Jennifer Crusie's Blog, page 318

The Argh Interview: Anne Stuart

JC: Welcome, Anne Stuart!

Full Disclosure: Anne Stuart, aka Krissie, and I have been close friends for many years and, with Lani Diane Rich, are now the Three Goddesses, maintaining spiritual retreats in Vermont (Squalor Holler), Ohio (Squalor on the River), and New Jersey (Squalor on the Lake) where we gather to discuss fiction, fabric, yarn, movies, dogs, and what we should eat next. Therefore I'm hopelessly biased in her favor. On the other hand, she is a living legend.

JC: So you're issuing a brand new ICE book, On Thin Ice, on Amazon. Tell me about that.

AS: I had a book I was desperate to write. A number of years ago I started writing my first series, loosely called the ICE series, about a group of covert operatives doing bad things for good reasons. Basically men who kill and the women who love them. I could have kept writing them forever, I expect, but my publisher declined the last one (several times), wanting serial killers instead (yuck), which left my poor hero kidnapped and held in a rebel camp in the Andes for three years. I had to get him out of there. I even wrote three chapters to lure my publisher and forwarded them hundreds of emails asking for another, to no avail.

JC: Meanwhile your next hero rots in Peru. I hate that, when characters won't leave after a book is done. It's like they're sitting there in the back of your brain, the last guest at the party, hitting you with puppy dog eyes to guilt you into writing them. Although I never stranded anybody in a rebel camp in the Andes.

AS: Not Peru. He's in a fictional country called Callivera since Colombia (my original choice) was uncooperative enough to be on the West Coast of South America. And I didn't want to leave poor Finn MacGowan stuck there, but I didn't seem to have any options. So my agent suggested I could write it anyway, and we'd work out something with Amazon. Which we did. The book was ready months ago, but these things take time. But I got a gorgeous cover and it debuted on Amazon a few weeks ago, to much praise and joy in the land.

The set up is simple – Finn's been a prisoner for almost three years, he's just about to escape, when more rebels arrive with an American aid worker named Beth Pennington, who just happens to be an heiress. Since Finn isn't adverse to being paid a huge reward he reluctantly takes her with him, as well as the bratty teenage son of a Hollywood movie star, and they make their way through rebels and waterfalls and ocean voyages and bad CIA bosses to a farmhouse in France, with lots of sex, violence, and cameos by the characters from previous books sprinkled throughout.

JC: On Thin Ice sounds like classis Stuart which means it's terrific. You're also reissuing seven of your earlier romances.

AS: Yup, we're doing a whole romantic suspense package with Amazon. I've published the long Maggie Bennett series, Escape Out of Darkness, Darkness Before Dawn, and At the Edge of the Sun; two of my beloved (by me, at least) Signet books, Moonrise, the story of an IRA assassin turned CIA assassin and the daughter of his mentor, and Ritual Sins, about a sexy, charismatic cult leader and a woman who wants to get her inheritance back; the one book I did for Pocket Books, pretty much a straight suspense novel called Seen and Not Heard, based on the true story of French grandmothers being murdered. The heroine, an expatriate American, is married to a mime, and things go downhill from there; and one of my all time favorite series books, Ritual Sins, a Rambo romance about the daughter of a politician with a savior complex, his daughter and the body guard she'd always secretly loved. With hubris born of desperation, I truly believe I can't write a bad book, but I particularly adore Moonrise, Ritual Sins and Against the Wind.

JC: Once again, your heroes are all types we hate: assassins, cult leaders, mimes. Can I assume you're going to be writing about a slum landlord, a land developer, and an investment banker in the future? What is it with your heroes? I mean, honest to god, a mime?

AS: Let it go, Crusie.

JC: Fine. And then there are the three Maggie Bennett books in which you do something that's a cardinal sin in romance. So we won't talk about that. The hero at the end of the series is based on a Georgette Heyer character. Let me guess: Vidal from Devil's Cub.

