Meg Benjamin's Blog, page 13

Charlaine Harris and the Scourge of Disappointment

**SPOILER ALERT** This post discusses Charlaine Harris’s Dead Ever After and makes some reference to the conclusion. If you haven’t yet read the book and want to be surprised, don’t read this post! **SPOILER ALERT**

Poor Charlaine Harris. She announced that she was ending the Sookie Stackhouse series (which has been going since 2001). In her final book, Dead Ever After, she resolved Sookie’s love life, which has been nothing if not chaotic. And all hell broke loose.

Harris’s fans, or rather Sookie’s fans, were furious. They wanted her to end up with one of the numerous other guys in her life, both dead and living. Harris has gotten hundreds of one-star reviews on Amazon and vicious criticism on both Goodreads and the forum on her own Web site. These readers don’t necessarily object to her writing, but they’re livid over the fact that she chose somebody other than their favorite character as Sookie’s final true love.

Now I started reading the Sookie series when it first came out and I stuck with it up through Dead In the Family, when I began to lose track of characters and subplots since there were so many by then. But I’ve also read all of Charlaine Harris’s other series.

She has three that I’m aware of. Her Aurora Teagarden books are cozy mysteries. Her Lily Bard mysteries are considerably darker, but still have some cozy elements. Neither of these series is paranormal and Harris brought them both to a close by having the heroine find her true love and settle down (although Lily and her true love actually make a brief appearance in the Sookie series, a sort of wink to those of us who were familiar with Harris’s other books). Harris also started another series while she was doing the Sookie books, once again somewhat grittier, featuring Harper Connelly, a kind of psychic who can find dead bodies no matter how obscurely buried. And once again, Harris brought the series to a close, this time after four books (although she’s also published a series of Harper Connelly graphic novels).

In other words, Harris has a history finishing series once they’ve run their course. My guess is that she would have done the same thing earlier with the Sookie series had it not been so phenomenally successful. And had it not been turned into True Blood.

True Blood obviously boosted Harris’s popularity tremendously. But it also created problems. First of all, of course, the books and the series diverge sharply in their stories. But I think people who started reading Harris’s books after they started watching True Blood tended to conflate the two. Thus instead of the character Eric Northman, they saw Alexander Skarsgard. And instead of vampire Bill, they saw Stephen Moyer. They expected Harris to honor their preferences. They particularly loved Alexander Skarsgard, and they wanted him to win Sookie—not Eric, mind you, or not the Eric that Harris had created over the years who was an extremely problematic character, but Alexander. He’s admittedly very hot.

So Harris went and broke their hearts. And, as the folks at Wonkette might say, there’s a lot of butthurt out there. But really, what could Harris have done? She needed to end the series. And ending the series meant that somebody had to win Sookie and somebody had to lose. She didn’t choose Alexander Skarsgard for her own good reasons, and his legion of fans is irate.

But I have a feeling Harris would have gotten push-back no matter what character she chose to match with Sookie. And I give her credit for choosing her ending based on the books and not on True Blood and its fans.

However, what’s happening to Harris should strike terror in the hearts of other series authors who’ve made a point of giving their heroines multiple lovers. Sooner or later, those series must end, which may mean narrowing those options down to one (yeah, I’m talkin’ to you, Janet Evanovich). And when that happens, readers will not be happy. At that point, I suggest those writers check out what Harris has to say: “I wrote the best book I could, and I’m confident I stayed true to the characters I’d been writing for so many years.” (http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2013/may/10/charlaine-harris-sookie-stackhouse-true-blood)

If you can say that, I’d say you’ve pretty much laid the whole thing to rest.

So long, Sookie. It’s been fun.

 

The Viewing Public

I work at home, which means I no longer need a career wardrobe. In fact, when I’m writing, I usually stick to yoga pants or exercise shorts with T-shirts or tanks, depending on the season. Now here’s the thing—this is not what you’d call my “public” wardrobe. I wear it around the house and for doing very minor tasks like walking to the mailbox. I don’t wear it when I go out on errands. On the other hand, occasionally people come to the door while I’m working, so occasionally somebody from outside my immediate family sees me in my grubbies.

