Shanna Swendson's Blog, page 255

The Other Side of the Story

Apologies for the delayed posting, but this is the first time I've managed to make it work all day.

I'm on the home stretch of the current project, with only about a hundred more pages to write. I'm not entirely sure I have that much story left, but things keep popping up, so I'm sure it will all work out. This is the part I hadn't planned in that much detail, the part that comes between the "Ordeal" and the "Death/Resurrection," in hero's journey terms. I know the big, climactic ending, but I'm not entirely sure how I'll get there.

I loved that new TV series, Chaos that was on Friday night, which I figured was pretty much a death knell, and yeah, the ratings sucked badly. It probably didn't help that I had to go look for information on it, which is a sure sign that the promo is somewhat lacking. In one of the articles I was able to find, they were talking about being inspired by the 1970s Three Musketeers movie, which was mostly an action comedy. This is essentially the Three Musketeers in a modern setting, where they're spies and not musketeers. We've got the three veteran guys who've been working together a long time and dealing with the complicated politics of their situation, and now they've got the new guy, the idealistic rookie. It probably won't last the rest of the season, but I plan to enjoy it while I can because it's perfect Friday television. It's definitely pizza-worthy.

A few weeks ago (could be longer -- time is doing funny things to me lately), I talked about how I don't seem to have a "favorite" show right now. There's stuff I watch and enjoy, but there's nothing that's really capturing my imagination (at least, until Doctor Who comes back). I've since realized that the show that's most captured my imagination is the one I'm not seeing, one that's taking place behind the scenes of another show. I was never too deeply involved in the NCIS spinoff. It was mostly Sunday afternoon OnDemand fare, but it was perfect for that -- some action, some comedy, characters I found interesting. Then they retooled it this year for reasons that remain a mystery, and while I still generally eventually end up watching it, I tend to let weeks of episodes pile up, and I'll watch other things multiple times before I get around to them because I find the characters that they added to be highly irritating. One part of the retooling that bugged me was that they wrote out the character I liked the most, the psychologist. I think I could have dealt with that, since I'm used to my favorite characters being marginalized, killed or written off. But they didn't just send him off into the sunset, never to be seen again. No, they gave him this off-screen storyline where he's had to go deep undercover for reasons that remain entirely unknown (considering there was an episode last season mostly about how he shouldn't try to do field work), and he still pops up from time to time, always in some tense, crisis-laden situation.

Which means that there's a story going on about a mild-mannered, slightly nerdy psychologist who's been suddenly thrust into the world of international espionage and counterterrorism, going so deep under cover at times that even his colleagues don't know where he is or what he's doing, he's having to learn to use weapons and to do hand-to-hand combat, and whatever he's seeing or doing, it's giving him this dark, haunted look, like he's going through hell and barely hanging on. And I'm not getting to see this story. Instead, I'm being forced to watch a mediocre, run-of-the-mill procedural where the supposed "deep cover" unit's undercover operations mostly consist of stuff on the level of saying "Candygram!" to get someone to open the door. They're taunting me with my absolute favorite kind of story -- the ordinary guy gets thrown into extraordinary circumstances and learns what he's really made of story -- with added mysteries of why and how he's doing this, and they're not letting me see it. It's like when shows sometimes do those one-off episodes from the perspective of a secondary character, so that he's going about his day while there are glimpses of these major things happening just off in the periphery. So the show's focusing on solving the dead marine of the week or busting the smuggling ring within the military transport system while elsewhere there's a guy without the usual spy or law enforcement training, the guy they wouldn't even let touch a gun before, hauling around arsenals in his suitcase while tracking terrorists through the middle east, and all we get to see is him popping up with his small arsenal and haunted look to tell us what he's discovered while sneaking through back alleys in Yemen or monitoring an imprisoned terrorist from his cover as a prison psychologist before he disappears again. So, naturally, my storyteller brain keeps trying to fill in the gaps, which means that the show that's currently captured my imagination the most is the one I'm not getting to see.

I'm not sure how interesting it really would be if I did see it. The hints may be the intriguing part. But it does seem weird to me as a writer to create an entire offscreen storyline that involves a complete character arc and a transformation of a character. If you're going to take someone from innocent and physically awkward to haunted and badass, you should probably show the process -- especially if all the other characters you are showing are relatively static and aren't going through any real arcs or changes.

Now I kind of want to try writing one of those "ordinary person surrounded by the real heroes" stories -- the guy going about his daily routine and occasionally getting the glimpses of people trying to save the world in the background. It would probably have to be a short story because I don't think you could keep it up for an entire novel without eventually putting the main character in the center of the action. It would probably be a pain to write because you'd have to plot all the "main plot" stuff first so that you could weave the daily routine through it. It could be fun to do as a duology -- have the version from the viewpoint of the peripheral character and then the "real" version. I guess it's like that short film on the Wall-E DVD focusing on that little robot trying to repair the light while the events of the main movie take place around him.

Not an April Fool's Joke

I am not going to attempt any April Fool's jokes here. There's too much risk of something coming up in a future Google search and someone not noticing the post date and taking the post literally. Heck, last year I made a joke about what April Fool's jokes I wasn't doing and someone took it literally. When you have to explain your joke about not making a joke, it's too much effort.

I managed to get my characters out of the tricky situation they were in, and then from there into another tricky situation, for which I think I have a solution, so I hope to make progress today. It's a little frustrating to work for hours without changing page counts, but I have undone the damage I did in making the wrong decision, even though I feel like I should apologize to my characters for what I'm putting them through.

Let's see, random news type stuff of the day …

The Bronx Zoo cobra has been found and is back home. It seems it really never did leave the reptile house, so that whole Bronx Zoo cobra Twitter feed (and the related Bronx Zoo mongoose Twitter feed) of the snake's adventures was apparently a hoax. Bummer. (And, yes, that is a joke. I am aware that a cobra can't tweet, even if it does have an iPhone and there's an asp for that -- the cobra's explanation for its tweeting ability.) But I loved the idea of the snake on the lam and the mongoose chasing him all over the city, just as long as I was very far away. I think I watched that cartoon of Rikki-Tikki Tavi too many times as a kid.

I'm not hearing a lot of buzz about the new CBS show premiering tonight, Chaos. I looked into it because I thought I saw a couple of familiar faces in one of the promos, and now I'm thinking it could be a ton of fun. It's sort of a comedy/adventure spy show, about a group of loose-cannon CIA agents and the rookie who gets assigned to their unit to spy on them for their boss. It involves Eric Close, and while the clips I've seen don't indicate the extreme amounts of shirtlessness we had in Now and Again, he does seem to put on glasses a few times, which isn't bad (hot men in suits putting on glasses just does something for me). Then there's James Murray, who played the paleontology research assistant/big game hunter (really, really, really big game) in the first two seasons of Primeval, though it looks like he's playing the opposite of his stoic, reserved Primeval character here, as he seems to be the loud, obnoxious comic relief. Plus, in a departure from all the British actors doing American accents on American TV shows, we have a British actor doing a Scottish accent on an American TV show. I found some clips and behind-the-scenes stuff online, and it looks like the cast is having way too much fun, which tends to mean the show will be fun to watch. This could be perfect Friday-night entertainment, which means it will be cancelled in about three weeks. Even so, tonight I think I'm making a pizza so I can enjoy this properly.

