Jennifer Crusie's Blog, page 218

Logical Supernatural

I’m not sure why it’s so hard to get the protagonist right. After all, she’s the character the story’s built on, she should be the no-brainer in the bunch. But possibly because I’m so closely connected to her–she’s my best friend while I’m writing the book–and because I don’t want to hurt her–throw rocks at that woman, Jenny–or because I’m viewing the plot so closely through her PoV, I have a heck of a time getting any distance on her. Which means that common sense is my friend. That is, I look at what she’s doing and ask myself, “Is this what a normally intelligent person would do in this situation?” Then I look at the pressures of the situation–a normally intelligent person does not rush into a burning building, but my protagonist would to save her dog–and at her character arc and try to go from there.

What I’m trying to figure out now is how long it would take Nita, an intelligent cop, to accept that the supernatural is real.

As a resident of Demon Island, she’d be surrounded by fake demon and Hell things all the time. People would be cosplaying as demons and devils and angels. There’s a fake Church of Satan (mainly there for the church store) and a whole amusement park with Hell-ish spectacle and theater, much of it done with special effects. She’d have been bombarded with the concept that Hell is fake from birth. Plus any amusement park is rife with conmen of one kind or another, not to mention the run-of-the-mill drunk jokers. She’d have seen it all.

My question is, at what point does she just have to give up and say, “The supernatural is real.” And at that point, does she accept that it’s ALL real, or just take the things that are in front of her as real? “I don’t believe in Hell, but that thing that just happened is not natural.”

One thing that helps is that she’s drunk for the first seven scenes (about a two-hour time frame; she starts with four hot toddies and then has another one about an hour in), so I do believe she’d chalk a lot of what she sees up to that. She also knows that she has mini-seizures and hallucinates briefly when she seizes, so she’s used to seeing things that aren’t there in a much more restricted way. But at some point, she’s going to just have to accept that there’s a whole world of things out there that she’s going to have to cope with or decide she’s going nuts and that nothing is real.

Obviously, we’re going with Option A, but still, since the readers are going to know from the second scene that the supernatural is real, at what point do they say, “Oh, come on,” when she still denies it?

I think I’m good for the seven scenes where she’s drunk. Then there’s a scene at breakfast where she talks to Nick, still trying to figure out why he’s pushing this dumb story. Then she goes to the morgue where a body disappears, and it’s her second disappearing body which Nick explains as a demon thing. I’m good there with the second one–a body being stolen from a morgue is entirely within the realm of the possible–and the body that disappeared the night before happened while she was sobering up, although there were witnesses. Then she does a lot of entirely routine investigating, ending up back at the bar where Nick is acting very strangely (not to the readers who know he’s just been to Hell and back) and she takes him to a crime scene where Mort shows him a box that can’t be opened, and Nick opens it, and what’s in there is pretty irrefutably supernatural . . . except she only gets a glimpse before Nick slams the lid back on so it can’t get out. Then there’s other stuff that could still have an explanation, albeit she’s reaching pretty far, and then something happens that is just not possible, followed by something else that’s really horrible and not possible, followed by a really bad hallucination which is followed by two more things that aren’t possible. And then it’s night and Nick pours scupper down her until she falls asleep and in the morning with the sun shining she tries to tell herself that there’s a logical explanation for everything,even though she knows there can’t be, because if it’s all true then her life is irrevocably changed and she’s not at all who she thought she was, and then one more thing happens and she says, “Fuck it, you’re the Devil Elect, they’re demons, what the Hell is going on here?” and the first act ends and the team begins.

I THINK all of that is logical. What I’m worried about is that readers won’t, that they’ll look at how she’s interpreting everything and think, “How blind can you get?” and dismiss her as Too Dumb To Live (the TDTL heroine). On the other hand, if she accepts the supernatural too soon, she’ll seem credulous, and also TDTL. Her brother Mort already believes so she’s likely to discount him the way people discount UFO believers. Button is very logical and realistic, but she’s not seeing most of the stuff that Nita sees, so she’s not much help. And Nick and the others are the ones pushing the supernatural explanation, so she’s not going to be able to go to them for help in refuting the possibility. She’s really caught between the people who haven’t seen what she’s seen and therefore don’t believe and the people who keep telling her they’re supernatural and are therefore suspect.

