Meg Benjamin's Blog, page 15

I’m Nobody

I’m nobody! Who are you?

Are you nobody, too?

Then there’s a pair of us—don’t tell!

They’d banish us, you know.

I’ll confess—this is actually a version of a blog post I published a while ago, but this week was Emily Dickinson’s birthday: She was born on December 10, 1830. I think about Dickinson now and then, particularly when I head off to one of those Big Conferences where I truly feel like the first line of this poem applies to me. But I also think about her whenever I consider the self-publishing phenomenon.

You see, although Dickinson wrote literally hundreds of poems, fewer than a dozen of them were actually published during her lifetime. Moreover, the ones that were published were usually altered substantially because editors figured most people would be turned off by her idiosyncratic style (to say nothing of her occasionally heretical religious beliefs).

Dickinson herself was sort of a textbook agoraphobe. She lived the latter part of her life without venturing far beyond her own room in the family home in Amherst, MA. After her death, her brother’s Significant Other, Mabel Loomis Todd, and Thomas Wentworth Higginson, a critic who had corresponded with Dickinson, published the first edition of some of her poetry after carefully editing (i.e., censoring) her more unusual thoughts and her literary style. The real depth and daring of her poetry wasn’t revealed until Thomas H. Johnson returned to Dickinson’s original versions and published a complete edition in 1955.

So what does this have to do with self-publishing? Well, just for a moment, consider what might have happened if Dickinson had had access to the Internet. She wouldn’t have had to send her stuff to the unsympathetic Higginson for critique (he referred to her as “my cracked poet” when he discussed her with his friends). Today, she might find a congenial on-line class where she could try out her slant rhymes with less conservative readers. Or, more importantly, she herself could put together a small collection of her poems, unedited, and put them up on Smashwords and Amazon for ninety-nine cents.

I’d like to think that she’d have been treated much more kindly if she could have presented her own poetry to a wider audience in the way she wanted it to be seen.

And yet, it’s quite possible that Dickinson knew only too well how her own poetry would be received, even if she’d been able to get it out there where it could be read. It’s quite possible that Higginson and Todd represented the way most readers would have reacted to something so unconventional. Even if she’d been able to publish her poetry unaltered, there’s no guarantee it would have been read, or if read, understood and appreciated.

So maybe Dickinson knew what she was doing. Maybe she was one of those rare writers for whom writing itself was the reward. And maybe even now she wouldn’t want to present her poetry to the outside world for other people to see and maybe misunderstand. Unlike a lot of us who agonize over readers and critics and editors and agents, maybe Emily figured the hell with it and wrote strictly for herself. After all, that poem that I quoted at the beginning of this post has a second stanza too.

How dreary to be somebody!

How public, like a frog

To tell your name the livelong day

To an admiring bog!

I think I’ll keep those lines stored away in the back of my mind. They’ll come in very handy after the next rejection.

Jumping the Shark

So you all know this phrase, “jumping the shark,” right? If by some chance you don’t, it refers to a particularly egregious episode of Happy Days in which Fonzie enters a competition that involves jumping his motorcycle over a shark tank. The phrase itself, however, has come to refer to an episode of a TV series that marks the beginning of the end, the moment when the series begins its long descent into cancellation or irrelevance.

Usually when a series jumps the shark it’s because the writing declines or the actors get sick of their roles or the show as a whole goes to pot. But I’ve decided it’s also possible for a series to jump the shark simply because it’s run its course. And in that case, it’s time for the series to go, even if the writing, acting, and production values are still right up there.

This thought occurred to me while watching season five of Burn Notice. Now Burn Notice used to be one of my favorite shows. I loved Jeffrey Donovan’s multiply talented Michael Weston. Gabrielle Anwar’s Fiona was the perfect combination of strength and vulnerability. And Bruce Campbell was, well, Bruce Campbell. But the basic premise of the show, Michael trying to find out who framed him and trying to be reinstated as a spy, could only go on for so long. Even the introduction of a new player, Cody Bell’s Jesse Porter, couldn’t keep the idea going past a certain point. And by season 5, I was feeling restless. Yeah, yeah, sinister forces out to stop Michael, criminal mastermind, blah, blah, blah. Anything else on?

