Jennifer Crusie's Blog, page 308

We Don’t Need No Stinkin’ BA

You know, usually it takes eons for a college to make a change, but McDaniel is speedy. When Pam went back and said, “The BA is making things harder for people,” they asked me if I thought a bachelor’s degree was necessary, and I said, “Nora doesn’t have one,” so they decided to get rid of that requirement. One catch: you can’t get credit hours if you don’t have the bachelor’s, it more along the lines of an audit, but you’d get the same class everybody else gets. The big benefit is to the international students, I think, but I’m hazy on all of this because it’s administrative and I do not administrate. Pam knows all, however, so ask whatever questions you have in the comments and I’m sure she’ll swing by to answer them.

Yarnstorming

Those of you who roll your eyes because I collage as brainstorming should skip this post. No, really, it’s just going to make you crazy. Me, I’m already crazy. I’m stressed to the max on Liz, I’m kinda broke because Liz is three years over due (turns out they don’t pay you if you don’t turn anything in), and I knocked a glass of water into my good laptop last month and killed it. I loved that laptop and it was only four years old. It would have done me just fine for another four years. But no, I had to have a glass of water while I was typing, so I’ve been working on my old laptop, the one that’s about eight years old, and it’s kind of slow, and the letters have worn off the keys and it’s really heavy and its trackpad isn’t working really well–it’s a good old pal but it’s nothing to do a lot of work on without screaming. So this past month has been tense, nothing like January which almost finished me off, but I’ve got a lot pressing down on me and sometimes I just sit in the middle of the bed and vibrate.

At times like that, I crochet.

There’s something incredibly soothing about tying regular, rhythmic knots in beautiful yarn. It’s a lot like driving in that there’s an automatic repetition to it, my brain gets quieter, and when my brain gets quieter, I can hear the Girls better. But something odd happened this month. I’ve got a story series in the back of my head that’s percolating nicely, not time to write it yet, even if I could, which I can’t because of Liz, but still, it’s a rich, wonderful world, a kind of steampunk fairy tale world with some Pratchett and Dr. Who overtones along with whatever else gloms on (it’s sticky time for these stories). At the same time, Nerd Wars started up again last month. Nerd Wars is a group on Ravelry (big knitting/crocheting community, currently taking on the Olympic committee) that holds three-month-long tournaments, six challenges each month, and players compete as part of a team. I am generally on the Discworld team but this month I jumped ship and joined the ‘Punks, the new steampunk team, because I needed to learn more about steampunk which is one of slipperiest terms I’ve ever had to deal with. That was all I wanted, to learn more about steampunk, and instead I found myself crocheting things in my stories.

The first short story in the series is called “Zo White and Five Orphants” and it’s about a woman who is a kind of good (well, good-hearted, moral she isn’t) Fagin to five street kids who have, uh, issues with fitting into society. As in they’ve all been thrown out of decent orphanages for anti-social behavior. So Zo is trying to keep these five kids alive until they reach adulthood and can take care of themselves; although they’re cunning little bastards and damn good at survival, they’re still kids and need a parent. They end up in a derelict mansion of a serial killer and the cops have caught them there, and Zo has to talk the cops out of arresting the kids while trying to get them to understand that Odolf, the mansion’s owner, is not just a rich, important aristocrat but also part of a cult that rips out people’s hearts and eats them (Zo’s stepmother is also part of this cult, she sent Zo into the woods with a huntsman with instructions . . . no, wait, you know that story).

But it wasn’t until I started crocheting steampunk things that I realized that Odolf was also a mad inventor; I just thought he was an evil son-of-a-bitch hide-in-plain-sight killer, but now that I think back on it, anybody who rips hearts out as part of his social life is probably going to cross boundaries in other ways, too. I began with a steampunk dragon that had nothing to do with the stories, but the damn thing fought me all the way and would not be cute and slowly as I got it to where I wanted it to be it became part of the story, inadvertent brainstorming, something Odolf made as an amateur mechanic and magician, key word being “amateur,” as in “makes a lot of mistakes” and “still learning the basics.” In this society magic is strictly regulated and mechanical things are outlawed, and mixing magic and mechanics will get you the death penalty without any further discussion, so that means that Odolf’s dragon was not a just a cute pull toy (not really cute, either) it was alive and angry and on wheels. In fact, the whole house is full of angry, dangerous, illegal moving things, and now there are five sociopathic little kids in there, surrounded by dangerous toys, and Zo has to get them out by talking the cops into letting them go while keeping the kids from getting killed by the toys or vice versa . . . At least that’s the plan for the first story in the series.