So it’s a mess. Back to rewriting.

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Carrie

“Remember the white dress I wore through that film? George came up to me to the first day of filming, took one look at the dress and said: “You can’t wear a bra under that dress.”

“Okay, I’ll bite,” I said. “Why?”

And he said: “Because… there’s no underwear in space.”

He said it with such conviction. Like he had been to space and looked around and he didn’t see any bras or panties anywhere.

He explained. “You go into space and you become weightless. Then your body expands but your bra doesn’t, so you get strangled by your own underwear.”

“I think this would make for a fantastic obituary. I tell my younger friends that no matter how I go, I want it reported that I drowned in the moonlight, strangled by my own bra.”

Carrie Fisher died this morning, strangled by her own bra. She wrote wonderful books, and she was in some space movie. She was amazing in everything she did, and she will be missed.

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Don’t Look Down

I’ve been writing discovery draft like crazy lately, and it’s always a humbling experience because the first drafts are so bad. I know they’re bad. I know while I’m typing that most of what’s going on the page is going to be deleted or rewritten, but I can’t get to where it’s got to be without starting with discovery. It isn’t even giving myself permission to suck, it’s accepting that whether or not I give myself permission, it’s going to suck. The whole time I’m doing it, I’m getting a much better grasp on the characters and the story (ye gods there are a lot of characters in this story), and I definitely have a better grip on the plot and the setting, but the suckage is still overwhelming. Still, the Discovery Draft mantra is “Don’t look down,” so I’m just sticking with the typing.

All of which is to say, the posts this week are going to be crummy or non-existent because this stuff I’m writing is too bad to show even you guys, and you’re used to my discovery drafts.

I did figure out how much money Nick has (it involved a compound interest calculator and googling for interest rates at various times in history) and I played around with some of the list you all made, so there’s that:

The great thing about doing the signs is that I start to visualize the town. So really, PROGRESS!

But boy, this stuff sucks.

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Take the Risk

Merry Christmas, Argh People, and much love and peace in the new year.

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Cherry Saturday 12-24-2016

It’s Christmas Eve. Spend it with Judy:

It’s okay. It has a happy ending.

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Demon Name Help

No, not names for demons, I have books for that.

I need the kind of cheesy names that businesses use to cash in on an idea. Names for motels and bars and restaurants, names for food and dress styles, names for amusement park games and rides and for shops and . . . well, you get the pictures. Anything that might be found on a tourist-trap island based on the idea that it’s a gate to Hell.

So far I have:

The Devil’s Playground (the big amusement park on the island)

Main road of the park: Good Intentions Drive (thank you, Anne Moore)

Food:

Hell Fries

Fish Styx with Tartarus Sauce

Persephone’s Pomegranate Pops (juice bars, thank you, Kim)

Park Shops

Hell’s Handbaskets (souvenir store, thank you, Nicole)

Rides

Highway to Hell (Roller Coaster that goes underground, thank you, Philby)

Bars, Clubs, Restaurants:

Hell Bar

The Underworld (Bar in a basement)

Satannica (club)

Hell’s Belles (gentlemen’s club/strip club)

Shady Hades (club)

Enki Panki (singles club)

The Long Spoon (restaurant, thank you, Philby)

Snowball’s Chance (ice cream parlor, thank you, KJ)

Sweet Temptations (candy store, thank you, Nicole)

Dia-Bowl-Us (bowling alley, club)

The Orpheus Theater with the Eurydice Restaurant in the back

Stores:

The Devil Wears Praxis (Tailor)

Demonista (Women’s Clothing)

Erishka Gals (Women’s Clothing)

DemoGorgeous (Women’s Clothing)

Lara-Lyssa (women’s clothing designer)

Chamber of Scissors (women’s tailor)

Idle Hands (Craft Store)

Hell on Wheels (Used Car Lot)

Service

Charon’s Taxi Service

Yama Glamour (beauty salon)

Asphodel Meadows (retirement home)

Cerberus Vet and Kennels

BeelzeSuds: (Laundromat, thank you, Nicole)

Motels and Hotels:

The Deville

Inn Fernal

Knock yourselves out.