Plus, new Phineas and Ferb tonight, though it's apparently a "clip show." We'll see how that really translates in their universe. They've already re-made an earlier episode in the form of a musical, so there's no telling how they'll do a clip show.

And now to go see if I can finally move my page count forward.

Holding Out for a Hero

It turns out I made a major strategic error in part of the stuff I wrote in my Tuesday binge. I made a story decision that made sense at the time, but when I went a little further in the story, it turned out that it sapped a lot of the urgency from the following events. Something I did to get my characters out of one sticky situation ended up meaning they could pretty much stay out of sticky situations for the rest of the book (note to self: invulnerability is great for villains, horrible for heroes). So yesterday I had to figure out another way to get them out of the sticky situation so they could still stay in trouble for the rest of the book. I won't have that much that needs serious re-working, since I figured out the problem pretty quickly.

Something said in the comments of a post last week triggered a rant I've had building since a panel I was on at a convention last month, and then a fun link I found also fit into it, so I figured now's as good a time as any for it.

What happened to the heroes? I mean real heroes, not anti-heroes or heroes who are "heroes" only in the sense of being the main character. Real good guys, white hats who aren't almost as bad as the bad guys they're up against. That complaint came up in the things people are wanting in books but not really finding, and it came up as a digression in a panel on religion in fantasy when Tim Powers mentioned that there seem to be fewer main characters who live up to the ideals and values that might come from religion -- the virtuous people who are willing to lay down their lives for others or for the cause without having to be ironic about it. They are out there, but they're not really the vogue at the moment.

I think some of this trend dates back to the cynicism of the 60s and 70s when it became uncool to be earnest and sincere, and anyone who was earnest and sincere was probably a bad guy. This mindset has infiltrated the literary world and seems to come from the same place as the idea that happy endings are unrealistic. Likewise, they seem to believe that real heroes are unrealistic and don't exist anymore, if they ever did. We even get the deconstruction impulse, where heroic figures of the past have to be re-evaluated and all their petty sins exposed to show why they really weren't so great. See, there aren't any real heroes, after all, because even the people you thought were heroic were actually pretty bad.

But I read the newspaper every morning, and just about every day there's a brilliant example of the kind of heroism I like to see in characters. Not too long ago, there was the rookie cop in this area who'd responded to take a domestic violence complaint when the abuser abruptly returned home with a gun, and this young cop put herself between him and a young girl, so the child survived even though the man killed his girlfriend, the cop and himself. Or there's this story out of Japan, in which a man put on SCUBA gear immediately after the tsunami and dove into the tsunami waters to go find and rescue his family (profanity warning in the linked article -- the writer has a colorful way of expressing how impressed he is). Or a story last week about a little girl who allowed herself to be hit by a car in order to protect her little sister. Or a local news story a week or so ago about a man crashing his car due to a medical issue and the man in a nearby house who rushed outside and pulled the dazed man from the burning car before it exploded. These are all the kinds of people and deeds that the cynics would call "unrealistic," but they happen every single day.

The other impulse that seems to be at work here is the idea of making yourself look or feel better by looking down on other people rather than by improving yourself. That seems to be the appeal of so much of reality television -- hey, look at those idiots. I'm so much better than they are. Even on the competition shows that are supposed to be about rewarding excellence, there are all the ironic "vote for the worst" campaigns to keep truly untalented people on the show for more mocking opportunities. That seems to have spilled into fiction, with the loser or anti-hero as main character, giving the reader someone to look down on. Traditional heroes are aspirational -- they're smarter, braver or more skilled than most of us are, and they give us something to look up to.

That doesn't mean heroes are perfect. They can have flaws and weaknesses. They may be reluctant. They can make mistakes. They can stray from the path and be tempted to do the wrong thing or to take advantage of a situation for selfish gain. They may not even realize what they're capable of because they've never been tested. One of my favorite fictional tropes is the unlikely hero, the seemingly ordinary person who gets thrown into extraordinary circumstances and then discovers what kind of person he really is. I'm even a fan of the honorable thief, the Robin Hood type who robs from the rich and crooked to help the poor and helpless, or else the reformed thief who learns to use his skills for good. These are people with pasts who have been bad or who are in opposition to the status quo, but they are still highly skilled, and they still act honorably, in the grand scheme of things, even if they might not be following the letter of the law. In general, the heroes I like are basically good people who have the right motives in spite of their flaws, pasts, weaknesses and mistakes.

And that brings me to another side of this issue, moral relativism. I'm totally on board with developing villains as real characters and not just mustache-twirling cardboard cutouts. I agree that they should have some motivation -- but not to the point where they come across like some Dr. Doofenshmirtz evil scheme backstory, where everything they do is justified by some sad thing in their past (I expect the villain to justify and excuse himself, but I don't like it when the story or author seems to do so, when I feel like I'm supposed to feel like his past justifies his actions). And I accept the idea that the villain sees himself as the hero of his own story, that he's not doing these things just to be evil but that he has a purpose that he thinks is totally justified, even if that purpose is extremely selfish. But I keep hearing in writing seminars or panel discussions where authors will say that really the only difference between the hero and the villain is a matter of perspective based on whose story it is.

Uh, no. Sorry. If the only difference between the hero and the villain is whose point of view the story is in, then you don't really have a hero I want to read about. The bad guy and the good guy should be doing different things for different reasons, and even if they're doing some of the same things, they should be doing them in different ways and for different reasons. The good guy may have to kill people, but I would expect that he'd try to avoid hurting innocents while he's killing bad guys, and I would hope that he's doing all this for some greater good, that perhaps in the big picture more lives will be saved by defeating the bad guy. Meanwhile, the bad guy is more likely to kill indiscriminately and to do so for selfish motives. The good guy may not always follow the letter of the law, because the law can hide a lot of injustice and can be manipulated, but he's doing the things he's doing for reasons beyond himself or without darker motives like, say, racism or revenge.

If the protagonist of your story isn't heroic in this sense, he's still a villain even if he's the main character, and I want him to lose. Think about Macbeth -- Macbeth is the main character, but he's still the villain of the story because he does bad things for bad reasons, and he's ultimately defeated. He isn't a hero, in spite of being the main character and in spite of the story being told mostly from his point of view.

