Jennifer Crusie's Blog, page 320

Retail Therapy

I'm not sure why buying things cheers me up. I already have more crap than anybody else on the planet–the joke here is, "Don't ask Aunt Jenny if she has something, ask her where it is"–plus I'm broke. But this week I found cheap stuff (rule: must be under ten bucks) that made me smile. And here's the thing: according to several different places on the net, smiling relieves stress, lowers blood pressure, makes you more attractive to others, boosts your immune system, and is a natural painkiller. So as long as the stuff that makes me smile is under ten, I figure I'm getting a deal. Do you know what therapy costs?

I found a one-hour hourglass timer at T.J.Maxx for $9.99. I'm using it to kick start the writing every day. "You just have to write until all the sand is in the bottom."



Beats any digital timer and makes me happy at the same time. There's something so soothing about all that sand slowly falling . . .

iTunes has forty Drifters songs for $9.99. It's the All Time Greatest Hits and More (1959 to 1965) by The Drifters.



The Drifters may be my favorite group of all time–they're always in the top five–because their music makes me insanely happy (". . . something happens to me that's some kind of wonderful . . .") and I can get their songs for a quarter each. Whoa, Nellie, I'm there.

I was searching for pins on eBay (don't ask, it's for a project) and I found this one:



Gertrude looks like she doesn't take any crap from anybody, kind of a German Mona.



She only set me back $9.49 including shipping, fifty cents under my limit. I figure she'll make me happy every time I look at her. Even if that's only ten times, that's less than a buck a smile. DEAL.

And then there's Standoff, one of my all time favorite TV series which unfortunately only lasted eighteen episodes (morons cancelled it) but all eighteen are available on Hulu Plus along with a ton of other stuff for $7.99 a month.



It's Ron Livingston and Rosemarie DeWitt (fun fact: they met on the series and got married three years later) as hostage negotiators who are also lovers. One of the smartest things the series did was begin after they'd slept together, three months after, as Matt announces to the world in the first episode (which was dumb and out of character but I went with it anyway). I love the way they layer the relationship with the hostage negotiations–as Emily says, "At the heart of every crisis is a broken relationship"–and I love the smart ass humor and great chemistry. (One of my fave moments is when Emily is trying to explain how things have changed to Matt, and tells him it's like crossing the border between Portugal and France, everything's different. Matt says, "You know Portugal and France don't share a border, right?" And she says, "I know, but what do you think? What are you thinking right now?" And he says, "I'm wondering if I'm going to get into Portugal tonight.")



Eighteen great episodes, Ron Livingston and something to smile about in every one. Bonus: Hulu Plus means not bringing more actual stuff into this house.

Speaking of having too much stuff, I mentioned to Light that my drawing paper was in the studio. She said, "There's a studio?" I said, "You know, that big room off the office. The one with the pool table." She said, "We have a pool table?" Sometimes you don't have to buy stuff, you just have to dig it out.

Oh, and I also bought a house in New Jersey. It has no poles but it's also derelict with a mold problem. Or as Gaffney said, "How much did they pay you to take it?" If nothing goes wrong, we close in September and I'm the owner of a lot of mold with attitude. It was more than $9.99, but as I said, no poles.

It may be awhile until I'm back here again, but I am doing better, and I'll go back through all the comments next week when I'm on the road and we'll revisit coping strategies. One key thing: I've figured out what was wrong with my book–very excited about it, as a matter of fact–so I'm going to go turn over my hourglass and put The Drifters on and maybe get a picture of Ron Livingston for my computer, and then finish a book. Nothing but good times ahead.

For $9.99.

"We Just Have To Learn How To Get Through These Very Bad Days"

That title is from Beth Henley's Crimes of the Heart, from the scene where Meg pulls Babe's head out of the oven when she's trying to kill herself. Meg asks why, and Babe says something like "It was a very bad day," which is the reason they'd all given for their mother hanging herself in the basement. And Meg says, "We just have to learn how to get through these very bad days."

This is a skill I must master.

How bad did it get? I was bringing Lani home after dropping her car off at the repair shop again–that car must be completely rebuilt by now–and we were both depressed as hell, but as she got out, she turned to me and said, "It's all going to be all right."

