Jennifer Crusie's Blog, page 307

Software To Make Your Writer’s Heart Beat Faster: Voodoo Pad

I’m not a software geek. I don’t like learning new programs (another reason to love the Mac since you learn one of them, you know most of them) and I really don’t need many applications anyway, certainly not a new one.

And then I found Voodoo Pad.

Voodoo Pad is personal wiki software, a program that lets you build a private wiki on your computer. It’s going to be good for about a thousand things, but right now what it’s good for is organizing the ten thousand pages of notes that Krissie, Lani, and I have accumulated building a world for the Fairy Tale Lies book.

You start with a New Document (you have a choice of Document or Page, Document is like a three ring binder and Page is, uh, a page in it). This new document will be the index for whatever it is you’re building a wiki for.

So let’s say you’re organizing a book. You title the index page with the title of your book, and then on that page you list Characters, Locations, whatever you want to keep track of in your notes. You select Characters, hit the Link button and a new page opens up that says Characters at the top, and on that page you list your characters. You select your heroine’s name, hit the Link button, and new page opens up with your heroine’s name on it. Type in your description, drop in photos or drawings or anything else you’re using as description. Then look to the left where all the page names are displayed alphabetically and click on Characters again. When you go back, the name of your heroine is now a link.

Now go back to your index page, select “Locations,” hit Link, and a new page called “Locations” opens up. List your locations. Select the location where your heroine lives, hit Link, and a new page opens up with the name of the heroine’s house on it. Type in a description and when you type your heroine’s name, it will automatically become a link back to her page. Then drop in pictures, maps, whatever. Keep doing this and you’ll have all your notes, images, descriptions, whatever in one multi-paged digital notebook with all your keywords linked to each other with a list of docs on the side.

The program does a lot more, but for right now, just the fact that I have a program that will organize the three million projects I have in pieces on my computer is enough to make me dizzy with happiness. I can use Voodoo to organize Argh posts if I decide to do a book because there’s no limit to the size of the pages; I can put whole chapters in there if I want. I can scoop up the ten million notes I have about that writing book I keep meaning do and finally get them organized and linked. I can put all my Writewell stuff into one doc. I can scan in all the cottage documents and organize them (the program will capture e-mail receipts and turn them into PDFs for you). It’s going to be fabulous for keeping the stuff for the five McDaniel courses organized. Oh, and it plays well with Dropbox so I can put the whole thing in there.

I love this software. And right now they’re offering a limited time price of $24.95 which is a steal if you’re a writer trying organize info for a book; you can download a trial version to see if you like it before you buy, although it’s a short trial. That’s all right; I was pretty much sold with the first link.

Voodoo Pad. I recommend it.

Edited to Add: For Macs only but search for “wiki software” and see what’s available for PCs, or try the Mac hacks Tom talks about in his comment below with the free Voodoo trial.

Also in answer to JulieB:

Scrivener and Voodoo have some overlap, but they have different purposes.

Scrivener, billed as “a complete writing studio,” is essentially novel-writing software although you can use it for many more things. For example, you can organize your scenes by numbering and naming them and putting brief notes on color-coded notecards on a bulletin board, each linked to a file that holds that entire scene, giving you a way to see your book at a glance by looking at the bulletin board or hitting the “outline” button or with a click just the scene you’re working on. There’s a window next to each scene that can hold pictures of characters, links to research, etc. It does a lot more than that with a lot more features than that, and it can be used for other kinds of projects, but its focus is on novel-writing.

Voodoo is wiki-building software. It’s designed to organize all the information for a project, linking all the elements together so that it becomes a wikipedia for that entity, which means it’s good for anything that has a lot of information that needs to be easily searchable: “VoodooPad is a place to write down your notes and thoughts. Ideas, images, lists, passwords, your mom’s apple pie recipe. Include anything you need to keep track of and organize, and VoodooPad will grow with you without getting in the way. Drag and drop folders, PDFs, applications, or URLs into VoodooPad, and they will link up just like on the web. And with powerful search, nothing will be lost or out of reach.” I use so many bits and pieces of different things that it’s a godsend for organizing all of my writing projects.

Just to make things more interesting, the other software I use a lot that overlaps with these (it’s in my dock) is Curio: “Curio is the digital notebook for freeform information gathering, brainstorming, and creative exploration. Curio allows you to effortlessly take notes, manage tasks, make photo collages, sketch with brushes & pens, and create beautifully styled lists, mind maps, tables, and index cards. All within the same amazingly intuitive integrated environment.” (I have the cheapest version because that does everything I need it to.)

There’s a lot of overlap among the three programs, but they each do the specific thing they were designed for so beautifully that it’s worth it to me to have all three.

Oh and as Julie mentioned in the comments, there’s an app for that (Voodoo).

In Other News . . .

I have absolutely nothing to say because at the moment I’m trying to glue my life back together. I’m hauling out carloads of stuff to Goodwill, packing up books I can’t replace as e-books, going through my clothes, spray painting white every I have that was once dark brown, taking the car in for its check-up and then back for a recall, running the dogs through the yard three times a day, and getting ready to segue into the next act of my life. None of that makes for good Argh posts, but I do have some random news/thoughts/mini-rants.

The McDaniel course has enough people registered that there are two sections. This makes me happy because it means we’ll definitely have enough to make a second section even if half the students hate me and drop out.

Agnes and the Hitman has been optioned again. You probably guessed that when I asked about casting awhile back, but it’s official, the option check is in the mail, and I’ve read the script. It’s more action than romance, but that’s okay. Also, the producer is a sweetheart and how often does that happen?