All of this was a big reason why fantasy fiction appealed to me in the first place. I wanted white knights on fiery steeds vanquishing evil. I wanted innocent farmboys who rose to the occasion when they were dragged into great events. I wanted to imagine that if such a thing ever happened to me, I would be able to live up to those examples.

Using Real Life in Fiction

Wow, when my subconscious decides to get going, it really gets going. After a week or so of struggling to write five to ten pages a day, I did thirty pages yesterday and probably could have done more, but I also had to finish a freelance project and then I was just too tired to spell words properly. My mom says I don't get writer's block, I get writer's logjam, so that once it's cleared, whole huge amounts of stuff then come pouring out. It's like ideas were building up and building up, but were stuck behind one part that wasn't working, and once that one part was figured out, then all the other ideas were free. I did find that things worked out in a totally different way than I'd planned, which I hope makes for some unexpected twists. Now I'm kind of curious how the rest of the story will go.

I'm now doing the "writing" part of a two-part post to answer a question. Last week, I talked about some of the elements of the Enchanted, Inc. series that were inspired by things in real life. Now I'll get into the writing part of the question, about how to use real-life elements in your fiction and where to draw the line between real life and fiction.

People are always telling aspiring writers to write what they know, and there is some truth to that. When you write from personal experience, your writing will likely be more vivid and will ring with truth. But that doesn't mean you have to write about your life, exactly. Your real life can inform and inspire your fiction without you having to write about people who are exactly like you and doing exactly the things you've experienced with people who are just like the ones in your life. In fact, it's probably better that you don't write a slightly fictionalized version of your own life story, unless you're a celebrity or have worked for someone famous so that people will buy your book expecting it to be just like the real story because they want a glimpse inside that world.

One reason for this is that, in fiction, the truth can be constraining. If you're too mentally tied to what really happened, that can keep you from writing something that's more interesting. Real life and fiction are two totally different things and have to work in different ways. Fiction has to make sense and be believable. With real life, there's usually evidence that forces us to believe what really happened, no matter how extraordinary or illogical it is. In fiction, there is no external evidence, so readers have to be able to believe it based purely on what's in the story. Characters have to have clear motivations that make some kind of sense within the world of the story, while real people don't always make sense. Real events seldom fall into a good, linear plot structure with rising and falling action and pacing that keeps events moving. If you're writing too directly from your own life, it may also be more difficult to be as objective as you need to be to tell a good story. You may end up creating a "Mary Sue" in the character based on yourself if you're afraid or unwilling to face negative aspects of yourself, let yourself be criticized by others or let anything bad happen to your story self.

"It really happened that way" can hold you back from really exploring the fictional possibilities of your story or from looking at it logically. I remember once doing a critique through a writing organization of a book that had the main character working as an up-and-coming criminal attorney downtown in a major city while living on and running a big ranch outside the city and also doing a lot of charity work and running for political office. I suggested that the author tone it down a little and pick one or two of those things to focus on because I didn't believe any one human being could do all that. I had friends who were up-and-coming attorneys, and they all worked about sixty to eighty hours a week. I also used to live on a very small cattle farm, with only a few cows that were practically pets, and I know how much time even that takes, so running a ranch is an even bigger job. Throw in the commute to get from downtown to a ranch, and there simply wouldn't be enough hours in a day. I got one of those snippy thank-you notes to the effect of "thank you for the critique, but here's why you're wrong" informing me that she knew one person could do all that because she'd based this character on a family member who had done all that. Never mind that it was some forty years earlier and he'd been in a small town instead of in a major city where it would be an hour-long (at least) commute to get from downtown to anything resembling a ranch. But the bottom line was, I didn't care if it had really happened or how it really happened. I didn't believe it as a reader, based on what I knew to be true and based on what was in the story the way she'd written it, and this author was so tied to the "it really happened" thing that she didn't try to make it believable in the context of the story. You can't stick newspaper clippings into your book to prove that the thing in your book really could happen. A note about a historical oddity that inspired your story is one thing, but you still have to make the story work in a way that readers would believe even if they didn't see the note.

But where real life can help is when you use it in bits and pieces. I often say that I take pieces of my life and throw them into a blender with lots of fictional stuff, and then out comes a story. I may never have been in the exact same situation as the characters in my books, but I have been through things that gave me the kinds of feelings they might have had, and I can draw upon my experiences to write about the way the characters are feeling and reacting. I've had my heart broken, I've fallen in love, I've lost people and things I care about, I've been scared, I've been elated, I've been disappointed. I can take those emotions and use them in my writing to convey what's going on with my characters, even if the situations are very different. I can take sadness caused by one thing and use it to write the way a character feels because of an entirely different thing.

People are always asking me if the heroine of my series is based on me, since she does have a lot in common with me, but I say that all my characters are somewhat based on me because I'm the only person I know from the inside out. I can try putting myself in other people's shoes, but it's still going to end up being based on my own responses and experiences. I may use different facets of myself for different characters, and always mixed in with a lot of fictional stuff so that none of them are really "me." I may like or identify with some characters more than others, but I try to be objective enough to be willing to do what's necessary with all of them.

I can also take little details from reality and weave them into a story to create a sense of verisimilitude. For instance, in order to motivate the heroine of my Enchanted, Inc. series to respond to a fairly dodgy job offer and set the story in motion, I gave her a truly awful boss. I took details from all the awful people I've ever worked with or for and blended them together, along with lots of fictional details, to create the Boss From Hell. I get a lot of e-mails from readers who completely relate to having that boss or who claim that I had to have based that character on their boss. Although the character is entirely fictional, there are little things about her that are based directly on reality. I don't think the character would have worked nearly as well if I'd just taken any one real person and changed a few details to mask her identity but otherwise made her exactly as she was in real life. By blending true details from a variety of sources with fiction, I created a character that is somewhat believable (if a bit over the top) but that is also universally recognized, since everyone seems to have worked for someone kind of like this.

I've done similar things by choosing telling details from real events and adding them to fictional events in my books. An annoying aspect of a particular blind date ended up being part of an excruciating blind date in a book. I didn't re-create that real date. I merely used it as a starting point for a fictional event with a core of truth. You're not even limited by your own experiences. I may not have climbed Mr. Everest, but I've done things that were physically draining and exhausting but that led to a sense of extreme achievement, and I've been cold. I can take that, expand and enlarge it, maybe use some research from reading about people who've really done it, stir it all together in my imagination, and the result may be something that feels real, even if it isn't.