AS: And you'd be dead wrong about that. Not that Vidal hasn't inspired me. Though perhaps his father inspired me even more. No, believe it or not, this is Randall, the amiable snake from Behold, Here's Poison. I even named the character Randall. (I may have referred to him as an amiable snake as a small homage to Heyer).

JC: I loved Randall, so you had me at "amiable snake." Tell me about Maggie instead.

AS: Maggie's a tough lady. She can kick ass, shoot, rescue herself and others. Originally I was going to write about Maggie and her two sisters, but my editor decided that having Maggie as the centerpiece made more sense, so in books two and three the sisters are simply supporting characters. It was also this sea change, mid-series, that forced me to commit the unpardonable sin.

JC: So that's seven reissues? I'm in awe.

AS: Yes, and six of them are really good.

JC: Stop that. I have learned that if you say any book of yours isn't good, it insults all the people who loved it. And I bet a lot of people loved that book, whatever it was.

AS: It sold 5000 copies.

JC: Oh. Was it the one about the mime?

AS: Yes.

JC: You should have seen that coming. Okay, here's something about your new book and reissues that I'm not crazy about: they're exclusive to Amazon, which means they're only Kindle-ready. Are you happy with that?

AS: Mixed feelings. On the one hand, I want everyone to be able to read my books, and for a year this shuts out Nook, Kobo, Sony, and print readers. OTOH, I adore Amazon, which brings me books in two days and other glorious things, and I adore my Kindle. I think there's a backlash against Amazon because it's grown so big and successful, but for me it's been an amazing gift for someone living in a remote area. Amazon sells more books than anyone else, and sells more books in electronic format than print, so it made sense to go with them for the first round. Besides, just about everything electronic (apart from those e-readers) can run a Kindle app. I've been perfectly happy reading a Meredith Duran book on my iPhone when my Kindle ran out of power.

JC: So are you going to do that in the future? Are the Maggie Bennetts going to be exclusive to Amazon, too?

AS: All seven reissue titles and the new ICE book are exclusive to Amazon for the first year. Then they'll go wide.

JC: Hmmmmm. Still not crazy about that. But aside from the exclusivity problem, how do you feel about e-publishing in general?

AS: I've never been a Luddite, so I never thought I'd hate an ereader, even in the early days. I was surprised at how much I loved it, once I got one. So much that I paid full price for the latest Eloisa James to put on my Kindle, rather than buy it at Walmart for much less. So I love the technology.

JS: I agree. I'm completely sold on the iPad.

AS: But what I love even more about e-publishing is the ability it gives writers to write what they want and know it will get out there. I've wanted to write the ICE book for three years, and they always said no. People like Connie Brockway and others are in the same position — their series were cut short by a publisher and they had more to tell. They can write those books for epublishing and know they'll be read.

JS: I think that part is great. I have short stories I want to write that nobody would want to publish—who wants a 30,000 word short story collection?—but e-publishing makes it all possible. And Jen Weiner just did something I thought was impossible, finish a story on Thursday that her publisher will issue on Monday. That's just flat out amazing. But at the end of the day, it's still publishing, which means making public, not just printing. Amazon's size must mean that they can really promote you. Are they as good as print publishers at getting you interviews, reviews, basic promotion?

AS: Uh … in my old age I'm learning discretion, since I've had perfectly harmless statements turn around and bite me in the butt. Let's say that Amazon is new at this, the entire business is new, and they don't have the kind of machinery in place that would help. The key word in e-publishing is discoverability. There are so many books out there, how do you find the ones that you'll love? You can't wander in a bookstore, and there's nothing set up for e-published books to get responsible reviews. So you somehow have to find a way to call attention to a book you think people will love, and that's hard. It's one thing to go around beating my breast like Eisler and Konrath, but otherwise who's going to notice? Yes, Amazon doesn't have the set-up to get reviews and interviews and attention, the kind of things I get with traditional publication (which I have no intention of giving up). But there's a bright side to that.