I’m afraid the same thing is happening with another of my favorite series, Leverage. As with Burn Notice, I love the cast. But the premise, Nate Ford’s band of merry confidence tricksters, is beginning to seem tired. There are only so many ways to introduce conflict among the players and most of them have already been tried more than once. I’d say it’s time to find a graceful way to end the crew’s adventures.

The sad thing about these shows is that they haven’t descended into mediocrity—they’re still doing good work. It’s just that the premise the shows are based upon is wearing out. Time to suck it up and quit while you’re ahead.

I’ve seen terrific shows stay on a little longer than they should have, and the results aren’t pretty. I loved The Wire, for example, but that final season was so much weaker than the others that I almost wished they’d just skipped it. I stopped watching The Sopranos a couple of seasons before it ended because I was tired of Tony and no longer interested in the evils the family indulged in. In both cases, the series had reached a peak in the fourth season—the wonderful, heartbreaking examination of the school system in The Wire, the jolting plot with Ralphie in The Sopranos—which they never really equaled. If the shows had ended then, most of us would have grieved, but we might also remember them fondly as shows that went out on a definite high.

I guess the point is that all shows wear out eventually. Right now I’m waiting breathlessly for the next season of Justified, but I’m sure there will come a time when I’m no longer as entranced by Rylan’s adventures as I am now. The tough part for the show’s producers is figuring out when they need to put their creation out of its misery (the fact that that creation is the source of their livelihood must make this decision even more difficult). Still, tough though that decision may be, it needs to be made. I’d say it’s time for Michael Weston to stride off into the sunset, preferably with Fiona on his arm.

Writing Revenge

This isn’t a post about Nora Ephron. I’m going to write one, honest, as soon as I can process all my feelings about her but I haven’t done that yet. However, Ephron was the author of one of the great revenge books of our time—Heartburn. In case you’re not familiar with the book, it’s a thinly fictionalized version of the break-up of her marriage to Carl Bernstein, the journalist. In a nutshell, Bernstein cheated on her while she was pregnant and then was found out in a very public way when his mistress’s husband outed them both in the gossip columns. Up until that time, Ephron had specialized in nonfiction, particularly in acerbic essays about modern life. But she chose to write this particular experience as a roman à clef, perhaps because it was too painful to write about it otherwise.

What I mainly remember about Heartburn (other than a couple of terrific recipes) was Roger Ebert’s review of the subsequent movie in which he excoriated Ephron for writing the book in the first place since it would expose her children to the sordid details of her breakup. Ebert didn’t seem particularly upset with Bernstein’s original actions, mind you, but he did mind Ephron talking about them in public, especially because Ephron’s acerbic prose pretty much skewered Bernstein in perpetuity.

The idea of seeking revenge through writing is a fairly long-standing one, however, and not just limited to cheating husbands. Erica Jong revenged herself on Julia Phillips in her accounts of her misadventures in trying to see her book Fear Of Flying made into a film in her follow-up novel How To Save Your Own Life. Jong painted Phillips as a drug-addled harpy who ruined everything she touched—she “disguised” Phillips under a pseudonym, but anyone who’d followed Jong’s experiences in Hollywood knew who she was talking about. Unfortunately for Jong, Phillips (who died in 2002) was still around and newly sober when Jong’s revenge was published, and she was writing her own autobiography You’ll Never Eat Lunch In This Town Again. She had no qualms about presenting her version of the Jong debacle, using very real names this time. Jong did not come off well.

Other authors have presented thinly veiled pictures of old friends and enemies, using fiction to accomplish the kind of skewering that real life denied them. Lauren Weisberger filleted her former boss, Anna Wintour, in The Devil Wears Prada. Carrie Fisher gave less than flattering portraits of her mother in Postcards From the Edge and her ex-husband in The Best Awful before switching to true nonfiction to describe the same experiences in Wishful Drinking. In Fisher’s case, the needling with mitigated by the fact that, like Phillips, she was equally hard on herself.

