Nita said. “It’s probably the only reason I’m still employed.”

Chloe slumped down in the driver’s seat and let her head fall back against the headrest, staring at the ceiling in unity with her new partner, the not-psychic. She’d been wrestling with a conundrum ever since her conversation with Lieutenant the day before. Pick a side, Button, she told herself, and considered which side would most likely to guarantee a law enforcement career fitting a Button.

Obviously, the lieutenant’s side.

On the other hand, Nita Dodd had that stellar arrest record. And while she was wrong about the very attractive Nick Giordano not being real, she was not incorrect about there being something very off about the way Detective Witherspoon was handling the investigation.

Buttons had had exemplary careers in law enforcement for three centuries, she knew, but not because they played politics. They solved crimes. They arrested lawbreakers. They shot down the worst of humanity like the rats they were. She had a legacy of fighting evil to uphold, and reporting on her insane but efficient partner was not the way to continue the Good Fight. All she had to do was make sure Nita Dodd did not do anything too bizarre, and they’d both come out of this on top.

She sighed. “You may not be employed much longer if you can’t get a grip.”

Nita looked at her again, eyebrows up this time, surprised. She still looked scary as hell with her black helmet hair and those black, black eyes, but Chloe was getting used to her.

“The lieutenant asked me to take notes on you and report back anything you did that was . . . not . . . standard police procedure.”

“I hope you have a big notebook.”

“I think she wants to get rid of you.”

“I think that’s a fair assumption.”

Chloe frowned at her. “You don’t seem worried.”

“I like my job,” Nita said. “But I like the detecting part. I like protecting my island. I like protecting the people here. I like knowing things. Not that crazy about the procedural stuff. So while I do not wish to get fired, it wouldn’t be the end of the world.”

“It would for me,” Chloe said. “This is all I’ve ever wanted to do. This is what I was born to do. So, please, no more wearing poodle pants to a crime scene.”

Nita nodded. “That’s fair. No more poodle pants.”

“And no more telling people they aren’t real.”

Nita straightened. “Okay, I know I’ve had too much to drink, but I’m telling you, that guy is not real.”

“We should talk in the morning,” Chloe said, starting the car.

“We should talk right now,” Nita said. “Why did you tell me what Chinamin said?”

“Because I had to pick a side. ” Chloe pulled out and steered around the ME’s van where Mort was arguing with Blake Witherspoon.

Which explained why Mort hadn’t come back to the bar. She waved to him and slowed so that he could see Nita, who waved, too, and then she sped up a little, anxious to get away from anybody else Nita might insult.

“Well, thank you for picking my side,” Nita said, “although I still think it’s a mistake.”

“There’s something else you should know.” Chloe turned down the side street that led down to the water and the little beat-up shotgun house where she’d picked Nita up three hours earlier.

It was dark off the main drag, and not a little ominous. She felt the weight of her gun in her shoulder holster and felt comforted.

“What is it?” Nita said into the long silence, sounding wary now.

“I applied specifically to come here and work with you as a detective,” Chloe said. “And also to get the promotion, but I was going to have to leave my job in Haven anyway.”

Nita nodded. “What happened?”

“I shot somebody.”

“Oh.”

“In my defense, he was committing a crime. I would never shoot anyone who wasn’t a criminal.”

“That’s important,” Nita said.

The silence stretched out as they drove on, and Chloe knew Nita was doing it deliberately so she’d get nervous and blurt something out.

“It wasn’t the first time I’d shot somebody,” she said finally.

“Okay, how many bad guys have you drilled, Detective Button?”

“Three,” Chloe said. “But they were all guilty and they were all ruled as good shootings, so I’m not under investigation or anything.”

“Gooood,” Nita said, drawing the word out a little. “You seem very young.”

“Not that young.”

“How long have you been on the force?”

“About a year,” Chloe said, trying to keep her voice light.

“You shot three people in a year,” Nita said.

“Yes.”

“You know, there are no guns allowed on the island.”

“Except for the police.”

“I don’t carry a gun.”

Chloe looked at her in surprise. “You don’t carry?” Are you crazy?

“Button, given my temperament, would you want me armed?”

“No,” Chloe said.

“Well, there you go.”

This makes no sense. This was a woman who was so paranoid she thought people weren’t real, but she walked around without any form of protection? “You really go out unarmed.”

“I have a baton. It telescopes. My sister Keres bought it for me for Christmas my first year on the job. I like it. It gets me results and it doesn’t kill people. So far.”

That’s nuts. “What if somebody else has a gun?”

“There are no guns on this island. There’s a metal detector at the other side of the bridge. They wand the people before they get on the trolleys that carry them across. Most people are grateful. It’s a safe island.”

“Except Joey just got seventeen bullets,” Chloe said.

“Which is one of the many reasons I am going to find the person who ordered that hit, and discuss things with him using my baton, including how that gun got on the island. I’m not anti-violence, I just think violence should be up close and personal. It means something that way. That’s my house up there on the right.”

Chloe pulled up in front and parked, still shocked that Nita didn’t carry.

“So you go out on a dark street like this,” she said, trying to understand as she leaned forward to look out the window at the treacherous night. “Without . . .”

There was a very faint light in Nita’s window, and somebody had just moved in front of it.

“You live alone,” Chloe said, every cell in her body on alert.

“Yes,” Nita said.

Chloe pulled her gun from her shoulder holster, calm and steady, the Button Way. “Stay here,” she said, and got out of the car.

First the poodle pajamas, then the whole reality thing, and now her partner was unarmed.

It was a damn good thing there was a Button on the scene.

She headed for the house.

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Cherry Saturday 1-8-2017

Today is Bubble Bath Day.

Bubble baths really do lower your blood pressure.

So think of it as medicinal.

And then shoot anybody who comes through the door to interrupt you.

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Argh Ink Book Club: Gaiman and Pratchett’s Good Omens: The Nice and Accurate Prophecies of Agnes Nutter, Witch

Tell me how much you loved this book. Or how much you hated it, although you’re wrong, of course. Or parts you liked best or parts you disliked or parts that confused you or whatever. Or characters: there’s Adam and Anathema and Aziraphale and, of course, Crowley and so many more. So much to talk about.

The only requirement is that you be playing “We Are the Champions” in the background while you participate.

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Thank God That’s Over

See more at http://booksofadam.tumblr.com.

Oh, and thank you to everybody who bought books! Mollie doesn’t have all the totals in, but she went ahead and gave $1000 to the ACLU and $1000 to Planned Parenthood, and PP’s contribution was tripled because of some matching donor thing, so you all did a very good thing. Thank you so much!

Now on to 2017. Fingers crossed.

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Cherry Saturday 12-31-2016

Happy New Year’s Eve! Here comes 2017!

Everybody drink.

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