Because Amazon doesn't have the kind of huge overhead and salary base that traditional publishing does, they're not as tied to a bottom line. For a traditional publisher to accept something, they have to know it will pay for their building in Manhattan, everyone from the mail room clerks to the CEO, distribution, printing, etc. And they've gotten more frightened by the shrinking market.

JS: Actually, Amazon does have a huge overhead. They're just so diversified that it doesn't matter if the profits on one book aren't enough to cover them. They're selling microwaves and gift baskets and DVDs, so they're not dependent on any book selling large.

AS: True enough. I should have said their ebook publishing arm doesn't have much of an overhead. So lack of promotion aside, the great thing about e-publishing is that you really can follow your heart, and if you're a good writer with a track record you can do anything. I'll finally get to write my WWII RAF pilot novel. And it can be any length I want. I feel like a Goddess — I can do anything.

JC: Like a mime hero?

AS: Bite me.

JC: Fine, be that way. And it is true, you are a goddess, and Anne Stuart books in any format are a divine gift, so I'll quit complaining, especially since the future reissues will be going wide. What's next: historicals or romantic suspense? Oh, and I should tell you, some bimbo named Kristina Douglas is claiming to be you, although her Demon books are really good, so maybe that's not a bad thing.

AS: Ah, Kristina. She's a gorgeous forty-something with a boy toy and the world at her feet. She loves writing paranormal — she wrote her first faux vampire in 1981 and she's been wanting to do the real thing ever since then. Plus, fallen angels? Yum.

JC: That's very generous of you.

AS: Well, Kristina and I are very close. But enough about her. I adore both romantic suspense and historicals. I need to finish the Rohan cycle. I left poor drug addicted Brandon to his own devices. I gotta stop doing that).

JC: Was he in Peru?

AS: No one's in Peru! Callivera. And Brandon Rohan's in London, with PTSD from the war in Afghanistan. The one in the 1800s, that is. Right now I'm working on a big fat glorious classic romantic suspense (with tons of sex, naturally), so we'll see how that goes. It's always been my career downfall, wanting to write too many things. Years ago an editor said I needed to choose what I wanted to be when I grew up, a historical writer or a romantic suspense writer. Problem is, I can't. A girl's gotta write what a girl's gotta write, and career planning can just fly out the window.

JC: That was terrible advice for you. I'm so glad you didn't take it. Speaking of writing too many things, you showed me the first part of a book once called Death and the Vicar's Daughter. As I remember, it carried your Difficult Heroes series to its logical conclusion when the Daughter fell in love with Death. I loved the part I read. Are you ever going to write that one? Please?

AS: I would love to. My agent loved it as well, but thought the concept brushed too close to the Kristina Douglas books.

JC: Oh, I definitely think it's an Anne Stuart. It's a vicar's daughter. Death is just a bonus. Now what about the rest of your backlist? It's huge and wonderful.

AS: I'm in the midst of getting my historical backlist available, and those will go in e-editions to everyone, including the ability to download and print up a version if you can't stand reading by machine. We'll be doing two a month, starting with To Love a Dark Lord and Shadow Dance, with my delicious novella, The High Sheriff of Huntington, coming first.

JC: That's my favorite novella of yours. Bet I get this one right: you used Alan Rickman as a placeholder for the hero, didn't you?

AS: Of course. And not just Alan Rickman, but Alan Rickman as the Sheriff of Notthingham. Over the top and completely delicious, though he doesn't threaten to cut anyone's heart out with a spoon.

JC: At least he wasn't a mime. So that means lots more books from Anne Stuart and Kristina Douglas?

AS: Some writers decide to retire after they've been in the business a long time, like Lavyrle Spencer and Maeve Binchy. I won't ever retire — I just want to stop dancing to the publisher's tune and write what I want to write. I'd love to have the books published traditionally and electronically, but the whole industry is undergoing a seismic shift, so we'll have to see what happens.