I’ve been watching the run-up to the election and I’m perplexed. I know both sides need to shriek and point fingers, but some of this is just blatant lying. Obama is not trying to keep the military from voting. He did not say you didn’t build your business. Of course, I’m biased. I love Harry Reid saying, “I heard Romney didn’t pay any taxes” because if Romney ever releases his tax returns, all he has to say is “Whoops, I was wrong.”

My new pet peeve: websites that won’t let you finish the article until you like them on Facebook. I don’t like Facebook, let alone websites that try to force me to like them on Facebook. The whole thing reeks of desperation. For cripe’s sake, have some self-respect.

I just discovered Revenge. I’d ignored the show because I thought I didn’t want to watch very rich people having problems in their beach houses. I was wrong. The heroine is pretty much a sociopath, but you know why she’s a sociopath and who made her that way, and since she and her sidekick together are worth millions and using them to fight obscenely evil people who are also worth millions, it’s like watching Greek Mythology: The Hamptons Years. Instead of flinging lightning bolts at each other, they buy buildings, leverage the fall of large corporations, bring down politicians, and taunt terrorists. Even most of the poor people are conniving good-for-nothings. The only people who are boring in this are the good guys, but fortunately they are few on the ground. I think they’re just there as foils, to remind the viewer that people in general do not invest twenty million dollars as a small part of a bigger plan. Hey, what’s twenty million when you’re ruining the guy who helped destroy your daddy who was pretty much perfect. I’m not fond of Blonde Cookies, but Emily is such a devious bitch (albeit OUR devious bitch) that watching her go head to head with Victoria, the greatest thing to happen to Diva TV since Alexis and Krystle, is nothing short of riveting. (We need more women named Krystle on TV.)

Our Devious Bitch:



Their Devious Bitch:



All the episodes are available on Hulu now but I’m warning you, this is not a show you can dabble in. Once you start, it’s going to be popcorn and vicarious vengeance for twenty-two episodes.

So upheaval all over the place here, new stuff happening, old stuff going to Goodwill, huge potential for disaster or triumph, and a great new series to wallow in.

Could be worse.

Write a Novel in Forty Weeks! Or Not.

Pam and I are nailing down the McDaniel curriculum–well, Pam’s had her part done for weeks–and as I look out over the five eight-week courses, I am reminded of how irate I get every time I see one of those Write A Novel in a Weekend! books. Or even Write A Novel in a Month! books. Hell, I can’t TYPE a novel in a month. But forty weeks is, um . . . divide forty by four weeks in a month … TEN MONTHS and yes you can write a novel in ten months. I can’t, but that doesn’t mean you can’t.

So again, looking at five courses and trying to decide how to balance what needs to be done (everything) with what students will legitimately have the time to do (about a tenth of everything) while covering all the bases (more than four) while not being superficial (and that was Point of View you just saw zipping past your window on the Romance Writing Bus) and still leaving students with a viable project to market at the end of the fifth class, my head hits the desk. Plus I believe that creative writing teachers should have “Primum non nocere” tattooed on their foreheads or at least on their lesson plans, because “First, do no harm” would have prevented a lot of the bitterness I see in people with MFAs.

So in the spirit of “Primum,” I don’t tell people how to write; they get to choose that path on their own. Then second, I don’t tell people what to write; their Girls in the Basement will choose that path for them. What’s left? Pretty much “how to write better while sticking to the way you want to write and the stories you want to tell.” Which is the place where I started from in planning the last four courses.

The first course is a romance genre survey which means talking about romance as a writer and reader. There are many good things about this, but a key benefit is that it gives students the first eight weeks of the forty to write their novels. Reading story (or watching story) is a fertile source of inspiration, and talking about writing often spurs people to actually put words on a page. But for me, as the teacher batting clean-up in the next four courses, it’s a chance to say, “Write as much of your novel as you can before you hit 522 because after that, we’re going to be playing in that sucker and I want you to have your story established before I start poking at it.

Given that, then we can talk about character and community and love and sex in 522 with side excursions into scene structure and critique methods, and then segue into plotting and novel structure in 523 with side excursions into synopsis writing, and then do heavy-duty workshopping of the first thirty to fifty pages of the novel in 524, and then finish up by putting a proposal together and researching publishing in 550. If the student keeps writing in the background through all of that, it’s entirely possible to have a complete ms in forty weeks. The laundry won’t get done, but the book might.

My task these past couple of weeks as I gathered all my notes and tables and lists together was to isolate assignments that would push the book forward without taking too much writing time away from it. Obviously one way to do that is to assign scenes from the book, and there are a couple of those, but I think it’s probably more helpful to require students to think about what they’re doing in the book as a whole. So while students in 522 will have to turn in the first scene in their books and then revise it after it’s critiqued, they’ll also have analytical exercises where they look at both the romantic and sexual arcs in their stories. And of course a conflict box because I don’t teach without a conflict box. So it’s a mix of actual scenes from the book, exercises about crucial content in the book, and critiques of other students work that help crystalize story theory for use later in their own work. In eight weeks. Right now, 522 has five assignments: A multi part story core analysis, the first scene in the book, critiques of four other students in the class, a multi part story emotion analysis, and a rewrite of that first scene. I think that’s do-able without making anybody insane while covering the tougher parts of character in the romance novel. I think.

I have to go put 523 together now from my notes, so I’ll probably disappear again for awhile, but I’d really like to know if this sounds like it’s both enough for a good education and not so much that the student weeps helplessly because she’s so far behind. And I’d also like to know what you’d want from a creative writing course that focused on the romance novel. I know this plan will change once we’ve taught the first five classes–education like war makes plans that stop when the battle begins–but I want to get it as right as possible the first time.