The bottom line here is that screwing with writers is never a good idea. Unlike non-writing civilians, they screw back. The best illustration of this maxim I know comes from Bobbie Louise Hawkins’ poem “Vicious Valentine” (from My Own Alphabet):

Here I sit all broken-hearted

Loved a twit but now we’ve parted

The present’s grim the future’s brighter

He shouldn’t have done it to a writer.

Over the River And Through the Woods

Tomorrow is the first time I’ll be fixing Thanksgiving dinner in Colorado. For the past several years, we’ve celebrated in Fredericksburg, Texas—a Hill Country town not unlike my very own mythical Konigsburg (except for no Toleffsons). A few years ago we started having Thanksgiving at a Fredericksburg bed and breakfast (there are a lot of them—it’s like the capitol of Texas bed and breakfasts) with our sons and their Significant Others. It’s been great fun, but it didn’t start out that way. The first year, in fact, was something of a disaster.

From the beginning, we knew just the place we wanted to rent. We’d stayed there in the summer, and it was a light and airy house with a creek running through the live oaks and pecans out back. Perfect. The only problem was that the name of the place was very similar to the name of another bed and breakfast in Fredericksburg. And I was frustrated when I made the reservations because the online service wasn’t working right. And…well…I reserved the wrong cabin.

We didn’t realize this until we’d gotten to Fredericksburg after dark, mind you. Then we had to frantically phone our sons, who were driving up in their own cars. I saw the outside of the cabin I’d rented by mistake and told myself (repeatedly) that everything would be okay. It was, after all, a historic house, even though it had no creek, no live oaks, and no pecans except for the pie I’d brought. But it was Thanksgiving. And we’d all have a great time fixing dinner and eating it.

Once I saw the inside of the place, my Pollyanna tendencies had to start working overtime. The owner had decorated it with “antiques,” which meant she’d stuffed every room in the place with junk. “Vintage” clothes hung over the doors, sort of like someone had just dropped by and left their undies behind (my older son was particularly taken by the black one-piece and rubber swimming cap with floppy flowers that were hanging in the bathroom). My sons, who both inherited my sarcastic gene, began referring to the place as the Bates Motel, expecting to find Norman’s mom reclining in a rocker somewhere underneath the detritus.

Then I heard my daughter-in-law whisper to my older son, “There’s no oven.” I looked around the meager kitchen and realized she was right. Hotplate. Microwave. Coffeepot. No oven. I had a smoked turkey breast, a couple of bags of stuffing mix, and a bag of sweet potatoes in the car. And no oven in which to cook them. That was the point at which my husband took my arm, handed me a glass of wine, and ushered me into what would be our living room for the next three days (although it was also the room where our younger son was sleeping—maybe a little more togetherness than I’d planned on).

We made it. On Thanksgiving day we went down to our friendly neighborhood HEB (South Texas’s fantastic grocery chain) and bought the biggest toaster oven they had. We cooked in shifts in the tiny kitchen and washed dishes whenever the counters got overloaded. And afterward we played Trivial Pursuit and got royally plastered.

This is the point at which I should draw a moral and say that Despite All Our Difficulties, It Was The Best Thanksgiving Ever. Except it wasn’t. It was pretty much a disaster. But the next year (and all the years since, until this one), I managed to reserve the right cabin. And it’s been pretty much smooth sailing. The sound you hear is me, knocking wood. Happy Thanksgiving all!

 

 

Don’t Forget Me In Print

My sixth Konigsburg book, Don’t Forget Me, was just released in print last week at Samhain, which is really cool. But what I really want to talk about now is why the book is named Don’t Forget Me, aside from the fact that that phrase conveys every author’s most fervent hope.

Don’t Forget Me is the story of Nando Avrogado and Kit Maldonado. Readers who know the other Konigsburg books may remember Nando and Kit from Long Time Gone, where they seemed very much together. What that book didn’t include was their breakup at the end of that summer. Don’t Forget Me deals with the aftermath of that breakup a year and a half later.