And I looked at her and said with absolute sincerity, "No, it's not."

Yeah, ol' Nothing-But-Good-Times-Ahead finally hit bottom.

I think it was just a perfect storm of things and it knocked me off my game. I know how lucky I am–hell, I have a JOB–but there are so many uncertainties that I'm having a hard time finding a safe place to stand. Sometimes you just need to hold onto one thing that's sure and safe, and if you can't find one thing that's not up in the air with the potential for disaster, well, that makes it hard to breathe. Add to personal stress the knuckle-draggers in Congress who have managed to trash the US credit-rating while protecting the rich, and the general ass-hattery of politics in general, mixed with the horrible jobs and real estate markets, and I needed a cookie badly.

Of course I could have come back here and posted about how depressed and anxious I was, but really, who the hell needs that? I'm one of the luckiest people I know, who am I to bitch about a few setbacks? If I don't have anything to contribute, I should just shut the fuck up. So I shut the fuck up. Hence the long silence.

Now things have shaken out a little and I'm coming up for air. I've hung on using my general coping tactics–music, crochet, chocolate, dogs–and I've got some good stuff to look forward to now–you need some good future coming up even if it's little stuff–but I'm not out of the woods yet, and neither, I'm betting, is most of the country.

So here's what I want to know: When you start going down for the third time, not just "I've had a bad day" but "No, it's not going to be all right," what do you do? Drugs are out, addictive and expensive, and probably shopping, too, for the same reasons. What's a cheap, easy, effective coping tactic for getting through the very bad days (weeks/months . . .)?

Because my oven is electric, so that's not a solution.

Random Sunday: The Cranky Edition

People are thwarting me. I understand that they think it's for my own good. In fact, it probably is for my own good, they're probably right. I fail to see what that has to do with the fact that I WANT something. So today's Sunday is Cranky.

Alastair reached in the fridge and gave Lani a Diet Coke. "I love you," she said. "I love you," he said. "Jesus Christ, do you have to do that in front of me?" I said. "Haven't you developed immunity yet?" Alastair said. He's missing the point. If she has just insisted that he stay in bed because he's sick and then waited on him hand and foot, "I love you" is allowable. If he rescues her from a speeding train and they fall into each other's arms, the "I love you" is understandable. If he gets her a Diet Coke, "I love you" is icky. Because this week, I am Cranky.

My daughter was trying to explain to me that looking for a house to buy is a long process. I said, "I've bought four houses and you've bought one, and you're telling me how to do it?" That was wrong of me, she was trying to help and encourage me. But this week, I am Cranky.

Most of the dogs are pretty well-behaved or at least know that "No" means "try that again and the wrath of the Pack Leader will descend on you in all its fury." But Lyle, who's been spoiled rotten for five months because of his imminent death, lost that bit of knowledge, so when I opened up the door and said, "No," meaning, "do not dash through this door at any cost," he dashed. I yelled so loud he tried to crawl under the bean bag. He's doing pretty good with "No" now. I'd feel sorry for him because he probably only has days left (or at this rate, years), but this week I am Cranky.

Lani and Alastair and the kids came back from the Y, rained out. Lani said, "Who knew?" I said, "Anybody who looked at AccuWeather; it's going to pour here for three days." She said, "I'm going to get you a T-shirt that says, 'It's your own damn fault.'" She's already planning on getting us matching T-shirts; mine will say, "I'm not mean, you're just a sissy," and hers will say, "I'm not sensitive, you're just an asshole." Sometimes we are both Cranky.

I have a new laser printer (because my old workhorse HP that I LOVE refuses to talk to my laptop) and I tried to register the damn thing and kept getting error messages. Because all the letters have to be in caps. And the thing I thought was an O was a 0 (oh and zero). Then it wanted the date I bought it, but I didn't know the day, so I put in month and year. Incomplete. So I made up a day. Not according to format. What format, there's no format on the site. So here's my point for Brother: if you're so damn desperate to have me register, why are you being such a putz about it? Also, no I do not want to get updates from you. I've had it with you. And not just because this week I am Cranky. OTOH, it's a nice printer.

