Jennifer Crusie's Blog, page 228

And Another Thing . . .

Welp, I now have a photo of what my books look like:

That’s a selfie taken by Paul Ryan with DC interns. If I hadn’t already been convinced to diversify, this picture would have done it because I am now officially as clueless as Paul Ryan. Must fix that.

In other news . . .

I’ve been working on Nita’s book, trying to wrap my head around a million things. Like the Big Picture of the book.

Naturally, spoilers to follow.

So I write in four acts because that’s a good rhythm for me. First act starts the conflict on the first page and then sets up the world, the community, the plot, the subplots, everything.

At the end of the first act, all the information has to be on the page and the next three acts play it out to a climax. August Wilson said to start a story after everything but action is over. I love that, and I try to follow it, but I definitely follow it after the first turning point (or second if you call the beginning scene/turn out of the stable world as the first turning point). The second act is direct pursuit of the goal, gathering information/power/forces, etc.that leads to the mid point which is the point at which everything has changed so much that there’s no possible return to the same world that the protag lived in at the beginning. She’s changed too much. So at the turning point, she does something that throws her into a much more escalated conflict, focused on action and direct attack until the crisis point where she loses, which destroys any remnants of what she once was. She picks herself up (because her only other choice is to give up, and we don’t do that here in Crusieland), and throws herself back into the fray to meet the antag at the climax and, since this is a Crusie, kick his ass.

Okay, those are broad descriptions and I don’t always follow them. But they’re a good template for when I’m looking at a lot of miscellaneous scenes that may or may not go in the book and start to sort them out by chronology because I can look at where Nita is in her evolution in that particular scene and know where it goes in the Big Picture, that is, which act it goes in.

So right now, the story is:

Act One: Nita meets Nick and finds out she’s only part human and most of what she knows about reality is missing a few memos. She begins a tentative alliance with Nick

Act Two: Nita tries to cope with her new identity while joining with Nick to find the killers (Nita’s goal) and the gates (Nick’s goal), goals that are linked. As they start to take apart the island to find hidden truths, Nita’s identity takes another couple of hits until at the end, she’s pretty much shed her old ideas of who she is and is trying to embrace the new Nita. Also embracing the new Nita is Nick; I think they become lovers at the end of this act. Maybe. It depends on how much Nick has evolved by this point, but I think he has to be pretty much back to human by now; no point in dragging that out. Still dead, of course, but human again. And Nita’s still alive, and not human. Nice character cross there.

Act Three: Nick and Nita are a team at this point and they’re making great progress, finally narrowing down the antagonist and vanquishing him, only to find out that there’s somebody else behind him, and that somebody launches a full-out attack to bring them down. I think Nick gets dragged back to Hell again here.

Act Four: Nita’s fighting the good fight with the team, but Nick’s gone so she goes to Hell to get him back, and then they both come back to the island apocalypse. For some reason I have the last scene of Angel in my head for that. Nick wants to fight the dragon. (Is there a dragon? I dunno.)

So back to Act One, which is written but not completely revised. Since it’s going to be about 33K once I get it cut, it needs to be conceptualized in narrative chunks (which should not be confused with scene sequences).

ACT ONE

1. Intro/Set-Up/Beginning of Conflict

Nita meets Button, fights with Mort and Clint

Nick makes Vinnie make him a partner

*Nita meets Nick, both knock each other off stride

Nick talks to Belia, deals with Vinnie Daglas and Rabiel

Button goes home with Nita, shoots a demon.

2. Something Is Not Right

*Nita has breakfast with Nick, still doesn’t believe him, but Mort shows up.

*Nita at the Mortuary/disappearing bodies.

Nick at the Historical Society with Marvella.

Nita talks with lieutenant, has a very bad feeling.

Button trying to fit in, works with Nita in the squad room, puzzled. (They’re talking about Nick, so that’s a semi-asterisk.)

3. Confrontation

*Nita meets Nick for lunch

Nick goes to Cromas, gets yanked into Hell (Mammon, Max, Sequins, et al.)