All my Konigsburg books are named after songs, sometimes obscure (Venus In Blue Jeans isn’t exactly at the top of everyone’s playlist) and sometimes very well-known (Long Time Gone has been used as a title for over fifty songs—if you’re interested, I was thinking of the Dixie Chicks version). When it came time to write about Nando and Kit, my original idea was to call the book Heartbreaker, after Pat Benatar’s great raver. But somehow, the more I got into the story, the less appropriate the title Heartbreaker became. Heartbreakers, after all, hurt their lovers deliberately, or at least they do it without really caring. But that’s not true of either Nando or Kit. They’re both heartbroken themselves.

Still, I was going to go with Heartbreaker  until one evening when I was riding into Denver with my DH, listening to Prairie Home Companion. The musical guest was Neko Case and the song she sang was called “Don’t Forget Me.” I only half listened to it, but I noted a couple of odd lyrics—one where the singer talked about being old and full of cancer, which isn’t exactly what you expect in a love song. Still, for some reason I couldn’t get that song out of my mind, so I went to my ultimate resource for song information, iTunes. There I discovered the song was written by Harry Nilsson, which explained the quirkiness (he also wrote “Everybody’s Talkin’ At Me” and the “Coconut” song). I also found it had been recorded by a lot of different people, including Nilsson himself along with Neko Case.

I hadn’t really thought of it as a book title until I listened to it a second time—and a third and a fourth. It seemed to me the main qualities of the song were regret and longing: it’s an emotional roller coaster. And it suddenly struck me that those were also the main qualities of my separated lovers—regret that their love affair had ended so badly and longing for a second chance.

Of course, they get that second chance—this is romance, not tragedy. But it takes a lot to bring them back together again, most of the novel in fact.

Here’s the blurb for Don’t Forget Me:

Once they said goodbye forever. Now they want to walk it back.

Konigsburg, Texas, Book 6

Eighteen months ago, Kit Maldonado was so over Nando Avrogado, she left Konigsburg without a backward glance. With the family restaurant in San Antonio sold out from under her, though, she’s back to manage The Rose, an exclusive resort eatery outside town.

Dealing with a stingy boss, an amorous head chef, an understaffed dining room and planning her aunt’s wedding should have kept her hands full. But she realizes she might not be as over Nando as she thought.

As the town’s new assistant chief of police, Nando’s got enough trouble without sexy Kit fanning embers he thought had long ago turned to ashes. Every time he turns around, she’s there—and it doesn’t help that everyone in town wants to see them back together.

One incendiary kiss, and there’s no denying the force of their attraction. But there’s a mysterious and oddly familiar burglar who’s been lurking around Konigsburg, someone who isn’t above a little mayhem—maybe even violence—to cover his tracks.

Excerpt:

Nando Avrogado was hiding. Granted, the Dew Drop Inn didn’t provide much in the way of cover, although it was dark enough to make identifying anyone pretty challenging unless you were less than six inches away. Granted, Nando himself, at six three and a hundred eighty-eight pounds, was somewhat difficult to hide, even when he wasn’t in uniform (as he wasn’t at the moment). Nonetheless, he was hiding. From Francine Richter, five three and a hundred five.

It was embarrassing. It was nothing a mature adult male of twenty-eight should be doing.

He should just get over it. He knew that. He should just head down the street to the Faro tavern, where he usually hung out, and take his punishment, whatever that punishment turned out to be—tears, curses, possibly violence. It wasn’t exactly his fault that Francine hadn’t understood the meaning of their goodbye date the way she was supposed to. It sure wasn’t his fault that she’d been leaving messages on his voice mail for the past two days.

Except that it was his fault. Sort of. He’d tried to make it clear throughout their handful of dates that nothing more serious was on the horizon for them. That they weren’t going to hook up for the long term. That they were just having some temporary good times.

And in reality, the times hadn’t even been all that good after the first couple of dates. He had to admit that, for the most part, he’d just been going through the motions. Francine was okay. She didn’t natter too much. She looked good. She was…a decent kisser. Not bad exactly, but not good either.