Recently, it was the guy from the lawn service, and his look told me immediately that he found my wardrobe choices a little…questionable. However, short of sitting around in my best togs on the assumption that I might have a gentleman caller, I don’t know what I could have done to make him any happier. This fact, in turn, led me to consider the whole question of judging other people’s appearance.

You may be familiar with the People Of Walmart web site. It’s a collection of snapshots of actual Walmart customers who are dressed in somewhat “colorful” ways. In fact, a lot of these people give rise to an automatic “What were they thinking?” Few of us, I assume, would show up in public with several inches of buttcrack on view.

On the other hand, I’ve seen pictures of older women in bathing suits with snarky comments that made me want to grab the photographer by the throat. The idea that only babelicious young things should be able to go swimming is at best annoying and at worst an assault both on the elderly and, in many cases, on women in general.

So here’s the thing I’m wrestling with—who gets to make this judgment? Is it fair to snicker at people in the Walmart pictures? Why should some of us become arbiters for the rest of us? Yeah, in reality, I try to at least look decent when I venture into polite society. I don’t wear anything that’s going to offend the sensibilities of most viewers. But do those viewers actually have any right to demand that I dress in a fashion that meets their standards? And what if those standards include putting every woman over forty-five into a Mother Hubbard so that younger people don’t have to be offended by reminders that bodies change as you age?

I don’t have any answers here. I guess I’m arguing for tolerance of differences, but that doesn’t mean I want to see people stuffed into clothes that are several sizes too small and that reveal generous sections of their anatomy that nobody wants to see. But the thing is, you can’t make people not do this, and to some extent it’s not your job to try.

And so we blunder on, trying to hit some kind of sweet spot between looking like you’re dressed for a royal wedding and looking like you’re living in a cardboard box. Just don’t get me started on Jersey Shore (look away, please, just look away).

Show Me the Love

“Show, don’t tell” is standard advice that every author has heard at least once. And it’s good to hear—letting readers see that your character is angry through his actions is always more convincing than telling them “Harry was livid.” But sometimes it clashes with another prime directive in romance writing: let your readers know what your character is thinking. Yeah, you want to show Harry’s anger, but occasionally you also want to take a quick journey inside Harry’s head to illuminate all the cobwebs that are hanging out there.

Romances use more interior monologues than a lot of other pop fiction. We romance authors are prone to explaining how our heroes came to be towering alphas (sometimes towering to the point of misogyny) and why our heroines can never trust themselves to love until meeting Mr. Right. We also like to come up with metaphors for the way sexual attraction makes people feel. An author in one recent book claimed the heroine wanted to crawl inside the hero’s skin and stay there. Personally, I found that metaphor to be pretty creepy since it makes the heroine sound sort of like a hookworm, but to each her own.

All of this came to a head for me recently when I read some romantic suspense by an author who’s on my “auto-read” list (yeah, she’s also the author with the hookworm heroine, but shaky metaphors happen to all of us). I won’t tell you her name, but I will tell you that it’s been a couple of years since she’d published anything and I was really looking forward to her new book. Unfortunately, it took me a while to get into it. A big part of the problem was the hero and heroine, who had one of those instant attractions that frequently happen in romance novels. Now I have nothing against the whole “love at first sight” trope—I’ve used it myself. But the way this author handled it was to give the hero and heroine constant internal monologues about how hot they found one another. Their scenes together seemed to consist of lines of mundane dialogue alternating with paragraphs of internal musing about how much they wanted to do the deed.

I had two reactions to this. One was to wish they’d, in fact, get the deed over with so we could move on to the plot. The other was to feel that the whole thing was bogus. The author was spending so much time telling me about, in fact hammering me over the head with, the characters’ sexual attraction that she never got around to showing me how they felt. The words were there, but the concomitant action wasn’t. Moreover, the characters never seemed to actually feel anything. Despite the number of times the author told me they were nuts about each other, it never really rang true. Nothing they did or said seemed to go along with that heat level.

