Jennifer Crusie's Blog, page 74

Collaboration: It’s All in the Details

We’re at 60,000 words now. Dealing with the nitty gritty. Like road names:

And then much later:

Fun with Richard and Jane

Those of you who’ve been around for awhile are familiar with Jane and Richard from my writing lesson examples. I believe at the moment, Richard is buried somewhere in Jane’s boss’s backyard while she enjoys her promotion. Anyway, Anemone and Liz are writing a romance novel in Rest in Pink, which has led to many meta moments like this one:

Anemone picked up the folder she’d brought to the breakfast table. It was pink, so I already had an idea of what was in it. “She’s a thirty-three-year-old writer—”

“No,” I said.

“—of romance novels. Why not?”

“Writers writing about writers is not good. It’s like grad students writing short stories about grad students. Very meta and self-serving.”

“Write what you know, Liz.”

“Also writers lead very boring lives, sitting around in t-shirts and pajama pants, drinking Diet Coke and googling for minutiae. You can’t get a story out of that.”

But then Bob, who has no respect for my creative process, pointed out that Richard and Jane were actually Dick and Jane. So I had Liz tell Anemone that, and then they googled for Dick and Jane so they could steal the plots–yes, by then I was way past the book we were writing–and, well, here’s Liz and Anemone talking about the book they’re going to write about Jane and Richard. I’m pretty sure none of this except for the first one will appear in Rest in Pink, but you never know. Also every story cited below is real, including the one with Dora.

#

I sat down across from Anemone on one of the blue couches—you know, I’ve always liked that color, but after a month trapped in Faye’s Rhapsody in Blue, I would kill for a nice taupe—and tried very hard not to yawn in her face. Staying up most of Sunday night with Vince is one my favorite things—right up there with food and music—but it did make Mondays hell.

“Would you like a nap?” Anemone said politely, so I must have yawned in her face after all.

“So here’s the thing,” I said. “You know how we named our lovers Jane and Richard? Vince just pointed out to me that’s Dick and Jane. You know, from the kids’ books.”

“Yes, I know,” Anemone said. “So we change them?”

“I think we go with it. I did some minor googling. They have a younger sister named Sally, a cat named Puff, a teddy bear named Ted, and—this one is my favorite—a clown named Jack.”

“Not following,” Anemone said.

“Puff is the evil grandmother with one of those puffs of silver hair. Sally is the little girl. Tim is Dick’s best friend, teddy bear of a guy, and Jack the Clown is the evil whatsis that we had planned and that I have forgotten in detail.”

“Evil politician. And Spot?”

“Jane’s best friend.”

“I don’t think a hero named Dick—“

“No, no, he’s still called Richard. But at one point, Jane will turn to him and say, ‘Richard, you are such a dick . . .’”

Anemone started to laugh and stifled it. “We need to take this seriously.”

“I am,” I said. “I think we look at the plots of the Dick and Jane books and see what we can use. Updated to adulthood, of course. Some pieces of some of the stories are online, and the first one is a little repetitive, just “look” and “oh,” but she does almost step in a puddle and then Dick saves her with his wagon.”

“Jane?” Anemone said, reluctantly interested.

“Sally. But we can make it be Jane. Who almost falls in a lake, but Richard saves her. With his classic station wagon.”

“That is the dumbest idea I’ve ever heard,” Anemone said.

“Yeah, the station wagon is a bridge too far. Who the hell would still be driving a staton wagon?”

Anemone shook her head, and I thought she was giving up on me, but then she said, “Send me the URL.”

#

“Did you read the one where Jane got three dolls for her birthday?” Anemone said. “Jane can have triplets.”

“Jane is not going to have three secret babies. No. I read the one where Sally wanted to go for a ride in the big yellow car, the red and yellow airplane, and the blue boat that Father was in. I think Father is the head of the secret agency that Jack the Clown works for. And the next thing Sally will want to go for a ride in will be his windowless van. That kid has escape fantasies. And a death wish.”

#

“I read a disturbing page this morning,” Anemone said. “It was Dick—“ she shook her head—“Richard holding a stick and saying, ‘Come, Spot, Come.’ Very Fifty Shades. Didn’t you say Spot was Jane’s best friend?”

“Jane has terrible taste in best friends and boyfriends. Maybe she ends up with Jack the Clown. Maybe Richard really is a Dick.”

#

I found one with Dick and Dora,” Anemone said.