Nando sighed, taking a sip of his lukewarm beer. If he were honest, it wasn’t Francine who’d been the real disappointment. He was the one who wasn’t measuring up to expectations, Francine’s for sure, but his own too. Given his lack of enthusiasm, maybe it was just as well that they’d never progressed beyond a few hot make-out sessions on Francine’s couch.

Of course, if he were honest he wouldn’t be sitting in this dive, drinking beer that tasted like dishwater. He’d be down the street with his friends at the Faro, drinking some honest brew and dealing with Francine when and if she showed up.

He rubbed his eyes and fought back the impulse to groan in frustration. God, he was tired. And it wasn’t just the hours from his job as a Konigsburg cop. During the last few months he’d seemed to fall into a rut that just got deeper and deeper. Same people, same problems, same everything. When had this feeling started anyway? And why? He’d gotten all the things he’d once thought he wanted in his life—full-time appointment to the Konigsburg police force, a decent place to live away from his parents (sharing an apartment with his brother Esteban, but doing that wasn’t such a bad deal), an active social life without being tied down to anybody.

Yeah, right. It was that “active” social life that was the problem. Maybe he should try deliberate celibacy rather than the unintentional kind for a while. See what it felt like to not hit the clubs on his night off. The whole excitement-of-the-chase thing was getting very old. And truth be told, the chase hadn’t been that exciting for a long time. Eighteen months, in fact.

Don’t go there. It’s over. No matter how much you wish it weren’t.

  Buy link: http://store.samhainpublishing.com/dont-forget-p-7160.html

Fearless Love – Farewell To the Dew Drop Inn

The first six of my Konigsburg, Texas, books began at the Dew Drop Inn in downtown Konigsburg. I started doing this in Venus In Blue Jeans because I’d come up with a scene where the hero and heroine really wanted to meet eat other (they were powerfully attracted across a crowded room), but just couldn’t seem to manage it. The next three books were all about the other Toleffson brothers, and having them hang out at the Dew Drop made a lot of sense. Book 5, Brand New Me, was a little tougher since the hero, Tom Ames, owns his own bar, so I had him checking out the competition. Having Nando Avrogado, the hero of Book 6, Don’t Forget Me, start off at the Dew Drop also made some sense since he was drinking to forget his lost love.

Fearless Love, Book 7, starts in a chicken yard. In fact, nobody in Fearless Love goes anywhere near the Dew Drop. I didn’t exactly do this deliberately, but I knew this book was going to be different the further along I got. I love Konigsburg, and I love the people I’ve created there. But sometimes it’s fun to branch out, and I did that a lot in Fearless Love. It has new characters, new places, new situations. And I think that’s a plus. In a long-running series, you need to try new things just to keep it fresh.

Most of the book takes place at either the Rose restaurant (located at the Woodrose Inn, the plush bed and breakfast that’s shown up in several of the books) or the, shall we say, humble chicken farm owned by the heroine, MG Carmody. MG and the book’s hero, Joe LeBlanc, go into Konigsburg occasionally, mainly to visit the Faro and the folks who work there, so those of you who have read the other books will get to see a few familiar faces. But a lot of Fearless Love happens in new places around Konigsburg—a couple of honky tonks, for example, and the kitchen at the Rose.

So no Dew Drop. No Docia’s bookstore. No Sweet Thing. But a lot of new places and people to meet. It might take some getting used to, but I think you’ll like it. There’s more to Konigsburg than Toleffsons, after all.

Fearless Love: Back To Basics

I’m a plotter, which means I usually work out the plots for my books in advance. I even have an Excel spreadsheet I got years ago from Delilah Devlin’s plotting bootcamp that makes you lay out your story chapter by chapter. I have to admit—the plot usually changes once I start writing (and I’ve been known to summarize a chapter by saying something like “bad stuff happens”), but I usually have a general idea of what’s going to take place in a book before I start writing.