I’m not sure what the moral is here—even big time authors sometimes need to be reminded of the show-don’t-tell rule? But it may simply be that chemistry isn’t a matter of explanation. The characters have to be believable to begin with, and then their connection will be believable too. Without that, no amount of assertion will ring true. There’s got to be something beyond just “Harry could hardly believe how turned on he was” if an author really wants me to buy in. Maybe she could have Harry slowly discover the truth of his feelings or maybe she could have him fight his impulses or maybe she could have him walk into a wall because his attraction to the heroine makes him goofy. But it would help to have him do something other than tell me she’s hot. Trust me, Harry, most heroines are.

Guilty Pleasures – Nashville

I remember a couple of years ago when a new series of Robert Altman DVD’s were issued one of the critics in Entertainment Weekly claimed that Nashville was overrated. To this I respectfully reply “Balderdash.” Nashville is one of those rare movies that were not only masterpieces when they first came out, but that have become even more trenchant in the years since.

When Nashville was first released a lot of time was wasted trying to guess who the country music stars in the movie were supposed to be. “It’s Loretta Lynn—no, Tammy Wynette—no, Dotty West.” These days, that’s a lot less likely to happen, and that’s all to the good, given that the artists the characters are based on are mostly dead. It doesn’t really matter if Barbara Jean is based on any particular singer or not (and I’d go with not), she’s a real character with real, heartbreaking issues. The Hal Phillip Walker character, the unseen political candidate, seemed somewhat unrealistic in the seventies, when the two major parties still controlled elections. Now, he seems like a familiar figure from a few elections past. And the intersection of show business and politics is more relevant than ever. What might have seemed like an exaggeration in 1976, seems absolutely prescient in 2013.

And, sadly, the assassin is just as realistic now as he was in the seventies. Maybe even more so, given the rancorous political atmosphere of the present.

Some things don’t work. The clothes and hair styles seem wildly dated, for one thing, and the few references to race don’t really come across as strongly as they should. And Lily Tomlin as a gospel singer is still a stretch. But Altman’s unblinking version of reality still stings. Tomlin’s singing may not work, but the realization that she’s just as callous about sex as Keith Carradine’s tomcatting singer is still a stunner. Geraldine Chaplin’s “Opal from the BBC” is as biting a satire of the press as you’re liable to find. And even the minor characters, like Shelly Duvall’s witless twit of a groupie, have an impact.

I don’t want to get into arguments over what Altman’s greatest film is, but let’s all agree: Nashville is definitely in the running.

Find Me At RT!

If you’re coming to the Romantic Times Booklovers Convention in Kansas City next week, I’d love to talk to you. Here’s a schedule of where I’ll definitely be found and when. Please stop by and say hello–I’d love to chat!

Wednesday, May 1

COVER MODEL KARAOKE

Come sing along to your favorite hits, with hunky cover models! Join the Smutketeers and the Nine Naughty Novelists, who will be your doo-wop back-up singers, for a fun-filled hour of musical mayhem. There will be gift bags, prizes — and we mentioned the hunky cover models, right?!

3:45pm - 4:45pm

Location: Ballroom Level

Room: New York A

Thursday, May 2

E-BOOK, INDIE PUBLISHER & GRAPHIC NOVEL EXPO

Come meet more than 300 authors whose books are available as e-books, self-published and independent press books. All e-books at this event will be available through All Romance E-Books (ARe).

This event is also open to the public. Tickets are $5.00 and you can purchase a ticket at the door the day of the event.

4:00pm - 6:00pm

Location: Mezzanine Level

Room: Exhibit Hall A

SAMHAIN’S SAFARI

Lions and tigers and shapeshifters… oh my! Enjoy jungle beats, tasty treats and gaming feats with the staff and authors at Samhain Publishing. This year we celebrate all things shapeshifter with food and drink, games, music and prizes including e-readers, Samhain store gift cards and plenty of books. Take a walk on the wild side with us!

6:15pm - 7:45pm

Location:  Lobby Level

Room: Gillham Hall A

Friday, May 3

PROMISE HARBOR BACHELORETTE PARTY

Join the authors of the Promise Harbor Wedding series who’ll be there to play Dirty Minds and give away naughty prizes.