From a legal standpoint, be careful about basing characters directly on real people in a way that might make them identifiable. If it's way too obvious that a character is essentially a not-very-fictionalized version of a real person, to the point that people who know them can recognize them in the book, even if they don't know that you (the author) know the person, I'm not sure the "this book is fiction and none of the characters are real" disclaimer at the beginning will protect you. Steal a detail or two, but don't just use the real person as a character. Those thinly veiled celebrity "novels" get away with it because their fictionalized real people are usually based on public figures, and there's a different standard for proving libel for a public figure. Most of those also might fall into the realm of "satire," especially since it's a satire of a public figure. If a private citizen is recognizable in a novel in a way that could harm that person's business or reputation, there could still be trouble. I'm not a lawyer and this isn't hard-and-fast legal advice, but it is something you should probably think about before making your ex-boyfriend the villain in your next book. Besides, your ex-boyfriend probably isn't interesting enough to make a good villain unless you mix in a lot of fiction. You'd need to give him goals and stronger motivations, and conflicts that tie into those goals and motivations.

I would say you've used too much real life when it gets in the way of a good story. If you can't bring yourself to make some needed story event happen because it isn't the way it really happened (unless you're writing about a particular historical event) or because you relate the characters too closely to real people to allow that thing to happen, you're too close to real life. If a character needs to die, it shouldn't matter if he was inspired by your best friend. If a character needs to succeed, it shouldn't matter if he was inspired by the ex you want to see fail. Your novel shouldn't be your therapy. If you need to write about your evil ex getting run over by trains after numerous public humiliations, then write it, but keep it to yourself and keep it out of your novel unless that's really and truly what an objective person would say the story needs. If you need to write about yourself triumphing over all, again, that's something for your diary, not for your novel.

I'm open to other questions about writing, both the craft and the business.

Book Report: Really Random Stuff

I think my subconscious took over again yesterday. After a truly epic burst of procrastination, when I finally got down to work I ended up coming up with something I didn't really expect that's now going to lead into something that could be ridiculously fun. Like, I was cackling to myself when I saw it coming.

There's no way to find a theme for this week's book report, since my reading was so varied last week, so I'll just dive in.

First, there was Museum: Behind the Scenes at the Metropolitan Museum of Art by Danny Danziger. I requested this from the central library based on the title because I thought it would be something that I needed as a reference for something I'm working on, and because the library's online catalogue doesn't give much in the way of details, it turned out not to be what I needed at all when I picked it up. But I read it anyway, and I'm so glad I did because it was a fascinating book. It's a collection of first-person accounts transcribed from interviews with a variety of people who work at or who are involved with the museum, ranging from curators to janitors, trustees to security guards. The people talk about their jobs at the museum or their roles with the museum and how they came about, as well as their own lives and interests. Interestingly enough, some of the more intriguing stories are from the non-art people who could do pretty much the same kind of work at any other place.

It reminded me of a project I used to do in my first job out of college. I was working at a major academic medical center (medical school, biomedical sciences graduate school, health professions school, research labs, multiple hospitals and clinics, all combined in one huge institution), and my main job was being first the assistant editor and later the editor of the campus newspaper. Every year, there was an employee recognition issue, honoring the non-faculty employees celebrating milestone years (like 20 years, 25 years, etc.). These were the people who weren't doctors or scientists but who had still devoted their lives to this medical center -- people like secretaries, campus police and the people who washed glassware for the labs. It was pretty much my favorite part of the year because I got to go out and talk to these people and hear their stories. You could probably do a book like that about the medical center, or about any place, and the people who get the least glory or recognition at work are often the most interesting as people because they have full lives away from work. Instead of their jobs being their lives, their lives are their lives.

This book also made me want to go back to the museum. I've been once. I'd spent the early part of the day at the Cloisters, but since your admission to one museum gets you into the other on the same day, I decided to stop by the main museum on my way back downtown. I occasionally have museum issues, so that certain types of large art museums will suddenly get to me severely, and I have to get out NOW. I need the emergency exits like they have at haunted houses that allow them to get people out without making them go through the whole thing. It gets much worse if the place is crowded. I'd been fine in the Cloisters because it was practically empty and it's not laid out like a regular museum, but the big museum was very crowded because it was spring break and every school tour group that had taken a trip to New York for spring break was in the museum that day. I made it through the medieval collection and some of the arms and armor and then had the sudden "Get me out of here!" freak out but couldn't find my way out easily so I had to go through a lot more galleries to get back to the front so I could escape. I'm also not a very visual person, so I don't always connect well to art. I love the historic items, but I need words to really get art. For instance, the episode of Doctor Who about Vincent Van Gogh where Vincent makes them look at the stars was the first time I totally got that painting. I don't know how accurate that was to the real intent, but that speech helped me really see the painting. Now after reading this book, where the curators talked about their favorite pieces in the museum, I want to go to the museum again and look at those pieces because I think I'll get them now. I also want to meet some of these people from the book. And the book kind of made me want to try to get a job there. It would be so cool to passionately believe in the place you work like that. I guess I had some of that working for the medical school, but you don't get that working in a PR agency because the clients come and go and turn on you very easily.

Then over the weekend, I read the last Dick Francis book, co-authored with his son Felix and published after his death. It looks like Felix will be continuing as a solo act, but with the Dick Francis brand (there's a book listed as Dick Francis' Gamble, by Felix Francis, on Amazon, scheduled for release this summer -- no indication whether that's just a branding thing like all the "James Patterson" books written by other people or if it's Felix writing a book his father planned before his death so that Dick Francis gets some credit even if the book isn't actually written by him). I'm kind of guessing that this last book was mostly Felix because it felt different. Not in a bad way, but every author has a particular voice that's almost impossible to duplicate, and while the three previous collaborations have felt more like classic Dick Francis, this book felt like it was written by a slightly different person. It still scratches all the Dick Francis book itches and has everything I've loved about those books, so I'm thrilled that Felix is continuing the legacy. This book's hero is an Afghan war vet who's recuperating after losing a foot to an IED. Since the army has been his life, the only place he has to go is to the home of his mother, a famous racehorse trainer, with whom his relationship has always been rather icy. He discovers while he's there that his mother is in some kind of trouble, and out of sheer boredom from the lack of military objectives, he takes on the task of figuring things out, treating it all like a military campaign. This was practically a one-sitting read and the perfect thing for a cool, drizzly Sunday afternoon. Part of me wanted to savor it more, with the knowledge that it was the end of an era, but you just can't "savor" a Francis book the first time through. You can only devour.

And now it's another day of good writing weather, and I think I can write a bit more before my subconscious puts me on "pause" again. It's a pity I can't just extract my subconscious from my conscious brain and then plug it directly into the computer. I find myself saying, "Do I really need to be here for this?" But, alas, the subconscious has no fingers and needs me to type.