And then there's Word. When I open it, it insists on giving me a window to help me choose the kind of document I want. If I hit cancel, it gives me a document anyway. Microsoft: More controlling than my mother.

I had more, but then I saw these pictures on Gawker and wept like a baby, "ugly crying" as Matt Cherette says, and now all the cranky is gone. I heart New York and its very smart courts. Congratulations to everybody there who can finally marry the people they love! I'd say more, but the pictures do it better and I have to cry some more. God, I love a happy ending.

B.S. Johnson Strikes Again

Lani and I talked last night and agreed that we are very lucky people–everybody we love is happy and in good health, we have a terrific living situation, we do work we care about and enjoy deeply–but that just AT THE MOMENT things are making us crazy. At the moment, hell, we're past the one month mark. Still, we know we're fortunate so when Life begins to shoot lemons at us out of a water cannon, we duck and weave and handle it as best we can. Case in point: my laptop which developed a strip of wriggling lines down the center of the screen. It now has two strips of wriggling lines. The replacement display is not in yet, and Alastair says there's something wonky with the hard drive. So I bought an iMac, a desktop system. No problem on waiting on the laptop (well, I like a laptop because it's portable but still), all I needed to do was set up my desk again and I'd be fine. Lani even spent a couple of hours painting the rest of the room that's my office so I could get it set up. Alastair moved all my files over to new computer. I spraypainted my desk. Everything was ready to go so that I could catch up with my seriously sprained online life not to mention my writing.

Enter Bloody Stupid Johnson.

The architect who designed this house, who shall be nameless (his name is not BS Johnson), was the worst designer in the history of architects. The house is built strong, but I've spent a lot of money and a lot of years trying to turn it into a place that's good for humans to live. I was doing pretty well–Alastair and Lani love it and so does Krissie–and when I saw my white desk in my white office with my new iMac on it, I was feeling pretty chipper about it, too, even though there are no windows in this room except for the sidelights on the door to the outside. (B.S. Johnson failed to put any windows on the front of this house. No, I'm not kidding. He made the back of the house solid window, so he didn't have an aversion to glass, but the front is just a wall of masonry, or was until I bought it and started punching in windows everywhere.)

So everything's set up, and I crawl underneath the desk to plug in my surge protector and discover there are no outlets on the wall. I think it's pretty much Architecture 101 to put an outlet on each wall, but not for B.S. Johnson. So you're thinking, stop meeping and just plug it into an outlet on a side wall. But you have forgotten we're talking about B.S. Johnson because there are no outlets that aren't blocked from the desk by a door because there are SEVEN doors in this room (and it's not a big room). Seven. The front door, the door to the storeroom, the door to the garage, the door to the bathroom, the door to the closet, the door to the elevator shaft (don't ask), and the door to the rest of the house. Which means there's only one wall that's big enough for my desk. There are two spaces on the opposite wall that might hold a much smaller desk except one would block the bathroom door and the other HAS A POLE THREE FEET FROM IT. Yes, B.S. put a pole in this room, too. Smack in the middle.

I've got a kludge working for the moment and Alastair has a plan, but my only hope now is that whatever is going on astrologically or karmic-ly or whatever is over soon. Because I am tired of being thwarted.

But I have a computer again, so life is good.

More Meeping and a Question

The screen on my laptop just went wonky. We took it to the Genius bar and they say it needs a new display. Which they don't have. The display should be in with five days and then if I leave it with them overnight . . .

Okay, my screen is WRIGGLING. And they're not going to be able to fix it for A WEEK???

Pardon me, I had to go lie down for a minute.

So I bought an iMac. I blame Lani. Alastair's trying to set it up and transfer over all the files but since the laptop's hard drive is also doing something wonky, he's having to do it by hand. So we've got that going for us. No seriously, I owe him big but it may be awhile before I have a computer full time again. I blame myself for the laptop's meltdown. I've had it over three years and I think I've turned it off maybe half a dozen times in all that time. It probably just needs a vacation. But I will be back shortly.