8:00pm -?

“The Bar” (we hope there’s only one)

Saturday, May 4

GIANT BOOK FAIR

Meet more than 400 authors who will autograph books, posters and bookmarks. Bring your “keepers” and have them signed!

The Saturday Giant Book Fair ticket is included in the full general convention registration fee.

This event is also open to the public and can be purchased as an individual ticket for just the Giant Book Fair. You can pre-order a book fair ticket here (Choose Day & Weekend Passes and Individual Tickets in the dropdown menu) or you can purchase a ticket at the door the day of the event. Pre-ordered tickets will be picked up at the hotel on the day of the Giant Book Fair.

You may bring in your books from home to get them autographed, however, they must be checked in and stamped (invisible ink so no damage to your books) before you enter the book fair. Also only two books from home per author are allowed.

PERK FOR FULL CONVENTION ATTENDEES:

Attendees signed up for the entire convention and who have a badge will be allowed to enter the Giant Book Fair 15 minutes earlier (at 10:45am) so they can beat the crowds of local fans waiting to get in to meet the authors.

11:00am - 2:00pm

Location: Mezzanine Level

Room:  Exhibit Hall A

FAN-TASTIC DAY: FAN-TASTIC DAY PARTY

Meet a revolving door of hundreds of authors as they make appearances every 30 minutes in this high-energy event. Be one of the first 500 to sign up and receive a goody bag filled with free books and promotional items. Choose “FAN-tastic Day Pass” when you register for a pass that includes the party, the goody bag (first 500 registrants), the workshops and the Giant Book Fair.

There will be 50+ door prizes, including e-readers, lap desks, books, gift certificates and more!

6:30pm – 7:45pm (I’ll be there from 7:15-7:45pm)

Location:  Ballroom Level

Room:  Chicago, New York, San Francisco

Going Alone

Me in my “diva coat” just before the signing

A few days ago, Kim Linger Brooks wrote a blog post at Nine Naughty Novelists about her first RT. Now Kim is a friend of Erin’s who became a friend of all of us at that convention, and she ended up hanging out with the five of the nine who were there, but she was still full of trepidation when she set out for Chicago. I think she was incredibly brave. Going to your first convention is nerve-wracking enough, but going without knowing anyone is mind-boggling.

My first romance writers convention was RomCon in 2010. It was being held in Denver, which meant I could always hide out at my house, but I was still scared to death. Finally I shared my terror with the Naughty Nine, asking if anyone else would be interested in attending since it was a fairly inexpensive convention (compared with, say, RT or RWA). Fortunately for me, Erin decided to give it a try. And Erin was smart—she brought along her mom and her daughter. Instant friends.

So why is doing this so terrifying? Conventions are great for seeing people and being seen yourself, but they’re also great for reminding yourself just how insignificant you are in the great scheme of things. When that happens (and it happens at virtually every signing for me), it’s good to have friends you can talk to, who can remind you that although you may be small potatoes, so is everybody else (except for Nora Roberts, Susan Elizabeth Phillips, Jayne Anne Krentz, JR Ward, etc., etc., etc.).

In 2011, I went to my first RT. Seven of the nine (everybody except Syd and Kate) were going to be there, but Erin was the only one I’d met IRL. Once again, very nervous stomach. Fortunately for all of us, we became friends almost instantly, which meant there was always somebody to hang with. The next year only five of us made it to Chicago, but we still had a great time.

I was very nervous about attending the Romance Writers of America convention though since, once again, I wouldn’t know anybody. Then last year my terrific critique partner, Teri Wilson, asked me to room with her, which took away at least fifty percent of my terror. And once I got to Anaheim I found some other friends from my days in the San Antonio Romance Authors and people I’d met before at RT. I’ll be there again this year in Atlanta.

The thing is, conventions are billed as fun, which is true, but they can also be scary. I know that better than anyone. While there are writers who are total extroverts (Susan Elizabeth Phillips springs to mind), a lot of us tend to be shy, retiring types. Telling someone “Oh, you’ll make friends there. It’s easy” doesn’t really help. It’s not easy. And unless you’ve got a few semi-familiar people around to hang with, it can be absolutely terrifying. On the other hand, you may discover that some of your “virtual” friends are going to be at the convention too—and that’s one of the great advantages of conventions in general. You get to make the virtual real.