JC: Any more mime heroes?

AS: Kiss my ass, Crusie. Your next book should combine your love of dogs and cooking with a spunky heroine who bakes dogs into pies and feeds them to her enemies while singing Stephen Sondheim ditties.

JC: Uh, no. I don't write dark. I AM dark, I write light. Whereas you are sunny and good-natured and lovely and write the Heroes From Hell. Inexplicable.

And that's the latest from Living Legend and Goddess Anne Stuart. You can get her new ICE book and seven latest re-issues at Amazon now—one with a mime!–so go do that. And thank you, Anne, for another riveting interview. Now go get that poor guy out of Peru.

AS: Callivera, damn it!

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Bunnies in Sweaters

I have to get on the road, and the interview that was supposed to be up yesterday still isn't revised (we've had some transfer problems), so you get bunnies. But don't you feel better just looking at them?

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Romance Sells

I'm cleaning out my room in an effort to find my cellphone–second one I've lost in two months–and I'm finding stacks of teaching materials, crochet patterns, and stuff I've saved because it was interesting. I'm putting the interesting stuff in a folder to do drive-by Argh posts, and since the interview that was meant to go up on Saturday is still being passed back and forth, here's a breakdown of fiction sales for 2010:

2010 Romance Fiction Sales in Comparison

(source: Simba Information)

Romance: $1.358 billion

Religion/inspirational: $759 million

Mystery: $682 million

Science fiction/fantasy: $559 million

Classic literary fiction: $455 million

It's from the RWANational website, and I went there because I found a handout from 2003 and wondered what the stats were now. I'm not surprised that romance is the most popular, it always has been, but twice as popular as the next genre on the list? Impressive.

PopD Mysteries

As we're gearing up to start the PopD Mystery series (and we're all sick right now, so take "gearing up" with a grain of salt), it's a good time to talk about what we're going to do and invite comments and suggestions, starting with our definition of "mystery."

For the purposes of PopD, a mystery is a story where the goal of the protagonist is to solve a crime, preferably murder. The protagonist thereby becomes the detective even if he or she is not a private eye or on the police force. If it detects and solves crime, it's a detective. This usually means that the antagonist is the criminal which makes plot analysis so much easier than in a rom com. It also makes sense because mysteries are plot-centric while romcoms are character-centric. So for once the good-guy/bad-guy description of protagonist/antagonist is going to work. Three cheers for a just society.

We're using all American movies because we're lazy and because we're up to our butts in those already. It's a shorter series than the romcom series because we were clawing the walls after 36 romantic comedies, so this list is coming in at around 25 titles (we're still finalizing). The list is divided into six subgenres–Classic, Noir, Romantic, Supernatural, Non-Traditional, and Comic–so we can see how the different flavors affect the plot. The earliest movie is from 1934 (The Thin Man) and the latest is from 2010 (the BBC Sherlock pilot). Thirteen of the movies were based on novels or short stories.

Here's the list. Discuss:

Classic Mysteries (5)

*1934 THE THIN MAN (streaming on Amazon) based on the novel of the same name by Dashiell Hammett

*1954 REAR WINDOW (streaming on Amazon) based on Cornell Woolrich's short story "It Had To Be Murder." http://www.miettecast.com/woolrich.pdf

*1974 MURDER ON THE ORIENT EXPRESS (streaming on Amazon) based on the novel of the same name by Agatha Christie

*2009 SHERLOCK HOLMES (streaming on Amazon) loosely based on the Sherlock Holmes stories by Arthur Conan Doyle

*2010 SHERLOCK: A STUDY IN PINK (streaming on Amazon and Netflix) based on "A Study in Scarlet" by Arthur Conan Doyle

Noir Mysteries (5)

*1941 THE MALTESE FALCON (streaming on Amazon) based on the novel of the same name by Dashiell Hammett