In the meantime, I need a disease for a character. She'll have had some kind of wonky medical test, and the doctor has told her that it could turn into something else down the road, but not to worry about it now, and even if she does develop whatever it is, it's easily treated by some kind of donor from her family (not a kidney, something simpler). But she's a fixer, she plans everything out, and she has no family: her deceased mother was an only child so that side of the family is gone and she doesn't know who her father is. Which is why she decides to find out who her father is . . . . I was going to give her polycythemia vera, but you do actually have to go in for treatments for that and while it can turn into leukemia, I'm not sure family members can do anything to help that. No, I haven't researched this yet. It's a miracle I'm posting on Argh. Computer troubles, remember? Find me a nice, non-gruesome medical problem; it's just to get her started on her father hunt and I don't want it to eat the rest of the book with fear and loathing.

Thank you.

Also, MY COMPUTER IS SICK. Meep.

The Lousy Friend Post

I've been distracted and I never told anybody about Lani's next revision class and it starts Sunday. So to ease my guilty conscience:

Saturday is the last day to sign up for Lani's Revision class at Storywonk. She's teaching structure and she learned everything she knows from me, so it's very good. She's still wrong about the end of Indiana Jones, but hey. No one's perfect.

The Fun of It All

I've been e-mailing with a friend who's struggling with her romance novel. She's very smart and she's studied hard and she loves the genre, but she's having a hard time understanding how to write romance, which I can understand because it's a damn hard thing to do. So at first I gave her a pep talk on following her instincts:

First, no matter how good a teacher is, you take what makes sense to you and leave the rest. There is no one right way to write a romance or any other kind of story. All the teaching about structure and spine and the rest is to help you find the way to your story; if it clears out some of the stuff in your way so you can get the reader to what matters in your story in a cleaner, faster way, great. If it's confusing, it's not something you're responding to as a story-teller, so ignore it. Writing classes are like a buffet: you take what looks good and you ignore the rest.

So the real answer to "how do you plot a romance" is "the way that fits the story." Which takes you back to protagonist/goal, antagonist/goal, inescapable conflict. The official definition of a romance is a story of how two people form a committed relationship with the expectation that the story will end optimistically in regards to the relationship. Readers need to believe the two people will be together forever. But these can be people who've never met before, people who were married before, people who grew up together, people from different planets, whatever, and all of those stories are going to have different spines, different arcs, and demand different craft choices. So when you talk about plotting the protagonist's goal in general, it's no help to you because that general goal/plot may not be what your story is about.

Look at His Girl Friday. Hildy's goal is to tell her ex-husband that she's getting married again and then leave NYC forever to go to Albany as a wife. Walter's goal is to get his wife/star reporter back. That's a crucible, only one can win, and it's both the emotional and the external plots. There are a million ways that particular plot could be played out, but once you know Hildy–broken-hearted by neglect from the man she really loves and desperate for a show of real love from him but tough as nails and a reporter to the core–and once you know Walter–crazy about Hildy and the newspaper game, possibly not in that order, and completely without scruples when it comes to getting what he wants, a conman to the core–then the way to plot this is pretty clear. Use Hildy's love for journalism as a metaphor for her love for Walter (she's trying to walk away from both), and have Walter use that against her (because he knows her so well) to get her to come back to both. There's a lot more stuff going on there, but the important thing is, this isn't Walter vs. Bruce, fighting over Hildy, which it could have been, Hildy vs. Walter, making him declare his love for her and promise to always put her first, which it could have been, it's Hildy vs. Walter, fighting over her future, the one she thinks she wants and the one he knows she needs. It's the same dynamic as Moonstruck and to a certain extent Pretty Woman: One of the lovers destroys the chosen life of the other to set him or her free. Those three movies are really different, but it's the same plot dynamic played out very differently in each because of the characters, the kind of people they are and the kind of relationship the reader knows they need (nobody roots for Bruce and Albany in His Girl Friday; the fun is seeing how Hildy and Walter battle it out). . . .