“Who the hell is Dora?”

“They were hopping,” Anemone said, “And then Dora said, ‘I can hop on my line. It is fun to get on a line and hop.’”

“Richard is now a coke fiend?” I said.

“I don’t know about Richard, but Dora is definitely a crack whore.”

#

“My favorite page so far?” Anemone said. “Dick likes Jane. Jane likes Dick.”

“Jane’s no fool,” I said.

Happiness is Music

I’ve been making myself crazy between the book and the house and a thousand everyday things, and then Bob started talking about ring tones, and then after he quit for the night (he’s a day writer which I don’t get, must be a military thing), I started just searching for music in general and ended up with Cyndi Lauper singing “I Drove All Night,” and Rihanna doing “Umbrella” (yes, of course I watched the Tom Holland lip sync again) and Kelly Clarkson ripping her boy friend a new one along with his leather seats and tires with “Before He Cheats,” and Walk the Moon’s “Shut Up and Dance” and Sugarland doing “Come On, Eileen” with Sara Bareilles . . . well, there was more, and that’s when I remembered that playing music has kept me sane and happy all my life, something I forget when I get too far up in my own head. So I owe Bob for that one, too.

I told him Liz’s ringtone for Vince at the end of Lavender’s Blue is “Break on Me” which Bob doesn’t like because he says it’s boring. He’s wrong, it’s wonderful and sensitive and . . . but I am a cooperative collaborator so now Vince’s ringtone is “I’m Still A Guy.”

Music: Happiness three minutes at a time.

What made you happy this week?

Revising with a Plan

So I got my part of Act One done on Rest In Pink, and now I’m looking back at Lavender. In particular at the Act One there which is sloooooooooow. The first act of Pink is 35,321, which is also too long, but this is rough draft, so close enough for now. The finished Lavender Act One? 38,579. Attention must be paid.

A quick look down the scene list with the scene word counts pretty much shows me that Bob is not the problem. Bob’s writing is compact, almost terse. No, I’m the problem. Five thousand words out of my stuff, not his.

So the first thing to do is update the scene list with word counts of the scenes. That’ll show me where I lost my grip. And sure enough there are four scenes where I went over 2500 words. That’s not a magic number for scenes, but for me that’s where readers get tied of reading.

But it’s not just word count. Bob is doing the heavy lifting on the mystery so I’m doing the romance. And to make that work, I need Liz and Vince together as often as possible. And there are six scenes in Act One where they’re together, sometimes only in passing. Three scenes when they’re together for the whole time and focused on each other. How many scenes are there in Act One? Twenty-two. Three scenes out of twenty-two to sell my romance. No.

But there’s also the story to consider. There are a lot of subplots here and Liz’s romance plot interacts with Vince’s mystery plot; I can’t just jettison everything but Liz and Vince (tempting, but no).

So to figure out how to fix this, I need to condense what I’ve written down into sections/scene sequences.

So Scene Sequences for Lavender’s Blue, Act One. It reads like a synopsis but there are no spoilers beyond the first act.

SEQUENCE 1: LIZ MEETS VINCE
1. Liz meets Vince.
The first scene is Liz and Vince alone together on the edge of the highway. Good introduction to the romance, 2587 words which is a good number for an establishing first scene. The scenes should get shorter gradually, but that’s a good start. It’s just one scene, not a sequence. Bob added something integral here at the last minute, and it got longer but it also got better, so this stays.

SEQUENCE 2: THE WEDDING PLOT
1. Vince takes Liz to the Porters and leaves (MORE VINCE IN THIS SCENE) 1355 words
2. Liz goes to Red Box with Molly and they catch up, 3540 words
3. Liz tells Will she has to be in Chicago, 860 words
4. Liz finds out that Patsy wants her to stop the wedding, Anemone is introduced, 3090 words.

For those of you who have been here awhile, the problems are obvious.
1. There are two scenes there are over 3000 words. One of them is back story. The other is discovering something that could be explained in a sentence. There are massive cuts in the futures of these scenes.
2. There’s almost 9000 words here and almost no Vince. (Please note, there are Vince PoV scenes I’m not including in this analysis because they’re fine as it and I don’t have to cut them; this is Liz’s PoV plot we’re talking about.)
3. This whole sequence is pretty much Liz finding out things, not doing things. It’s also one scene after another of Liz saying “No.” So looking at it from the point of view of story, this sequence has to
• Introduce the Porters and their relationship to Liz (they’re going to be very important in all three books)
• Introduce Molly and her importance to Liz (more important than the Porters)
• Introduce Anemone and her importance to Liz (more important than Molly)
• Establish the central social conflict of the story–the wedding and all the people invested in it–because that’s where Liz’s personal plot dovetails with Vince’s mystery plot.
And then somehow
• Make all of that part of the romance plot in which Liz is active and is somehow with or linked to Vince.