Button and Nita at hotel with Mort

*Nita confronts Nick at bar, meets Mammon

*Nita and Nick go to Cromas

*Nick and Nita go to Sadie

*Nita and Nick go to Nature Preserve

4. Revelation

*Nita at Bar with Nick, Mom Arrives

*Nita between time

*Nick at Bar, sorting things out

Button with Max and Sequins

*Nita upstairs with Nick, holding onto sanity

*Nita next AM: Cold Light of Day

ACT TWO:

*Breakfast with Nick

The asterisks are scenes of Nita and Nick together. If this is a romance, there aren’t enough of them, so that’s a problem. Also, I have to look at the escalation here . . .

Really, I just want to keep up with the news. I’m a political junkie and while everything about the Republicans makes me want to throw something at a white guy, I cannot look away.

But now, back to work.

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Cherry Saturday 7-16-2016

Today is Fresh Spinach Day.

Look on the bright side. It’s not Fresh Kale Day.

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Melissa’s Question, Part Two

We’re over 200 comments on the previous post, and as those of you who have been here for awhile know, when we get there, the comments section gets wonky and at 300, it goes belly up, so commenting on that post is now transferred to this post. For those of you new to the conversation, Melissa asked me, very politely, if I’d even though about moving out of my blizzard of white characters, and I posted and said, “Yep, thought about it, don’t know how to do it because . . .” and explained my difficulties, and lots of people chimed in and we talked about it in 255 comments. The 256th comment and all subsequent comments will be here. Same conversation, we’re just keeping the blog from breaking.

Have at it.

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Answering Melissa

Melissa wrote in the comments of a previous post:

“One thought after viewing some of your collages: I’d love to see some people of colour star in your books. And wouldn’t it make more of a contrast between Nita and Button, or any of the other characters?

It’s totally your call and your world. Just putting it out there.”

The short answer is “Yes.”

The long answer is “Yes,” too, I just haven’t figured out how to do it yet. I’ve been trying to figure it out for years, making an idiot of myself along the way, and I’ve just come up against the whole thing again in the Nita book. So the answer is, “Yes, and here are my problems achieving diversity in my work, none of which are excuses for NOT achieving diversity; suggestions for solutions welcomed:”

Practicality:

I have such a hard time getting a story on the page that bringing another aspect in that’s not story-based is just going to make me more paranoid. I don’t design characters, they show up, so going in and messing with the process for diversity’s sake is a very bad idea for my process, which is sprained right now anyway. I haven’t published a book in six years; this is not the time to make things more complicated.

Political Correctness Makes Me an Idiot:

When I’ve tried in the past to deliberately put people of color in, I’ve made such an ungodly mess of things that I gave up. I had some INCREDIBLY patient AA authors try to walk me through what I could do without screwing up, and because I was so hamstrung by political correctness, I ended up so far up my own alimentary canal that I never could get out. The worst, I think, was when I asked the woman I was corresponding with it if would be wrong to pair a black woman with a black man. She said, “No, that would be the most natural thing in the world.” OF COURSE IT WOULD. Why would I ask such a dumbass question? Because I honestly didn’t know if I put a black character in a romance with a black character if that would send a message that I was against interracial romance. Please note that none of this had anything to do with an actual story. This is how paranoid I am about screwing up race.

Painted Black: Another problem is that I’d be basically writing the kind of characters I’m already writing, I’d just be painting them a different color, which I don’t think is real diversity. Okay, Faux Diversity is better than No Diversity, but I really try to avoid the Faux.

My Little or No Description Rule:

One craft problem is that I try not to describe my characters that much because I want readers to do the visuals that work for them. (I learned this one on Manhunting when I gave the hero a mustache and then got letters that said, ‘In my book, Jake does not have a mustache.” Fair enough.) Cindy in Wild Ride is black (she’s on the collage twice) but I never said she was black and nobody ever noticed she was black, possibly because I can’t write black characters but more likely because the placeholders are only the starting places until the characters come alive in my mind, and at that point she may have switched over to white. I never actually see my characters when I’m writing them, I just hear them, it’s why my fiction is so visually flat, so god knows what color Cindy ended up; I never think about it because I don’t care what color my characters are. They’re just them. A lot of readers have seen Simon in Faking It as black, and that works for me (there is no Faking It collage, I started after that). I would have no problem with any of my characters being cast as people of color, but I do have a problem with stating race because of . . .