I'd go back to your emotionally-charged ideas because that's where the juice is. My first drafts are all over the place; half the time I don't have an antagonist. But the emotionally-charged part tells me what my protagonist needs, desperately, and if I'm lucky, why he or she needs it. Then I go back and figure out why she can't get it. And yes, part of it is internal but there has to be something external standing in her way, and in romance that's tough because there's not much keeping people apart that's external these days. I wimp out and use an external antagonist to make life hell for the protagonist and the love interest; the struggle brings them closer together and whatever the heroine is fighting the antagonist for can be a metaphor for her internal struggle: an art forger fights to get back paintings that will reveal her identity only to claim that identity and sign the paintings at the end. A woman who doesn't trust relationships meets the man she's fated to love and walks away and Fate fights back and wins by making her confront her worst fears about attaching to people; the plot is about the romance, but the romance is the battleground for Min and Fate (and in the subplot between the hero and Fate). If you want a protagonist heroine/antagonist hero, look at His Girl Friday and Moonstruck, both beautifully written and tightly plotted. . . .

But that wasn't it because this woman really knows her craft, knows her structure. It was something intangible, something she thought just wasn't there in her work, and that made me think about how damn hard this is, getting that intangible on the page so that readers really believe this is IT, the big one, that the protagonist and her lover will lose something crucial if the relationship doesn't last. It's magic on the page when it happens but I don't think you can explain how it happens. I think you just write until it's there. Or it isn't and you put the book away until you find a way to find it.

So the best I could do for her is this:

When I was rewriting Bet Me, I kept overthinking it. And then one night, I thought, "Maybe I should just go for it." And I wrote "Hopelessly Romantic" on a piece of paper and taped it over the computer screen. And after that, I just went where the juice was, scenes with the two of them that made me happy even if the characters were miserable because even when they were miserable together, it was better for them than when they were apart. There's that thing about falling in love where you know it's a mistake and you're too damn smart to do that again, but it's just THERE, your heart beats faster when you see him, he smiles the minute he sees you, and even when it's awful, even when you swear never again, you have to go back. It's like those kissing salt shakers with magnets in their mouths, you just have to click together. If you can capture that, if you can give the reader that internal struggle to hold on to identity and individuality when everything in the physical world is telling you to blend into that other person, you've got a romance novel. Paul Newman told a story that always epitomized the great romance novel for me. He said he and JoAnne Woodward had a hellacious fight, said things that couldn't be taken back, and he stormed out, never to return. Then he got to the car and thought, "Where the hell am I going?" and went back in. That whole "I can't quit you" thing may be a cliche now, but it's also the truth. You just have to make the reader feel that, too. The big thing that I'm always forgetting and have to relearn with every novel is that the story has to be fun. Not necessarily happy or funny but fun to read, the highs and the lows, the reader has to have a really good time suffering with the characters, even if the "really good time" means weeping helplessly.

But I don't know how to tell you to do that because it's in your characters.

That's not much help. So over to you guys: What makes a romance novel special, memorable? What scenes stick in your mind, when you go back to read a book, what do you go to? What would you tell her? Hell, I'm having problems of my own, what would you tell me?

What makes a romance novel great?

Random Sunday: The Not Dead Yet Edition

The "not dead yet" is me, not Lyle, although Lyle's still going strong, too. The partially dead is because, through a terrible convergence of internet failure and travel, I have not had access to Argh for eons. Or to the forums. Or to PopD. Not that anybody missed me. I'll just sit here alone in the dark. I would tell you of my travails, but that would be meeping, so in no particular order, here's some good stuff that happened while I was out.

Lyle, who on the first visit to the vet's when he was diagnosed as terminal weighed 9.9 pounds and was labeled anorexic, is now 14.8 pounds. So the anorexia is over and he's pushing into lardbutt territory. His blood counts are still vile, but they're the best they've ever been. My vet, who is fabulous, just cheers when she sees them even though we all know it's futile and Lyle's doomed. Of course it also means that Lyle's feeling fine and living large and as of this moment has leaped onto one of the giant bean bag chairs which is a good 30″ off the ground and is demanding mush. Lyle's mush and Cheesus's sub q: miracle workers. Also huge thanks to Lani-Lucy and Cheesus for dogsitting for eight days; they were wonderful.

I went to dinner at Maialino in NYC with my editor, mass market publisher, and the head of marketing. Or as you know them, Jen, Matthew, and Anne Marie (yes, of Frenching-Anne-Marie, although she wisely did not bring copy edits this time). Matthew was the only one who mentioned the three books I have that are past deadline ("Some of our authors turn books in"). I said at one point that I'd always wanted a brownstone in the West Village. Matthew said if I'd turn a book in, they'd buy me one. I said, "Really?" He looked at me with what was either contempt or sorrow, but I'm not getting a brownstone. He is, however, getting a book. Soon. Probably.