So I’m looking forward to RT 2013. We’re going to have a bachelorette party for the Promise Harbor Wedding authors and we’ll be doing karaoke again with the Smutketeers. It’ll be fun. But if it’s your first time, please look me up. Believe me, it’s much less daunting if you have somebody to talk to. And if you find me at a signing, I’ll be pretty much guaranteed to have plenty of time on my hands. Yes, it’s scary, but it’s also worth it. So take a breath and dive in. You’ll be glad you did.

POV Games

The Promise Harbor Wedding features four books (Jilted, Bolted, Busted, and Hitched) by four different authors (Kelly Jamieson, me, Sydney Somers and Erin Nicholas) that all start with the same wedding. It’s a wedding that goes rather disastrously awry, but it’s also a wedding that’s seen by seven different characters, using seven different points of view. Do I have to tell you how much fun that was for us?

First of all, we needed to figure out what our characters were doing at the wedding in the first place. We had a bride and groom, of course—Kelly’s hero and Erin’s heroine. But since [SPOILER ALERT] they don’t actually make it through the wedding, we also had their Significant Others, both of whom qualified as guests (one in a very loose sense). Syd and I had the supporting players, the best man in her case and the matron of honor in mine. Syd also had the best man’s “date,” the cop who arrested him earlier for disorderly conduct. My heroine’s SO was actually not a wedding guest so that left us with seven points of view to deal with.

Kelly and Erin laid out the basic wedding for the four of us. The bride and groom would obviously be able to see the main events better than the other characters. But once we had that template to work with, the other characters could all cut loose. We also had to be aware of the emotional states of the characters involved. Kelly’s hero is the groom and her heroine is the groom’s ex-girlfriend who’s a guest at the wedding. Both of them have reasons to be emotionally devastated by what happens at the wedding, and they’re both pretty upset. Nobody writes emotion like Kelly writes emotion, and I guarantee you’ll feel upset for them by the end of the wedding in Jilted.

In my case, my heroine, Greta Brewster, has just gone through a divorce of her own—something she was trying to keep from her mother and her brother, the groom. Her view of weddings and marriage in general is a little jaundiced, based on her own experience, and what she sees at the wedding does nothing to make her feel more positive. Greta also has a slightly snarky personality, not unlike mine, and her sense of the ridiculous causes her to see the wedding events in a somewhat more comic light than the other characters. Kelly’s view of the wedding will make your heart ache. I hope mine will make you grin, at least a little.

I think of the wedding scenes in our four books as a kind of kaleidoscope vision. Each person sees the same wedding a little differently, and each person reacts based on what she/he thinks he/she’s just seen. Which is all to say—don’t stop with just one version. Remember, you’ve got a lot of other ways to see the Promise Harbor Wedding.

Buy a copy: Samhain | Amazon

Plot, Character, Setting

All novels have three major elements—plot, character, and setting—but how novelists deal with them differs from novelist to novelist. We’re all individuals and we all tend to feel our way of proceeding is the best there is. That makes collaborating with other writers on a series an interesting experience.

My normal process for creating characters is just to let them develop as I work out the plot, although I’ve got some really useful spreadsheets I picked up a few years ago from Delilah Devlin that help in sketching out the general details. With Bolted, though, I was in a new situation since it’s part of the four-book Promise Harbor Wedding series with three other writers (Kelly Jamieson, Sydney Somers, and Erin Nicholas). The books aren’t really sequential—they all begin with the same, disastrous wedding ceremony and then take off from there. And some of the same characters show up in all four books. So although I could let my hero and heroine develop over the course of the story, I also had to keep my fellow writers up to date with how they were developing so that they’d seem the same in the other books. And some of my secondary characters, particularly the heroine’s mom, had to be changed slightly so that they’d fit everybody’s concept of what they were like. It was a different way of working and sort of fun.