1974 CHINATOWN (streaming on Amazon)

*1997 LA CONFIDENTIAL (streaming on Amazon) based on the novel of the same name by James Ellroy

* 2005 KISS KISS BANG BANG (streaming on Amazon) based in part on the novel Bodies Are Where You Find Them by Brett Halliday

2006 BRICK (streaming on Amazon and Netflix) inspired by the novels of Dashiell Hammett

Romantic Mysteries (4)

*1944 LAURA (streaming on Amazon, rental on Netflix) based on the novel of the same name by Vera Caspary

*1955 TO CATCH A THIEF (streaming on Amazon, rental on Netflix) based on the novel of the same name by David Dodge

*1963 CHARADE (streaming on Amazon Prime (free) and on Netflix) later novelized by screenwriter Peter Stone

1987 THE BIG EASY (streaming on Amazon)

Supernatural Mysteries (2)

1991 DEAD AGAIN (streaming on Amazon)

1996 THE FRIGHTENERS (streaming on Amazon) Warning: This one will scare the hell out of you.

Other possibilities: Sleepy Hollow, The Gift, Stir of Echoes

Non-Traditional Mysteries (4)

*1945 AND THEN THERE WERE NONE (streaming on Amazon) from the novel of the same name by Agatha Christie

*1958 VERTIGO (streaming on Amazon) from the novel D'entre les morts by Boileau-Narcejac.

1993 THE FUGITIVE (streaming free on Amazon Prime) based on the TV series of the same name

1998 WILD THINGS (streaming on Amazon) Warning: Lots of sex in this one.

2000 MEMENTO (streaming on Amazon) adapted from the short story "Memento Mori" by Jonathan Nolan (published in Esquire)

Comic Mysteries (3)

1977 HIGH ANXIETY (streaming on Amazon) parody of Hitchcock films

1998 THE BIG LEBOWSKI (streaming on Amazon and Netflix)

2007 HOT FUZZ (streaming on Amazon) Warning: Lots of gore in this one

[I know, I know, you want Clue, too]

Lightning Round

Edited to add: And the lightning round is over. You guys move swiftly. However Mollie really does want to clean out the inventory so we'll be doing this again. No idea when yet, but soon. Moll wants a clean house.

Original post:

Mollie's put up a form to give away copies of the trade pb of The Cinderella Deal to the first five people with US addresses who fill out this form:

https://simpleprogress.wufoo.com/forms/win-a-copy-of-the-cinderella-deal-r7x3a7/

In other news, sometime in the near future we'll be giving away foreign editions the same way. But I'll give you a one day head's up, and we'll do several giveaways. Ironically, we only ship to US addresses, but if you're somewhere else and have a pal in the US who will ship to you, you can get around that. There's a limit to how many tax and custom forms Mollie will fill out.

Edited to add: And the lightning round is over. You guys...

Edited to add: And the lightning round is over. You guys move swiftly. However Mollie really does want to clean out the inventory so we'll be doing this again. No idea when yet, but soon. Moll wants a clean house.

Original post:

Mollie's put up a form to give away copies of the trade pb of The Cinderella Deal to the first five people with US addresses who fill out this form:

https://simpleprogress.wufoo.com/forms/win-a-copy-of-the-cinderella-deal-r7x3a7/

In other news, sometime in the near future we'll be giving away foreign editions the same way. But I'll give you a one day head's up, and we'll do several giveaways. Ironically, we only ship to US addresses, but if you're somewhere else and have a pal in the US who will ship to you, you can get around that. There's a limit to how many tax and custom forms Mollie will fill out.

It's a Mystery

So we're getting ready to start PopD up again, drawing on all the work you did in coming up with the mystery movie list several months ago, but we're changing a few things. (This is cross-posted on PopD, too.)

First, we're abandoning the chat-during-the-movie. It was too distracting for us and we ended up doing less-than-stellar analysis because we weren't watching for content. That means that you can watch the movies any time you want (we'll post the entire list ahead of time).