Movie Monday: Road Trips

We seem to be having our annual spring cold snap. I've heard the term "Indian summer" used for a warm spell that comes in the fall after it's started to get cool, but is there a term for winter-like cool weather that comes in the spring after it's started to get warm? Saturday, it was in the 80s. I opened windows, turned on fans and spent much of the day pulling weeds and trimming the evil alien vines on my patio. Sunday, the high temperature was 51. I spent much of the day curled up under a blanket with some tea and the latest (and last!) Dick Francis book. It was bliss. This is what I call "writing weather," so I'm hoping to be productive today.

I wasn't that productive over the weekend, aside from Sunday night, when I sat down and wrote ten pages. Saturday night I gave up on trying to focus and was going to watch the Sci Fi Saturday night movie, but ended up with something just as hilariously awful on another channel. Back in December, there was a romantic comedy called How Do You Know starring Reese Witherspoon and Paul Rudd. In the promo for this movie, somehow it never came up that they'd co-starred in a romantic comedy before. I'd never even heard of this movie, and I read all the movie reviews, so I wonder if it ever got released in any significant way. The movie, called Overnight Delivery, was from 1998, and it's this bizarre combination of The Sure Thing and Better Off Dead. If that combo wasn't intentional, then the filmmakers had seen these movies way too many times and the influence seeped into their subconscious.

Paul Rudd is a college student trying to maintain a long-distance relationship with his high-school girlfriend while he's in school in Minnesota and she's in school in Memphis. He has his whole future with her planned -- marriage, white picket fence, family. But he's getting lonely, with Valentine's Day approaching, and when his roommates tease him about what his girlfriend might really be up to, he calls her. Her roommate answers, and before finding out who the caller is, she launches into a rant about what her roommate has been up to with some guy and there's finally some quiet now that she's out with him. He's devastated by the discovery that his girlfriend's cheating on him and ends up pouring his heart out to a fellow student (a brunette Reese Witherspoon). He wants advice on winning his girlfriend back, but she says what he needs to do is dump her in a pre-emptive strike, before she can dump him and before she knows that he knows what she's been up to. Together, they write a scathing break-up letter, and then she helps him stage a sexy Polaroid of them together. For the finishing touch, they take it to the express delivery drop box. It'll be picked up the next morning, then delivered the following day, which is Valentine's Day. But then the next morning he wakes up to find a message on his answering machine from his girlfriend. She talks about how she's dog sitting and was out walking the dog, which has the name the roommate mentioned. It was all a misunderstanding! In a panic, he begs his partner in crime to help him, and they end up on an epic, disastrous road trip to try to intercept the package or get there before it does. It Happened One Night (or, really, the 80s update The Sure Thing) ensues. If you've ever seen a road trip movie before, you pretty much know exactly what will happen along the way.

The similarities to The Sure Thing are obvious, with the road trip with one girl while heading to see another girl. Then there are touches of bizarre absurdity like in Better Off Dead. Instead of the relentless pursuit by the paperboy, there's the Terminator-like relentlessness of the delivery driver who has the package. He's a rookie on his first solo run, and he's convinced that their attempts to retrieve the package are a final test, so he's determined to deliver that particular package if it's the last thing he does. The reason they don't just fly and that the express packages aren't flown comes from another bizarre fit of absurdity that seems to come out of nowhere. I mentioned when talking about How Do You Know that Paul Rudd does some of the best meltdown freakouts in the business, and he got plenty of practice in this movie because he spends most of the movie in that state. I was rather impressed by Reese Witherspoon because she was playing a character totally unlike any other role I've seen her in. She really doesn't have a standard "type" she plays. Even her romantic comedy roles are all different. This was a pretty awful movie, but it was good for a mindless Saturday night in front of the TV. I think I'd have been disgusted if I'd paid to see it in a theater, but for a Saturday night with nothing else on TV, it was kind of fun.

But this did make me wonder where the line comes between expectations and cliches. Yes, the same sorts of things happen in every movie of this type, but there's not a lot of room to maneuver without disappointing the audience. Of course the travelers have to be opposites who disagree on things because there wouldn't be much of a story if they got along perfectly and spent the trip singing to the radio together or discussing their favorite movies. Of course disasters have to happen, getting worse as the story progresses, until they reach the point where they have no money, they've lost their luggage and they've lost their transportation and are in the middle of nowhere with only hours to go before their deadline. It would be a boring story if they just drove across country, stopping every so often for food and gas. And you pretty much expect the travelers to end up together because it would feel like a letdown if you'd spent so much time watching them face adversity together, only to have them part at the end.

Though I suppose you might be able to get away with having them turn out to be kindred spirits who get along perfectly if you've got some external conflict, like their rental car was last rented by someone the mob was chasing, and the mob thinks something crucial is hidden in it. And then the fact that they do get along so well might end up creating internal conflict if one of them is actually involved with someone else and finding the perfect person really complicates matters. There are probably more disasters and different kinds of disasters than the standard ones that seem to come up over and over again in these kinds of movies. I do have to give this one credit for avoiding the "We can only afford one hotel room, and there's only one bed! Whatever shall we do?" scenario or the related scenario of having to pretend to be married to each other to get that hotel room.

Yikes. Now I want to try to write a road trip story, just to see if I could get away with doing it differently. I'd have to figure out a way to add magic, though.

Book Buying Patterns (or, Where are the Books I Want?)

After I posted last week about getting into Parks and Recreation (the TV series), it looks like I'm not alone in liking the "niceness" of it. I found this article about how refreshing the "niceness" is. It's not treacly nice, just people I wouldn't mind knowing in real life. And was I the only one sobbing at the end of The Office? They totally got me. I'm not sure about the new boss they announced (and I'm surprised by the fact that I haven't heard any mention of that online yet -- was I the only one who saw that promo?).

Anyway, that talk of how refreshing nice can be, combined with thinking about that Publisher's Weekly survey on book purchasing I posted yesterday, along with the general discussion/debate about the role of publishers and what authors can do, thanks to the Digital Revolution, has got all kinds of thoughts and theories swirling around in my brain.

One thing I'm realizing is that for me, at least, the major publishers are Doing it Wrong -- and I'm talking about me as a reader, not as a writer. I don't know if it's trend chasing, doom-loop thinking, making decisions based purely on numbers, groupthink from a narrow demographic, or what, but I'm not getting what I want out of the major publishers these days. When answering that survey, I found that I'd bought six SF/F books last year (not counting books by Terry Pratchett -- with as much re-reading as I do, and with my mom and me pooling our collection and frequently swapping, I can't really tell what I bought, when). The Borders where I usually shop is one of the ones being closed, and I haven't bothered to go up there to hit the going-out-of-business sale because I couldn't think of anything I desperately wanted to buy. I have a Visa gift card from a rebate that I need to use and am planning to do a big Amazon order, but it will all be DVDs and music, not books, because there isn't a book I want to buy right now.