Usually when I write plot and character develop at the same time. But with Promise Harbor, we all brainstormed the general plot, and then our characters took off from there. We all started with the same situation, seen through different characters’ points of view. In Kelly Jamieson’s Jilted, her POV characters were the groom who’s deserted at the altar and his former girlfriend. Both of them have reason to be heartbroken over what happens, and Kelly’s versions are very emotional. My POV character is the matron of honor. She’s less involved in the situation and a little more cynical herself. So my version tends to be more snarky than angsty. The same things happen in all the versions of the wedding that show up in the four books (in fact, we all had to work together to make sure the incidents in our scenes were the same), but the characters involved make all the difference.

Usually, I have to know how a story ends before I begin writing. I couldn’t really work with a story that was open-ended—I’d be afraid of getting blocked midway through. However, the way the characters get there may change as I work through the story. My heroine’s ex-husband pops up in Bolted, for example, but the idea of him I had before I started writing changed slightly as I began working with him. He developed into a much more interesting character as I wrote him into the story.

Then there’s setting. I’m more comfortable with settings I know. My Texas books all take place in settings I’m very familiar with so that I can describe them without too much strain—I lived in San Antonio (where the Medium trilogy takes place) for over twenty years and I spent a lot of time in the Hill Country, the location for Konigsburg. Again, Bolted was different because we all decided on the setting together. Promise Harbor is in Massachusetts, somewhere vaguely close to Martha’s Vineyard. I did, in fact, live in Massachusetts for a short time many, many years ago, but it’s been a while since I’ve been back. In this case, I had to refresh my memory about how things looked via Flickr and movies like Jumping the Broom that actually take place in the right area. The four of us decided on some common settings, like Barney’s Clam Shack in Promise Harbor. But we also introduced some places that were purely our own. In my case, it was a dilapidated hotel in a little town a few miles up the road that my hero calls Casa Dubrovnik (the owners are Alice and Nadia Dubrovnik). It’s sort of based on places I’ve stayed, but also some half-remembered movies.

So Bolted is different, but I hope it’s different in a good way. The process we used in developing the series was also different, but fun. Every once in a while, it’s good to get out of your comfort zone. So I hope you’ll check out Promise Harbor to see how well we did. Jilted is available now from Samhain. Bolted will be released on April 2, Busted on April 16, and Hitched on April 30. Vive la differénce!

 

 

The Bridesmaid’s Dress Disaster

A few years ago, when I wrote Wedding Bell Blues, I gave my heroine the most beautiful bridesmaid dress ever, so beautiful it made the hero propose. Some of my readers, however, cried foul. Bridesmaid’s dresses, they said, were uniformly ghastly. The idea that one could be lovely was more unbelievable than any HEA ever written.

Those readers will be much happier with Bolted, my part of the Promise Harbor Wedding quartet (with Kelly Jamieson, Sydney Somers, and Erin Nicholas), to be released on April 2. My heroine in Bolted is the Matron Of Honor at a true wedding disaster, but even before the ceremony itself falls apart, she’s already been saddled with the dress she refers to repeatedly as the “most ghastly bridesmaid dress in the history of mankind.” The dress in question falls into the dreaded Gone With The Wind category: full skirt with the “crinolines from hell” and ruffles everywhere. To make things even more interesting, my bridesmaid heroine escapes from the wedding with only this hideous dress and her fierce determination to take a hike.

I’m not sure why bridesmaids’ dresses are frequently such disasters. I’m sure some brides are deliberately nasty to their attendants, but I’m sure other brides really believe they’ve come up with something just grand. Those of us with these grand dresses hanging in the back of our closets might beg to differ.

Maybe it’s just a matter of clashing tastes, with the difficulty of having one person choose a  dress for three or four others. Maybe the bride is blinded by her own vision of her wedding—she’s going back to medieval Scotland and taking the rest of us with her kicking and screaming. In the case of Bolted, the bride is distracted by some emotional problems and leaves the choice of bridesmaids dresses to her cousin, who turns out to have a serious Gone With the Wind fixation even though the wedding takes place in Promise Harbor, Massachusetts.