I met Krissie in NYC and we roomed together before driving back to Ohio together. I got Alastair the Uncle Fester T-shirt that says "There's One In Every Family." Well, it made us laugh. While I was searching for a picture of that T-shirt using "There's one in every family," I found this:



I believe that's Famine, War, Pestilence, and Death.



I think I must buy it. (Actually, the one I found using "There's one in every family" was "Flopsy, Mopsy, and Conan," but the next one was this one.)

So I'm driving across Ohio with Krissie on the way home, and suddenly I look down and I'm going 98 miles an hour, which freaks me out because it doesn't feel like 98 MPH and then I realize: that's kilometers. I look across at Krissie in the passenger seat and say, "Did you push a button?" "Nooooo," she says, looking the other way. So I make her get out the car manual and find the button she pushed because we can't see it. Except when she finds it, it's right there on dashboard in plain sight. Half an hour later, Agnes, my car, begins speaking Spanish. Never go anywhere with Krissie: she pushes buttons.

Krissie wanted to buy Alastair some underwear (don't ask) so we went to Walmart. I found "Superman, Man of Steel" stretch boxers that she immediately grabbed out of my hand. I'd have gone for The Flash, but it seemed like pushing my luck after the Uncle Fester T-shirt.

Speaking of T-shirts, I loved this one, too:



I typed my master's thesis on an electric typewriter. I remember typewriters. If the MacPlus hadn't come along, I'd never have written novels. My god, remember WITE-OUT? The horror.

Times Square is now officially awful: I got mugged by Muppets. The Disney store has giant Muppets on the street and they want to interact. When I'm on my way to a conference full of tense romance writers, I do not want Elmo in my way. Bring back the hookers, that's what I say.

I got to see a lot of old friends at RWA National which was great. Spent a good two hours with Cathy Maxwell just by accident and we laughed like loons the entire time because Max is the funniest person I know. Felt sick and cancelled my coffee with SEP which is really awful because I never get to see her, but falling asleep with my head in a Danish didn't seem like a good idea, either. Sat and talked with my old grad school pal, Daphne Durham, who is now acquisitions editor for Amazon's new publishing arm. We had a moment when we thought about all those drunken nights in Larry's bar when it seemed clear we'd never amount to anything. I told her they'd closed Larry's and we had another moment. Then I told her Julia Keller had won the Pulitzer. Who knew OSU's English grad department had such potential? Also had coffee (well, water for me) with Michael Hauge whom I hadn't seen for years (I don't get out a lot). We were talking about Hitch (see the PopD post) and I said it was an awful romcom and he got this funny look on his face, and I said, "If I go to the IMDB, will it have you listed as a script doctor?" and he said, "The IMDB doesn't list script doctors," but it turns out he only started consulting with Will Smith after Hitch although he insists it's excellent. We went on to amiably agree on almost nothing, which is okay because I owe him big for everything he taught me the two times I took his class.

And of course I roomed with Krissie which mostly consisted of us lying on the beds and moaning about how tired we were and gossiping about what we'd heard. RWA is exhausting. We did have the brains not to stay in the conference hotel because that place was designed by Satan, although their elevator system is much better now. But that meant walking through Muppets to get to the conference so that was bad, especially since Krissie can't walk that far without great pain. But then she discovered the cinnamon thingies they have next to the register at Duane Reade and all was better.

I'm looking at houses in New Jersey (long story) so I spent two days with a realtor, one on the way to the conference and one, with Krissie, on the way back. Coming up from measuring the downstairs at one house, I heard Krissie say, "Jenny won't care about the water, her water in Ohio tastes like toxic waste." I LIKE the water in Ohio. Jeez. I took Krissie along because the house was in very bad condition and it would need to be totally rehabbed, and her job was to talk me out of it. She dutifully told me all that was wrong with it, and then said, "I love it. Buy it." Then somebody else bought it. But now I am fixated on moving to New Jersey. An hour from my daughter, an hour from NYC, four hours from Gaffney, seven hours from Krissie. And twelve hours from Lani and her family, but they'll come to visit. Assuming I can pull this off. Very exciting.