It’s not unusual in a first act to have a lot of introduction and set-up, first acts are mostly set-up, BUT you have to keep the central story going, too, it’s even more important than set-up, and that’s Liz and Vince. Vince is in the story in his own scenes doing his own thing, with the occasional thought about Liz, but they’re not together. So I have to cut the hell out of this while making sure those four things are established AND get Vince in there somehow. How, I do not know yet. Especially since he’s pretty much missing from the next sequence, too.

SEQUENCE 3 THREE BAD MOMS
1. Liz deals with Mom, 2153
2 Liz deals with Aunt, 1420
3. Liz talks to Molly about Mom and Aunt, 1320
4. Liz goes to bar and talks with Duff, Cash, and Vince, 2236
5. Liz deals with Faye, 2919

So this has to be whacked way back. I’ll try to synopsize Liz’s conversation with Molly (3), and cut Mom’s back to echo Aunt’s although I’m going to check Aunt for repetition, too. The bar stuff is actually good, although I can cut it back some. Vince only comes in at the end, but it’s good, and Bob picks up on that in his scene that follows, so that keeps it going. That scene with Faye? That’s going to get to trimmed WAY back. It also established Lavender, so it’s important, but mostly we need to get back to Liz and Vince. This is all family stuff that has nothing to do with Vince. That fourth scene is back to Vince at the end and it actually sets up a lot of the romance, so I’ll keep most of it. But really, more Vince.

SEQUENCE FOUR: LIZ AND VINCE
1. Flirts with Vince in Bar 2236
2. Gets hit by a rock, calls Vince 1462
3. Hospital with Vince 1097
4. Car with Molly and home to Mom 1340

This is the real start of the relationship. I think the fourth scene can be cut back, but the rest of it stays. This is what a romance reader is looking for. The problem is, did she keep turning pages to get to it?

SEQUENCE FIVE: THE WEDDING TRAP
1. Liz has lunch with Lavender and says no to being Maid of Honor 1213
2. Anemone forces Liz to stay and be MoH 2327

These scenes are the button on Act One. They can both be cut back. The important main plot consequence is that Liz is going to be in town three more days which gives her time to see more of Vince, in every sense of that phrase.

And while I’m wrangling this, Bob is setting up the mystery in the six Vince scenes that aren’t included here. Yeah, fifteen Liz PoV scenes, six Vince PoV scenes. Once the murder happens, he has a lot more to do, but mostly he’s serving and protecting the town, establishing a back drop for the murder.

So here’s the sequence for Liz falling for Vince, the beginning.

1. Liz Meets Vince, first connection
2. Liz copes with the Porters trying to get out of town
3. Liz endure three bad mothers, with a two-minute interaction with Vince.
4. Liz and Vince, second connection
5. Liz gets trapped into the wedding.

So my work today is to figure how do I keep a romance reader reading through 2 and 3 to get to 4 where she’ll get a lot of the two of them together plus some snappy patter and a rescue? And also go to Home Depot and throw out half this house.

Yeah, I’m still thinking about this. Bob keeps saying, “Leave it, it’s fine,” but it’s not fine. Gah.

Updates

My power cord betrayed me again and I have been unable to log on until now.

In that time you have posted 250 comments. Do you even need me here? Yes, to put up posts. Here, have another one.

In other news, Bob and I have reached 48000 words on Rest in Pink, which I just gave back to him, even though he turns into a pumpkin about eight which is further exacerbated by muscle relaxants because he hurt his back. That’s what he gets for doing things other than writing.

I am now going to read comments and cut the hell out of the beginning of Lavender’s Blue because Rest in Pink starts fast and is very good. You all talk amongst yourselves in the comments (like you need me to tell you that).

Oh, and here’s the beginning of Rest in Pink. I know you haven’t read Lavender’s Blue yet, but Pink is supposed to stand alone. The X’s are the parts where I took out spoilers. I do not count the fact that Vince and Liz are lovers as a spoiler. You all knew that was coming after you read the first scene in Lavender.