Then, we'll post one podcast a week, the same day every week, and we can chat after the podcast in the comments. If you want a live chat, we're open to discussion, but you'll have to convince us. We'll be doing some of the podcasts ahead of time because I'll be on the road so much, but we'll do them so they're always up at the same day and time, much easier for you to follow.

Something else that's new: we don't know nearly as much about mystery as we did about romcom, so we'll be doing a lot more fumbling around in the beginning. I did write my master's thesis on the mystery novel, but it was on women's roles in mystery fiction from 1840 to 1930, so it's not going to be a lot of help. I've also read a lot of mystery, it was my first genre love, but that doesn't mean I know anything about writing the stuff, so this should have a much steeper learning curve for us than the romcom series did (although we learned a lot on that one, too).

Since we're rebooting the PopD experience, now's a good time for you to weigh in on what you'd like to see incorporated. Or anything else you'd like to contribute. Not that you guys need encouragement to comment, but really, we're pretty open at this point. List goes up next week, every title streaming either on Netflix or Amazon. Back at you then . . .

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Okay, Don't Make Penguin Sweaters

Evidently they're now full up on Penguin Sweaters. Or different groups have their wires crossed. However, penguins aren't the only ones in need. There's the Snuggles Project, making blankets for shelter animals, and of course, Project Linus, which makes blankets for children in need. Blankets are more fun to make than sweaters anyway.

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Call for Penguin Sweaters

No, that's not a snarky headline. There are penguins at risk from freezing because of an oil spill, and they need knitters to make sweaters. Save a penguin in New Zealand.

Pattern is here. I can't find a crochet pattern, so I may lean on Lani to make one and then I'll figure it out looking at hers. Also: must be of wool to keep the little buggers warm.

Wish I knew how to post pictures to the comments. I'd love to see what you come up with.

Get That Bag A Night Job

This is an old draft post from back when we were doing PopD; it's got good stuff to talk about in it although I think it could have been a lot shorter, but I don't have time to do a full edit and you're about to set the monkey free, so comment on this. Doesn't have to be about the bags. Have a nice time.

Lani/Lucy has this theory that everything in a story has to work all the time, do two or three jobs, or it's not earning its keep. Since I have the same theory, it tends to crop up when we're doing the Popcorn Dialogues analyses, but this week, for What's Up, Doc?, we really bit down on it. (Please note: Massive movie spoilers ahead.)

If you haven't see the movie (and you should, you should), it's about a guy named Howard who's trying to get a grant to study the musicological attributes of igneous rocks. The second scene in the movie is Howard with his humorless, micro-managing fiancee, Eunice (the magnificent Madeline Kahn), in a cab that stops suddenly so that he bangs his head on the red plaid suitcase that holds his rocks. It's important that the viewer know that there are rocks in the bag, so Howard complains, Eunice tells him to suck it up, and the cab driver makes a "I hate it when somebody touches my rocks" joke. (Why yes this is similar to David and his prehistoric bones and humorless fiance in Bringing Up Baby. It's an homage.)

The cab has stopped short because a woman named Judy has walked in front of it carrying a red plaid bag just like Howard's. Judy and Howard are going to end up together. In fact, that's the central plot of this movie, getting Judy and Howard together even though Judy causes chaos wherever she goes and Howard can't remember what day it is. It's okay, they're great together, you buy it, and although there's a glitch in the beginning that Lucy and I would fix (easily) the romance is good.

The problem is that those damn bags pretty much sit on their zippers for the first hour of the movie. They each have only one job, to carry Howard's rocks and Judy's underwear. Now if they were just pieces of luggage and not major players, that would be okay, but there are two other plaid bags just like them floating around the movie and all of them are pretty much jobless until almost the end when they all start multi-tasking like mad, but by then it's too late. If Buck Henry (great writer) wanted four identical bags floating around so he could use them an hour into the movie, he really should have used them from the beginning so viewers wouldn't keep saying, "What's with the damn bags?"