And yet, I'm a voracious reader. I read more than a hundred books a year. Why am I not buying books? One reason is that the library is more convenient for me than any bookstore, since the library is a couple of blocks from my house, and I can go online and reserve any book I want from within the system and then pick it up at my neighborhood branch. I have to get in a car to buy a book (or wait for Amazon to deliver it). Since my bookshelves runneth over, if I can get a book from the library, I will. My book purchases tend to be either things that just aren't available from the library (mostly mass-market paperback originals) or that I've read from the library, loved, and want a keeper copy for re-reading when it comes out in paperback. Book prices also have something to do with it. The mass-market format is priced in the $8 range these days, so even that's not so much a impulse purchase of the "hmmm, this could be interesting, I'll give it a shot" variety. And then that format is dying out, with more stuff coming out in trade paperback. That's even less of a "what the heck, I'll give it a shot" purchase. That's why I get most of my books from the library for either trying out a new author, reading the hardcover before the paperback becomes available, or for reading something I know I'll have no desire to own (like a lot of the books I read to see what's happening in the market).

But it's not just a price/practicality thing. Even when I go to the bookstore, I have a hard time finding things that suit me. I may not have a current "favorite" TV series, but I do think current TV has more things that are to my taste than current publishing does. The USA originals and the channel formerly known as Sci Fi's summer line-up are right up my alley -- fun and quirky, characters I like, not too dark but still able to deal with some serious stuff. And, I guess, edited for television, without a lot of nudity, profanity, graphic sex or violence. It's hard to find books like that. I used to read a lot of romance but now mostly read Georgette Heyer to get my romance fix since romance today seems to be going for super-hot (which means that they seem to be leaving out all other aspects of relationship development -- if they have fun in bed, that seems to be all that matters). Fantasy seems to be trying to out-dark itself, with "gritty" being the key word -- with a few exceptions that I do rush out to buy. I can't take the sexy monsters or the "we're all going to die of global warming and reality television" dystopias. I love the idea of steampunk, since I've always been a big fan of Victoriana, but I haven't yet found the book that fully lives up to the promise of what I think the genre can be -- aside from those written by Jules Verne.

Of those six books I bought last year, one was a keeper copy of a book I read in hardcover from the library after its initial release. One was something I was reading for market research purposes that the library didn't have and that I now wish I hadn't spent money on (it sounded good, or I wouldn't have bought it, but ended up being kind of icky). One was the latest book in a series I've been enjoying. Three were a new series, where I bought the first one, liked it, then bought the next two when they came out. There is a possibility that I bought more books that I haven't read yet, since I'm going off my reading list.

So, add up the high prices and the lack of availability of what I want, and I won't be buying a lot of books. There are still tons of older books I haven't read, so I won't run out of reading material. I can see where this could also be what leads to that e-publishing revolution. A $2.99 e-book brings you back into the realm of impulse purchases where you're willing to try a new author. It used to be that the publishers served as some kind of guarantee of quality, but if they become gatekeepers to keep out anything outside their narrow range of interest, then you might find more variety outside their gates. They're so timid these days about purchasing decisions that it may reach a point where they use the self-published market as the "farm team," and then only publish the authors who have been extremely successful on their own. It may be the need for something new to read that eventually drives me to buy an e-reader, since the stuff I might like probably won't be published in print.

Now, my question of the day for my legion of minions/adoring readers/people who stumbled upon my blog/people who are very bored and procrastinating: What are you looking for in books that you aren't finding at the moment? Do you have some reading need that isn't being served?

Links Galore -- TV, Movie, Book Stuff

I was at my desk before 9 a.m. today. That just seems wrong. Let's hope it means I get more done today. Yesterday, I reached the halfway point in the book, but now I have to figure out how to get my characters out of the very sticky situation I've put them in, and every idea I've come up with only makes the situation worse. Bad situations are good in fiction, but I do eventually have to get them out of this instead of just piling on more bad stuff. However, we do have zombie gargoyles, which makes everything more fun. As much as I love gargoyles, the only way to make them more fun was to add the "zombie" part.

I'm not normally a big "fun with linky things" person, but there's so much fun news out there that I had to share. I tried to do the links so they'd open new windows/tabs so you can follow them without losing your place.

First, a bit of nostalgia for people of a certain age. Back in the Dark Ages when I was in elementary school (and I think on into junior high, maybe even early in high school), one of my absolute favorite things was the school book order. Every so often -- I don't remember if it was monthly or quarterly or on some other schedule -- you'd get this little newsletter-like catalogue, full of books you could order. They were mostly children's books (naturally), and since the order form was from Scholastic, I suspect most were published by Scholastic, though I did get my novelization of Star Wars through a school book order. The books were pretty cheap, in the dollar range. And if you bought a certain number of books, you usually got a free poster (ooh!). The day when the book order came in and the teacher passed out the books was like Christmas. Someone has digitized some old book order forms. Those are from after my time, but boy, do they make me long for book orders again. Hmm, I suppose that's kind of what Amazon is, the world's largest book order catalogue, only instead of your teacher passing out the books when they come in, your mailman delivers them. And the books are more expensive than a dollar (though I bet the school book order books aren't that cheap these days). And you don't get a free poster of cute kittens or puppies and some funny saying when you order five books from Amazon. They should totally start doing that, though.

Then in TV news, the channel formerly known as SciFi has announced their upcoming programming. As usual, some of it sounds intriguing (like the series about the first Cylon war in the Battlestar Galactica universe) and some of it sounds awful (their attempted reality shows). The movies sound like their typical "so bad it's good" Saturday-night fare. The thing I'm most excited about is that I get my Christmas wish to have a Christmas episode of Haven this year. I can only imagine the potential insanity there, and you know both Audrey and Nathan probably have serious holiday-related issues. Here's the scoop on all of it.

The next one is one that has the potential to be so very cool, but I'm also worried about how it will really work. Do you like crime procedural shows on TV? Or are you sick of them? Well, what would you say to one more, if it's a crime procedural show about the City Watch from Terry Pratchett's Discworld books? One is being developed by Monty Python's Terry Jones. It sounds like it's based on the characters and situations but without being directly based on the stories in any of the books. They're going to treat it like a regular crime-of-the-week police procedural series, only it will be set in Discworld, the cops will be the familiar Watch characters, and the forensics specialist is Igor. Here's the scoop, including the news release. From the sounds of it, it's just in development with interest from networks but no commitments. Meanwhile, Battlestar Galactica's Ron Moore is developing a supernatural/magic cop show called something like 17th Precinct. The last I've heard, NBC had ordered a pilot. It's "an ensemble police drama set in a world ruled by magic." The cast includes a lot of BSG names, like James Callis (Baltar), Tricia Helfer (Number Six) and Jamie Bamber (Lee). No word yet on whether Callis and Bamber will play British or American, but I'm pulling for British.