I did this with my most recent Konigsburg book, Fearless Love, available now from Samhain. In fact, I did it twice.

When I first started working on Fearless Love, I was going to use something like the plot in one of my favorite movies, Songwriter. I knew the heroine was a struggling singer, MG Carmody, and that she’d come back to the Texas Hill Country after some problems in Nashville. But in my original version, MG was being pursued by bad guys because she’d taken evidence that they’d stolen one of her songs and put it out under someone else’s name. Or she had a tape of one of her songs being sung by somebody else and she wasn’t getting the royalties. Or something. I don’t exactly remember what all was going to happen but it involved bad guys from Nashville and MG hiding out under an assumed name and all kinds of intrigue.

It was the intrigue that finally did me in. I was trying to work it out, chapter by chapter—when the bad guys would find out where she was, what they’d do, what she’d do, what the hero would do—and I got lost. Totally. I’m sitting there, staring at my spreadsheet, wondering how I can pull all of this together when a simple thought occurs to me: if I’m lost, the readers will be even more lost. I don’t want to do this.

So I threw it all out. That sounds simple, but let me tell you, it was terrifying. I’d spent a lot of time working over this plot and now it was gone. Where was I supposed to go next?

Where I went next was to step back and look at the basics. I had a hero, Joe LeBlanc, who was the chef at a classy restaurant. I had a heroine, MG Carmody, who was a singer living on a chicken farm in the Hill Country. How could they get together and what could happen when they did? As it turned out, they got together because Joe bought eggs from MG and then gave her a job in his kitchen. And MG, down on her luck and trying to get her singing mojo back, started playing gigs at a couple of honky tonks in the neighborhood (it’s the Hill Country—everybody has honky tonks in the neighborhood). And MG’s Great-Aunt Nedda, who had the mortgage on MG’s farm and a grudge against MG’s late grandfather, provided an extra bit of conflict but not nearly as much as thugs from Nashville. Oh yeah, and there’s a cooking competition and a petty thief. Still not exactly The Wire.

Fearless Love has great food and great music, something the Hill Country provides in abundance. It also has a simple, straightforward plot so that you can get to know Joe and MG and understand what happens to them.

And the next time I find myself lost in the intricacies of the Plot From Hell, I’ll just tell myself “Back to basics, honey, back to basics.”

Here’s the blurb for Fearless Love.

Fearless Love, Konigsberg, Texas, Book 7

Sweet music doesn’t come without a few sour notes.

MG Carmody never figured her musical dreams would crash against the reality of Nashville. Now the only thing she has going for her is her late grandfather’s chicken farm, which comes with molting hens that won’t lay, one irascible rooster, and a huge mortgage held by a ruthless opponent—her Great Aunt Nedda.

With fewer eggs to sell, MG needs extra money, fast. Even if it means carving out time for a job as a prep cook at The Rose—and resisting her attraction to its sexy head chef.

Joe LeBlanc has problems of his own. He’s got a kitchen full of temperamental cooks—one of whom is a sneak thief—a demanding cooking competition to prepare for, and an attraction to MG that could easily boil over into something tasty. If he could figure out the cause of the shy beauty’s lack of self confidence.

In Joe’s arms, MG’s heart begins to find its voice. But between kitchen thieves, performance anxiety, saucy saboteurs, greedy relatives, and one very pissed-off rooster, the chances of them ever making sweet music are looking slimmer by the day.

Warning: Contains hot kitchen sex, cool Americana music, foodie hysteria, and a whole lot of fowl play.

Buy link: http://store.samhainpublishing.com/fearless-love-p-7011.html

Six Sentence Sunday – Fearless Love

Today six sentences from Fearless Love, my next Konigsburg book, released this Tuesday by Samhain! It’s from the first meeting of my hero and heroine. She’s being pursued by an angry rooster, and he’s being a nice guy.