Verisimilitude, That Bitch

One of the things that kept bothering me while I was writing Liz is that I have no idea what it means to be a single thirty-something in the twenty-first century. While I realize that there are many single-thirty-something-in-the-twenty-first-century experiences, I don’t know any of them, so I kept pulling back and thinking, “Does this sound like a single-thirty-something-in-the-twentieth-century or, worse, a-single-sixty-something-in-the-twenty-first-century?” Because while truth isn’t necessary to fiction, verisimilitude is. One “that would never happen” and your story falls apart.

I’d already had a conversation with Mollie about this because Liz was going to end up with an RV at the end of the book, not an airstream, a regular albeit short Class B RV. For me, it was a move in Liz’s arc: at the beginning of the novel the only home she has is her car and she’s alone and at the end she’s stuck with this RV (she didn’t choose it) and she’s adopted a dog. But Mollie said, “Nobody I know would want an RV, that’s for people like you and Dad.” I said, “Lani wrote a book about a young woman who lived in an Airstream and it was great.” She said, “That’s an Airstream. Airstream’s are different.” I decided she was wrong because there are a lot of thirty-somethings out there with RVs, but I wasn’t completely sure and that was the problem, not being sure. For Liz’s kind of life, an RV seemed like a genius idea, but it if was something where a reader would say, “That would never happen . . .”

Of course the tricky part in all of this is that verisimilitude is in the eye of reader. There’s always going to be somebody who doesn’t believe your story. I once got an e-mail from a teacher who’d read Crazy For You that said, “The least you could have done was research teaching.” I e-mailed back and said, “I spent fifteen years in the Beavercreek Public School System; your teaching experience is not necessarily everybody’s teaching experience.” So even the stuff that I know for sure isn’t right for some readers. Still, the idea is to get it in the ballpark of believability for the majority. And I really don’t know if Liz was, if any of the characters were, or if they weren’t being seen through some kind of time warp, and they were people from the eighties transported to the teens. Last century fiction. It’s a problem.

Which is why dark fairy tales appeal to me now. Fantasy. A different world where I don’t have to worry about what’s true in this time, I just have to worry about what’s true about human beings in general. I can cast off the shackles of social verisimilitude and stick to psychological truths.

Although as we’ve brainstormed Fairy Tail Lies, there’s still going to be an RV. It’s a gypsy caravan but it’s an RV. I really want an RV.

But I digress. In the rock-throwing scene, I had to do a first person I-just-got-hit-by-a-rock narrative. I researched concussions, trying to find the sweet spot between truly-injured and quick-recovery and then did a kind of stream-of-consciousness thing which is when Lani put a note in the manuscript that said something like “NOW I like her.” But I kept going back to it, wondering if I’d gotten the concussion right, and especially wondering if I’d gotten the thirty-something-single-woman-with-a-concussion-in-the-twenty-first-century right. This writing gig is not for wimps.

So now I’m curious. Here’s Liz getting hit on the head with a rock. How’s the verisimilitude on a scale of one to ten, ten being spot on and one being “You really are old and out of touch, aren’t you?”

* * * * *

Molly followed me out a minute later. “What happened?”

“I toyed.”

“With Vince?” She grinned. “I’m sorry I missed that.”

“I barely escaped with my virtue,” I said and started to walk home.

Molly followed behind me, laughing at the idea of my virtue. I told her we had to walk since if Vince picked us up for DUI, I’d have to trade sex for a-get-out-of-jail-free card instead of the T-shirt. And I really wanted that shirt.

“That’s not all you want,” she said, and held out her hand. “Give me your phone.”

I was too tired to argue so I handed it over, wondering who the hell she was going to drunk dial with my caller ID, but wanting to get home and fall into bed more than I wanted to know who was going to be yelling at me the next day. She tapped on it for a minute or so as we walked, and she then handed it back.

“Vince’s number is in there now, in your favorites. You get lonely later, give him a call. I’m pretty sure he’ll deliver to the house.”

I almost considered it, just to see Vince’s face when he saw all the bears in my old bedroom, but I said, “No, thanks, leaving tomorrow, no complications.”

She laughed, but when we reached the sidewalk to front of my mother’s little ranch house, she stopped.

“I’m so glad you’re home, Lizzie,” she said, and even with a couple of beers in her, she sounded sober about that. “When you left . . . it hasn’t been right since.”

“I’m not staying,” I said, but she hugged me anyway.

“Just . . . come back again,” she said, and then she let go and went off down the walk to her own bed three houses down.

I thought about going with her to make sure she was all right, but instead I watched her until she turned down her own path to the porch, and when I heard her front door close, I headed for my own bed.

But when I was halfway down the walk, something moved in the shadows beside the house, next to the bedroom windows, so I stopped. Burney didn’t have much of a peeping Tom problem when I was there last, but it could have changed.

Then I remembered it was Burney. Of course it hadn’t changed. I took another step and then something definitely moved in the dark at the side of the house. It was just a shape in the shadows, but it was there.

“Hey!” I said, and started toward it, and something came winging out of the dark and landed in the dirt beside the walk. “Hey!” I yelled and bent over to see what it was, and about the time I registered that it was a rock from my mother’s rock garden, something smacked me hard on the temple and the lights went out.

CHAPTER

When I came to, it was still dark, the grass was cool, and all I could think of was, I knew this town was going to kill me someday.

After that, I had a hard time concentrating—Somebody threw a rock at me? Really? Son of a bitch—and time passed while I tried to figure out what to do. I couldn’t spend the rest of my life in the grass. The neighbors would notice and my mother would be disappointed. I definitely had to sit up.

I sat up slowly and felt my stomach lurch.

Nausea. That was a bad sign.

I put my hand up to my throbbing temple and my fingers came away wet.