In movie news, although the end of Voyage of the Dawn Treader movie seemed to be setting up The Silver Chair, they've just announced that the next Narnia movie will be The Magician's Nephew, the Narnia prequel that shows how it all began. I'm a little irked because The Silver Chair was my favorite of the books, and I really want to see that movie, but part of me is kind of hoping that this means they're letting the kid who played Eustace grow up a little so they can add a subtle romantic element to the relationship between Eustace and Jill when they make The Silver Chair. I know it's not canon to the book, though I always liked to think of it that way, but I think it would add something to the movie, since the entire story is those two stuck together on a long journey. It's a natural set-up for them to first become friends, then to start developing other feelings.

Finally, the folks at Publisher's Weekly are doing a survey on habits in purchasing fantasy and science fiction books, and they asked for help spreading the word to get more people to take it. You can find the survey here. The survey's mostly about e-books vs. paper.

I feel like such a luddite here, as I don't really do e-books. I've read a couple of things from Project Gutenberg that I couldn't get anywhere else, mostly for reference. I do have an e-reader app on my Android phone and am very slowly working my way through David Copperfield whenever I find myself in a waiting situation. The phone is a little small for comfortable long-term reading, but I can't help but think of the number of books I could buy with the money I would spend on an e-reader device. If you normally buy a lot of hardcovers, then the cost difference might add up pretty quickly, but my reading tends to run to mass-market paperback, and it would take years worth of book purchases to even out the cost of the reader. I suppose if I traveled more often it would be something I would consider, or if the books I wanted started being only available electronically, but for the moment, I'm almost entirely paper.

But I'm curious about my readership here. I won't try to do a fancy poll, but do you do e-books or paper? How recently did you make the transition? Are you moving to e-books? There's a lot of stuff going on in the publishing world these days, with the big publishers starting to do some e-only books as a way of testing the waters before they commit to a print edition, then there are authors who are leaving traditional publishing entirely to publish themselves electronically. I just wonder how much of the market they're potentially leaving behind and whether that would hold true for my readership (not that I've got any big plans in the immediate works, but the Ongoing Plan for World Domination is a long-range plan).

Real Life and Enchanted, Inc.

I seem to be doing my usual annual thing of getting up earlier following the spring time change, even though this is the change that makes mornings come "earlier." It must just sync with my body clock so that I naturally wake up at a time that before the time change feels way too early to get up, so I go back to sleep, but now it seems reasonable to just hop out of bed. Anyway, I got into my office this morning and was stunned by the amount/angle of sunlight, since I'm not used to seeing my office at this hour of the morning. We'll see if this leads to greater productivity. Yesterday, I did actual writing work before noon, which seldom happens, and I'm on target to do it again today.

This week's Enchanted, Inc. question was something that I think was posed as a writing question, but I'm going to handle it in two parts. This week, I'll talk about the Enchanted, Inc. specifics, then I'll address it as a writing how-to next week.

The question was about the boundary between fiction and the elements I take from my own life. There are some obvious things in the Enchanted, Inc. books that match my life, but where do I draw the line?

I mostly draw upon my own experiences as inspiration or background for things in my books instead of directly basing the books on anything from my life. Here are some of the things that were inspired by or influenced by real-life elements -- and some things you might think are but that aren't.

First of all, Katie really isn't me. She isn't even based on me. We do have some things in common, but she's not the character most like me, personality-wise, and I don't see her as my representative in the story. The truth is, all the characters have some basis in me because I'm the only person I know from the inside out. Like Katie, I'm from a small town in Texas. Sort of. I was actually born in Oklahoma, so I'm not a Texan by birth. I'm an Army brat, so I grew up moving around a lot, living in Texas, Oklahoma, Louisiana, Colorado and Germany. I only lived in a small Texas town during my high school years, but my parents still live there, so I still get plenty of small-town exposure. My parents are from small towns/rural areas in Louisiana, so I probably did pick up some of that mindset and background during my childhood. I have lived most of my life in Texas now, so I guess I think like a Texan and have that perspective on the world, even if my passport says I'm from Oklahoma.

Katie had a pretty sheltered upbringing, never getting too far from her hometown until she went to college and then later went to New York, while I'd lived overseas before moving to a small town. I am insanely practical, so that trait does come from me, and I have a similar pre-Owen dating life to Katie, in that I've often been the "little sister" or "one of the guys" that no one thinks about as a potential date. Katie is a lot snarkier than I am, or at least she says the things I think but don't say. I'm always surprised when that starts coming out every time I start a new book from her perspective. People say I talk like I write, but I feel a big difference between her voice and my voice. I certainly have my moments when I unleash the snark, but I think I'm mostly a bit nicer than she is. I do seem to give her a few of my tastes and opinions.

The character whose personality most resembles mine is actually Owen, which I didn't realize until I'd written three books. I'm not a ridiculously gorgeous, wealthy, male wizard, but I can be that shy when I'm not in my comfort zone. I can go into "author mode" the way he goes into "business mode" and be fine, but socially, until and unless I reach a point of comfort with someone, I may not be able to talk at all. In fact, that's a pretty good way to tell whether I'm attracted to someone. If I chat easily, I'm probably not. If I'm attracted, I'm more likely to flee (which explains why I'm still single). I blush furiously and have fair skin that makes that obvious. My normal sense of humor is closer to his dry understatement than Katie's outright snark. And I'm a terrible slob, especially where books and paper are concerned.

Although I come from a small Texas town, Katie's hometown is not based on my hometown. It's a different kind of town in a different part of the state, and it maps geographically to a real town -- both in location and rough layout. In the real town, there's a courthouse, grocery store, Dairy Queen and motel in approximately the same places as they are in the book, and there is a creek running through the town, but since I've only passed through that town and made Dairy Queen stops there, I don't know if anything else is similar. I just took that physical framework and then built my own town on it. I did use my own knowledge and experiences from living in a small town to build my fictional town and populate it, but I don't have the experience of living in a town where I grew up and where my family is from, so I had to guess at what that was like. Everywhere I've ever lived, I've always been a newcomer/outsider, so maybe I was pouring the occasional longing I've had for roots into that part of the story. If you've got a map of Texas, a copy of Don't Hex with Texas and are familiar with the works of Joss Whedon (or the career of Adam Baldwin), you may be able to figure out which town served as the model for Katie's hometown. There's an inside joke there.