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What Have We Learned From This Binge Watch 3: The Antagonist Is Crucial in Building a Team Story

My biggest problem in writing Nita at this point is not having a clear antagonist. I already knew that my plot was a mess because of that–your antagonist shapes your plot–but until I started considering her team, I didn’t realize that the team’s make-up was also shaped by the Big Bad. Once I thought about it, it was obvious: the make-up and character of the team is defined by the project it undertakes, and the project it undertakes is shaped by antagonist.

Which means I need to learn a lot more about team antagonists. And then find Nita’s.

The protagonist/antagonist relationship works best when it’s a close one, drawn together by strong emotion and clear unavoidable conflict. (See The Conflict Box for more on that.) Both protagonist and antagonist need to achieve their goals, which they can’t do without blocking the other’s goal. That can be fairly simple when you’re dealing with a single protagonist but becomes much more complex when dealing with a team. The team leader is still the protagonist–don’t write a multiple protagonist unless you really like making yourself nuts–but since she or he is tied so closely to the team, those team members have to be as invested in that goal as she or he is.

It was at this point that I realized I had multiple problems (aside from the elephant in the draft which was that I still wasn’t sure which character was the antagonist). That is, I needed to know the underlying parallel/relationship of Nita to her antagonist (I always need that), but also the underlying parallel of Nita’s team to the antagonist’s team. Why? Because this freaking book has a cast of thousands, they’re all on teams, and they’re all going off in different directions, so I had to pick a land, or in this case, an antagonist team. Writing this many characters is like herding ducks. In space. I mean look at this cast list, just so far (not finished with the discovery draft yet):

• Nita, Button and Mort for the humans

• Nick, Daglas, and Rabiel from the law-and-order part of Hell

• Mammon, Max, and Sequins from the anything-goes part of Hell

• Moloch, Brad, Thad, Ashtoroth, Lilith, and Ranger Rich from the greedy-and-immoral part of Hell

• the Rev, William, Renfield, and Dorothy from the Church of Satan on the island (they’re human)

• Marvella, Cecily, and Linda from the Demon Island Historical Society

• Chinamin, Clint, and Frank from the Demon Island police

. . . I could go on, but you get the picture.

Clearly, I need to pull myself and this story together. So looking for guidance, I went back to the worst antagonist of 2016 (outside of politics), Vandal Savage. Okay, he was badly written and poorly acted, but beyond that, the character failed in being a terrible subtextual match for Rip Hunter:

Hunter is a time traveller, Savage has been reincarnated 206 times.

Hunter assembles a team, Savage ostensibly works alone but actually has backers who are using him.

Hunter is trying to save his family, Savage is . . . uh, I have no idea what Savage wants. To conquer the world, yeah, but as goals go that one is in the Top Five Worst of All Time. (Rip’s Family Fridge Revenge goal is up there, too.) Conquering the World has no emotional resonance. How about you just conquer half the world? Is that good? ‘Cause that’s a lot of real estate. No, you want it all? WHY? Oh, because you’re a madman. Uh, no.

It’s okay to have a crazy antagonist but he can’t be screaming and picking things out of the air, he has to be crazy like a fox. He has to have a real reason for why he wants something. Having a mad passion for Hawkwoman and pursuing her through the centuries is actually a fairly decent goal. Men have started new religions and given up thrones for the women they loved, I’ll believe he’s pinballing through time trying to make her his own. Except he’s so damn bad at it. Two hundred and six times and she still hates him. (Every time I see that number, I think of LoPan in Big Trouble in Little China, and Jack Burton saying, “Two thousand years and [you] can’t find one broad to fit the bill? C’mon, Dave, you must be doing something seriously wrong.”)