Blood. Another bad sign.

I lay back down in the grass. If people were trying to kill me, they’d just have to come and get me, I was in no shape to go find them.

I should probably find somebody for help, though. Because if I didn’t, I’d still be in the grass when the sun came up and the neighbors would see and my mother would be disappointed.

My head spun for awhile and I tried to think of who to call. Not the neighbors because my mother would be so—

My head really hurt.

I felt around in the grass until I found my purse. It was harder because I couldn’t sit up. Sitting up seemed like something I might do later in life, like belly dancing or learning the trapeze.

Somebody hit you with a rock, a voice said. Call for help, you idiot.

The voice was inside my head, which was disconcerting because it certainly wasn’t my voice, I would never call for help. People call me for help, I do not call them. I do not need help, I rescue myself.

Of course not being able to sit up was going to make that harder. If I didn’t get help, I was still going to be in the grass when the sun came up and the neighbors would see and my mother would be disappointed.

I had my purse in my hand. I fumbled inside it and found my cellphone and punched at the screen until I managed to find the “Favorites” list.

I could call my mother, she was only about twenty feet away, but she’d be so disappointed. I could call Molly and she’d come get me, but then M.L. would know and yell at my mother because I was such an embarassment to the family, and my mother would be so disappointed. I could call Cash—no, I could not call Cash. Mac would come get me. Good old Mac. I stared at the phone screen, trying to remember why I’d want to call Mac. Then I saw Vince’s name.

I punched my finger at his name. It took a couple of tries. My head hurt. I listened to the phone whirr as I stared up at the stars. They appeared to be moving.

Somebody said, “Hello,” and it took me a minute to remember I was on the phone.

“Hello,” I said.

“Liz?”

“Wow. You can recognize my voice?”

“No, I can read my phone screen.”

“Oh.” That was vaguely disappointing. It shouldn’t have been disappointing. It wasn’t as if I expected him to remember my voice. But it would have been kind of nice–

“Liz? Are you there?”

“I think somebody hit me with a rock.”

“What?”

“I think somebody hit me with a rock.”

“Where are you?”

He was so damn calm. If somebody called me and said, “I think somebody hit me with a rock,” I’d be more animated. I’d say, “Oh, my GOD, A ROCK?” And then–

“Liz?”

“I’m on the front lawn.”

“You’re at your mom’s house?”

“Yes.”

“I’m on my way.”

His phone clicked off, and I went back to watching the stars swirl around. I kept expecting them to stop because I was getting better, but they just kept going. So I thought about Lavender, doing all the right things and clearly a suitable bride for Cash; and Cash leaning close in the bar, looking so damn good; and that kiss with Vince the cop that was also damn good, verging on great, although that could have been the alcohol talking. And then he’d recognized my voice. No, wait, he hadn’t, I’d just wanted him to recognize my voice, but for why? I asked myself. I was still pondering that when a shadow loomed over me and the stars went away.

“If you’re here to kill me,” I said, “a cop is on the way.”

“That would be me,” Vince said. “Can you sit up?”

“Sure,” I said, and sat up, and when he held out his hand, I took it and let him pull me to my feet. “Just like this morning,” I said and threw up all over the lawn.

“Hospital,” he said, and then I was sitting in his jeep, so very tired, and I tried to sleep, but he kept saying, “Liz!” in this sharp, cop voice, and once when I tried to sleep anyway, he even grabbed my shoulder and said, “Stay with me!”

“Where else am I gonna go?” I said. “I’m in your car.”

And then I saw the hospital sign, and after that, I really do not remember.

When Life Gives You Lemons, Go Out for a Coke

Those of you who read the ReFab blog know this has been the Year from Hell for me. It’s not the worst year I’ve ever had, that would be 1983, but this is definitely in line for second: since January, I’ve found out I have diabetes, I was diagnosed with stage eight AMD which means I’m probably going to be legally blind but nobody knows if that’ll be next week or ten years from now, my much-loved terminally-ill puppy died, financial and family needs are going to break up Squalor on the River, and my career, formerly on life support, just turned to me and said, “Really? You’re going to keep on doing what doesn’t work, REALLY?” and took a leave of absence. Paraphrazing Liz in the now-on-the-shelf Lavender’s Blue, “You don’t have to hit me with a rock to get me to change. Oh, wait, I’m still doing the same thing. Maybe you do.”

So I’d finished the first almost-fifty-thousand words of Liz but it wasn’t working for me. There were parts of it I loved, but I really hated writing it (yes, that should have been a clue) and I couldn’t figure out how to make it better. Lani said, “You always hate whatever you’re working on, give it to me to read,” so I did. I also sent it to Jen who said, “I can’t wait to read it.” And I gave it to Mollie because she has a marketer’s eye for fiction. And when the reactions came back, they were pretty much the same, although worded with different levels of tact: Don’t like Liz, don’t understand what her problem is, don’t care because she has no goal, and oh yeah, the story really hasn’t started yet. Or as Lani put it, “Once she gets hit on the head by the rock, it’s great!” That’s about 25,000 words in.

When I began to think about, it started to make sense. I was writing about a woman going back to a home town she hated, a place that made her feel stupid, insignificant, and above all wrong, an outsider from birth. The fact that nobody in town was actually doing anything to make her feel that way escaped me because what mattered to me was the way she felt. That’s interesting in real life but death in fiction because fiction has to make sense. Which is when I had my epiphany: I’d completely missed what was going on because I was writing in first person. Liz’s reactions were identical to my reactions to my hometown and I hadn’t separated them out. The whole project was doomed from the get-go because using fiction as therapy makes for bad fiction. I wish I’d had this eureka moment three years ago, but I don’t think I could have. I think sometimes, when you’re clinging really hard to what you know, reason is not what pries your fingers from a dead world, it’s a short sharp blow to the knuckles that makes you let go.