The PoV Problem:

I write in deep PoV which means if I identify race, it’s because my character has identified race, and she needs to have a reason to identify race, and if the only reason is, “Oh, look, there’s an Other,” she’s a racist asshat. I have never once looked at a friend of mine and thought, “Oh, look, there’s my black friend, Shirley.” She’s just Shirley. So how do I get race on the page without my PoV character being racist? If Nita looks at Button and thinks, “There’s my new partner, she’s black,” what does that say about Nita? (Button’s blonde because I was going for the fluffy blonde stereotype to break.) BUT I’ve been confronting that in my revisions on the Nita book because there I do have to describe skin color: the demons are green. When I went back in to puzzle out what demons were, they were clearly another race, an alien race but another race. Which meant that they’d be as diverse as humans. Which is when Daglas became dark green and Rabiel pale green because that made things so much more interesting. That never has a bearing on the plot, I just thought it made demons more real, a diversified race. But of course that also means I’m talking about skin color. I can get around the PoV problem because Nita’s gonna notice their skin color because they’re GREEN, but if Daglas and Rabiel are pretty much the same kind of people, same speech, same experiences, then am I really writing about race?

The Impact of Race:

I could easily have made Sophie in Welcome to Temptation black. She’s got dark curly hair in contrast to Phin’s blond frat boy (and I needed him to be white and blond because he was a icon of privilege), and making her black would have further emphasized the differences between them. But then when his mother throws a fit about him seeing her, it’s not about class which is one of the underlying themes of the book, it’s about race. Even if his mother isn’t a racist–and she isn’t–that would make her one. And then we get to the town turning on her and it’s not an outsider/insider thing, it’s a political lynching. It changes the entire book. It’s not that that couldn’t be a good book, it’s just a book that I’m not equipped to write and don’t want to write. I’ve been struggling with class all my life; classism I know. I’ve been female all my life; sexism I know. I’ve been white all my life; I have no real idea of what it is to experience racism, not at the visceral level I’d need understand it and write it honestly. It’s my third rail: if you can’t be honest about it, don’t write about it. I also don’t write about childlessness, poverty, or war because I’d be making stuff up based on what I’ve observed in others. There are things you can research and things you have to experience, I think. I don’t want to be one of those guys who writes about war without ever having been to war. It just seems dishonest.

But I live in a diverse world, a world that’s a better place because it’s diverse. So I have a problem.

For the past several years, I’ve been working on a compromise where I don’t give much description (which I don’t want to do anyway, see above) and letting people picture the characters themselves. I’ve consciously tried to avoid any racial description which isn’t really that much of a help since people will default to white-as-The-One, and I’ve tried to limit blondes unless I needed them for plot purposes, like Button as a fluffly little badass. A lot of my heroines have curly black hair (readers have complained) because that’s how I see them. Nita has thick, straight black hair, and I could easily make her Asian except that she’s not really human, and that’s the last thing I need to do to Asians. I could make Nick black, but he’s the Devil. Not good. (Also the son of Pope Alexander, but I could do a workaround there.) I could make Nita’s family people of color, but her mother is a homicidal maniac and Nita isn’t human, so that’s not good. I need Button to appear dumb; let’s not do that to a person of color. Vinnie’s a thug and a criminal, so no on him. When I made Daglas and Rabiel dark and light, I made Daglas dark because he’s the secondary hero and Rabiel light because he’s a sweetheart but dumb as a rock. The ramifications of race are so overwhelming that I start doing things like that, writing on political correctness instead of “here’s who Daglas is.”