I got the idea about the group of college friends from Texas moving to New York from some people I knew in college. I overheard a lot of conversations from some girls a year ahead of me in the news lab. They'd decided that if they didn't go to New York right after college, they might never go, so they were all going together, getting whatever jobs they could find. At first they were looking at two-bedroom apartments, but they realized that was more than they could afford if they wanted to live in a reasonably nice part of Manhattan, so they were then looking at one-bedroom apartments, with a sofa bed in the living room. I was fascinated by these conversations because the idea of doing what they were planning was both terrifying and exciting. I kind of envied them for having the guts and the group of friends to do that with. So, that became the group of friends that Katie eventually joined when one of them got married and they needed to fill a space in the apartment. I didn't realize it until much later, after people started raising casting suggestions, but there's a lot of one of my college roommates in Gemma. She was a model and a drama major, and in my mind's eye, Gemma looks a lot like her. I didn't plan this, though.

Gregor, the boss who turns into an ogre when he's angry, was inspired by an actual boss I had -- or, at least, the way I felt about him when I first started working for him. He just turned purple instead of turning green and spouting fangs, but that was very much what he was like. Once I figured him out, I got along pretty well with him and ended up working for him as a freelancer for years. But at first, it was pretty rocky, and I remembered the terror of my boss suddenly changing before my eyes when something set him off.

Mimi is something of a composite character, based on some clients I've had. The dithering, wait-til-the-last-minute and then change her mind part of Mimi comes from one former client who really wasn't that evil. She was just annoying. She was the kind of person who enjoys the last-minute rush of barely meeting a deadline. She pretty much planned things so that we'd just barely make the last FedEx deadline, the one where you have to go to the airport and drop off the package at the FedEx office just before they put it on the plane. She thought that meeting at the office on a Saturday to stuff press kits was fun, and she loved all-night press-kit stuffing parties in someone's hotel room at trade shows. If you tried to get ahead of things and have some things done ahead of time, she'd change her mind (and not tell you) so that it had to be re-done at the last minute, anyway. I ended up working with her as a freelancer, too, and we were on good terms, even if there had been moments when I could have cheerfully killed her. Another person who went into Mimi was a client who really was evil and/or crazy. She was so bad that we resigned the account rather than deal with her anymore -- and that was after we started tape recording meetings with her because she would claim to have asked for things that she never mentioned and then complain when we didn't do those things. I think she worked through every agency in town until she reached the point where no one would submit proposals to work with her. I pretty much threw every bad working experience I ever had into Mimi. There are a few other people from my life who found their way into aspects of Mimi, but even suggesting who they might be would make them too identifiable, so I'll just leave it at that. For a while, I was starting to think that one of the Mimi inspirations had some kind of psychic link to me because just about every time I wrote a scene containing Mimi, the next day I'd get a call or e-mail from her and I'd think, "I summoned her!"

Incidentally, I was trying to make it so that Mimi had a cameo appearance in every book, which was a challenge in the fourth book that took place in Texas. I initially had a scene where Katie is walking past the TV while her dad is watching the news, and Mimi is being interviewed, but I ended up cutting that scene. I do have plans for Mimi if I get a chance to take the series that far.

The bad blind date where the guy wouldn't talk at all (from the first book) actually happened to me. I've also had the dilemma of trying to find a Christmas present for a guy I just started dating at the beginning of the Christmas season.

The weird stuff happening on the subway was inspired by the incident when I was visiting New York to research the first book and an entire mariachi band entered the subway car I was on and played -- and no one seemed to notice. A mariachi band is not quiet, especially not in a narrow, enclosed space, and yet people didn't even turn around.

Nita from the fourth book was partially inspired by a friend from college, a first-generation Indian-American who would every so often get a burger for dinner and talk about how her dad wouldn't understand. I also picked up bits and pieces from my neighborhood. I live in a very Indian neighborhood, so I see these young Indian women in the library, checking out stacks of chick lit and romance novels. I've found that if you stay in a motel in a small town in Texas, the manager/owner is most likely Indian, and it's a family operation, so that seemed like a way that Nita's family would have fit into that small town. I guess I eavesdrop a lot to pick up on bits of conversation from families around the neighborhood, and all that went into Nita and her family.

Owen's cat was based on my neighbor's cat, who was oddly fascinated with me. She sat in the window and watched me constantly, and if she ever got out of the house, she'd end up on my front porch.

Those are the specific real-life things that I can recall putting into the books. There may be others, and sometimes it's not even something I'm aware of doing. Next week, I'll talk about using real-life stuff in books on a more general basis.

My Life as a Lifetime Movie

I was so amazingly productive yesterday -- I ran an errand, got some exercise, did a ton of laundry, revised the last few chapters on the current project, planned the next chapter or so, wrote quite a bit and did a freelance project. Plus, I started the writing work before noon, which I believe is a sure sign of an impending apocalypse or else a sign of serious illness.

In other news, they've released a teaser for the next (and last!) Harry Potter movie. Here it is on YouTube.

And I've heard that they're making a Lifetime biopic movie about JK Rowling, focusing on her days as a struggling single mother writing the book that would end up making her a billionaire. I may actually watch that just to see how they manage to make the life of an author exciting enough for a movie. If they made a movie about me, it would be horribly dull, and I had a very similar path, aside from the child and the extreme success. But I was a moderately struggling unemployed single woman when I wrote my book that launched a series. I didn't have responsibility for a child, but I also wasn't able to rely on public assistance during that time. Any money I got, I had to earn for myself (I mostly lived on my savings). I suppose you could turn my story into a comedy and show me meeting with my oddball array of marketing clients while fretting that this was taking me away from my book. I did have several people close to me die of cancer during the process, to add some drama. There was one who died while I was writing the book, and I remember coming home from singing for her funeral to sit down and get back to writing. Then I had two aunts die (one of cancer) right around the time the first book was released, and I missed one of the funerals because I had a booksigning in another city the same weekend, and the family encouraged me to go to the signing because that's what she'd have wanted, and she would have been so proud. And then the friend who was my beta reader on the first two books died before the second book was published (while I was writing the third, which is probably why that one is a little darker).

You know, my story might make a good movie, after all, even if most of the suffering happened to people around me. Of course, I'd have to achieve something like World Domination in order for anyone to care enough to make a movie. Going from not quite rags to so-so success isn't all that interesting. They'd have to change the ending of the biopic. Or maybe I need to change the ending, myself. The real story would be the comeback, not the initial burst of success. At the rate my career has gone, I'm going to have more comebacks than Shirley MacLaine (or does anyone joke about her infamous string of past lives anymore? That was mostly an 80s thing, I think).

Apparently, Kristen Wiig would have to play me. People are always telling me that I remind them of her. I'm not sure I see it, but apparently it also has to do with personality.

Not that I would want a Lifetime movie made about me. The JK Rowling one is unauthorized. I just wouldn't mind the kind of success that might make someone want to do something like that. I do wonder if the core of Rowling's fan base would ever watch a Lifetime movie.