SUNDAY, First Week of May

Posted on BurneyCommunityNews on Facebook:
WELCOME to BURNEY!
Burney, Ohio seems like a sleepy one stoplight town on the Ohio River, but come visit! We’re actually a seething caldron of illicit sex, graft, political corruption, and murder, controlled by the all-powerful Blue family! And now, Anemone Patterson, famous for her lurid past, has come to Burney with Elizabeth Danger, a woman from Burney with a shady history of her own, who is doing the dirty with dour Burney cop Vincent Cooper, possibly in an attempt to subvert the law!
Stay tuned for more dark doings and darker depravity as Burney turns even Bluer. Go to BurneySecrets&Lies at ThomasThacker.com and pre-order the forthcoming tell-all e-book on Burney and all its dark secrets, out soon. You will not be disappointed.

CHAPTER ONE

I’ve spent every Sunday night for the past five weeks with a cop. He is technically not on call on Sunday nights, which doesn’t stop people from calling him anyway, but he’s stopped picking up the phone, especially if we’re in bed when it rings. We see each other on other nights, but he picks up when people call then. Sundays are the nights we do not answer the phone.
I love Sunday nights.

I’d padded out to the counter of the old diner he lives in, still stark naked because the idea of being naked in a diner turns me on. Also the idea of the diner’s owner turns me on. Put the two of them together, and Sunday nights have gotten really satisfying for me, especially since this diner is private, transported to the woods on a flatbed truck to the banks of the Ohio River by the aforesaid cop, who will shoot anybody who comes near the place on Sunday nights. I have heard that he has actually said this to people, so he’s serious.

I’d come out to the counter to check my phone because the cop was asleep, and my employer, the fabulous Anemone Patterson, sometimes has brilliant ideas that she needs to share with me, and evidently Vince hasn’t given her the good news about Sunday nights yet. So I sat down at the counter in the empty diner—did I mention I was naked? it’s so great—and tapped the phone to look at my messages.

There were a lot of them.

Please don’t let anybody be dead, I thought, and then tapped the one person I absolutely trusted, my cousin Molly. Xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx.

I tapped on the voicemail, and Molly’s voice said, “I just texted you a Facebook URL. Go there right now. And then call me.”

That was it, that was the whole message. Given the urgency in her voice, I didn’t think it was cat videos, so I went to my texts, found hers, and hit the link.

“What do I have to do to keep you in bed?” Vince said from behind me, and I patted the seat next to me. He sat down, as naked as I was, and yawned as he looked over my shoulder at my phone, the heat from his body distracting me. “What the hell?”

I leaned back into that good warmth and his solid shoulder and felt his hand hot on my waist. “This is the Burney Community Facebook page, the one xxxxxxxxx used to run. Faye Blue took it over while xxxxxxxx is otherwise incarcerated.”

“And she put that up?”

I got to the dour Burney cop part and snickered. “I don’t think this is her.” Vince was not dour. He was sometimes unexpressive, but he never looked like a basset hound. I snickered again as I finished reading. “No, she didn’t put this up. Looks like somebody hacked the page.”

“What exactly is illicit sex?” Vince said, sliding his hand up my bare back as he read.

“Adultery? I don’t know. Keep doing that.”

“‘An attempt to subvert the law’,” Vince read over my shoulder, close to my ear. “You subverting me, Danger?”

“Every chance I get.” I frowned at the screen as I saw the URL, something I’d missed before when I’d clicked on it. “Oh, hell. This is Thomas Thacker. He’s that moron who was Anemone’s ghost writer before me. She fired him for being horrible, and he’s been harassing me for money for his research, which I do not want and for which Anemone has already paid him.”

Vince rubbed my back slowly. “I don’t see how this gets money from you. He’s insulting you.”

“Oh, not really. I kind of like having a shady past. Makes me more interesting.”

“You do not need to be any more interesting.” Vince stopped rubbing and took my phone to read the post again. “The interesting thing here is that this is all mostly true. Except my name isn’t Vincent.”

“Vincent isn’t the name on your birth certificate?”

“Nope.

I waited for more but it wasn’t forthcoming. “So what is on your birth certificate?”

He hesitated and then said, “Vinnie.”

There were a million things I wanted to ask, but I got the feeling that none of them would be welcome. I was never going to call him Vinnie. “Middle name?”

“No middle name.”

“Okay, Vince it is.” I looked back at my phone. “So where’s Thacker getting his info?”