Here's what's with the damn bags:

Bag 1: The Top Secret Bag

The first scene of the film is a guy taking a plaid bag out of a locker, opening it to check the contents which are a pile of folders labeled "Top Secret" (loved that), and then being followed by a guy with golf clubs. Two guys in suits. How do you tell them apart? One guy has golf clubs. Why does he have golf clubs? So you can tell them apart. This is a problem. Also, don't give the first scene in your movie to two characters who are so peripheral they don't even have names. Also let your reader/viewer know what the hell is going on: the guy with the bag is a government whistleblower and the guy with the clubs is a government agent sent to get the documents back. When do we know this? At the end of the movie.

Bag 2: Howard's Rocks Bag

We already talked about this one. It's full of rocks.

Bag 3: Judy's Bag

Yes, I know it's a stretch that Judy has a red plaid bag just like Howard's and the whistleblower's. They were having a sale. Just go with it, the movie is a farce, it doesn't need to be real, it just needs to make sense. But it would be nice if Judy opened the bag at some point and showed us that it was full of her underwear.

Bag 4: Mrs. Van Hoskin's Jewels Bag

Mrs. Van Hoskins, a guest in the hotel where Howard and Eunice are staying, keeps her jewelry in a red plaid carry on. Why? Okay, look, we've been over this, just GO with it. Mrs. Van H's bag is important because the Guy in the Suit in charge of the hotel desk is in league with the Guy in the Suit Who's a Jewel Thief (but not with the Guy in the Suit Who's a Government Agent) and they're going to steal the bag from Mrs. Van H.

So we've got Guy in the Suit with the red plaid Top Secret Bag, Howard with his Rocks Bag, Judy with her Underwear Bag, and Mrs. Van W with her Jewels Bag. Got it? Now what are you going to do with this, campers?

The movie does nothing with it for an hour. Oh, the bags are swapped and stolen and hidden and traded, they travel more than a candidate the first week in November, but all you see are red plaid bags; nobody ever opens them until an hour into the movie, when you've forgotten what's in them and then they all come together in one place, whereupon they cause a home invasion, one of the greatest chase sequences of all time, and a slapstick courtroom scene. We need the bags for that great screwball ending. It's the hour of Musical Anonymous Bags that precedes their big number that does not work because everytime somebody moves, swaps, or steals another bag, the viewer says, "What's with the bags?" not "Ohmygod, that's the X bag and . . . " The bags only have one real job and they don't go to work until the end of the movie.

Lucy and I decided early on that the bags were a big, big problem, big enough to knock a point off plot and structure. Anything that makes a viewer say, "Huh?" is bad. Really bad. Throw the reader/viewer out of the plot bad. Lucy said, "Get rid of the bags," but that would mean getting rid of that over-the-top one-damn-thing-after-another climax. Her point is that you can't knee-cap an hour of story because it'll pay off in the last half hour. If you want those four bags to do their day job at the end of the story, you're going to have to give them a night job for the first hour. My point is that they're necessary to the story, so we have to give them a night job.

This is where we began to cogitate.

We've got four bags and six Guys in Suits if you count Howard, which we don't because Howard is Ryan O'Neal, looking particularly tasty in horn-rimmed glasses so we know who he is, and Frederick, which we don't because Frederick is played by Austin Pendleton who is extremely hard to confuse with anybody else on the planet, so we've got four guys in suits. It's a bad idea to have four guys in suits swapping four identical plaid bags and never looking inside or doing anything with them, and an even worse idea because the movie never explains the two guys fighting over the Top Secrets bag, so they're annoying and unrecognizable. They're all the way through the movie, they steal Judy's stolen room service, they mug Mrs. Van H, they hide on Howard's window sill seventeen stories above a busy street, but they do not have identities beyond Guys in Suits Who Steal Plaid Bags. So we have this lovely complex screwball love story, and in the midst of that, every now and then, some guy in a suit dashes through with a plaid bag.