So he’s not actually pursuing Hawkwoman, he’s trying to take over the world, a little bit at a time, 206 times. Yeah, try to make this guy a coherent antagonist. He’s like an evil whack-a-mole with ADD; every time period they go to, he’s doing some evil, buying a nuclear weapon in Norway, running a mental hospital in Oregon, running a cult someplace I forget, and most of those times he has no idea he’s trying to Take Over The World, he’s just doing this thing because . . . uh, power?

And none of that is in any relationship to Rip Hunter. Complete antagonist fail.

Then you get to the end of the first season, and you find out the real evil is the Time Masters. As I believe I said before, I mentally threw things at the TV (mentally because the TV in my bedroom is white and the perfect size and I’ll never find another one like that again) because the Time Masters would have been GREAT antagonists. Look at all the connections here:

• Rip is a renegade Time Master, trained by the Time Masters, and now pursued by the Time Masters. He’s not just running from them, he’s the mirror image of them. It’s a good close relationship, and the conflict is heightened by how well the two sides know each other and can anticipate what the other will do. (There’s no relationship between an ancient Egyptian priest and a time traveller.)

• Rip has a small team of misfits and criminals going up against the vast and highly trained fleet of the Time Masters, but the Time Masters are hampered by bureaucracy while Rip and the Legends can maneuver easily without restriction. There’s a relationship between those two team’s abilities even though they’re the reverse of each other. (There’s no relationship between immortality and time travel.)

* Rip wants to save his family; the Time Masters want to save the world from an alien invasion. They both see disaster and want to prevent it, both sides are willing to sacrifice people to achieve that, both sides are sure they’re in the right. (There’s no relationship between wanting to save a family and wanting to taking over the world.)

The Time Masters using Savage as a tool works fine, as long as the reader/viewer knows that they’re the real antagonists by the end of the first act/third of the story. If the reader/viewer knows that, and knows that Savage is an essential piece of the Time Masters’ plan, then all the attempts to take him out now have meaning instead of being a really terrible remake of Groundhog Day. And you can see that in the penultimate episode of the first season when the team realizes that Time Masters have taken away free will, and go gangbusters after them to set themselves and the world free. Those are stakes that matter, stakes worth dying for. Taking down Savage after that is a huge anti-climax because he was never Rip’s antagonist; he even killed Rip’s family on orders from the Time Masters. The Time Masters are huge and powerful and closely tied to Rip Hunter in the subtext of the story; Vandal Savage is a unreleated joke.

Then look at the much-improved second season where Sara is the team leader (so far).

• Sara has the advantage of a team that worked together and bonded and have now chosen to go with her to protect the timeline, but she also has another huge advantage: One of the group she’s up against is the man who killed her sister. If she kills him in an earlier timeline to save Laurel, she could destroy the world (it’s that butterfly flapping its wings thing), but she can make her sister’s murderer’s life hell by fixing all the things he’s doing in the timeline to advance his plan. Her goal is vengeance, but not the clichéd goal of killing him; she’s going to drive him crazy while fulfilling her team’s goal, too.

• The Legends are a band of misfits and criminals who have bonded through shared struggle and loss; the Legion is band of three (soon to be four) master criminals who don’t care about each other at all but share a lust for power. The strengths of one are the weaknesses of the other and vice versa; that’s a relationship.

• And to pull everything together, Sara’s goal not only neatly fits the Legends’ mission to keep the timeline intact, the Legends’ goal neatly reverses the Legion of Doom’s goal to disrupt it. You don’t need a conflict box to see how they block each other: Two teams enter this story but only one will leave.

Based on that analysis, I decided I needed three things to establish a strong central story spine in a team story:

• A Protagonist (Team Leader) and Antagonist (Team Leader) related to each other in some way:

The protagonist and the antagonist should have a subtextual character connection, either as doppelgangers or opposites, to heighten the conflict and unify the story. (Think Finch and Samaritan’s Greer as opposites, one determined to limit the power of an AI and the other determined to unleash it upon the world.)

