Jennifer Crusie's Blog, page 326

Good Blog: Hyperbole and a Half

This post is such a cheat because (a) I just did a Good Blog post yesterday and (b) Lani linked to it first on her blog which is where I found it. But really, Allie Brosh is a genius.

Do not read about how a fish almost destroyed her childhood but definitely read about The God of Cake. And take the Pain Chart to the doctor with you next time. And by all means, do not miss Wolves.

Good Blog: Australian Portraits 1920

Rox sent our critique group, the Glindas, to la boite verte to see pictures like this:

. . . and this:

Some of the Glindas thought the pictures were terribly sad; Rox and I have hearts of stone and just thought they were fascinating. Okay, some are really sad . . .



especially when you find out they're mug shots. All those people have just been arrested and yet I thought most of them were looking together and some of them were absolutely cocky.

Mostly I wanted to know the stories. What were they arrested for? Con games, prostitution, theft, murder? All kinds of things going on in those photos, if we only knew . . .

Okay, maybe they are really sad.

Damn Carrots

I finished the first scene of Haunting Alice and sent it to Jen yesterday (Tuesday), and then I sat back and thought about what I'd done. And, to quote Opus, "Lord, it wasn't good." Sunday night we watched Hitch for PopD which I've also been thinking about a lot. Both stories have led me back to the Grail Cup of fiction writing–Character is Everything (plus its coaster Don't Write the Parts People Skip)–which has made me realize FINALLY why it takes me so damn long to write a book. We're talking Epiphany Territory here. I'd have sat up and shouted "Eureka," but it upsets the dogs. So . . .

(eureka)

I can't make a book work until the characters are alive in my head. But if I waited for that to start writing, I'd never get anything done, so I go ahead and start writing, and I know the stuff isn't right, I know it's not there yet, but I keep going anyway. And I discover great stuff along the way like Kimberley and Oingo Boingo, and plot threads pop up and it's all good but it's not soup yet, it's just a bunch of ingredients floating around in uninspiring water. There is no steam. The carrots, to extend a metaphor, are still crunchy. It's the Damp Carrots Stage.

This stage is worrisome because everything feels so wrong, but it's a process, so I keep going. And going. And going. And it still isn't right and I get a little weepy. I think about my career. Twenty books. Twenty published books is a damn good career. With the reprints, more than half of them have been NYT bestsellers. In some circles, I am considered a success. I could quit now. No shame in that. Well, except that I quit in the middle of a book. That's horrible, to just leave those carrots sinking to the bottom of a cold plot. That's a Frankenstein Mistake: if you create something, you are honor-bound to see it through and take care of it. So I have to finish the book. But after that, I can quit if I want to. Back to work.

The problem with the Haunting Alice first scene is that I kept adding ingredients but I couldn't get it to cook. Alice was just bitchy. Ethan wouldn't even come on the page so he was just an empty army surplus jacket. Isolde refused to say a word. They knew it was wrong, but I kept shoving them around. And then it was Feb. 1 and it had to be in and I sent to Jen and felt huge relief for about a nanosecond and then I realized what I was doing. So at six AM this morning, I'm still awake, staring at the ceiling, trying to figure out how to fix this and I cannot think of a way. But twenty books is a career . . .

Then Jen e-mailed me and said the scene was fine but that we didn't need to use it if I didn't want to, and I said, "Yes, please, let's not use it." And she said, "No problem," and I heaved a sigh of relief. Which is when I saw the Hitch connection.

Hitch is a movie about a man who understands women so well that he can teach other men how to get over their nervousness and connect with the girls of their dreams. I love Will Smith, and the client he's working with for the majority of the movie is Kevin James who is excellent, so I had high hopes. But what emerged during the movie and especially during the podcast afterwards, was that we (Lucy March/Lani Diane Rich) didn't give a damn about Hitch and his girl but we were all over the secondary couple. Albert and Allegra were worlds apart, but they were both vulnerable and both real and as they struggled to put a relationship together, the story arcs their conflict in wonderful small moments that make you root for them every time until the climax of their subplot when Albert suddenly throws his inhaler away and kisses her and then dances in the street. I'm telling you, THAT's a romance story. And then in the climax of the main plot, when Allegra says, "He threw his inhaler away before he kissed me!" and you know that she knew he was a geek the whole time, well, your heart melts a little. These two crazy kids are gonna make it work. Especially after that wedding dance. We loved Albert and Allegra.

But Hitch and Sarah? They have no problems. They mill around the plot looking like raw vegetables next to the bright and steamy Albert and Allegra. If the main plot needs romance, Hitch and Sarah kiss. If the plot needs conflict, they fight. Or she cries. Or he has an inexplicable food allergy. Or the writers throw a Big Misunderstanding at them. There are so many WTF? moments in the Hitch-and-Sarah plot (they throw vegetables at each other? Really?) that I stopped listening to it and started thinking about other things, like how bad Alice and Ethan were and how twenty books is a career. Then Albert and Allegra would show up and I'd forget all that and think, "Come on, Allegra, he's darling, get a clue." (The parts with Hitch and Albert were also brilliant, which leads me to the conclusion that Albert is the heart of this movie. Albert is one well-cooked carrot.)

So here's what I think. I think the subplot was so simple, the characters so diametrically opposed (he's an overweight schlub of a junior lawyer in her investment firm; she's a beautiful, famous socialite) that writing a plot that flowed from their inherent conflict was a natural thing. What will happen if Albert and Allegra go to a party with all her famous friends? He's the only one who will really listen to her and then defend her again the morons, and she'll think he's great. What will happen if Albert and Allegra go to a game? He'll get mustard on his jacket and teach her to whistle and be really happy for her when she get it right, and she'll be charmed by what a good guy he is. The characters were simple without being stereotypes: Albert might look like a schlub but he's smart and funny and he really cares about Allegra beyond her wealth and beauty. And Allegra might look like a sophisticated professional beauty but she's vulnerable and lonely and warm-hearted and once she really looks at Albert, she's a goner. The writers knew those characters and wrote a good, simple, basic plot arc for them that was character-driven and real.

Then they got to Hitch and Sarah and knew they were in trouble because they'd created Perfect People.

Hitch is smart, funny, handsome, charming, successful, hardworking, confident, and rich enough to have one of those great NYC apartments you always see in the movies. Also, he never fails. Put him head to head with schlubby Albert in a story and Albert is going to kick his ass every time because we care desperately about Albert while Hitch already has everything, so later for him. Sarah is smart, funny, beautiful, charming, successful, hardworking, confident, and rich enough to have one of those great NYC apartments you also see in the movies. She never has an uncertain moment. Put her head to head with awkward, lonely Allegra and Allegra will walk all over her every time because we're worried about Allegra while Sarah can do anything, so later for her. The Perfect People romance almost always leads to Dumb Conflicts because if these people are that sharp, there is no impediment to their relationship. Which is when the writers order half a dozen Big Misunderstandings from Amazon because they have free shipping. It's impossible to stick two Perfect People together because their shiny surfaces make them slide off each other, so I never believed that Hitch and Sarah loved each other. And that killed any emotional involvement I might have.

I think Alice and Ethan were pale, shapeless versions of Perfect People. They were both exasperated at the situation they found themselves in, but they had no stake in that first scene, there was never a moment where they broke a sweat, there was nothing in that scene that either of them couldn't have handled with their eyes closed. And because they were both shiny smooth generic Perfect People, they were annoying. Everybody in that scene was annoying. I need to write Albert-and-Allegras, not Hitch-and-Sarahs. Which means I have to know Alice and Ethan as grown-ups well enough to show their vulnerabilities, to find out what they want and need that will make them break a sweat. And that scene did not do it.

So I forgot that character is everything and wrote Perfect People which means that no matter how much I turn up the heat, those damn carrots will not cook. Thank God for Jen Enderlin being so understanding. And now I must go back to Liz whose carrots have been simmering for awhile, so now I can turn up the heat and get somewhere. And then when I finish Lavender, I can quit, because twenty books is a career. Except that I already know what the plots of Pink, Peach, and Yellow are, so I'll have to finish those. And then I'll have to fix this Alice book and the Nadine book, but then I'm quitting. Because twenty-six books is a career. Probably.

Thought for Today: No Damp Carrots. Thank you.

Exploitation Post: Not The Grateful Dead

I'm exploiting you again. Run.

Here's the problem. I'm rewriting the first chapter of Haunting Alice and there's a ghost in it and he's been around since 1998 and he had Phish tickets and when Alice tells him they broke up, he gets all depressed and . . . never mind, you don't need to know that part. The point is that evidently the Phish got back together again (I googled, but evidently not enough) so the Phish won't work. Which is a shame because that was funny.

So now I need a cult band that broke up maybe twenty years ago. Not exactly that, somewhere between fifteen or twenty-five years ago is still good. Not the Dead because there are too many jokes about Deadheads already. Plus I knew a guy who loved the Dead once and I wanted to kill him every day I had to work with him. Also, Ethan has this great line, "Be grateful it's not the Dead." Yes, that's how low I'm stooping.

Give me a cult band that broke up roughly twenty years ago that I can be snarky about. Thank you.

Why Are You Here?

An academic working on a major paper on romance fiction would like to know why you come here; that is, what you get out of the Argh Ink blog in general. I tried to guess and then I said, 'You know what? The Argh People are not afraid to say what they think. Let's just ask them and then you can get the info straight from the blog comments." So here's the question:

Why are you here?

After that, we're moving on to "Did Adam and Eve have belly buttons?" and "Why is there air?*"

* To blow up volleyballs. Extra credit if you know where that comes from.

Sneaky Peeks

It's no secret that I'm grotesquely behind on Lavender, but what I have not shared with you is that I've spent the last month obsessing over something that should have been three days work. Maybe This Time comes out in trade paperback in April, and St. Martin's Press would like to put the first chapter of my next non-Liz novel in the back. Standard stuff, right? And it shouldn't be a problem since I know who the protagonist is, who the antagonist is, what their goals are, who the love interest is, the entire supporting case, the setting, the mood, the tone . . . I know a lot. I even know the title: Haunting Alice. So what's the problem?

1. I am incapable of writing quickly. If I get to a place where I don't understand something in a story, I have to stop and think about it. I can get a rough draft down, and then I look at it and despair because it's so bad, but I know the first scene and probably the first chapter will have to be rewritten over and over again, so that part's okay. I just don't know how to rewrite yet, I haven't found that rhythm yet, so I obsess. I think about the characters and where they've been before the scene and where they're going after. I think about the central conflict and where the juice is. I think about . . . too much. And then it's there in my head again and I tear after it, write the hell out of the scene, and then I look again and it's . . . not right. So I wander around thinking about the structure, where are the beats and why did this new character show up and how is he going to be vital later and maybe he should be a she . . . It's a miracle I ever finish anything.

2. I'm not actually working on this book right now. I'm working on Lavender, except I've been so obsessed by this first chapter thing, I haven't been back to her in a month. This is entirely my fault, by the way. If I told SMP I didn't want to do the chapter, they'd say, "No problem," and go away. I want to do this chapter. This is going to be an interesting book, both from the point of view of genre and character and all that good stuff and from the point of view of writing a real sequel: same characters twenty years later. I've never done that. But I'm putting in a lot of time on a book that I won't start for a year yet, maybe longer, unless SMP and I have a discussion and change things around.

3. Working on Haunting Alice means plotting Stealing Nadine, too, since this is that simul-quel project, the idea of writing two books that happen mostly simultaneously. So I had to block in what was happening in Nadine while I plotted Alice. What's fun about that so far is that the two books deepen each other so much. Of course, once I'm actually writing them, that's going to make things more difficult, but I think I can do it. But in the meantime, I'm up to my butt in Archers and Goodnights when I should be dealing with Dangers and Blues and that cop from Burney.

4. Finally, there's the fact that this isn't going to be the finished first chapter in Haunting Alice because I rewrite like a madwoman and by the time Alice hits the shelves, Wayne the Ghost By the Fireplace is probably going to be Eloise, the Ghost in the Mirror or something. Anybody who's ever read one of the first scenes I've put up here and compared it to the same scene in the finished book knows how that works. We workshopped some of those first scenes to death here. And I'm not alone on this one. Lani Diane Rich once put the first scene to her next novel in the back of a book she had coming out.

When The Comeback Kiss was in production, I was starting on the novels for the next contract. They wanted a teaser chapter, so I gave them one; the WIP was tentatively titled Hard to Get. The opening scene for it was a provisional one; I wrote it to get started, and once I got started, I changed the heroine's name, her location, her goal, her job, her family, and her conflict, and entirely rewrote the opening. Also, we later changed the title. So now, people read The Comeback Kiss, and even the ones who have read what Hard to Get became – Crazy in Love – write to me and say, "Dude, where's this book? I can't find it anywhere." And I have to explain that they've already read it.

5. Then there's the guilt. People are going to read this chapter and think, "Huh. Wonder when that's coming out." And the answer is probably 2014 or something. So that's annoying. On the other hand, you do get to see the MTT characters twenty years later, so that might actually be okay. But still, it's absolutely not a "Coming Soon" preview. It's a "Coming Sometime. Probably."

Argh.

So I am finishing this chapter today if it kills me because I need to get back to Lavender, I want to get back to Lavender, but the whole time I'm wondering, is this a good idea? Is it enough that it shows where they all are twenty years later, even if the chapter changes? Or is it just annoying? Does anybody even read these things?

How do you feel about those sneak peeks at the end of novels?

Trade Cover for The Cinderella Deal

Since we've done so many covers on here, here's the trade paperback for The Cinderella Deal. I think it's generic and says absolutely nothing about the book–Daisy wouldn't be caught dead in a pink four-inch heels–but this is probably what it's going to be:

Edited to add:

Assuming we're stuck with a shoe cover (and I'm pretty sure we are), how does this grab you for Daisy? I know she wouldn't wear high heels, but I'm trying to compromise here:

Maybe something like this:

I know, I can't photo shop for beans and the fonts are the wrong sizes. Photoshop is on my list of things to learn to do. But is this better or still bad? Worse?

Meet Kristina Douglas

Welcome to the Kristina Douglas interview.

JENNIFER: Welcome. I'm Jennifer Crusie and I'm delighted to be talking to . . . who are you again?

KRISTINA: Oh my god, it's Jennifer Crusie! I'm so honored! I'm Kristina Douglas, demure debut authoress extraordinaire!

JENNIFER: Of course. Welcome, Kristina. So you have this fabulous new series about angels. I love angels. Those fluffy wings. The shiny halos. They sound very sweet and inspirational.

KRISTINA: Not mine. They've fallen. In fact, they're called The Fallen. They are sleek and dark and just a little bit nasty. In bed.

JENNIFER: In bed? There's SEX in these novels? Oh. Not quite what I was thinking. So, dark angels having sex. Reminds me of Anne Stuart. But enough about legendary authors, tell us about your first book, The Fallen: Raziel. What's that about?

KRISTINA: Well, God sent these hot angels down to earth to teach mankind about all sorts of things like warfare and cosmetics. And they lusted after females and decided earth was better. So they fell, God got pissed and made them vampires. They live in a mystical place and ferry dead people to heaven and hell, and they have human wives who die and leave them broken. The hero from the first book, Raziel, is one of them.

JENNIFER: He falls in love with a human woman?

KRISTINA: Yes. He picks up a mouthy young woman named Allie who's been hit by a bus, and just when he's supposed to toss her into hell, he pulls her back.

JENNIFER: Hit by a bus. I've had days like that, so already I like her. Is Raziel the leader of the Fallen? Is she going to be Queen of the Damned or something?

KRISTINA: Nope, Azazel is their leader. He's gorgeous and looks thirty-something and has raging, fabulous sex with his hot, sixty-something, gray-haired wife. We won't explore where that fantasy came from.

JENNIFER: Sounds good to me. But back to Raziel. He's supposed to take Allie to hell but decides to save her. I'm thinking he gets in trouble for that.

KRISTINA: Yes. Raziel falls for Allie, against his better judgment, while the evil Nephilim, who are kinda like the Reivers in Firefly, try to kill and eat them and destroy Sheol. And someone on the inside is a traitor.

JENNIFER: I see. So it's not a LITTLE story. We're talking epic here. Like it could be a series.

KRISTINA: Very epic. And it is a series, Azazel's story comes next.

JENNIFER: So the second book is called The Fallen: Azazel?

KRISTINA: Nope. Second one is The Fallen: Demon, since Azazel falls in love with Lilith, who some old dead guys think is a demon but we know is a feminist heroine.

JENNIFER: Angels, demons, death and hot sex. Do you know what this reminds me of? The books Anne Stuart writes. Not that I'm accusing you of trying to be like Anne Stuart. But maybe you were copying her a little? Maybe you think you're the next Anne Stuart?

KRISTINA: Okay, okay, you've guessed it. Here's a secret: I am Anne Stuart.

JENNIFER: No, honey, you're not. I understand how you could feel that way, some days I think I'm Georgette Heyer, but then the feeling passes. There's only one Anne Stuart.

KRISTINA: Yes, and that's me.

JENNIFER: No, you're Kristina Douglas. It's okay, we can't all be Anne Stuart. Although I have to say, she could write the hell out of this story. Let's talk about your process. Tell me how you arrive at your stories.

KRISTINA: Fantasies. Sex fantasies, death fantasies . . .

JENNIFER: Sex fantasies?

KRISTINA: . . . sex, sex, sex.

JENNIFER: Oh. I collage. I may be doing this wrong. So are there more Fallen books in the series?

KRISTINA: Yes, there's the archangel Michael. Wiry, tattooed, only interested in war. I may give him a nun.

JENNIFER: A nun.

KRISTINA: And we've got Metatron (once played by Alan Rickman). He's gonna fall. His heroine is gonna say he sounds like a transformer.

JENNIFER: Does Metatron get a nun?

KRISTINA: Someone gets the nun. Not sure who. The other gets a warrior.

JENNIFER: It's like a secret Santa swap. "Who got the nun?" Do you ever worry about somebody burning a cross on your lawn?

KRISTINA: Oh, hell no. I used to be a deacon in my church. I taught Sunday School. I sing in the choir.

JENNIFER: Still maybe we should do some Standard Author Questions before somebody gets offended. Where do you get your ideas?

KRISTINA: Amazon. They've got everything there. Except sex.

JENNIFER: Who do you want to be when you grow up?

KRISTINA: I want to be a cross between Mary Stewart and Georgette Heyer. With sex.

JENNIFER: What book do you wish you'd written?

KRISTINA: I wouldn't have minded writing Outlander, which I finally finished. Great sex. Hmmm, I'm picking up a theme here.

JENNIFER: In the event of an apocalypse caused by fallen angels, what's your weapon of choice?

KRISTINA: Baseball bat. I don't like blood. The crunch of bone might be a bit jarring, and I suppose guns are good but they're too distant. I think I'd want to be in there swinging.

JENNIFER: Mine would be a cast-iron frying pan. Because then later I could make Chicken Marsala. For the After-Apocalypse Party.

KRISTINA: I can just see us at the barricades, babe.

JENNIFER: Us? I just met you.

KRISTINA: We met fifteen years ago.

JENNIFER: No, that was Anne Stuart. Sum up The Fallen: Raziel in ninety-two words or less.

KRISTINA: Allie Watson steps in front of a bus and gets scooped up by a gorgeous creature who informs her she's dead. He's about to deposit her in the flames of hell when he thinks twice about it and pulls her back, almost dying in the process. He carts her off to Sheol, the land where the Fallen live, and while there they battle Nephilim, traitors, and each other, until tragedy forces her into a role she never wanted. Lots of sex, violence and happy endings – what more could a girl ask?

JENNIFER: It's everything a reader could want! You know, Anne Stuart is going to love this book. You should get a quote from her.

KRISTINA: Like "This is an amazing story, the story I would have written if I'd changed my name to Kristina Douglas"?

JENNIFER: No, something better than that.

Thank you very much for giving us this interview, Kristina. Now, listen up, people, The Fallen: Raziel by brand new author Kristina Douglas is in bookstores January 25, 2011. Go buy it.

It has sex in it.

Crochet a Rainbow for Australian Flood Relief

Fiber artist Sarah London (you may remember her from the wool-eater blanket I posted about here in June) is coordinating the Crochet a Rainbow project for Australian Flood Relief.



She's asking for four-and-a-half inch granny squares, any colors, that she'll join into blankets for flood victims. If you crochet, you know how easy the basic granny square is (my granny taught me to make them when I was very young). If you don't know how to crochet, this is a good project to learn on since all you have to know is the chain stitch and the double crochet stitch (treble crochet if you're British). Purlbee has a great pictorial tutorial, and there's a good video tutorial here.



Or if you already know how and have a stash of yarn you'd like to de-stash, here's a good-hearted way to do it. And then with your new skills, you can move onto other granny projects:

Granny Squares: keeping people warm and dry since forever.

Random Sunday: Small Pleasures

Here's the thing about Random Sundays: I have to be in a particular mood to write them, they're kind of like stand-up with the smart mouth and the fast pacing, and I have not been in that mood for many weeks because of many different stresses. But yesterday, everything kind of came together and although I'm still up to my ass in alligators, I have a much better perspective. For one thing, I have remembered that while career, politics, health, and real estate are big things that can screw up my life, it's the simple, everyday things that make that life worth living. So this is thank-god-for-small-pleasures Random Sunday, celebrating the little things that are the good parts, the coping parts, not the crying parts. There is no crying in Argh.

Part of my coping strategy is crochet. This month, it's designing and writing patterns for my Sock Monkeys in Love collection for Project Yarnway on Ravelry. Here's the design board: (I know they don't look like sock monkeys anymore. I'm okay with that. They evolved past that.)



The only parts that are finished are the two hats on the right and the scarf with the big sock-monkey-head pockets on the ends that double as mittens (thumbs go in the ears), but I have a lot more pieces that are in progress. It's amazing how much fun it is to work with a simple motif in so many different contexts. Next up: the Girly Skull Collection for Sweetness, the Evil Tween.

When Plants Vs. Zombies hit my iPad, I was stunned with admiration not only for the graphics, but for the incredible snark (a zombie in a Zomboni?) Then for Christmas I made Lani a PvZ scarf with the pattern from the lawn and appliques of the sunflower on the ends. Here's the PvZ sunflower on the lawn . . .



. . . and here's the first attempt at the scarf:



Sweetness, who usually goes to the dark side, loved it, but the lawn part is not right yet, too much contrast, and I think the ends need to be pockets with sunshine in them, so I'll do a better version for her. And an OmNom scarf from Cut the Rope for Light as soon as I figure out how to construct the OmNoms so the mouths open.



We're still debating the spiders (I'm for, she's against), but the stars definitely go on. And of course, I must figure out an Angry Birds scarf. Designing this stuff kept me sane in December, so I see no reason not to keep going.

The Internation Quilt Festival is in Cincinnati this year, and we're going. Krissie and Lani and I are beside ourselves with glee at the thought of piecing and beading and general stitching. And fabric. Really, fabric is second only to yarn on my list of small pleasures. Speaking of yarn, I ordered some with my Christmas money (thank you, Mom and Dad) during the Cherry Hill sale. How can you not buy yarn with names like Deathly Pallor, Lightning Scar, and Gilded Blade? Below, Deathly Pallor:



I'm going to make that into a scarf which Krissie will probably steal since a Deathly Pallor scarf is right down Anne Stuart's alley. Where it will be mugged by a tall dark handsome stranger who will later have rough sex with it and then, helplessly lost in love, marry it.

Sweetness has invented a new character for one of her stories: Psycho Patty, the psychopath. I'm stealing it for a story that Peri, the ten-year-old in Lavender's Blue, is writing but I've promised to give Sweetness full credit in the acknowledgements. And here. Then we went to Olive Garden for lunch and Sweetness who has decided to go for World Domination and spends all her day working on her evil plan, drew this:



That's me in the locker. I'm her secret weapon. She's going to put chocolate and yarn and dogs in the locker with me so I'll stick around, and then whenever she needs muscle, she's going to unleash Fake Aunt Jenny because, she says, we're both evil so I will make a good henchman. I love being a role model. The "rematch, rematch, rematch!" along the side is because she wanted to play tic tac toe, so I played and beat her. Then she yelled, "Rematch!" so I played her again and beat her. So she yelled, "Rematch!" again, and I said, "Okay, best two out of three," and she said, "Yeah!" and I beat her again. Sweetness has to work on her tic tac toe game. Also her math and spelling. But world domination and artistic ability? That she has in spades. That drawing really does look like her.

And then there are the dogs. Today, Lyle came in from outside covered with snow, burrowed under the covers of my bed, and threw up. (Why? Why? He was just outside, for Christ's sake.) Then after I yelled and changed the sheets, he cuddled up to me, rested his narrow little head on my leg, and fell asleep, radiating heat like a long, skinny, furry, hot water bottle and looking like the canine version of chewed-string. So now I have clean sheets and a warm puppy.



See? Small pleasures.

Lani and Alastair bought me Sock Monkey footie pajamas. Bright red, one piece, not flattering but warm as all hell. I said, "The only thing that's not good is that I have to get completely undressed to go to the bathroom and it's COLD." Light was sitting at the counter, chowing down; she nodded, wiped the pizza sauce off her mouth with the back of her hand, and said, "Been there." It was one of those perfect moments when you look at a kid and all you can think is, "I love you, bunkie."

I use dumb TV (Castle, Bones, Human Target) as a small pleasure to destress, and during the worst of the trauma, I tripped over Psych which is dumb TV at its finest. I'd seen a couple of episodes before and liked it okay, but it wasn't until I started at the beginning on Hulu Plus and worked my way through five seasons that I saw how it evolved, how the characters grew, and how very very good some of the episodes are. There are also some bad ones, but hey it's a series; that was true even of Buffy. There was one moment in particular that got to me as a romance writer. The protagonist, Shawn, is annoying as all hell because he covers up emotion with dumb jokes and dumber actions, but he's also smart as all hell and there's a good heart underneath that jerkish exterior, so he grows on you. And he's slowly fallen in love with Juliet, a cop he works with, and I knew that sooner or later he'd make his move. Now traditionally, those long romance arcs are done so badly that I want to take an ax to the writers (I'm thinking of Moonlighting and Northern Exposure in particular) and since Psych has the dumb guy hero, I was really dreading that moment. And sure enough, in the tenth episode of season five, "Extradition II: The Actual Extradition Part," Shawn goes for The Moment. Only because he's Shawn, he begins with stupid jokes about Lego People, and he's already disappointed her, so Juliet says, "I really need to sort this out on my own right now," and he nods and walks away to give her some space. And then he turns around and comes back and says, "Can I just say what I came here to say, please?" and she nods, tired, and he says this:

Shawn: I have a motorcycle.

Juliet: Yes. Yes, you do.

Shawn: And you know what? It is the purest form of freedom I have ever experienced. You zip through traffic, you park anywhere, you never have to take anyone to the airport, you certainly don't have to help anyone move. Easily the best purchase I have ever made in my life. And I have never regretted it, not for one second.

Juliet: Great. You love your motorcycle. Is there a point to this?

Shawn: Yeah, there's a point. The point is, since I met you, I . . . I've been thinking about getting a car.

And he kisses her while Elvis sings "Such a Night" in the background. It made my romance novelist heart so happy.



(If the blog cuts off the screen it's here on YouTube.)

I've been thinking about my best friends, true and enduring pleasures, both of them. We know a lot about each other, not just because we talk a lot but also because we've written books together. And in one of those random conjunctions of two separate ideas, I thought about The List. You know, the names of the five people you're allowed to sleep with even though you're in a relationship. I was pretty sure I could dope out the first four on Lani's list: John Cusack, Robert Downey, Jr; Colin Firth, and Jon Stewart (in alphabetical order since I'm fairly sure ranking changes depending on mood). The last one I took a wild guess: Stephen Colbert because she likes brains; wrong, it was John Krasinski. She got three of my five which is pretty damn good, and the two that weren't on my list would absolutely be in my top ten (Jeffrey Donovan and Jon Stewart). I was pretty sure I knew two on Krissie's: a Japanese rock star whose name I can never remember and Alan Rickman. After that I was guessing: Richard Armitage? Russell Crowe? James Marsters? Lani came up with Marsters, Rickman, and Reno from Final Fantasy for Krissie and then guessed Guy Pearce and Crowe. Krissie's real five: "Gackt. Spike. Hawkeye. Captain Jack. Sheriff of Nottingham. Plus Mr. Rochester on the side." Or as she puts it, "I'd rather f*** characters than actors." Those characters translate to Gackt, the Japanese rock star, Marsters; Daniel Day Lewis; Johnny Depp; and Rickman, with Toby Stephens as an alternate. The fun thing about this, for me, was looking at the types: Lani's are mostly smart-ass betas, and Krissie's are mostly smart-ass alphas, and mine are mostly smart-ass outsiders. Yes, we share a taste for men who snark. Mine? Bruce Campbell, Vincent D'Onofrio, Damian Lewis, Ryan Reynolds, and Alan Rickman. Although I might bump Reynolds for James Roday after that Psych moment:

Sue me: I love a happy ending. Small pleasures, Argh People, small pleasures.