But my heroine, Greta Brewster, is nothing is not a survivor. She heads down the road, horrible wedding dress and all, to find her Mr. Right. Conveniently enough, Mr. Right happens to need rescuing just as she appears.

Here’s the blurb for Bolted:

Sometimes you have to get lost before you can find yourself.

The Promise Harbor Wedding, Book 2

Greta Brewster McBain in a bind. Two, if she’s really counting. First there’s the can-barely-breathe, bridesmaid’s dress from hell. Second, the stranger who just carried her “perfect” brother’s fiancée out the church door has made it impossible to tell her own mother about her own divorce.

Rather than confirm her reputation as the family screw-up, Greta takes a drive to clear her head.

Trapped in a hole and unable to reach his cell phone, Hank Mitchell is resigned to becoming a permanent part of his own archeological dig when help arrives—in the form of a woman who looks like a Gone With The Wind refugee. Behind the ruffles and lace, though, is something he appreciates: a woman who isn’t afraid of a little dirt.

Their instant connection draws Greta into the eccentric world of the Hotel Grand, where she impulsively trades her hoopskirts for an apron. Soon things are getting hot, not only in the hotel kitchen, but in Hank’s arms…

Warning: Contains hot moonlit sex, a melancholy turtle, two wisecracking seniors, and the world’s ugliest bridesmaid dress.

Order Bolted

Who Is That Guy?

So I’m watching Vegas, and all of a sudden there’s this guy in glasses—a character called Jonesy. Only the thing is, I know him. From somewhere, some show, some other show, that is. I’m now no longer paying attention—much—to the story. I’m trying to remember where exactly I saw that actor before. Why he looks so familiar. And then, when the episode is almost over, it comes to me. He was this wormy little creep named Dewey on Justified. Tattoos, weird hair, very pronounced Kentucky accent. Only now he’s wearing hornrims and a snapbrim hat. And to make things even more interesting, according to the IMDB, he’s actually Australian. He’s an actor named Damon Herriman.

I love movies and TV shows, and I tend to remember actors and actresses who make an impression on me. Only I don’t always remember where it is I saw them before. And it usually bugs me until I figure it out—bugs me enough, sometimes, that I spend most of the program trying to figure out who it is and why I know him/her. Which means I don’t always pay as much attention to what’s actually happening on the show.

Take Garrett Dillahunt, for example. I first encountered him in the late-lamented series Life. He played a nasty Russian mobster—he was icy and blond and thoroughly unnerving. His death at the hands of the hero (Damian Lewis, the sort of villain on Homeland) was the climax of the series. I kept running into him on other series like Burn Notice, usually playing villains. It always took me a minute to recognize him because he was no longer blond and no longer had a Russian accent. He got me again, however, when Raising Hope started. It took me forever to recognize the lovably dim father as Garrett Dillahunt, and after that I kept expecting him to have a psychotic episode and blow everybody away.

If you’re a fan of one of the big, character-driven series like The Wire, this can become almost obsessive because those actors keep showing up again and again in other series. “Wait a minute, wait a minute, it’s…Bunk! Isn’t it? Isn’t that him? And isn’t that the guy who played one of the kids in the projects, you know, the one with the hoodie?”

Fortunately for me, my husband is a tolerant soul and doesn’t tell me to please shut up and go away. The latest episode of this particular craziness was when we watched a rerun of an episode of Leverage. The actress who placed Nate’s ex-wife, Kari Matchett, was hauntingly familiar. I could almost remember her doing…something. It drove me crazy until I was fixing dinner the next day and then, suddenly, I remembered she was the head of Annie’s department in Covert Affairs.

This is, of course, fairly nutsy behavior. The only thing that keeps it from edging over into full-blown psychosis is the blessed Internet Movie Database (IMDB). If all else fails, I can flip open my laptop, head over to IMDB while the show is on and generally find a link to whatever previous performance it is that I’m remembering when I see an actor in a current role (“Anne Ramsay on Dexter? Oh yeah. She was Jamie’s best friend on Mad About You!”).

Otherwise, I’d probably be lying there at two a.m., wide awake, still moaning, “I know that actor, I’ve seen him before, who is that guy?”