Vince shrugged. “It’s Burney. Anybody in town would tell him anything. It’s not a secretive burg. When was the last time he hassled you for money?”

I took the phone back and scrolled through my e-mails as he put his hand on me again. I love it when he puts his hands on me. “About a month ago. There was one every day and then they just stopped. I was so busy coping with everything else that I thought he just got tired and gave up.”

“He stops and he starts working on this.”

I nodded. “If he keeps going, people will be upset.”

“Anybody we care about?”

“No. Anemone will love having a lurid past.”

“I would like to have a lurid present,” Vince said in my ear.

“You just had a lurid present,” I said, but I turned my head so my mouth was close to his.

“More,” he said, and kissed me—the man has a great mouth—and he took my breath away so I dropped my phone on the counter and kissed him back because I couldn’t not kiss him back. He is compelling.

Then he pulled me back to the alcove behind the glass brick wall that was completely filled with his queen-sized bed, a white bed-to-ceiling bookcase as a headboard.

“This is my happy place,” I said as I scooted back up to the pillows and the books.

“You’re about to get happier,” he said, crawling up to join me, and I decided that Thacker was just being an asshat, that nothing would come of his idiocy, and that I could safely forget about him and just be happy with Vince in our lurid present.

I was wrong, of course.

This is a Good Book Thursday, June 30, 2022

This week, I read Lavender’s Blue for the zillionth time, and Rest in Pink, what we have of it, about 40,000 words now, for probably the tenth time. I also read a lot of samples on Amazon Kindle, but nope, my head’s in the book we’re writing, which means I have no new books to tell you about. I’m selfish like that.

So over to you. What did you read this week?

Working Wednesday, June 29, 2022

I cleaned house (I’m going to be cleaning this house to the end of time). I did laundry. I did dishes. And I wrote more of Rest in Pink (now at 35,000 words) with Bob, which is really different for me because the first book, Lavender’s Blue, was the meet, mate, and merge book, where they’re happily together without commitment at the end. So this book is how they work their way to commitment, cautiously, porcupine love, very cautiously. It’s a different romance arc for me, and I’m having so much fun with it.

What did you do this week that was fun? Or not.

(Also, where the hell did June go?)

Happiness is Wonderful Days Even With Setbacks

Krissie wrote and said, “I’m worried about disrupting your writing because it’s going so well,” and I looked at how much time I was actually spending writing and talking with Bob online, and she was right. So she’s putting off her visit because she is a goddess of a friend and we’re speeding right into Act Two. And the weather here is wonderful–okay 90 here for the next two days and it’s June so what the hell? but then 70s again the rest of the week–and everything is growing like crazy and the house is getting incrementally cleaned out–damn I have a lot of stuff–and there’s nothing but good times ahead even though aliens have evidently taken over the Supreme Court and I hope James Comey is happy, the dimwit.

Where was I?

Right. What made you happy this week?

Here’s That Post You Wanted

Bob and I have finished Act One of Rest in Pink, which is pretty damn good since we started it about two weeks ago. We have had a few kerfluffles–he insists on only one space after a sentence and I don’t care if it does make me an old fogey, you need two spaces for clarity; I am trying to teach him that plurals do not take apostrophes; it gets heated at times–but we’re pretty much in sync at this point, although we do spend a lot of time arguing about what fictional people would do. In our last debacle, I did a sex scene and sent it to him last thing at night, and then stayed awake most of the night because it was the wrong scene in the wrong place at the wrong time. I e-mailed him the next morning and said, “DON’T READ THAT,” but it was too late and while he had some questions–JUST DELETE IT, BOB–he thought we should keep it. That took up a chunk of the morning.

But the point is, we’re at 34,000 words, so we’re both feeling pretty smug about the whole thing.

And now back to you. When we were talking about the blog awhile ago, some of you said you’d like an open post to talk about anything you wanted and to ask each other questions. That was confusing to me because it’s not like we make you stay on topic here and the comments generally range pretty wide, but evidently some of you felt constrained, so here you go. No constraints. Go where you will in the Comments, Argh People. It’s all yours.

This is a Good Book Thursday, June 23, 2022

I am currently reading Rest in Pink.

Yes, I know my GBT posts have been all Lavender’s Blue and now Rest in Pink, but we are working on this now obsessively and it’s all I’m reading. Thank god there are other people in here who do not have reading tunnel vision.

What did you read this week?