So basically, it wasn’t until I started to make steampunk projects for Nerd Wars (go Team ‘Punks) that I realized I was brainstorming for the book by making some of the things in the stories, not all of them from Odolf’s mansion, but all of them from the stories I wanted to tell.

Take the dragon, Nelson. Nelson started out as a dragon pull toy, but he was such a bitch to make, I keep frogging and trying again, and then I looked into his shiny metal eyes and realized he, too, had the soul of a serial killer. In fact, I think Nelson was a kind of Dexter, a mixture of assassin and savior who moved through Riven society killing murderers who couldn’t be brought to justice, not because he was a hero, but because he was a batshit sociopath with a savior complex. Then he met Odolf and Odolf did the heart thing on him, but transferred his consciousness by magic into a failed mechanical dragon he’d made, complete with a little screaming golden-haired princess. So now there’s a little self-powered serial killer dragon rolling around the house, completely nuts, with razor sharp teeth and an ax to grind. I love Nelson. He’s like a feral, rabid Lassie, completely mad, who ends up completely attached to one of the orphants, little golden-haired Gleep, possibly because he associates her with his golden-haired princess or possibly because he recognizes an equally feral mind. Here’s Nelson:

Then there’s Lefty and Bob, Odolf’s bunny slippers. They were Odolf’s henchmen until they blew an assignment and he killed them and put their consciousnesses into his houseslippers, which were on wheels because Odolf was lazy. And then slippers grews razor-sharp ears and blank killer eyes and tried to skate Odolf down the stairs one night, so he hid them away in a box, where Owl, the mad inventor orphant finds them:

But the invention that gets a story of her own is Jane the Automaton. I started her as a project called the Automaton’s Girlfriend, after the automaton in Hugo, but then I began to think about her. She’s a writing automaton, like the one in Hugo, and I thought about Odolf, wanting more books from his favorite author, deciding the reason there weren’t more was because she was lazy, kidnapping her and putting her consciousness into an automaton he’d made and then eating her heart so that he could write books like her, only faster. And when he finds out that doesn’t work, he gives the automaton pen and paper and tries to force her to write, only to find out that Jane–by then she had a name–was smarter than he was. The more that I work on Jane, the more kindship I feel (wonder why?) and the more I like her. She’s dead, but she’s not going quietly. Jane’s my Nerd Wars dissertation which means I get three months to finish her, starting with a wooden Christmas angel that I spray painted silver and made a silver yarn wig for; clothing to come and possibly a steampunk cat to keep her company). Here’s Jane’s head shot:

I also made something from the Fairy Tale Lies collaboration that’s set in the same world; in my story, the hero is a mechanic (illegal) who lives in a treehouse in the forest. The tree his house is in is mostly surrounded by water, so he’s filled the river with mechanical fish to act as an early warning system, realizing too late that his section of the river is polluted with magic from an old alchemy dump, so the fish become sentient. This is one of his favorites, Algie:

So yarnstorming is like collage on steroids, thinking about where these things I’m making come from and how they work in that world. I have no idea if I’ll ever write these stories, but I know these characters will never die in my head because I have made the things they’ve touched. Yarnstorming is the best time I’ve had getting ready to write in years.

That’s Professor Crusie, Please

So those of you who have been dying to learn to write romance from me AND get college credit, you’re in luck. Starting in the fall, Pam Regis and I will teaching the McDaniel College Romance Writing Program, which is a five-course online graduate program with full college credit. (The graduate credit can be transferred into a McDaniel Master of Liberal Arts (MLA) degree.)

You’re probably wondering how this happened. (If not, pretend to wonder. I’m still amazed.) Nora Roberts has given McDaniel College a lot of money to start a Center for the Study of Romance, which includes support for the romance collection in the Hoover Library, the establishment of a minor in romance fiction, and–TA DA–an online romance writing program. The fabulous Pam Regis is the director of the center and she e-mailed me and said, “Hey, do you want to teach online?” and I said, “Yes,” and she said, “Good, help me design the courses,” and we did. So if you don’t like the way this is set up, blame me, because every time I said, “Do THIS,” Pam said, “Okay.” I love working with Pam.