The underlying problem is this: Because of the way my life worked out, I’ve never spent much time in diversified places. You grow up in a all-white town with a casually racist family (fave family moment: when Mollie was four I announced to my family at a holiday dinner that if I heard one more racist joke, they were never going to see my daughter again, please pass the gravy . . .), go to an all-white college, and end up raising your kid in an all-white suburb for twenty years, racism is pretty much baked in no matter how much you try to avoid it, or at the very least you have a tin-ear for racist thought. Grad school was diverse, yes, but it didn’t matter what people looked like in grad school because they were all like me anyway: overworked, underpaid, sleepless, and crazy about literature and writing. Do I have black and Asian friends? Yes, but again on the surface, they’re like me. I know their experiences are not like mine, I cannot fathom what it is to be a person of color–any color–in this country, especially right now with that orange idiot we have spewing hate. But if I go on the surface–hey, it’s romantic comedy, what’s a little surface–honest to god, everybody I know of color is just like me. And that’s not really writing people of color, is it? So that leaves me faking their experience and that revolts me. White writer pretends she knows what it is to be a person of color in America. No.

The bottom line is, you are absolutely right, Melissa. And you are absolutely right to say something; I’m amazed nobody has said anything about this before, to tell you the truth. It’s pretty glaring. I just don’t know how to fix it beyond saying, “Cindy’s black,” and then twitch since that has no bearing on the story and I don’t think anything goes in a story that doesn’t have a direct bearing on it. I could make it integral to the story, but then the story changes, and I’m already holding onto story by my fingernails. At this point, I’m not sure I can finish a book, let alone deliberately diversify, which is one of the many reasons why I hand little-or-no-description characters over to readers and letting them run with it. It’s not a solution, it’s not even a band-aid, but it’s all I’ve been able to come up with.

At this point, you’re thinking, “You’re overthinking this, Jenny.” Hell, yes, I’m overthinking it, I’ve been overthinking it for years. The lack of diversity in my books is a real problem and it has bothered me a lot for a long time (it must be fifteen years since I convinced those patient AA writers I was a complete loon). And I know this post opens up a huge can of worms to the public (which is not the Argh people, you’re the community.) I know that what I’ve written is undoubtedly unconsciously racist. I don’t want to be that person or that writer. But I’m at a loss as to how to fix this. Suggestions welcome. Seriously. (Please try to refrain from telling me I’m being a moron. I’ve been a moron about this for twenty years. I just can’t find my way out.)

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Cherry Saturday 7-9-2016

This week is Nude Recreation Week.

Choose your own adventure.

(Do NOT google “Nude Recreation” looking for images.)

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Viciously Horrible

Every time I go to post here, I’m dragged under again by the horrors. I’d post something cheerful about the WiP, but I don’t want to write. I want to scream and blame somebody, but it’s not one person, one group, it’s a whole collective mindset that’s fogged the whole damn country– all black men are dangerous, we need our guns for protection, if you’re afraid it’s okay to shoot– insane ideas that defy logic and humanity. I need to believe that things will be different, but I’m afraid they won’t. I’m aching for those lost, and I’m terrified for the future, and I should not be posting now.

But some thoughtful things have come out of this.

There’s a piece by William Saletan in Slate, “There’s a War Over Race in America, But It’s not Whites Vs. Blacks,” and I think that’s not only true, but it’s important and needs to be emphasized: Neither the majority of blacks or the majority of whites want this horror; most Americans are against this nightmare. And there’s something else that was a tiny ray of light in what seems to be endless night: another Slate article quotes Newt Gingrich saying, “It took me a long time, and a number of people talking to me through the years to get a sense of this. If you are a normal, white American, the truth is you don’t understand being black in America and you instinctively under-estimate the level of discrimination and the level of additional risk.” If Newt Gingrich, the closest thing to embodiment of Republican Evil next to Dick Cheney, can say that, then maybe, maybe there’s a chance, and maybe this week hasn’t been a complete horror, maybe it’ll be the wake-up call this country needs. Because the massacre of twenty little kids in their schoolrooms wasn’t. And slaughtering forty-nine people who were laughing and dancing wasn’t. But maybe this time . . .

Right now it’s just horror. There will be a cheerful Cherry Saturday tomorrow. I wrote it months ago when I was cheerful. I’ll be cheerful again. But right now, it just isn’t in me. My country is bleeding, everything I believe this country stands for is under attack, and it’s been going on for decades, getting worse for decades. I want to talk about Shakespeare and about writing and about the dogs and about this wasp that invaded my bedroom, but I just can’t get there right now. This is not the America I believe in, but it’s the America I’m living in. And I hate it.