In my case, it’s been a series of short, sharp blows, and it’s taken its toll. When Krissie was here, we were all in the car and I caught sight of myself in the rear view mirror. I looked like death, pasty and haggard with sunken eyes. I said, “Dear god, I look awful,” and Lani said, “No, you’re beautiful,” and Krissie said, “Yeah, you do. You’ll be okay again, you just had too much hit you too fast.” And I looked in that mirror again and thought, I have to do something about this, I have to take care of myself. After I finish Liz.

Because, of course, Liz is where the money comes from. I finish Liz, I get enough money to live on. I don’t finish Liz, I’m screwed. And now I’m not going to finish Liz, at least not in the foreseeable future because aside from moving her into third person, I’m not sure what to do about saving her or even if I should save her. There is a real sense of freedom in this: I have been carrying Liz with me every day for three fucking years. If she’d been a pleasure to spend time with, it might not have been so bad, but aside from the stuff after the part where she got hit with a rock, which really is good, she was mostly a pain in the ass. And now I’m not sure what to do with her. I do know what to do with You Again now, ironically, but I’m not sure going back to a traditional novel is what I should do. I think trying to do the same things I’ve been doing for twenty-two years may be the reason the universe hit me with multiple rocks.

So I’m cogitating. I have plenty to do. The McDaniel lessons are keeping me busy and interested. I’m working on Writewell, which is a whole new language, audio and video. I am drawn to the FTL short stories, a form I’m familiar with but haven’t worked in much. I am tempted by doing You Again as a screenplay just to learn screenplay structure and by the graphic novel form, both because I think those are interesting forms and because I think I can do them when I can’t see a computer screen any more, unlike novels which I’m positive I can’t write by dictation. But mostly I think it’s time to do something new because, frankly, I’m not sure I can take another rock to the head.

So the rest of this year is Reinventing Crusie because the old Crusie went somewhere else. Sometimes I wish she’d come back because I liked her books and she had a drive I now seem to lack, but I think it’s good that she’s gone. Frankly, she was exhausting: the dumb bitch once did a forty-city book tour. It isn’t so much that I don’t know how she did it as it is I don’t know WHY she did it. She must have had her reasons, but they’re not mine any more.

So right now, I’m relieved and kind of curious to see what’s going to happen next. I told Mollie I wanted to be in New Jersey by Christmas, and Mollie said, “Then I’ll make it happen,” and she will. No idea where she got that kind of steely-eyed determination, but I admire her immensely. Lani and Krissie and I are making plans for a new and better Squalor community in a few years, one which will not involve air travel for any of the three of us, and that’s going to be good, too. And I will make things. Crocheted dragons and brightly-colored sundresses and fantasy short stories and mixed media paintings, I’m going to do everything I’ve ever wanted to do before my lights go out. And then, I’ll do something different in the dark.

You know, that’s a good title: Something Different in the Dark. I bet I could write a story with that title . . .

Post 900

I’ve been reading through old Argh posts, starting at the beginning when I hadn’t enabled comments, and it’s like reading a diary. Sometimes it’s like reading a diary with shadows on it because I read the posts and then I remember what was happening behind the scenes or what happened next that changed everything I thought when I wrote the post. And every now and then I stumble across an unpublished draft, and those are interesting, too, what I thought at the time and why I didn’t publish. There are 899 posts in the archive, 823 published and 76 in draft form, and this is the nine hundredth one I’ve written (824th published). The big take away is that often the best things I remember about a post aren’t in the post, they’re in the comments. The GHH post, for example, was fun, but it was the comments section that made that one epic, inventive minds that took an absurd concept and ran with it. That happens over and over again: I read an old post and think, But there was more, and then keep reading into the comments because that’s where the juice is. There are 2325 comments, and I am very, very grateful for everyone of them because this blog is much more interesting as a conversation than as a monologue.

Thank you.

Edited to add:

I was wrong about the number of comments. There are 2,235 PAGES of comments. Number of actual comments: 46, 488. Thatsa lotta comments. Really, THANK YOU.

Embellishment

I’ve been going through old Argh posts, and I found this draft from June 22, 2007 that I never published. Since I still want a rose, I’m publishing it now. (Might want to brace yourself for more Lost Posts from Argh until I get the archives cleaned out.)

When I was in New York last year, I was having brunch with Mollie in one of those little hole-in-the-wall cafes with eight tables that make you wonder how they stay in business until you taste the food, and at the table next to us, a man and a woman were talking and laughing quietly. And I couldn’t keep my eyes off the woman. She was beautiful, but beautiful women usually do not make me stare. So I thought it must be the color: she had the most beautiful coffee with cream skin and she was wearing subtly different shades of a soft, warm, minty green in these beautiful floaty fabrics, and she had a rose in her curly hair that was the same gorgeous green, and I wanted to paint a room in her just so I could sit in it and feel wonderful. So when we got up to go, I leaned over and said, “Thank you so much, you’re so beautiful, and I’ve had such a good time looking at you,” and she blushed (and that was beautiful) and said, “Thank you!” and the guy across the table from her laughed and said, “Hey, what about me?” and I said, “You’re beautiful, too” (he was) “but you don’t have a rose.”

That’s when I realized that the tipping point was the rose. Not just that she had a rose in her hair, not just that it was green, not just that she was laughing and alive, but that she was laughing and alive with a green rose in her hair, that she was the kind of woman who got up that morning and put a green rose in her hair and then went out and laughed.