The man standing on the other side of the fence was massive, or maybe he only seemed massive because he was blocking her path to freedom. His bald head shone with perspiration, along with his forehead and his biceps—even his short beard and moustache looked damp. Now that she got a good look at him, she could see the sweat marks on his T-shirt stretching down his broad chest: Running shorts, New Balance shoes, okay, that at least explained what the hell he was doing up and around this early in the morning, although how he came to be standing outside her chicken yard was still a bit of a mystery.

“Who are you?” she blurted.

He gave her a lazy grin. “Darlin’ you’re being attacked by a rooster; does it really matter who’s getting you out of there?”

Selling the Jerk

You’ve all probably see the commercial that inspired this particular rant—it’s the one for Direct TV’s moving package. As the scene opens we see a man, let’s call him Mover Guy, loading a U-Haul truck, obviously in the process of moving himself. Another man, let’s call him Neighbor Guy, arrives and (after declining to help Mover Guy), takes a seat on a carton. Mover Guy reminds Neighbor Guy that he owes him $500 (leading me to believe that Neighbor Guy is actually Brother-In-Law Guy since I can’t believe anybody would loan this moron five hundred bucks otherwise). Neighbor Guy begins to extol the wonders of Direct TV’s moving package which will allow Mover Guy to get connected at his new place. At one point Neighbor Guy consults something written on his palm so that he can get the name of the package right, making it clear that this is all A Plan. At the end of his spiel he points out that this moving package is worth more than five hundred and that it’s free, so, he says triumphantly, “it’s like you owe me.” Mover Guy grins to himself and shakes his head while Neighbor Guy does a triumphant dance in the background.

I hate this commercial on so many levels it’s hard to know where to start. First of all, of course, Neighbor Guy is so obnoxious you want to reach through the television screen and throttle him. But more than that, you want to shake Mover Guy so hard that his teeth rattle. You want him to turn to Neighbor Guy and say, “No, Chuck, you still owe me the five hundred. And if you don’t pay up before I leave town, I’ll send over my friend Big Vinnie to break your kneecaps.” You want the commercial to end with anything other than the Triumph Of the Jerk.

I’ve never been clear on the logic behind commercials where the representative of the product is a jerk. This isn’t the only one out there. For example, there’s the one for Athenos hummus where the unbelievably nasty Greek granny calls a girl a prostitute because of her (not particularly revealing) dress. Then we’re supposed to want to buy the hummus because Granny the Bitch likes it. I’ve never taken a course in advertising, but it seems to me that you want your product to be identified with admirable people since you want potential buyers to get the message that if they buy your product they’ll be admirable too. Jerk commercials, on the other hand, seem to imply that if you buy a certain product, you’ll be one with jerks everywhere. Is that really the right message to send?

But of course an advertising person would point out that the whole point of any ad is to make you remember the product. You may forget the ad itself over time, but with any luck you’ll remember the product name, and that’s the point. Apparently, even if you hate ads like these, the logic is that you’ll remember Direct TV and Athenos because of your strong reaction. And that’s supposed to be good.

I really hope that isn’t the case, although I can’t guarantee that it isn’t. I don’t have cable or satellite, so there’s little chance that I’ll be buying Direct TV in the near future, but this commercial is enough to put me off if for life. And frankly, I didn’t even remember that the annoying Athenos commercial was for hummus (I thought it was for yogurt)—all I remembered was how offensive Grandma was. I’m so annoyed by these commercials, in fact, that I’m willing to take a pledge never to buy these products if I can possibly avoid it.

My reasoning? I run into enough jerks on the highways of our fair city. I don’t need to run into more of them on my TV. And they sure as hell don’t make me want to buy the products they’re pushing.

Six Sentence Sunday – Fearless Love

So today we have a six from Fearless Love, my newest Konigsburg book, coming out from Samhain on October 9. My hero, Joe, has just cooked dinner for my heroine, MG, but he obviously has something else in mind for dessert!

“Good, after all of that, I’m starving.” She started toward the cupboard to get the plates, but he caught her around the waist pulling her tight against his body. Apparently, his recovery time was over. He cupped the back of her head and covered her mouth with his.

A few moments later, he raised his head. “I’m starved too,” he growled, “eat fast.”