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Book Done Yet?: Button, Button . . .

So about Button . . .

I really had her in there to begin with as a foil*/ficelle** for Nita, but then she shot that demon, and I thought, “Huh. Button has layers, and one of them is homicidal.”

So I went back and rewrote that scene in Nita’s house from Button’s PoV. SO much more interesting, especially since it’s a first look inside Button’s semi-deranged little brain. Which actually does make her the perfect foil for Nita, the calm, rational, control freak. And it also means I can do a Macbeth/Lady Macbeth cross-character arc*** between the two of them in their growing-to-be-real-partners subplot. And that gives me another layer to Nita’s arcing out of isolation. At the beginning of the story, Nita’s close to one person, her twin brother, and it’s pretty clear that if they hadn’t been twins, she wouldn’t let him get close, either. But as Mort says in a later scene, “Those nine months of playing Scrabble in the womb together–that creates a bond.” And now there’s Button, who’s going to become something Nita’s never had: a best friend.

So basically, I just love Button and I really love Button’s PoV. Ficelle, foil, minion, subplot protagonist, balance (I was getting a little worried about the predominance of demons in my cast), and if I decide to go with the demon lover I’m toying with for her, I can even get a foil romance subplot . . .

This is the part where I realize I’m being a wonk, put in asterisks, and go back to explain things.

*A foil is a character who shows off another character by reflection and contrast, the way diamonds are displayed on foil to reflect their sparkliness or on black velvet to intensify their light. My favorite foil example is Macbeth and Banquo in Macbeth: at the beginning of the play, they’re the same character, brave and noble warriors. Then they meet the witches and Macbeth accepts the prophecy while Banquo doesn’t trust them. Macbeth continues to fall, horrible, while Banquo remains good and true, which is why Macbeth has him killed halfway through the story: He can’t stand to see Banquo because he sees what he once was. Banquo is the bright foil that shows how dark he’s become. So Nita is dark to Button’s blonde, scary-looking to Button’s cuteness, controlled to Button’s impulsiveness, thirty-something to Button’s twenty-something, tall to Button’s short, etc. And because they’re standing next to each other, Nita looks taller and Button shorter . . .

But I think you can do that with plots, too. If Nita and Nick are people who are trying to build a relationship as their understandings of who they are change radically around them, Button and Max already know who they are. If Nita and Nick at the end are pretty much the same kind of people, Button and Max will always be opposites. And if Nita and Nick are committed at the end of the story, I don’t think Button and Max can be; the most they can get, I think, is a negotiated cease-fire (not a metaphor in Button’s case). I’m still not sure about the Max thing because for some reason I’m pairing the spares like crazy in this meditative discovery draft stage and I think that’s a bad idea. But Max and Button are so wrong for each other that it’s really tempting, so I’m thinking, yes, a romantic subplot as a foil here would be good.

**A ficelle is a character who exists to ask questions. I’m against ficelle-only characters because I think characters should have personalities and goals of their own, not just hang around the plot making convenient inquiries. But Button was already a foil and a relationship subplot with Nita, so making her new on the island so she can ask, “WTF?” when something happens is a no-brainer. A ficelle helps eliminate as-you-know dialogue (“As you know, Mort, our mother is nuts” as opposed to “Yes, that’s my mother, yes, she’s insane, yes, that’s a problem but we’ve learned to deal with it”).

Oh, and ***the character arc cross: I freaking love this character move, another one I stole from Macbeth. (Jenny’s Favorite Shakespeare play for 20, Alex?) A critic I once read and whose name I have now forgotten (I googled and got nothing) wrote that Macbeth’s tragedy is that he loses his moral imagination, and Lady Macbeth’s tragedy is that she gains hers. As a writer, that took my breath away in its brilliance. (As a critic, I think that’s too simplistic–I think Lady Macbeth always has a moral imagination and her great tragedy is that she uses the moral judgment of her women’s world to wreck the moral balance of Macbeth’s male world and then watches the recoil destroy everything she believes in–but it’s still a fantastic insight into the plot construction of this story.) So Macbeth moves from morally outraged at the thought of killing Duncan to accepting murder as a course of action outside the battlefield, and Lady Macbeth moves from not understanding that what she wants is a moral outrage to complete comprehension of the outrage she’s unleashed upon the world. Or if you want that simpler: Macbeth moves from understanding what’s moral to not caring until the end, and Lady Macbeth moves from not caring to understanding, which ends her.

So in Tell Me Lies, Maddie will never leave her small home town, while C.L. couldn’t wait to get out, but by the end, Maddie’s independent of the town and C.L. is ready to stay and put down roots. (They compromise, as I remember, on a place outside of town.) And Button will move from acting on instinct to a more controlled existence while Nita will move from controlling absolutely everything in her path including her own anger to kicking down the door to Hell and laying waste to everything in her path in her rage. Or if you want that simpler: Nita will move from controlling Button’s impulses to accepting Button as an establisher of boundaries once she cuts loose. And Button will move from acting on impulse to understanding and implementing the need for control as Nita goes nuts.

But mostly, I just love Button. She’s a little whacked, but so is everybody in this story, so go, Button, that’s what I say.

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Cherry Saturday 7-2-2016

Today is National UF0 Day.

So do I, Mulder, so do I.

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Book Done Yet: Romance and Vulnerability

I’ve been thinking about romance in general and in Nita’s book in particular. Romance is tricky stuff to write even if both of your lovers are alive, so making one of mine dead complicates things.

But two things in the past month have made me look at it again. One was a comment Elisabeth made, and the other came from watching Galavant again, this time with Krissie.

I’d made a comment in one of the WiP posts about Nick not having emotions because he’s dead, but that wasn’t quite right. He’s not emotionless because he’s dead, he’s emotionless because he doesn’t have a body. He creates the illusion of a body, but there’s no mass there, no blood, no nerve endings, just a skeleton and a lot of illusion. And that means he can’t feel anything, not just hot and cold and pain and lust, he can’t feel emotions because emotions live in the body. We don’t have emotions apart from our physical beings; they’re called feelings because our bodies feel them. I knew this from studying with Ron Carlson, the originator of “Emotion lives in the body,” but it wasn’t until I wrote a guy who didn’t have a body that I really grasped what that meant.

I mean, think about the last time you were in the grip of strong emotion. Saying, “I was shocked” or “I was sad” doesn’t tell anybody anything. But saying, “I couldn’t catch my breath” or “I cried, those big hacking sobs, ugly crying” tells your listener just how surprised or grief-stricken you were.

Which means if you don’t have breath to lose or tears to cry, you can’t feel anything. You can make judgements in the abstract–“”That was a bad thing that just happened, I wish that hadn’t happened”–but you can’t feel bad. You can’t feel anything. You’re dead.

And that’s why I said Nick doesn’t feel emotions; he doesn’t feel anything. He’s dead.

So when Elizabeth wrote: “One way in which your current Nick and Nita intrigue me is that they’re connected more by plot than by character, unless the point of your post today is that character ties will develop. I think you implied that this is not a romance because Nick doesn’t have emotions because he’s dead,” I thought, I didn’t explain that right, that’s not quite it.

Because Nita’s book is still a romance, it just starts with two people who are disconnected from their emotions. They’re good people, they’re just cold and unfeeling. They’ll do the right thing because it’s the right thing to do in the abstract, they’re guided by morals and values, not by feelings. Nita isn’t quite as cold as Nick–she still has a pulse–but she’s shoved her feelings away since she was a toddler so she has no idea how to access them now.

This is the point in a book where I look at what I’ve set up and think, Why the hell did I do that? I’ve learned my lesson about depressed heroines (never again), so instead now I’m doing not-quite-dead-yet heroines? And dead heroes? And yet, my instinct says that’s where to go, so that’s where I’m going.

It was right about that time that Krissie came to visit and we watched all of Galavant over two nights. Galavant is lousy with romance: King Richard sees Madelena and carries her off because he’s fallen in love; Galavant agrees to help Isabella so he can get Madelena (his one true love) back; Galavant and Isabella fall in love; and Chef and Gwen take a chance on romance even though they’re serfs. All of that’s before we get to the second season and two more love stories, one featuring the beautiful ballad, “Maybe You Won’t Die Alone,” and the immortal words “Put. Down. That. Cat.” Plus Uncle Keith and Destiny, and Richard and Tad Cooper. It’s like Love, Actually with hangings and armor.

But my favorite romance in Galavant was one I did not see coming. SPOILERS FOR THE SECOND SEASON AHEAD.

YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED.

SERIOUSLY, BIG SPOILERS.

Galavant’s first love, Madelena, is a stone cold bitch, and I love her. Her first love song is a love song to herself–“No One But You” — and when Galavant finally finds her again and says, “Do you still love me?” she sings “I love you as much as someone like me can love anyone.” At the end of the first season, she’s betrayed King Richard (the guy who kidnapped her, who she then married because he was rich, she liked the clothes, and she wanted to be queen), put him in prison and taken up with his brother, then stabbed his brother in the back and elevated Richard’s bodyguard as her new consort. And during all of that–four hours of story–she never feels anything. As Galavant says at the end of the first season, “Oh, god, she’s the worst.”

Richard survives her betrayal only because his bodyguard breaks him and Galavant out of prison and tells Galavant to take Richard back to his own kingdom (they’d invaded the one they’re in) so he’ll be safe. His bodyguard, a thug named Gareth, has been watching over Richard since they were both ten, acting out of duty and a sense of mission, pretty much killing anybody who gets in Richard’s way. Not a big guy for feelings, although he has a moment at the end as Galavant sails away with Richard.

So at the beginning of Season Two, we have Madalena and Gareth sitting on the throne as the new antagonists, both of them detached from humanity. And yet theirs is the love story I loved best. I just didn’t realize why until I watched it in the context of writing this book: When people who are not good at emotions suddenly discover that they have them, they become tremendously vulnerable. And vulnerability is the key to great romance. (And great characterization in particular, but we’re talking about romance. Focus, people.)

I said this is would be a spoiler, but I can’t ruin the magnificence of the moment when Madalena becomes a (semi)human being, except to say it involves an event so traumatic that it almost breaks her heart, and Gavin realizes it and brings her a gift to make her feel better (best gift ever), and she’s so touched, she kisses him on the cheek, and it’s one of the top five Best Romantic Moments Ever. Of course, they’re hopeless at expressing feelings, so Gareth finally resorts to yelling “I love you” to the troops when he and Madalena are reviewing them before a battle, and she panics, but then she finally smiles and blushes, and they’re just so darn cute. Sociopaths, of course, but so much in love. And at the end when she’s leaving, and she looks back at him and says, “Thanks for the love,” trying to be cool about it but still loving him so much . . .

Where was I? Right. Vulnerability.

Everybody has feelings, but it’s the characters who don’t know how to deal with those feelings that kneecap us. (Think Shaw on Person of Interest standing by Root’s grave, not knowing what to do.) If you combine that with the “Oh, hell, not you” moment, another vulnerability kneecap, you’ve created a powerful dynamic for a great romance. And that’s what I stumbled into with Nita and Nick.

Of course, I still have to WRITE it, but hey, the dynamic is there, so points to me. And now back to typing . . .

The post Book Done Yet: Romance and Vulnerability appeared first on Argh Ink.

Eight Ladies Hosting One Fine Writer . . .

Our pals at Eight Ladies Writing have a great post up:

Lois McMaster Bujold Answers Three Questions about Self-Publishing.

Bujold isn’t just a masterful writer, she’s a great source on publishing, especially self-publishing since she has her second written-for-self-pub fantasy novella, “Penric and the Shaman,” coming out soon (she teases with the first two paragraphs here).



And now on Eight Ladies, she’s giving some great background about her history with self-publishing. She’s regained the e-publishing rights for several books in her backlist and self-published those. In particular, her first fantasy novel, The Spirit Ring, provided some very interesting data points for her future ventures into the electronic realm. She also shares some thoughts for new writers who are considering the leap into self-publishing.

Go on, you know you want to click on those links.

The post Eight Ladies Hosting One Fine Writer . . . appeared first on Argh Ink.