• A Protagonist Team and Antagonist Team related to each other in some way:

The protagonist team and the antagonist team should have a similar connection, either as doppelgangers or opposites, to heighten the conflict and to unify the story. (Think Leverage’s “2 Live Crew Job” in which the two teams were of the exact same make-up but diametrically opposed morally and emotionally.)

• A Protagonist/Team and Antagonist/Team Goal related to each other in some way:

The goals of the two teams should not only be diametrically opposed, but that opposition should be thematic, too.

(See Leverage’s theme that sometimes bad guys make the best good guys reversed in the “2 Live Crew Job” episode’s other crew just being bad guys; see also PoI‘s protag and antag shared statement of intent–“You are being watched”–and how the last season’s voiceover that explains the story goal changes when Samaritan controls the screen, from benevolent and protective to tyrannical and ruthless, even though both teams are trying to save the world.)

Those three guidelines are draconian (there are many roads to Oz, your mileage may differ, etc.), but I’d argue that if you’re writing a team story, you’re already experiencing so much chaos that a clean conflict between two clearly related entities is essential. It’s all right to keep readers/viewers guessing; it’s not all right to throw so much stuff at them that don’t know what the hell is going on and feel stupid and annoyed. Give them a good strong central plot thread to follow, and they’ll put up with a lot of loose ends along the way, as long as they’re all finished and tied off to the that strong central conflict at the end.

Which brings me to Nita’s story.

• I know Nita’s team: It’s a coalition of Earth and Hell, living and dead; therefore the antagonist team should be . . . probably all human or all demon, the opposite of the rainbow that Nita works with. They can and should use other teams not of their origin as dupes, minions, and stalking goats, but I think the antagonist team’s motto is going to be “Diversity Never.”

• I know Nita’s team’s goal: It’s to keep the island (and Earth) safe; therefore the antagonist team’s goal should be . . . well, not to destabilize the island or Earth, that wouldn’t get them anything. But Nita’s team is blocking them from getting what they want. So they want to use the island for something nefarious and they don’t care who they hurt, human or demon, in the process because what they’re doing is for their Greater Good (flashback to Hot Fuzz there).

• What I don’t know is the first step, the real key in this story, Nita’s relationship to the antagonist team leader. Because I don’t know who the hell the antagonist is.

So what does Nita need in an antagonist? Doppelganger or opposite?

Start with who Nita is: Repressed, angry, an outsider, smart, driven, fearless, outspoken, impulsive, determined to do good and protect her home.

Just reversing all of those gives me a weak character—Nita’s flawed but she’s strong and smart–so I need somebody who can match her, a doppelganger.

So my antagonist team leader is going to be an outsider like Nita. A good antagonist is smart, so that has to go in there, and I like driven and fearless in an antagonist, too.

So Nita’s antagonist is an outsider who’s smart, driven, and fearless. That’s good.

But the antagonist can’t just match or echo the protagonist, he or she has to be stronger, smarter, braver, whatever. If I give the antagonist Nita’s strengths, I can make him or her stronger by reversing Nita’s weaknesses.

So the antagonist is manipulative not outspoken, calculating not impulsive, determined to achieve his or her ends with nothing to protect so unhampered by collateral damage, with the goal of taking power over the island regardless of the consequences.

Which one of my characters is an outsider who’s smart and fearless, manipulative and calculating, and determined to achieve his or her ends regardless of the cost?

I think I know who that is. Not completely sure, I’m still fighting my way through the discovery draft, but pretty sure. And if that turns out to be right, then I know what skills the team will need to combat that person. Huh.

Progress.

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Women Sitting Next To Christmas Trees

I found this link on the AV Club to this page of forty-three pictures of women sitting next to Christmas trees in the fifties and sixties.

Okay, skipping over why anybody did a search for women sitting next to Christmas trees in the fifties and sixties, there’s something about vintage pictures of women that always makes me wonder what the story is; in this case, where they were coming from when they stopped by the tree, where they have to go next, what they think of the photographer, of the person standing next to them in the frame or just out of it, why they thought that outfit was a good idea, and if Christmas made them want to take an ax to the entire family (that may be me projecting from the Christmases in my youth). I get that with all vintage photos, but especially the ones with women because women were so often silenced back then, and what they were thinking was so much truer than what they were saying, and what they were thinking is right there on their faces. Like this one:

These are not shiny, happy, Christmas-loving people. The one on the left looks like she may have had one toddy over her limit and is now reconsidering everything about her life. And the one on the right . . . if the photographer shares a bed with her, he better be sleeping with one eye open. She has a Plan.

Really, go skim through the photos and remind yourself that no matter how much 2016 sucks (and it does, it does), it’s not 1966.

Warning: If TV Tropes is a time sink for you, avoid this site. You’ll be there for days.

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Cherry Saturday 12-17-2016

Today is National Maple Syrup Day.

It’s why God created maple trees.

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What Have We Learned From This Binge Watch 2: What Makes a Good Story Team Leader?

There was a new episode of Legends earlier this month (last new one until the end of January), and it showed why Sara is a good team leader, in the same league as Nate and Finch. For starters, she’s a real mother, in every sense of the word.

I hesitate to say that a team is a family because it isn’t always. Many teams stay professional without developing familial relationships. However, those teams aren’t in stories. In every team I looked at (admittedly not that many), once the team got over three, the team leader took on a parental role. Even Michael in Burn Notice acted as a parent/big brother to Nate, possibly because he really was Nate’s big brother; he pretty clearly mentored Jesse, too. Sam had been his friend, Fiona had been his lover, Madeline was his mother, but he pulled them all together so that they all went to Maddie for mothering just as they went to Michael for leadership. I know that sense of community is important in 21st century storytelling, I know that family is important in a lot of women’s fiction, I know that the family-you-make is really important in reality, especially now as politics divides so many of us. So it makes sense that a good story team also slowly becomes a family.

Which leads us to the story team leader as Mom or Dad.

If you define parenting as directing, mentoring, and watching over people you love so that they are productive and happy while you’re keeping them safe, I think that’s also a good defnitions for a good story team leader. In a team story, the relationships are where the real juice is; the plots are crucial, of course, but the relationships are why we keep going back, which is why even a bad episode of Leverage, for example, is fun to watch. I think of the last flawed season of that show, and I know rationally and technically that they had the perfect story act and finale in the first four seasons, but I still want season five, and I’d have loved six, seven, eight, to infinity and beyond, because I loved those characters. And one of the strengths of those relationships was that Nate basically adopted Hardison, Eliot, and Parker, and Sophie became Mom after the first season; Eliot makes that canon when he tells her “We need you to look out for us.” It’s one of the many reasons that the Leverage team is so compelling.

The leader-as-parent is less evident in Person of Interest, but I think it’s still there in Finch as the calm voice of reason directing the group while, below the surface, he obviously cares desperately about them. He acts as a wise father (telling Reese he needs a purpose), a scold (asking Shaw to stop killing people), and a disciplinarian (sending Root to her room when he locks her in the library), and they all accept and follow his rules (even Root voluntarily goes back to being locked in the library after they save Reese). And at the end of Season Four, that becomes canon when the Machine calls Finch “father.”

But somebody should have called Children’s Services on the first seasons of Legends. Rip was often abusive, yelling at his team, lying to them on several occasions including the night he gave them the reasons they should join his team=, endangering them constantly, not just because his plans were so bad but also because he was willing to sacrifice them to save his family (for an example, see what he did to Jax at the end, sending him to the engine room to be poisoned). His incompetence just increased his failings as a father to the team.

In the second season, however, Sara steps in and becomes the Good Mother. She’s younger than all but one of her team, but it doesn’t matter: she has the authority and she uses it to direct, counsel, discipline, and support. It doesn’t hurt that she’s also the best fighter they have so that when she says, “This tactic is best,” nobody argues. But I think the thing that makes her such a superior leader is that she knows her kids. She knows where each of them is strong and where each is vulnerable, she knows who’s best skilled for each task and how to direct them within a job, and she knows how to pull them back together after they’ve finished, making sure they’re all back to safety physically and emotionally. And it’s all done naturally through the give and take of the characters. Unlike Rip, Sara does not call them all together to make speeches and tell them who they are; instead they gather to make plans and then she tells them what they’ll be doing based on what they’ve decided, an entirely different approach that makes them a team instead of employees. Sara, in fact, is a damn good template for any story team leader.

The latest Legends episode, “The Chicago Way,” pretty much lampshades the whole Mom and the team as family bit.

• Ray and Nate are horsing around in the cargo bay which is dangerous (they blew a hole in the side of the ship the last time), and Sara shuts them down before they can do any real damage. “What do you think you’re doing? Don’t make me come down here again.” When she leaves, they mimic her like two junior high kids, and when she comes back and yells “Hey,” they shut up and all but shuffle their feet under her glare. “What’s wrong with them?” Jax, the youngest team member, says. “Sibling rivalry,” she tells him, which Ray and Nate reinforce later when they steal Al Capone’s ledger and one says to the other, “Bro hug?” and they do some geeky shoulder checking.

• When Mick refuses to leave the ship like a rebellious teenager, she says, “Fine,” and leaves Amaya to babysit him; but when Sara is captured, he steps up as Lancer and becomes the second-in-command, leading the rescue, fulfilling her faith in him as the oldest (skill-wise) of her kids.

• Sara tells Stein that she learned to respect the timeline from him, giving him that respect in return as a way of honoring the family elder. And because she’s noticed that he’s been different, she prompts him to confess his aberration and then supports him when she learns about his daughter.

• At the end, she flat out says: “Maybe some things are more important than history. You know, you, me, this team, we’re a family. A messed-up one, but still a family. I may not be able to save Laurel, but I can protect this family.”

I think the whole team-as-family is a way of marking the emotional growth of the group. They assemble (or are assembled) for a purpose, and once they evolve to all accept that purpose as their mission, they begin to connect because of the common belief, building those personal relationships among themselves that naturally fall into parent/child, elder/younger, and sibling connections. Once emotion becomes part of the team connection, the family analogy is inevitable.

So Nita, who is automatically mentoring Button, has that going for her, although I should hit that harder in that first scene. Nick is definitely in a superior position over Rab, so mentoring once things start to get dicey and they start working together is a natural (he’s already mentoring Dag). Nita wouldn’t mentor Mort, he’s her twin, so maybe that’s why he’s going to be more peripheral than I’d originally thought. Max is the fifth member, or at least the guy who keeps popping up, and while he’s Mammon’s right hand man, I think he’s a young Nick in a lot of ways. I can definitely see Nita taking over Rab and slapping Max down, not sure about the relationship between Nick and Button, but that has interesting possibilities. And then circling around all of them on the periphery are Mort and Dag and Daphne and Keres and Vinnie and Mammon and Sequins and Joey and the biologist-to-be-named-later. I can also see Nita trading off leadership with her Lancer, Nick, depending on whether it’s an island conflict or a Hell-ish conflict, the two of them acting as parents if you squint your eyes.

It may just be that I like the team-as-family approach because it plays to a romance writer’s strengths: relationships.

So then drawing from the Legends’ Binge Watch:

• The team leader has to show she’s the natural leader, not just announce that she is:

That’ll work for Button and Mort, and by the end of Act One, it’ll be natural for Rab, too. Max may take awhile.

• The team members have to begin to respect the leader and choose to follow her because of what she does, not what she says.

I think by the end of the second act, that’ll be a given because so much more about Nita will have come to light, and she’ll be so much more confident.

• The team leader has to show she respects the team members by asking for help when she needs it.

I definitely need this in the first scene, at least foreshadowed.

And then do all of that for Nick, too.

Plus there’s the general good advice not to lie to your team, put your team in danger to achieve your own selfish ends, or waste your team’s time while you navel gaze. Basically, do the opposite of whatever Rip Hunter does.

Worst Team Leader Ever.

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