Our thoughts on fixing this were two-fold:

1. Make the four guys in suits different. Give one a mustache, make the guy with the golf clubs carry them everywhere, make the desk clerk and the jewel thief of a different gender, race, ethnicity, ANYTHING that makes them dramatically different from each other, not just four white guys in suits. Then make it clear that Guy One is a whistle blower, Guy Two is a government agent trying to get the stolen docs back, Guy Three is the desk clerk/mastermind of the jewel heist, and Guy Four is hired help who's not too bright but willing to do anything. Now instead of Guys with Suits with Plaid Bags, we have the Government Plot and the Jewel Heist Plot with four distinctive characters we can tell apart so that when one of them ends up on a ledge, we're not looking at each other saying, "Who is he again?" He's the government agent, didn't you see the golf clubs?

2. Of course we don't care about the Government Plot or the Jewel Heist Plot, so how do we make them essential to the story instead of annoying and peripheral? We make them complicate the story we do care about which is Howard getting Judy and his grant to study igneous rocks. At any time in this movie, Howard has a bag, Judy has a bag, and Eunice often has a bag. None of them ever open the bags. But if it's made clear what's in the bags, then the wrong person opening the wrong bag can make life hell for Howard. For example:

Eunice opens Judy's bag (thinking it's Howard's) and see Judy's underwear.

Judy opens her bag and finds Howard's rocks and uses them to make him buy her room service.

Howard opens his bag to show his rocks to the man giving the grant and finds pounds of diamond jewelry which undercuts his "I'm penniless and need a lot of money" request.*

The jewel thief opens the jewelry bag in front of the people who are fencing the stuff only to find Howard's rocks, which makes them think he's sold them out and leaves Howard without his rocks for his big presentation which is occurring at the same time.*

Eunice opens Howard's bag and find the jewels which she turns into the crooked desk clerk who has been scrupulous about not having anything incriminating to do with the jewels so now he must return them to Mrs. Van H. or do something about Eunice.

Judy opens her bag and finds the Top Secret documents and reads them (she reads everything) and uses the information later to do something Judy-like that will probably upset Howard.

The government agent stops the whistleblower, shows his badge, and demands that he open his bag so he can arrest him with the evidence on him, only to find that the bag is full of Judy's underwear, which implicates Judy and Howard in the crime.

*(These two actually happen in the movie at the end when the bags begin to pay off)

I can go on like this for days, but my point is that once the viewer/reader knows what's in the four bags, and once she or he is clear about what the three sets of people are trying to do–get the Top Secret documents, get the jewelry, get the grant with the rocks–then it doesn't matter that nobody can tell the bags apart, that they're everywhere in the story and the viewer/reader never knows what's in any particular one at any time, because the reader/viewer knows the damage they can do and is waiting to see what's in them when they're opened, like Easter Eggs, creating chaos wherever they go. This would lead inevitably to the home invasion where people with guns say, "All right, I've had it, put all the damn bags in the middle of the floor and back away," where Howard and Judy steal the bags and start the San Francisco-wide city chase that led the city to institute stringent restrictions on what film companies could do since it damaged so much of the town, and end in the courtroom where the dyspeptic judge could call them a foul and despicable lot.

If you haven't seen the movie, it probably sounds like chaos on wheels, and it is, but it's sublime chaos, or it would be if they'd fixed that damn bag problem.

Of course that wouldn't fix the problem of the romance set-up, but we know how to fix that, too. Popcorn Dialogues: It Takes Us Awhile But We Can Solve Anything (except for Barefoot in the Park). (The podcast where we fumble our way through this problem, with Lucy tanked on wine and me nauseous from overeating after not eating anything all day, is on the PopD site if you want to hear us circling those bags over and over again.)

But the bottom line is, every important element needs a night job that complicates the main plot. Especially those damn bags.