While I was staring at her in that café, Mollie was sitting across from me, equally beautiful but completely different. Mollie is tall and slender and cool and blonde, she can wear one of those little black stretchy dresses and four inch heels and leave her hair smooth and plain and stop traffic just by smiling, which I know, because I’ve seen her do it. And in NYC, that’s no small feat. But Mollie has embellishments, too, they’re just Mollie details: small, gold earrings and the diamond her husband gave her, on a gold chain around her neck because she doesn’t like rings. That’s it, and for her that’s perfect. Pinning a rose on Mollie would be dumb; not pinning a rose on the woman in the café would be a crime.

Which of course led back to me. All roads lead to me. (Hey, it’s my blog.) There’s a part of me who’d like to be a put-a-rose-in-my-hair kind of woman, but I can’t. It’s not just that green roses wouldn’t play in the IGA in southern Ohio, it’s that I’m not a green rose kind of woman. The woman in the cafe was clearly a pin-a-rose-in-her-hair-everyday kind of person and she must have made people smile all over the city that day. Mollie can wear her single diamond on a chain with her sweats and it’s perfect. Me, not so much. Because the thing about that kind of embellishment is that the minute you try, it’s all over. (I did have a short period in my life where I had little umbrellas in my hair but that was in Maui. You can get away with damn near anything in Maui. I’m talking about reality here.)

I think this may also be why I’ll never be able to join the red hat club. I see those hats and I covet them, but I put them on and they not only look wrong, they feel wrong. It’s not just that my face is moon-like; I’ve seen women with moon faces who look fabulous in those hats. It’s not that I’m not a hat person, there are hats I look just fine in. I think it has something to with the fabulous Ladies Who Lunch persona, which I admire no end, but which I am not, just as I also can’t go Goth or preppie. Which led me finally to the question, What the hell am I?

Which is pretty much the basic question of existence, right? Who am I? And I know you’re supposed to go up on the mountain and gaze into your navel to find that out, but I’m to my ass in alligators here with writing and my family and trying to stay healthy and lose weight because if I die, the whole “Who am I?” question becomes moot, so I need a short cut to personal enlightenment.

Which led me back to embellishment. Maybe I just haven’t been paying attention. Maybe there’s the Perfect Thing crying out to me that I’ve been spiritually wearing all along. Besides dog hair and a harried expression.

So I went to my closet to find myself. I have a hatbox full of fake flowers that I pin to my blazers, but I don’t wear them that often because it usually doesn’t occur to me, so I’m thinking lapel flowers are probably not me. I have some beautiful scarves, but scarves in general are too fussy, the one exception being the big jacquard one that Bob gave me for my birthday last year; the only thing wrong with it is that people keep borrowing it to try it on and then trying to sidle off with it. And there’s the jewelry I cherish, the cherry earrings that Kari designed, and the odd gold earrings I bought in the Village, and the silver bracelet Brooke gave me, and the Lea Stein butterflies . . . I wear them all but only when I’m paying attention, and I’m not seeing a pattern. I want to see my Rose, you know?

And then it occurs to me that since I work at home, most days it’s a fifty-fifty bet whether I’ll bother with underwear, let alone a Rose. That perhaps embellishment for me is not in the cards, that I am not a Rose person, that maybe what I do instead is put Roses on my characters. And sure enough there’s Agnes with her black-rimmed glasses and Cranky Agnes apron, and Mare has heart-shaped sunglasses and her Anti-Pesto coveralls and her Corpse Bride dress, and I’m suddenly all over this idea, and my future heroines are definitely going to have Roses, whether they turn out to be flowers or not. That woman in the diner is still so vivid to me, and that’s what I want, vivid characters. That’s the answer, my Rose is my creativity, I’ll give Roses to my characters.

And really, I don’t need a Rose. The last thing I need is some whacko coming up to me in diner because I’ve got a flower in my hair. That woman probably thought I was insane. Much better to not have a Rose. I’ll just sit quietly over here in the corner and make up stuff about people who have Roses.

Really, that’s better.

Much more practical.

I want a Rose, damn it.

Don’t Keep Calm

Warning: Profanity below. Or is it obscenity? It’s like porn and erotica, I never know the difference. Whatever, if rough language offends you, do not read on. Although really, if rough language offends you, what are you doing here? Anyway, I’m having a bad day so this is a pretentious rant. You have been warned.

You know, you give the world a classic graphic, and everybody screws with it and pretty soon it’s dead. I guess we just can’t have nice things.

I am, of course, talking about this:



It was a morale poster originally produced in WWII Britain in case of invasion, only given limited distribution because the invasion never came, and then forgotten, which seems inexplicable now given how its re-emergence has made its variations legion. The only thing I can think of is that Britons in 1939 had bigger things to think about than being cute with government propaganda. (A visual history of the poster is here; google the phrase and click “Images” to see more variations than you can imagine.)

And now the damn thing is everywhere. If it had stayed in its original form, I’d be fine with it. I think the original is brilliant, right up there with the “I Heart NY” logo, its simplicity emphasizing its emotional content and impact. Plus it’s British. It sounds British. That’s a stiff-upper-lip poster if there ever was one, with the not-so-subliminal footnote from British history: “We won.” And they won not in any small part due to their dogged determination to keep on going while the bombs fell. Yes, I know we helped, I know without American intervention it might not have turned out so well. And I also know that somebody’s going to say that carrying on hasn’t always served the English in good stead, that the Romans invaded Britain and conquered the Anglo Saxons, and then the Normans/French invaded Britain and conquered the Anglo Saxons, but I think you have to take a close look at the “conquered” part because if you notice, the international common language today is not French and it sure as hell isn’t Latin. Keep calm, carry on, and eventually, the world will see it your way. Or at least say it your way. And to keep that spirit going you hang up posters that perfectly capture that Anglo-Saxon spirit, and then seventy years later the Americans take the poster and fuck it up. I’m assuming we’re the only ones dicking with it, but it’s probably everybody. Still, I blame us. We did the same thing with Coupling.