The SMP cocktail party in their offices at the Flatiron Building was a crush, but I saw a lot of good people there, so it was well worth it. One lovely moment: I ran into Brenda Copeland whom I had not seen in years, and we did the squee thing. I almost said, "You should quit your editing job at [publisher redacted] and come to SMP because the people are fabulous," but that wouldn't have been polite, so I said, "What are you doing at an SMP party?" and she said, "I quit my editing job at [publisher redacted] and now I'm here at SMP and the people are fabulous!" Synchronicity. I also saw Toni McGee Causey who looked gorgeous, and a ton of other people so lots of squeeing.

I went to that party with Mollie in a cab and cabs make Mollie carsick, so she asked for gum and I gave it to her, just like when she was little. Then we got out of the cab and I spit my gum into a tissue and said to her, "Gum," and she leaned forward and spit hers into my hand, just like when she was little. Earlier at a booksigning, she'd asked if I had any candy, and I found a Hershey bar in my purse and gave it to her, and she made the same sounds just like she did when she was little. I loved it. Then we went to the SMP party and she was talking to a PR guy she works with there for several of her clients, and he said, "I saw you come in with Jennifer Crusie; I didn't know you worked with her, too," and Mollie said, "You mean my mom?" He said, "I did not know that," which I really love because it's tough for somebody to establish her own identity in any business when she starts out working for the family, and Mollie's so there already.

Which reminds me, I also got to see Sarah Wendell, Mollie's business partner and, of course, fabulous Smart Bitch, and at one point she came at me with a camera and barked, "Say 'LOVE'" so I yelled, "LOVE!" and she videotaped it. It was only about two seconds, but I worry about what she's going to do with that.

Then we got back to Ohio and I had to go to the blood doctor to put me down a quart (well, 500 ml), and I was driving along the highway that Liz drives down in the opening scene of Lavender's Blue thinking, Wouldn't it be funny if I got picked up for speeding in the same place Liz did? and I got picked up for speeding in the same place Liz does. Sixty-eight in a 55 zone. The nice cop let the little old lady go with a warning, and I promised I'd never do it again, and I meant it because I'm very grateful. Come to think of it, Vince lets Liz go with a warning, too. It's like the universe is saying, "FINISH THAT DAMN BOOK!" Or maybe it's Matthew; he has a lot of power.

I am desperately trying to get rid of all the crap in this house–Krissie coming to visit always helps because she takes back a lot of stuff and we must have ten or twelve Goodwill donation receipts around here by now so I am working on it–so when I saw the purple metal dress form with hooks at the top at Home Goods, I did not buy it. Then after I got stopped for speeding and before I went to my blood-sucking but after my car spoke to me in French (you just cannot trust some people to stay away from buttons), I thought, "I'm under a lot of stress and I need that purple dress form with the hooks" so I stopped on the way and bought it. And then I thought about the scorn and derision I was going to get from Lani and Krissie who have to put up with me meeping about how much crap I have, so at dinner I said, "You know that purple dress form at Home Goods?" and they said, "Yes," and I said, "It's in the back of the car," and waited for the eye-rolls but they both said, "Oh, GOOD." These are the friends to have, folks.

Along the same lines, we hit JoAnn's for fabric and scrapbook stuff. I love fabric but I'm drowning in it so I can't buy more except to cover my couch which is disgusting at the moment, but it's really not that much of a sacrifice because there's not that much fabric I want. Until I go to Spoonflower, where designers enter contests and put up the most scathingly beautiful designs like this one:

Those are bunnies in those waves, folks.

Or this one:



They have lots of fabrics that aren't border prints, but I love border print sundresses, so that's why I'm lusting after those. And if you're feeling helpful, punch that button to vote for them for the Big Breaks thing because their business is a genius idea. Thank you.

Speaking of buying things, I think this is my favorite T-shirt (yes I ordered all three):



You really have to laugh at that, it's such a ridiculous thing to say under any circumstances. How does anybody know who'll be sorry and who won't? And what's wrong with being sorry? You're supposed to make mistakes, that how you learn. Well, that's how I learn. Sometimes it takes several times before I learn, but that's how I learn.