The graduate level program has five eight-week courses that taken consecutively should result not only in a detailed understanding of romance and the writing of it but also in a complete and throughly critiqued proposal (by me, so stock up on wine and anti-depressants) ready to be sent to editors. (Yes, you have to take the courses consecutively.) You must have a bachelor’s degree (graduate level, folks), and a checkbook (it’s $1290 per course, so that’s about $6500 for forty weeks of The Crusie Theory of Novel Writing), and apply between July 1st and July 27th for the first course, “Reading the Romance,” which starts on August 27th (apply as in “submit a graduate application, application fee, and official undergraduate transcripts from an accredited institution verifying a degree”).

You can get the official descriptions of the courses through McDaniel, but here’s the quick-and-dirty version (Pam and I will both be teaching the first Reading the Romance Course, I’ll be teaching the last four, assuming I don’t get hit by a truck or do something so horrible McDaniel fires me):

o Reading the Romance:

This is pretty much “reading as a writer,” going through ten romance and women’s fiction novels and looking for characterization, structure, theme and all the other things that go into a great romance novel. Basically, we’re going to force you to read ten romance novels for college credit and then talk about how the writers did the things they did so you can do them, too. And since I know some of the writers, I’m going to rope them into talking about what they did (Susan Elizabeth Phillips, Barbara O’Neal, and Patricia Gaffney have already said they’ll do online chats, and I have enough dirt on Stuart and Rich that they’ll chat, too; I’ll be asking the others as we get closer to the class dates). It’s the Introduction to Romance As We See It before you get into the classes where I make you write it and show it to me and the other students in your class. Romance writing is not for wimps.

Required Reading:

Montana Sky, Nora Roberts

Heaven, Texas, Susan Elizabeth Phillips

Lord of Scoundrels, Loretta Chase

Indigo, Beverly Jenkins

Dogs and Goddeses, Anne Stuart, Lani Diane Rich, Jennifer Crusie

Wicked Lovely, Melissa Marr

The Saving Graces, Patricia Gaffney

How to Bake a Perfect Life, Barbara O’Neal

o Writing the Romance Novel I:

The second course is all about character and relationships, looking at the roles of the protagonist and antagonist in writing romance, the psychology of love and how to apply it in writing the romance, and the importance of community and all the relationships within it as both foil and subtext to the romance. We’ll workshop first scenes and first chapters and study the relationships in your novel-in-progress.

o Writing the Romance Novel II

The third course is about structure, how to use classic plot structure, scene structure, and focus in terms of time (pacing), voice, and theme. We’ll analyze the plot of your novel-in-progress and you’ll construct a polished synopsis.

o Romance Writing Workshop

This is where you put the first three courses all together, or How To Revise Your Novel. You’ll be doing mostly critiquing during this eight weeks, which is good because I found during my MFA that I learned a lot more critiquing other people’s work than I did doing my own.

o Publishing

And in the last eight weeks, you get the business course, how traditional publishing and e-publishing work (short version: it’s a casino, honey), how to work with agents and editors, and how to market your work. At the end of this course, you’ll know who you want to send your proposal to and you’ll have a good proposal to send: first thirty pages, synopsis, and query letter. What we don’t promise you: that you’ll get published. Absolutely no guarantees there, you just roll the dice and take your chances.

I’ll hold office hours online so you can come into a chat room and ask questions at specific times, plus we’ll have online meetings to discuss projects and critique work and chats with authors and others, but for the most part, you can work any time you want. Feel free to ask questions: we’re still putting the courses together so some things are still being decided, but the above description is pretty much what you’ll get. Any questions about credit hours and transfers and general admissions info should be directed to McDaniel or your own institution of learning.

Question: How is this different from Writewell?

Answer: It’s the difference between a really great bicycle and a Mercedes. At Writewell you get a lecture and support materials for a reasonable price, but you get no direct feedback from me. At McDaniel, you get me and the rest of your classmates, talking about writing in general and the romance genre in particular, and beyond that, discussing your work in particular. I can’t guarantee I’ll read your entire novel, but we’ll be talking about most of it every week over a span of forty weeks.

And now I must go back to work. Next up: Pictures of my crochet. Because I have the attention span of a gnat.

Andrew Stanton Is a Genius

Best talk on storytelling I’ve ever heard:

Andrew Stanton’s Ted Talk.

Who ARE These People?

So the Girls have been refusing to send up the dining room scene. I’ve done everything but sacrifice a chicken to them (I did, in fact, have chicken for dinner), and nada. I got a boost when somebody (must go back and find that person’s name to thank her) said something about Faye and Liz getting into over the rose petals at the beginning of the scene, and that was a big AHA! moment, but then . . . nothing.



So today I had to run errands which takes no thought process whatsoever, I just go places I’ve been a thousand times before and look at my list, and in the process I remembered something I forget every damn time: the Girls LOVE IT when I drive. Because all of a sudden, I started to think about the people in the scene, not Faye the bitch and Patsy the whack-job but who they were and what made them that way, and I realized I had a dining room full of interesting people. I stopped trying to plot the scene, which was getting me nowhere, and started to think about it from each point of view. Why was Faye there, what did she want, how was she justifying her behavior to herself? Why had Patsy shown up if she hated Lavender? How did Skye feel about her sister’s wedding? Why was Margot drinking and why did she take such an instant dislike to Liz? Or in short . . .

Who ARE these people?

And since I was stuck in a car for at least three hours–we live hell and gone from all interesting forms of commerce–I had plenty of time to myself in their heads, to dwell not only on where they were coming from but where they were going, how these characters were going to pay off in later books. I used to be the tech advisor for high school theater, and one of the things that the director (Hi, Becky!) used to tell the casts was that all characters were coming from somewhere when they walked on the stage and were going somewhere else when they left the stage and the actor needed to know that. Since writing is like acting except you get to play all the parts, this is crucial in scenes, too.

So the Girls are pleased with me right now. They’re not sending up a scene yet, I have more thinking to do, but not a lot. I’m pretty sure it’s there. I just have to apply the Joyce Carol Oates approach: “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?”

And remember that from now on, when the Girls are silent, to take them out for a spin.

The Who-Would-You-Cast Game

Enough of all this serious writing crap. Let’s play a game. Suppose you were casting Agnes and The Hitman. Keeping in mind that Agnes and Shane are both in their thirties, that Agnes has anger problems and is capable of forking somebody and Shane is a laconic professional killer, what actors would you cast? Extra points if it’s somebody more interesting than famous.

Insert Scene Here

So I completely cut the scene with Lavender at the door and that hellacious dining room scene. Now I have to fill in the blank.

I really hate filling in the blank. It the complete antithesis of the way I work, starting with a list of things that needs to happen and building the scene from that instead of starting with Girls and revising later. But I need this scene, sooooooo . . .

Protag vs. Antag:

Liz vs Faye

Liz’s goal:

Get Molly and get back to the bar.

Faye’s goal:

Control everything and get some money out of Lavender. (or something)

How does Faye block Liz?

Uh, asks her questions? Enlists her help? Gets her in a headlock?

How does Liz block Faye?

Disagreeing with her about the wedding?

How does this fit into the blank space in the book?

It’s the third scene in a row with a difficult mother. I’ll have to do something with that later.

It goes from Cash at the bar to Lavender at home.

It’s sandwiched between two bar scenes.

Who else is in here and what are they doing:

Patsy, being a pain in the ass.

Margot, drinking.

Skye, ?

Peri, wants to know about the bear.

Veronica, wants to be left alone

Where is Liz coming from when she enters the scene?

The bar where Duff made her mad and then Cash made her regretful, so she’s in a bad mood, wants to get out of the Blue house.

Where is Liz going to when she leaves?

Freedom or at least the bar again, nobody hassling her, no bad mothers.

What has to happen in this scene:

Lavender likes Liz.

Skye decides that Liz should take the dog.

Margot resents Liz.

Faye dislikes Liz.

Peri wants the bear.

What are the turning points?

When Liz says no to Faye.

When Lavender takes Margot’s glass.

Uh, that’s not enough. Or very good.

So that’s how I’m spending my evening. How about you?

The 12 Days of Liz: Day Twelve: Phoning It In

I like it when my POV characters have to do two things at once. More is even better, but I’ll take two. Anything that makes life harder for them is good. In this first Liz book, I have a character who can’t be in town with Liz but has to be strong on the page, the client Liz is ghostwriting for, Anemone Patterson. Solution: the phone.



Anemone calls Liz at least once a day, either nagging her to get to Chicago (Liz is trying) or asking for updates on what’s going on. She calls at pretty much the same time every day, which means that Liz is in the same place the first three days she calls, so I have a nice three-beat that can go haywire with everything else in the third act, plus it’s a subtle way to say “Twenty-four hours have passed,” giving readers something to hold onto as the plot rushes by. Mostly, though, Anemone always calls when Liz has something else she’s dealing with, and that makes life a lot more complicated which is bad for Liz and good for the book.

This is a chunk from the middle of one of those scenes:

The car door opened and Skye Blue slid into the front passenger seat. “I need to talk to you,” she said, looking over the seat at me, her face grimly pretty.

Obviously slouching hadn’t helped, so I sat up. “I’m on the phone with a client.”

“Who’s that?” Anemone said.

“Skye Blue, sister of the bride,” I told her.

“Skye Blue?”

“I’ll wait until you’re done,” Skye said.

“No,” Anemone said, “really? Skye Blue?”

“Sister Lavender and brother Navy,” I said, and Skye rolled her eyes.

“I assume her mother is a crack whore?”

“Drunk,” I said, and Skye jerked her head up. “Probably pills, too.”

“Is the daughter still there?”

“Yes, she’s waiting for me to get off the phone, but she doesn’t realize that this is a very important business call, so I can’t hang up, and she’ll have to go. Now, what do you want to tell me about this Linda person?”

“Lindsey. Nothing.” Anemone clipped off the word again. “You go ahead and talk to poor Skye Blue. That tells you everything you ever wanted to know about her mother. And when you’re done, get your butt up here.”

“Tomorrow,” I said. “I have to get rid of six hundred bears tonight, but tomorrow–”

“Bears?” Anemone said.

“Hello?” Skye said. “I need to talk to you.”

I sighed. “Make it fast,” I told her. “I’m on the phone.”

Skye smiled at me, as cute as could be. “I talked to Molly and she said you were the best person she knew.”

“So you brought the very best butter. What do you want?”

“You held Veronica the whole time you were at the house last night.”

I thought of that poor, trembling, overbred animal and thought, Not my problem. “So?”

“So Lavender’s going to have her put down.”

I straightened. “What? Why?”

“What?” Anemone said. “What’s wrong?”

“Cash doesn’t like the dog,” Skye said.

“Cash told her to kill her dog?”

“Who’s Cash?” Anemone said. “Oh, wait, that’s the bastard ex who dumped you three times. And now he’s a dog-killer? You really know how to pick them, Liz.”

“No, no,” Skye said to me. “He thinks Lavender’s giving her to a nice farm upstate or something.” She leaned against the back of the front seat, closer to me. “I need you to take the little beast. I’ll leave a door open and tell them she ran away.”

I could see Veronica, frozen in terror, as Lavender stalked toward her, death in her eyes. It didn’t seem plausible. Besides, I had not come back to town to fix everybody’s problems again. “Just take the damn dog yourself.”

“I can’t, I don’t have any place to take her that Lavender doesn’t know about.” Skye pressed against the seat, those violet eyes burning into mine. “Veronica’s a neurotic little mess, but she doesn’t deserve the needle.”

“Oh, hell.” I let my head fall back against the window. First the bears, then the rock, and now a dog.

“The needle?” Anemone said. “This woman is playing you, Liz.”

“I know,” I said into the phone.

Maybe my mother would like a dog.

“And then you can just take her with you when you leave town,” Skye finished up. “And no one will ever know.”

Yeah, I could see Veronica and me on the road; that was entirely doable. Jesus. “I’m not stealing a dog.”

“I’ll bring her to you,” Skye said. “My god, Molly said you were a kind person. The dog is going to be murdered.”

“Molly lied. Look I can’t save the whole freaking town. I have my hands full with Anemone’s book and my mother’s bears. Somebody else is going to have to be the Dog Rescuer.”

“Thanks for putting the book first,” Anemone said.

The driver’s door opened . . .

And then Peri and Margot get in. It’s like a clown car, ending with the arrival of Lavender and her conversation with Skye and Liz:

“But you’re going to save the dog, right?” Skye said, and the driver’s seat door opened and Lavender slid in.

“Well, this is cozy,” she said, and the temperature in the car fell about thirty degrees.

Since it had been chilly to begin with, I said, “Okay, my client is on the phone. I’m working here.”

“So what are we talking about?” Lavender said, ignoring me to stare at Skye.

“Who’s the new talent?” Anemone said.

“You offing your dog,” I said to Lavender.

“What?”

That at least got her eyes off her sister and onto me. Progress in communication.

“This is the dog-killing bride?” Anemone said. “Oh, goody.”

I ignored her to get rid of Lavender. “As I understand it, you’re planning on having Veronica put down because Cash doesn’t want her. Skye asked me to find a home for her. The two of you should go someplace else and argue about that now.”

Lavender swung back to Skye. “You told her that?”

Skye leaned forward, practically spitting. “You’re going to have her put to sleep!”

“No, I’m not.” Lavender pulled back. “Good lord, Skye, get a grip.”

I looked at Lavender. “So you’re not going to have her put down.”

“Who the hell do you think you are?” Lavender snapped.

“I think I own this car, and I’m trying to talk to my client, and your entire fucking family has wasted a good chunk of my afternoon, but since we’re all here and chatting, I also think you’re going to kill your dog, and it’s a bad, bad idea because people will find out and somebody will tell the press and they’ll use it in the election against Cash. America loves dogs and you’re going to be a dog-killer. Huge liability. Don’t do it. Are we done now?” I looked from Lavender to Skye. “Good. Don’t let the car door hit you on the way out.”

I kept my phone clutched to my ear as I opened my laptop and clicked on the first of Anemone’s e-mails. Fucking Blues who were still sitting in my car. Fucking Burney that still hated me and threw rocks at me. And fucking Anemone who’d sent the e-mails that were downloading into my inbox now, courtesy of the Porter’s WiFi, which I was stealing without a second thought. The first one was more stuff about martinis. I should introduce her to Margot. They’d have so much to talk about—

“Now what’s happening?” Anemone said.

“I’m reading your e-mails, all ten thousand of them,” I said.

“You know,” Skye said to me thoughtfully. “I was mad at you for a minute. But now I think I love you.”

I looked up and she was surveying me again, that summing-up look that was really annoying. “Fabulous. Go away.”

She nodded and got out of the car and closed the door, and I was alone with Anemone on the phone and Lavender in the driver’s seat, frowning at me.

“Is there anything else?” I said to Lavender.

“Cash said you never lie.”

“I’m no good at it. I need to work now.”

“Why did you come back to town?”

I thought about being rude, but it hadn’t worked before, so I said, “Because my aunt MariLou wrote me and told me my mother was going crazy because I hadn’t been home in fifteen years, and I felt guilty, so I bought a two-hundred-dollar five-foot purple bear and planned to drop it off and run on my way to Chicago. And then this car broke down. Willie is trying to find the part for it now. When he fixes it, I am leaving.”

She sat there for a minute, her eyes a little unfocussed from thinking hard. I say that not to imply that she was dumb, I didn’t think Lavender Blue was dumb. But this was something she had to wrap her mind around, and I knew how she felt. The Collective-Burney-Think was that I had come home to break up her wedding. It is very hard to think outside the Collective-Think when you’re living in Burney. Which is one of the many reasons why I’m never going to live in Burney again.

“I believe you,” she said.

“Yay.”

“I want you to come to my bachelorette party tonight.”

“What? No.”

“I love this town,” Anemone said.

The big problem is that scenes like this are addictive. They’re the jelly beans of fiction, you just want to keep writing them. Well, I want to keep writing them. The key is to make Liz’s life harder with them while escalating them; the problems she’s dealing with are greater, Anemone is more demanding, Liz is more stressed. Part of that is that Anemone gets invested in what’s going on in Burney and starts to meddle, and part of it is that Liz just really wants to get to work, and everybody is making it harder for her, not just by interrupting her but by ensnaring Anemone. So I have to remember all that, to make the conversations move the plot and change character instead of just having fun with dialogue.

And oh yeah, they need to be cut back. (headdesk).

The 12 Days of Liz: Day Eleven: Moving the Goal Posts

So I’m almost done cutting Act One and I’m realizing that although I’m taking a lot out, much remains. I know which scenes are flat, and I’d love to take those out, but they have to be there (so rewrites for those), but I cannot have a 45,000 word first act (or whatever it’s going to turn out to be). That means that somewhere between 25,000 words and 35,000 words, I have to find a turning point.

That seems really mechanical, I know, but it’s for a good reason: Readers shouldn’t have to read any more than a third of the book before some startling enough happens to make the story new again. No matter how much exciting stuff you put it, if it doesn’t have enough impact to change the protagonist and her story, it’s not a turning point and it doesn’t make the story new. There has to be a “Holy Cow!” moment for both the reader and the protagonist that makes them both look at everything that’s gone before with new eyes, that changes things irrevocably.

The one I had before was a moment when one of the characters goes off in a rage in front of Liz, verbally attacks her, and in that moment Liz realizes that she’s been seeing things the way they were when she left town fifteen years before. She fights back (verbally), she’s not defeated or cowed, but she’s shaken because things have changed in ways she hadn’t realized, and now she’s going to have to look at everything differently. It was a good turning point, but even with the cuts, it going to hit at around 45K, and that’s too long for a reader to read without a wake-up call, in my books anyway.

So I will be turning-point-hunting for the rest of the evening, once I finish the last of the cuts and get them put into the computer. Of course, that’ll give me a 10,000 word head start on the next act, but still, this is not good. I do have that scene where Liz hits her on the head with a rock. I don’t think she’s having a strong enough reaction to that one. Hmmmm.

The 12 Days of Liz: Day Ten: What Are You Wearing?

When I originally wrote the scenes at the wedding and in the hours after, Liz was wearing a purple bridesmaid’s dress. She didn’t like it, but she put it on and forgot about it, and I wrote the scenes with only a few references to what she was wearing, mostly comments from other people.

But then as I rewrote and focused, the story changed, and after the wedding, Lavender made Liz switch dresses with her (she had a good reason, I swear), so Liz is wearing a white silk wedding dress that’s a little too tight for her in the next four scenes. As I rewrote those scenes, I realized what a huge impact clothes can have on a character in specific and a story in general.

I’ve never been a fan of designer fiction, the kind of story where the heroine wears Manolos and Armani and carries a Birkin. I don’t think–not sure, there’s twenty books in my backlist and I haven’t read some of them in years–that I’ve ever done that, definitely not to a heroine. But there have been articles of clothing that were important–the Incredibra in Anyone But You springs to mind–that were about character and changed the plot, and Lavender’s wedding dress is that kind of clothing, so it changed everything.

First the dress changed, because it had to be something that Liz could actually get into, and she’s heavier than Lavender. Not by a lot, but she’s not gym-toned the way Lavender is. So the slender silk tank dress had to be a lot more flared, and I gave it a lace-up back just to be sure Liz could get into it

Then it had to be clearly a wedding dress, not just a long white dress, because people make comments about it all night, and I like that because it tells you a lot about the people making the comments, so I gave it a train, a fairly long one.

That was good in other ways: Liz isn’t that graceful in jeans and a T-shirt, so the dress physcially hampers her, which is a nice call-back to the way she feels about getting married.

And finally, there are Liz’s reactions to wearing the dress. After all, it’s the dress Lavender was wearing when she married Liz’s old love. And it’s a wedding dress, and Liz is commitment phobic in the extreme. And it’s Lavender’s dress which is going to make wearing it in the hours after Lavender dies really uncomfortable.

I’m still working through all of this, but I don’t think I’ve ever written anything where the clothing the heroine was wearing had so much impact, both on the plot, on the other characters, and especially on the character wearing it. It’s turning out to be extremely useful, so I’m glad the plot shifted and Lavender and Liz had to change clothes. Turns out changing clothes changes everything else, too.