I’m not a purist, I’m good with the idea of people doing their own interpretations of a classic–I love the ShakespeaRe-Told version of The Taming of the Shrew much more than the original–but in order to make a successful parody/homage, you have to (a) understand the original at a deep enough level to play off the subtext and (b) be smart enough to make it better. And the vast majority of the derivative posters I’ve seen have been subtext-free and dumb.

The Keep Calm subtext is pretty close to the surface: Keep calm and your natural strength and endurance will carry you through. It reminds people that they are strong, it reinforces a basic human need to keep on going and rewards the reader by saying, “You, YOU will survive because you WILL keep going. It’s the Way We Do Things.” So if you’re going to rif on that, you have to start with same basic idea: Keep Calm and (do this thing I’m telling you to do and you’ll survive). The possibilities there are huge and usually missed. For example:

Here’s a clue: putting two exhausted memes together does not re-energize either of them, especially when they have no relationship to each other.

Then there’s:

Keep Calm and Eat Cupcakes

Keep Calm and Eat a Brownie

Keep Calm and Have Dessert

Keep Calm and Have a Beer

Keep Calm and Drink On

Keep Calm and Drink Coffee

If you’re an American, those variations make sense: we’ve been sedating ourselves with food for decades, so eating is our way of carrying on. Still not original, intelligent, or surprising, but at least there’s some meaning there.

More annoying to me are the ones that are just plays on words, most of them obvious:

Keep Calm and Hang On (says the same thing as the original, just not as well)

Keep Calm and Rock On (says the same thing as the original, just not as well)

Keep Calm and Party On (says the same thing as the original, just not as well)

Keep Calm and Marry On (no, that’s not clever because there’s a royal marriage)

Keep Karma and Carry On (Huh?)

Keep Calm and Carrion (it sounds like the original except we changed that word, get it? GET IT?)

Keep Calm and Wear A Thong (written by a fourteen-old-boy who then snorted until Pepsi came out his nose)

Even those are better than the ones where the re-designer just wanted to shove his or her obsession in:

Keep Calm and Love Twilight Forever

Keep Calm and Watch Glee

Keep Calm and Come to the Dark Side

Keep Calm and Love Running (see if it said “Keep Calm and Keep Running,” it would have been great)

So which ones do work? I like the ones that are tied to pop culture memes that are still going strong, giving the old message a new context:

Keep Calm and Boldly Go

Keep Calm and Call the Doctor

Keep Calm and Don’t Blink

Keep Calm and Call Giles

Don’t Panic and Carry a Towel

Those all work because they change the context, not the subtext. It’s still “Stay calm and do this and everything will be all right,” but now it’s tied to a different world. The close tie to the subtext is why that last one works even though none of the words are the same: it still means the same thing. As opposed to

(crickets)

I will also confess to a fondness for the ones that screw with the subtext:

Panic and Run Away

Hide Yer Wife, Hide Yer Kids

Freak Out and Call Mom

But the really clever parodies are the ones that access the subtext in a way that creates the shock of the new. The reversals above, while fun, are just that, the flip sides of the original. Great parodies take the original where it has not gone before while staying faithful to the sense of their origins. My three favorites are below (the middle one is the zombie apocalypse, the last one is courtesy of Toni Causey):

But the best one of the bunch, the one that has the most emotional impact, the one that means something, is this:

Over seventy years old, its meaning assaulted by thousands of imposters and wannabes, and it’s still the best. Keep calm, little poster. You’re going to outlast all the rest.

Research Help: The After Part of Manslaughter

Are there any lawyers in the audience? (I know there’s at least one, but I thought I’d ask in general.) I need some opinions on a what-if so I can figure out the most likely chain of events. I don’t need to know what absolutely would happen because I don’t thing that’s possible with the law; I just want to know what’s most likely to happen so that the story is plausible so readers won’t say, “That would never happen.”

The situation is this:

Two people have an argument. Person A attacks Person B and Person B is knocked unconscious accidentally. Person B is lying on the floor, bleeding profused from a head wound. Person A turns and walks away. Person B bleeds out, dying from that and not the head wound.

I’m pretty sure that’s manslaughter not murder because there was no intent to kill, but I think it’s voluntary manslaughter (there was provocation in that there was an argument and it got personal) not involuntary. After that, I’m even more clueless, so my questions are:

What crime, if any, did Person A commmit beyond assault and battery? That is, what is Person A most likely charged with when he or she is arrested?

If Person A has no priors and has strong ties to the community, I’m assuming there will be bail and Person A will go home. How long after Person A is arrested will the case most likely go to court?

Assuming Person A is convicted, what is the most likely sentence?

Again, I don’t need to know what absolutely would happen because nobody can predict that. I just need to be plausible. We’re looking for the Realm of Possibility here or the Most Likely Outcome.

Thank you.

ETA:

This is Ohio’s take on manslaughter:

Voluntary manslaughter is typically described as a “heat of passion” homicide. As such, it is

defined as,

no person, while under the influence of sudden passion or in sudden fit of rage, either

of which is brought on by serious provocation occasioned by the victim that is

reasonably sufficient to incite the person into using deadly force, shall knowingly

cause the death of another or the unlawful termination of another’s pregnancy (Ohio

Revised Code, §2903.03, 1996).

Voluntary manslaughter is treated as a first-degree felony in Ohio.

According to the text, involuntary manslaughter involves negligence on the part of the offender.

Under Ohio law, however, the negligence level of culpability is not used. Instead, involuntary

manslaughter is defined as,

no person shall cause the death of another or the unlawful termination of another’s

pregnancy as a proximate result of the offender’s committing or attempting to

commit a felony (Ohio Revised Code, §2903.04, 2004).

Involuntary manslaughter also involves the death of another while committing or attempting to

commit a misdemeanor. As indicated earlier, murder is defined as causing the death of another

while committing or attempting to commit a first- or second-degree felony. If an individual

causes the death of another while attempting to a commit third-, fourth,-or fifth-degree felony or a

misdemeanor, he can be charged with involuntary manslaughter. Involuntary manslaughter

during the commission of a felony is considered a first-degree felony; during the commission of a

misdemeanor, it is considered a third-degree felony.

Which still doesn’t tell me what’s most likely to happen in real life.

Critique and Cogitation

I gave Lani and Krissie the first two acts of Liz to read, knowing there were big problems but not knowing what they were. That’s a major problem in writing a book: if you knew what the problems were, you wouldn’t create them, but only somebody outside the book can see them. Lani gave me the manuscript with track changes marked which is the best way to critique since you can make the changes right in the computer on the same doc, and a lot of them were easy fixes, things I could do right away. The rest fell into two camps: big fixes I’m going to have to think about (not whether to make them but how), and things where I could see her point, but what she wanted me to do was wrong.

The second group is where the pitfalls lie. The temptation to say “No, that’s not right because of XYZ” is huge, but you can’t say that immediately; if you do say it immediately, you’re probably wrong because it’s a knee jerk reaction. You have to look at two things: why the critiquer said it and why you’re resisting it. The first one is the easy one: you figure out why she thought that needed changed and you see if you can find another way to achieve what she needed (she’s your first reader so you can’t dismiss it out of hand because other readers will feel that way, too). And then if you’re still reluctant to change it, figure out what your problem is.

For example, Liz’s mother was an alcoholic when she was growing up. She went into rehab when Liz was twelve and she’s been sober since, but the years from four to twelve were bad ones for Liz for a host of reasons, not the least of which is that she loved her mother and couldn’t help her, although like all children of alcoholics, she tried. When Liz comes back to town after a long absence, her aunt tells her that her mother is drinking again, and Liz refuses to believe it although it worries her. After that, she doesn’t look for evidence of drinking and she doesn’t tell anybody except one old friend, who tells her that it’s not true and gives her reasons why. Lani’s objections were two-fold: Liz would look for evidence, and if Liz was asking other people about it, she’d ask her mom. Because those two things were missing, Lani couldn’t understand Liz’s reaction to the news and it made Liz seem cold and uncaring.

So the first thing is why did Lani trip over that? And she gave me the answer earlier because she’s an extremely thorough and insightful critiquer: Liz’s emotions aren’t on the page enough. I’m not a highly emotional writer anyway, but in first person, there has to be more of an emotional spill, and it’s not there until Liz gets hit with a rock. So Liz not reacting with more action to her aunt’s accusation was part of an overall flaw in the first act: Liz doesn’t have much emotion on the page. And that’s going to have to be fixed.

But I’m still not going to have Liz look for bottles and ask her mother. I’ll make other changes in hopes of accomplishing the same thing, but not that way because it would be a character violation. As Krissie pointed out, children of alcoholics, families of alcoholics, in general do not discuss the problem with other people; it’s the big family secret, shameful, especially in a small town. For the same reason, Liz wouldn’t go looking for bottles, plus that would be a betrayal of her mother. I think she’d do exactly what she did do, try to dismiss what her aunt had said, and then an hour later when she runs into a good friend, and the conversation turns to the aunt, she’d blurt out what her aunt had said, and the friend would respond. Later on, something she does makes somebody else ask about it, and she shuts the conversation down, but aside from that one blurt, she wouldn’t mention it.

So that’s character and you don’t violate it. But part of the reason Lani wanted more is that Liz seems cold, so when I said, “She can’t do those things, it would be a character violation,” Lani suggested she be aware of why she wasn’t doing those things, to acknowledge the omissions in her thoughts. But I don’t think Liz would acknowledge that she’s falling back into old patterns, I don’t think she’d recognize that she’s in denial. That’s part of what denial is, not recognizing your own emotions. So somehow I have to fix what tripped Lani up without violating Liz’s character. This is the stuff that takes cogitation. Lani pointed out the problem for readers and it’s a big one if it prevents readers from attaching to her. Now I have to figure out the solution.

But as I said, I think Lani already pointed the way in the big stuff she said needed fixed, particularly in Liz’s detachment in the first act. She also pointed out some big sections that she wanted cut because they weren’t going anywhere, so I have to figure out how to accomplish what I did in those sections elsewhere because she’s right, they’re slowing the story down, but the big problem is Liz’s detachment. The thing is, Liz is detached for a reason and it’s a big part of her personality (although not part of her character; she’s not intrinsically detached), so I have to figure out a way to get the emotional involvement on the page without shifting Liz’s personality too much because losing that detachment is part of her character arc in this book. But you can’t explain to a reader, “Okay, you’re going to have a hard time attaching to Liz and worrying about her because she’s emotionally distant, but if you hang in there, she’ll change.” You need to get that attachment there, in the first scene, and keep it going.

And then there’s the problem I always have which is that Liz has a negative goal. I tried to change it from “Liz wants to escape Burney” to “Liz wants to get to Chicago” but neither one is working. So back to the drawing board on that, too. But the big takeaway is that I now know why I don’t like some of this book. Now all I have to do is figure out how to fix it.

Back to cogitating.

ETA: Micki asked what track changes looks like. The blue is Lani’s comment and the red is my edit.