I'd write more but this is already really long and Lyle needs his mush. I didn't mention seeing Susan Scott and Alisa Kwitney, two more wonderful people I would be closer to if I moved to New Jersey, at the Rotrosen party which was fabulous, or lunch with Meg and Mollie which was lovely–ravioli in a light parmesan cream sauce with ham and peas at Trattoria Trecolori (do too many links make me look like I'm namedropping or are they helpful?)–or that the waiter at the fancy restaurant Jen and Matthew took me to who served their wine and then presented me with my bottle of Diet Coke, saying with a straight face, "This is a very good year." I said, "November?" and he cracked up, so my work was done. It was a lovely, lovely time, but now I'm home and I must get to work because if I finish this book, Matthew might give me a brownstone. And if I don't, he's going to make sure I get picked up for speeding every day until I turn it in. And Matthew, if you're reading this, please note that I did not mention your fear of being gunned down in the Hamptons. Which reminds me, Matthew thinks I blog too much.

Back to Lavender. Love to all. What have you been doing? We need to catch up.

Creativity and the Importance of Shiny Things

Day Three without internet. We think that the problem might be that the last guy to fix it, a descendent of B. S. Johnson, routed the line through the dog door. Thank God, Panera, McDonald's, and Beechmont Toyota all have WiFi, but still, ARGH. I told Mollie I was going crazy without the net and she said, "Why? You don't need it to write, do you?" And I do because when I think of something while I'm writing, anything at random, I want to go check it, to see it, to ask somebody about it. I have to go and find out. Which makes me feel guilty because obviously it would be better to just concentrate on writing the book which is so grossly past deadline I'm having trouble sleeping at night. Then I read an article in Scientific American Mind, and it all became clear and the guilt disappeared.

The article was "The Unleashed Mind" by Shelly Carson (Scientific American Mind, May/June 2011, pgs 22-29) and it talked about several aspects of creativity that I'd read about before including the ties to schizotypal personality, but the part that really grabbed me this time was her theory that many creative people have cognitive disinhibition, which is academese for the "Oooooh, Something Shiny" problem that plagues many writers. Only it turns out, it's not a problem, it's one of the reasons we're creative (and disorganized and inefficient and, as Carson politely puts it, "odd").

Cognitive disinhibition, Carson says, is

"the failure to ignore information that is irrelevant to current goals or to survival. We are all equipped with mental filters that hide most of the processing that goes on in our brains behind the scenes. So many signals come in through our sensory organs, for example, that if we paid attention to all of them we would be overwhelmed . . . . Thanks to cognitive filters, most of this input never reaches conscious awareness."

Unless your mental filters develop holes. Then you end up with all kinds of trash in your thought process, images jumbled together, contrasting ideas overlapping, new relationships between unrelated things forming and tumbling through your head. You're thinking about something or talking to somebody and something shiny drifts by and you're caught, watching the connections form, your train of thought switched to another track. If you're driving or talking to a boss who finds this annoying, it can be bad (that survival thing), but as far as creativity goes, it's excellent. Everything's invited to the party in your head, so some pretty amazing things stagger out at the end of the night. The fact that your brain doesn't filter out the irrelevant means that you can make new relevancies, go places people with functioning filters can't go. (Of course they can finish conversations and drive without missing highway exits; everything's a trade-off.)

So there it is, the reason that being without internet while I try to write fiction is making me INSANE: My access to shiny things has been kneecapped, and that's stifling my creativity. And also limiting my access to Talking Points Memo and Gawker and Ravelry and my own damn blog, but mostly, it's cutting off the Shiny and inhibiting my cognitive disinhibition.

I really, really, really need my internet, although the food here at Panera is excellent, so there's that. Back at you tomorrow from some undisclosed location. Until then, embrace the shiny.

Blackout

We have no internet. TWO DAYS and no internet in sight. I'm at MacDonald's right now, so all the pending comments have been approved, but it's going to be awhile before I get back to reading everything. Play amongst yourselves. Be nice. Floss. I should be back by Thursday or Friday. Maybe.

AAARRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRGH.