Abigail Barnette's Blog, page 41

The Big Damn Writer Advice Column

It’s Thursday! Time to answer some questions from the Big Damn Writer’s Question Box!

Q: How do you make sure your characters are developing the way you want them to? What do you do to make sure that the characters you are writing are not two-dimensional, or flat?

A: A really good way to make sure your characters are well-rounded is to make up a life for them that includes details that might not be pertinent to the book. If you’re writing a spy thriller set in Cold War Russia, we might not need to know that your American double agent was a Boy Scout growing up. But if you know that, then you’re aware that he has memories and experiences that exist outside of the slice of his life you’re writing. Maybe the scientist curing the virus in you Sci-Fi novel won’t ever have an opportunity to tell us about how her wild partying almost got her kicked out of college, but it will certainly shape her personality. People are like icebergs: you see about a tenth of what’s below the surface. Build that for your character, and they won’t be two-dimensional. And do it for all your characters; most of my side characters have elaborate backstories because even if they never get their own books, they’re the protagonist of their own stories.

 

Q: Tell us about what happens when you get an idea for a new piece of fiction. Before you start writing, do you need to know how the story will end, or do you sometimes just start with a character or a concept and see where it takes you? Are you a copious outliner? Do you chart each scene that needs to happen in advance and then work from that? Or do you just sit down and write and see what end up on the page?

A: When I get an idea, the first step is usually to let it sit in my brain for twenty-four hours. I figure if I can remember it twenty-four hours later, it’s worth paying attention to. The only exception is if I’m high (which is often). Then, all bets on my memory are off. In that case, I tell Bronwyn Green and she writes it in a file she keeps of all the ideas I’ve had that I might want later. I almost never want them later, but she humors me.

My ideas start out fairly nebulous. My first novel started out as “Why does everyone write about women falling in love with vampires? Why don’t they write about what happens after she becomes a vampire?” and grew from there. Other times, it will be just a character or setting. I have an entire fantasy series that existed in my head as just a setting for years. The test to see if stuff like that will actually work is sitting down and thinking out the story. It doesn’t have to be a full outline, just enough to see if I can actually get a story out of it. From there, I might outline it more or just start writing a little and then finish a full outline a few chapters in, to make sure I’m staying on track.

I would love to be able to sit down and just start writing and see what happens, and in the past, that was my strategy. But the writer brain seems to be constantly evolving, and something that worked five years ago, ten years ago might not work anymore now.

 

Bonus Question: Do you have any tips regarding gaining a following?

A: Honestly, I have no idea how I ended up with as many readers as I have. I think the only thing you can really do is create content you want to see, make connections with people in a way you like to connect, and don’t worry about making people like you if they don’t. That’s really all the advice I’ve got, because that’s how it went for me and it seemed to work out okay.

 

Wanna see your questions get answered (or just wanna air a grievance?) Put it in the box!

The Worst Person I’ve Ever Met (Part 3) or “The Bachelorette Implosion”

Need to catch up? Part One, Part Two.

This section will begin to delve into the spiritual abuse I mentioned in the introduction of part one. We here at Trout Nation come from many different backgrounds and belief systems. I have been locked in a spiritual struggle for almost ten years now, but I have returned to practicing witchcraft. If your beliefs don’t match mine, that’s absolutely cool, but it’s a part of this story and the damage this person did to my life. I’m not asking you to believe, but I am asking that everyone is respectful of everyone else in the comments. Which you probably would do anyway, because you’re awesome.

Shortly before they married, Sam and Cathy moved into a new apartment. This required the help of their friends, as the apartment they moved from had been thoroughly trashed. As someone who struggles to keep my house clean due to mental illness and my work schedule, I was sympathetic–to a point. Sam and Cathy’s home was nothing short of disgusting. Sam gets a pass for much of it; when Cathy decided she couldn’t handle working and going to school part-time, Sam was forced to work three jobs while trying to attend college himself. On a few hours of sleep per night with no time to socialize and no days off, he could hardly keep up with things like showering and eating, let alone cleaning the house. So, the task fell to Cathy.

Cathy, thinking herself a great intellectual and serious academic, made no secret of the fact that she believed her education (now in its sixth year at a two-year college, due to the “major course load” of one or two classes every term) was more important than Sam’s. She derided him for needing audiobooks to focus. “Okay, but you’re not really reading,” she would say with an indulgent smile as though she were allowing him to believe he was capable of understanding a book. Once, when I was telling a story to a group of our friends, I said, “but anyway, that doesn’t really matter to [Mr. Jen] and me.”

She gave the same benevolent smile and interrupted me. “[Mr. Jen] and I. Sorry. English major.”

I mocked that smile right back. “Actually, it’s [Mr. Jen] and me. If you removed him from the sentence, ‘that doesn’t matter to I’ is grammatically incorrect. Sorry, published author.”

She pushed back her hair and said, haughtily, “Well, I’ve never heard of that,” and sulked for the rest of the night.

Because of the immense power of Cathy’s staggering brain, she required more sleep than most people. Her I.Q. was so high, she once explained, that it taxed her physical body. “It’s exactly what happened to Stephen Hawkins,” she said, without a note of irony. “But it’s a little worse for me because my I.Q. is actually slightly higher than his.” In order to stave off ALS-by-intelligence, Cathy spent most of her time “resting” by chain-smoking (a habit she couldn’t quit because a doctor allegedly warned her that quitting would instantly kill her), reading, and singing along to Broadway musicals. She simply couldn’t clean their house, because it was too taxing. The four cats they kept shared one tiny litter box in the kitchen, beneath the table where they ate their meals. This went over about as well as one could expect, as the box was rarely if ever changed. Loose litter scattered across the kitchen floor, along with feces. When Cathy made everyone in our circle of friends Christmas cookies, we all made a pact to throw them in the garbage.

When we arrived to help Sam and Cathy move, we found that not only did they expect us to pack their things for them, they also expected us to do all the cleaning so that they could get their deposit back. They’d purchased absolutely no cleaning supplies in the time they had lived there and hadn’t picked up any for the move. Someone went and bought trash bags to clean out the refrigerator full of rotting food. I used their dish sponge to scrub the toilet by hand. As I was on my hands and knees trying to scour a year’s worth of feces, calcified urine, and menstrual blood from the bowl, Sam stepped into the bathroom and pointed to the sink. “It’s only fair that you do this one, too,” he said. “You stained it when you took off your makeup at Halloween.” I’d gone as the Wicked Witch but had a bad reaction to the makeup, so I’d washed it off in their bathroom. Sure enough, the sink was still stained green in March. At first, I was mortified and almost offered to cover the damage if their landlords deducted it from their deposit. Then reason kicked in and I asked, “Wait…did you try to clean it off?” He gave me a blank, horrified stare and said nothing.

The sink wasn’t stained. The year-deep layer of filth on their sink was stained.

A team of six people took ten hours to clean their five-hundred square foot apartment. The Dyson vacuum they’d received as a Christmas gift and which had never been used broke down after sweeping just the living room. They were overwhelmed, I thought to myself. You know what that’s like. And I still sympathize with Sam, though I have never in my life told a friend they were morally obligated to clean my house after a year of not doing it myself. These people were my friends, and you help friends out.

In their new apartment, which was much larger and cleaner than their previous one due to the efforts of a roommate they’d taken on, Cathy took to hosting Sabbats and Esbats for her friends of various Pagan traditions. Like me, she’d turned to Wicca as teen, but unlike me, she’d stuck with it. Wicca had never seemed quite right to me, but Raymond Buckland’s Buckland’s Complete Book of Witchcraft had turned me off from the idea of a coven entirely. I returned to practicing as a solitary witch, incorporating a loose framework of ritual from Wicca, but I didn’t want to worship with other people–especially if they expected me to engage sexually with them, as per Buckland’s writ.

Cathy knew I practiced on my own but she let me know I was always welcome at their rituals. “We don’t do the ‘skyclad’ thing,” she’d said with a roll of her eyes, as we had discussed our mutual reservations about Buckland’s teachings (for the record, my experience with Cathy so warped my own beliefs, I went back and re-read Buckland prior to writing this; I still find much of it a framework for and encouragement of sexual abuse of the spiritually vulnerable, but that’s a post for another time). Aside from her wedding, the things we talked most about were spirituality and magic. We spent so much time talking about our beliefs that I started to feel she was the only person who truly understood my path. Cathy set herself up as an expert, which I accepted because she’d been a practicing witch for longer than I’d been, and offered me guidance and advice in a gentle, nonjudgmental way. Eventually, I did attend one of their Esbats, where she and Sam ‘stood in’ for the Goddess and God. They cast a circle but never invoked or evoked any deity, and those of us in attendance were expected to make our offerings to Cathy and Sam. Instead of worshipping the God and Goddess, we were expected to worship and pray to Sam and Cathy. At the end, Cathy passed around slips of paper for us to write down bad habits or dark secrets that were weighing us down. She cast them into a tiny cauldron to burn them, but not before reading them silently to herself first. When it was time to finish the ritual, there was no cleansing, no banishment of any kind, and she didn’t disperse the circle because she didn’t believe it was necessary. I watched in disbelief as everyone simply broke the circle and wandered off.

I didn’t attend another.

With the date of the wedding growing closer, Cathy’s hunger for bridal adulation grew. When I received a large advance from one of my publishers, her response was not to congratulate me, but to tell me there was a two-thousand dollar bed she’d been eying at a furniture store that would make the perfect wedding gift. She also made it clear that she expected a very large bachelorette party. Though I explained to her that earning an advance didn’t mean money in my pocket immediately and that I would have to live on it for the year, she countered, “Well, I’m on food stamps. We have nothing. I think I deserve to have my dream wedding.” I rallied the other bridesmaids (one of them a total stranger who’d only met Cathy a few months previously, but who had been sucked into the role by virtue of being the fiancé of one of the groomsmen) and we pooled our resources. Cathy wanted a spa day, a trip to Chicago, maybe even Las Vegas. When we approached her before her wedding shower (held at the home of Denise, the innocent bridesmaid who had been inadvertently drawn into Cathy’s orbit) to tell her what we had planned for the bachelorette party, I fully expected a screaming tantrum. That was one of the reasons we chose the venue that we did for the conversation; any scene she might have created would have been subdued by the arrival of guests, and her ego would be soothed by the mounds of gifts she would receive.

“I love it!” she exclaimed, surprising us all. “Honestly, I’m so busy with school and wedding stuff that a big thing would have just stressed me out.” It looked like we had escaped the worst, though she still wanted total control over the items we purchased for the event. She wanted a bridal veil tiara headband and a sash proclaiming her the bride, and she’d seen an idea online for a t-shirt with individually wrapped Lifesavers candies stitched onto it. The idea was to go to various bars and let men bite the candies off. Everything she wanted sounded very far removed from the things she’d said before, but I (foolishly) assumed she’d realized that a small affair that wouldn’t bankrupt her friends would be more fun than a miserable trip with everyone counting their pennies.

The night of the bachelorette party, we met at Denise’s house. I brought a cake I’d made to look like a penis, as per the tacky, ribald theme Cathy had been surprisingly enthusiastic about. We’d all worn casual stuff because the vibe was supposed to have been laid back but Denise showed up in a short, tight leopard-print cocktail dress. We thought it was in the spirit of fun. Instead, Cathy’s plan for the evening had changed. Her new mission was to have a final night as a single woman, her goal to get as much male attention as possible. She just hadn’t bothered to tell any of us. She looked at the bridal veil tiara and sash she’d wanted and said, “I went to a lot of trouble to look good tonight and it is my night. I’m not wearing that.” She took one look at the cake and balked. “No, thank you,” she seethed; I learned later that she’d thought the cake was meant to “sabotage” her pre-wedding diet. “I hope you guys are taking me out to dinner,” she snarled, “because I want to go now!”

Completely caught off guard, we explained we were planning to surprise her with dinner at her favorite restaurant. We’d thought that would make her happy but it wasn’t enough to appease her. Instead, she sulked all the way to the restaurant, and when we arrived she bolted down the sidewalk ahead of us, her shoulders hunched. We called out to her to wait for us, but she walked faster. When one of the other bridesmaids jogged to catch up with Cathy and asked her what was wrong, she whirled to face us and shouted, “This was supposed to be about me! This was about what I wanted! Nobody has told me how hot I look or made a big deal about me yet tonight!”

We stood there stunned. How could she say no one had made a big deal about her? We’d acquired all the bachelorette trappings on a shopping trip Cathy had supervised and purchased only the items she’d hand selected. One of us had made her a stupid shirt with candies attached to it, as she’d asked. I’d baked a penis cake ejaculating “Congrats, Cathy” in icing semen, for Christ’s sake. What more could she have wanted?

Cathy march into the restaurant. She still expected us to take her out to dinner. We looked at each other in confusion and horror. What had just happened? I seriously considered going to the car and leaving her there. I’m sure the others did as well. But none of us moved. I didn’t want to be the bad friend who walked out, but with a week left before the wedding, Cathy’s entitled, bridezilla behavior had hit its peak. There was a horrible, tangled-up cost looming over all of us. Denise didn’t want to complicate the situation between her husband and Sam by ruining Cathy’s night. One bridesmaid was Cathy and Sam’s roommate and would face homelessness at worse, arctic chill at best. I was the one with the least to lose: my friendship with Cathy, which somehow still felt valuable to me. Then, there was the material cost of everything I’d purchased for the wedding, from the dress and shoes and the matching forty-dollar necklaces she commanded us all to wear, to the money invested in her bridal shower, bachelorette parties and the incidentals that kept stacking up. Cathy’s wedding was starting to eat into the funds for my own, which was barely planned and only two months away. It wasn’t just that all my time and money were tied up in Cathy’s Big Day, but I was so tired of all things matrimony that I couldn’t bring myself to want to moon over dresses and flowers.

I don’t know why I stayed. There must be some toxic friendship equivalent of Stockholm syndrome. But we did all stay. I don’t remember what was said among the rest of the group, but I do know that the night was a joyless, obligatory sort of blur. I supposed we visited some bars. I only remember two. Cathy did apologize to us, citing stress over the wedding and school, an oft-repeated refrain we all knew by heart but accepted out of sheer exhaustion. She did put on her stupid Lifesaver t-shirt and run around every bar we visited, sexually harassing men into biting the candy off. When she started pouting about not being hit on enough, we called it a night. Her bachelorette party was over by eleven P.M. I dropped her off at home with barely a word of goodbye. She asked me if I wanted to take the cake home. “If you don’t, I’m just going to throw it in the trash.”

To my knowledge, she never genuinely apologized to any of the other bridesmaids. She certainly never made amends with me. The cake presumably went into the trash, and the evening was never mentioned again.

Next time: “Cathy’s Special Day”

Jealous Haters Book Club: Handbook For Mortals Chapter 9, Temperance, or “I’m sorry that people are jealous of me…but I can’t help it that I’m popular.”

We begin this week with Lani Sarem making some bold accusations against Angie Thomas, #1 New York Times bestselling author of The Hate U Give.

It started in a Facebook group called Indie Author Support, where Sarem made this post:

For those who can’t read the image:

Okay so here it goes…My name is Lani Sarem. You may have heard of me. I wrote a book called Handbook for Mortals. It premiered #1 on the New York Times Bestseller list and then I subsequently became the only person (and the book became the only book) to ever get kicked off the list. Mostly it was due to a lot of people misunderstanding about what actually happened. I was pre-selling the book at comic cons and doing well. I had some help, my friend who is a famous actor is helping turn it into a movie and he was helping promote it at the comic cons. These cons get 40,000-120,000 people each over a weekend and a lot of the people come to meet the celebrities that are there. While meeting with the celebrities they alway ask…So you got anything new coming out? My friend Thomas (he starred in all the American Pie movies and Rookie of the Year) etc would point to our project and we would offer to sell them the book. It actually made it pretty easy to sell the book. I wanted to make my sales count though cause sales that happen outside of a bookstore (and some that happen in a bookstore that doesn’t report) don’t count. It’s hard enough to get sales…they should all count. At least that’s my opinion. Anyway, I got accused of a lot of things that aren’t true and as an indie author really got pushed around cause I didn’t have a big publisher or agent to fight for me. I was wondering in a group like this…Does it frustrate you that your sales don’t count everywhere? The music industry has way to count them no matter where they happen. I’m also happy to answer any other questions you may have as to what happened to me so ask away…Sorry for the long-winded post as well.

As you can see, she continues to beat a horse that died back in August. The story still doesn’t make a lot of sense. Her “famous actor” friend isn’t famous. Booksellers have stated it would be unlikely for established, mega-famous authors like Neil Gaiman or George R.R. Martin to sell twenty-thousand copies at a single convention. She’s still lying, but now the lie is, “Yes, I scammed, but I scammed for justice!” and she’s trying to rally other authors in her defense.

Unfortunately, at least a few people took the bait:

The first comment in this thread, from Jesse James Durdel, sounds like the kind of leading question someone would plant:

For one, most of us here have only heard one side of the story, and it’s not your side at all. Do you suspect someone got jealous and started calling attention to the con sales as a way to besmirch your name in the media?

The key phrase is the “one side of the story” here. I have no proof that JJD knows Lani personally, but I’m a blogger, not a journalist, so I can make whatever wild leaps I’d like, right? I’m going to say that JJD probably is one of Lani’s friends and planted this question to give her the opportunity for this answer:

I can tell you the person that started it was friends with the author and the agent of the book that moved to second on the list and when I was removed the agent took out the two people that started it and toasted about it [winking smiley]

Record scratch. Here we have Lani Sarem accusing Angie Thomas and her agent of deliberately sinking Handbook For Mortals in a fit of jealous panic. After all, doesn’t Angie Thomas, whose book was #1 on the NYT list for most of 2017, has been nominated for multiple awards, was named one of Oprah’s “Favorite Things”, has been adapted for a wildly anticipated film by an acclaimed director, and who has met President Obama, have a reason to feel threatened by Lani Sarem’s successes? I mean, Lani is friends with the guy who jizzed in a beer in American Pie. Who wouldn’t envy that?

Thomas, who until now hasn’t addressed the controversy directly, had this to say in response:

I’ve been silent about this. I laugh about it, honestly. But how dare you even insinuate that me, @byobrooks, or anyone on my team targeted you. YOU messed up. YOU got called out. Own up to YOUR shit.

— Angie Thomas Knows Nothing About the THUG trailer (@angiecthomas) November 27, 2017

I highly recommend the entire thread, because after having been accused of jealousy toward Sarem more than once, Thomas has earned the right to hold Sarem accountable for her words. But Sarem will never allow herself to be held accountable:

 

I never said your name…what I did say is your agent took the guys that started the twitter hunt and toasted to what happened and posted it on twitter. #handbookforcocktails real nice of him. #checkhistwitterfeed

— Lani Sarem (@RockanRollGypsy) November 27, 2017

Her “I never said your name…” is tantamount to “I’m not touching you! I’m not touching you!” between siblings in the back of their parents’ car.

There was no need to check the Twitter feed, however, as Brooks Sherman is completely uninvested in pretending to give a shit about Lani Sarem:

 

And so yes, once the entire story came out about how you and your partner tried to fix the list, I *did* take the people who uncovered the story out for a drink to toast their sleuthing skills.

— Brooks Sherman (@byobrooks) November 27, 2017

Having had her ass severely handed to her on Twitter, Sarem stepped out of the conversation. I guess she will never get the chance to tell her side of the story. You know, apart from the op-eds she wrote for Rolling Stone and The Huffington Post. Or the feature Vulture did on her. Or at the many Q and A’s she’s done at conventions and book signings. If only there were some way for this plucky young literary star of tomorrow, who’s been so unfairly maligned by the press, readers and evil, jealous, actually successful authors and their mean-spirited, hard-drinking agents, to tell her side of the story…

For example, a “How I Navigated The NYT Bestseller List” seminar that’ll run you $75.

The book industry is a mess. I didn’t realize how much until I put out my first novel and officially became the only person to ever get kicked off the New York Times bestseller list. Feel free to read the 769 articles that were written about me in the 9 days after I got kicked off. Not one reporter wrote what really happened, but I’ll tell you in person. I can help you navigate the book industry and the pitfalls and make sure you give making it your best shot.

Lani. Lani, Lani, Lani. The book industry is not a mess. Well, it is a mess, but not because of the way you were treated in the wake of your ham-fisted con falling through. You, my non-friend, are the mess. And now you want people to pay seventy-five bucks to hear “what really happened” and learn how to…what? Scam the list and get caught?

Successful, knowledgeable people should teach others how to do things. You’re not successful or knowledgeable. You’re an unlikeable, unwelcome hack who is only succeeding at slamming doors in your own face. Nobody wants to learn how to do that. If anything, you should be peddling yourself as a cautionary tale.

But of course, there’s always going to be someone in your corner, as evidenced by the last screenshot, where Richard Morgan said:

Dig into the articles and you’ll see there was a whole campaign against her and without anyone having read the damned book.

Well, Dick, I suppose that might be somewhat relevant if the entire “campaign” against her wasn’t based on her actions alone and not the quality of the book, but we agree on one thing: Handbook For Mortals is certainly damned.

On to the recap!

This entire chapter is written in italics, which, let me tell you, is a treat for a dyslexic. And while this entire chapter is mostly Zani free, there are eleven characters named in the first paragraph:

Tad, Mac, Cam, and Riley, along with Jackson and the whole band (Tom, Tim, Mike, Dave, and De’Mar)–and an audio tech named Drew–were all standing around the stage dealing with some work issues.

At least she managed to get De’Mar Hamilton’s name right in this chapter.

Drew had always gotten along with everyone and all in all was a decent guy. He was about as vanilla looking as someone can get, with brown hair and brown eyes. He led a pretty average existence overall, and no one ever had any problems with him.

Damn. This is like when that creepy kid told Mena Suvari’s character in American Beauty that she was boring and normal and ordinary.

The other guys tended to pick on Drew, though, because he was an easy target in a theater full of more-talented, more-experienced, and better-looking people, who all led far more exciting lives.

God damn, Lani Sarem, did a guy named Drew run over your fucking dog or something?

Even so, Drew always seemed to be pretty content and–compared to anyone from the small town in Iowa he was from–he was leading the best life by far.

Holy shit. Drew is Superman. He’s cleverly hiding in Las Vegas. And nobody would ever guess because he’s working with a guy named Clark Kent. It’s the perfect cover.

You might be wondering why we’re hearing so much information about Drew again. After all, we’ve already heard that he’s well-liked, as evidenced by how many people attended his birthday party. You may be thinking, “Well, with this level of detail, Drew must be a major character.” If so, how long have you been here? You know he’s not. In fact, he disappears from the book entirely after this chapter. But he serves a very important function to the story, as you will see.

“Drew, we need to have a rehearsal before the show rehearsal tomorrow,” Tom demanded. He had a way though of not sounding demanding, even when he was being that way. “We’ve gotta work this new song into part of the show,” he added, explaining why he was asking.

Some of you have wondered in the comments if this was a NaNoWriMo draft, which would explain the repetition of descriptions and actions and all the needless extras. So far, there’s been no evidence that it was. But the way she repeats and over-explains, it would have hit 50k on day two.

Lucky, lucky us.

Speaking of needless detail, this not-demanding-demand he demanded not-demandingly results in a conversation about whether or not they can have a pre-rehearsal tech rehearsal, including overtime concerns. I would include an excerpt here but it’s so thrilling that my insurance won’t cover it if you fall off the edges of your seats.

Mac turned to Drew. “Drew, Sofie was saying something about getting shocked by her handheld. You know anything about that?”

Drew’s face flushed and he frowned. “Man, there ain’t nothing wrong with her mic. I’m sure she just wants some more attention…or another new mic.”

“See, reader?” Lani Sarem’s writer brain gloats. “The avatar of every girl who’s ever been more successful than me is so terrible, even Superman hates her!”

As I said up top, Zani isn’t really present in this chapter, except when she’s off in the distance. Don’t be too disappointed, though; we still get to hear about how hot and special she is:

Zade walked by on her way to the main stage, moving too quickly to notice the group of men who had all stopped to stare at her.

and:

“God, that girl is beautiful. It’s beyond that, there is something unique and special about her.” Drew said, nudging Mac with his elbow. “Wonder what my chances are. Is she dating anyone?”

So, this whole “Every man wants Zoltar” thing is really starting to get pathetic. Someone may have mentioned this in the comments and planted the seed in my head, but I’m thinking of other female characters who have magnetically powerful sexual charisma for one reason or another. In Laurell K. Hamilton’s first Merry Gentry book, there’s a potion that makes people crazed with lust. When some gets spilled on Merry, she goes berserk and almost has sex with a police officer at the station. The potion is regarded as incredibly dangerous, and from what I remember, the entire plot of the book revolves around trying to find out who has let it get out and who’s using it for nefarious purposes. Unlike in the Anita Blake series, where Anita’s sexually magnetic curse, the Ardeur, is stated to be a negative thing while really just being an excuse for Hamilton’s self-insert to surround herself with a harem of vampires and were-creatures, in that first Merry Gentry book it’s very much considered dangerous and a violation of consent. In the television show Misfits, the character Alisha gets the “superpower” of turning any man she touches into a crazed rapist set on violating her, seemingly dooming her to a life without any consensual relationships. Again, this is portrayed as a bad thing. There are so many supernatural and sci-fi television shows that feature some variation on how bad this is, from Xander’s love spell in Buffy The Vampire Slayer to Rick’s Cronenberg experiment in Rick And Morty. Having everyone be automatically attracted to you is not good.

But that’s the world Lani Sarem has created for her utterly transparent self-insert in the story she wrote to reflect a perfect version of her world. All snark aside, that’s very sad.

Anyway, Mac doesn’t like Drew asking about Zelda because he’s still trying to figure out his feelings for her:

No matter how much he saw her at work (and out of work) he never seemed to tire of her at all.

Really? ‘Cause she exhausts the hell out of me.

The one thing Mac and Zade were sure of was that they had an unspoken rule that they really didn’t talk about all the time they were spending together with anyone at the show.

You know what I’m not sure of? What the hell is going on in that sentence.

To Drew, the question had been completely random but it didn’t feel that way at the moment to Mac. You know that bible verse: “The wicked flee when no man pursueth.” In other words when you are guilty you think other people know–even when they don’t. Mac was definitely getting defensive for no actual reason.

I’m not sure why we had to drag God and the bible into this, but at least she credited the source.

Mac tells Drew that it’s possible Lanzo keeps her private life to herself, but Drew insists that if a woman is into someone, she just can’t help but blab about it. Obviously, he’s not aware that Latti ZuPone is Not Like Other Girls™.

“Wow, Drew, I didn’t know you were an expert on females,” Mac said sarcastically.

Females? Swoon.

No one was really paying attention to the awkward conversation except for Jackson, and maybe Tad, who kept looking up from time to time at Mac and Drew.

What’s with the “maybe”? We’re in third person omniscient here. Keyword: omniscient. There’s really no room for ambiguity vis-a-vis what characters are or are not doing.

Drew protests that he could be Zippy’s type, but the other guys–because obviously grown men stand around at work and chat about who their crushes are–tease him. After one particularly cutting remark about who has “game” and who does not, Jackson says:

“That was harsh, ” Jackson said.

And hand to God, all I could think of was:

 

Mac had realized during the banter that he could redirect the attention to Jackson and find out how far things had gone with Zade and him without having to actually ask himself.

Because if any of them communicated directly, the romance element wouldn’t be fraught with needless drama and the entire book would collapse like a house of cards.

That was another thing Zade and Mac didn’t discuss: how much time Zade spent–and what Zade did–with Jackson. Mac knew if he gave her a hard time about it, she’d probably demand to define their relationship, which was something he wasn’t ready to do. Despite how much he knew he liked her.

With all these unspoken rules about what they will or won’t talk about, my assumption is that the bulk of Mac and Ziggy’s relationship is spent just staring wordlessly at each other.

Hey, remember how Mac’s heart got broken because he dated a performer and she strung him along? Isn’t that kind of what Mac’s doing to Lassie? He wants to keep her tied up for his use, but he’s not willing to actually commit to her?

“Yeah, I’ve been testing the waters a little. I’d definitely go swimming in that ocean.” Jackson grinned wide and nodded, making his position very clear.

God, even the euphemisms in this book are terrible. What kind of sex does Jackson have if it’s like swimming? Does he just flop around on top of you with his arms windmilling like he’s doing a dry-land butterfly stroke?

Mac asks if Jackson actually has swam the Zenglish Channel, but that’s a negatory because obviously, girls who would have sex with more than one guy are hoebags and sleezy skanks, and Zim is Not Like Other Girls™.

“Nah. She is quite a catch, but we’re keeping it light. She’s the kind you want to marry, not just use to get laid. Not sure if I’m ready to give up my freedom just yet, but she’d be the girl to do it for, that’s for sure,” Jackson surmised.

The fact that Jackson believes there are women out there who are okay for him to slake his animal lust upon without consideration of her feelings is pretty much a big, flashing neon red-flag. And on that red flag are the words, “I’M THE MOST BIGGEST DOUCHEBAG”. We know that Lydia is going to still be over the moon for her, and in any other story, I would think to myself, “Oh no. Poor Zydeco. She’s going to fall for this guy and it’s going to be like Julia picking Glen over Robbie in The Wedding Singer, but in this book? I’m laying my bets now that this isn’t meant to show us Jackson’s true character and what a terrible guy he is, but another chance to show how valuable a specimen of pure femininity Zatanna is.

What makes it even more difficult to tell if this is supposed to villanize Jackson or deify Linda is that Mac doesn’t think it’s a gross thing to say at all. He agrees with him.

“Yeah,” Mac affirmed, in a daze. He was processing what Jackson had said just as much as Jackon was: Zade was the kind of girl you marry.

Well, I guess we got our answer, didn’t we? It’s the market value of Lazlo’s precious womb that we’re talking about here.

Mac has had about enough of this tom foolery, so he’s like, back to work, doors are going to be open soon. And for some reason, Sarem decides this is a good place to try her hand at comedy writing.

SPOILER: She’s bad at it:

Tom commented: “You know I always feel like there is some joke there.”

(There isn’t, but it won’t stop her.)

“You know that doors being a saying about opening the doors to let patrons come in to see the show, and the fact that the theatre also gets called ‘the house’ and there is a band called the Doors and. . .”

How do you get this lost telling a joke? The house and the door go together, but what does it have to do with The Doors?

Mac shook his head. “And you live in a van down by the river? Kid, I have no idea what you are talking about.”

What a timely reference from twenty-four years ago. And the fact that it’s been introduced apropos of nothing in the style of lazy ’00s era “random” Fanfiction.net humor isn’t indicative of the author’s overestimation of her comedy skills at all.

“Yeah, I know. Like I said, I haven’t figured it out, yet. But there is a joke there.”

 

 

After everyone goes off to do their own things, Jackson approaches Mac and tells him that it’s cool if he asks Zumba out:

“[…] She’s still fair game, and I like a challenge. […]”

Every girl wants guys to talk about her like she’s a prize to fight for and not a human being deserving of a relationship that’s not a fucking contest.

Mac says Drew sounds like he’s going to ask her out and Jackson says:

“I said I lik a challenge, not a massacre,” Jackson laughed.

Again, I’m not sure if Jackson’s over-confidence is supposed to be interpreted as Gaston-esque or “sexy bad boy any woman would want to pursue her.”

Mac reminds Jackson that he doesn’t date performers and even goes so far to say that Lou isn’t his type, but Jackson blows that off because Lindsay is everyone’s type.

Then it’s off to the EDR for yet another explanation that the acronym stands for Employee Dining Room, and a description of how the place is set up and how repetitive the food is and how people felt about free food as a perk of the job even when it’s not great food, etc. You know, all the really important details.

Mac and Tad had already been through the line and piled everything that looked edible on their plates as they made their way to a table in the corner, away from prying ears.

How does one fuck up such a common colloquialism?

They were both slightly hunched over the table eating, their hands wrapped around the forks and treating them more like shovels than utentensils,

Two cavemen walk into a bar.

when Tad wasted no time asking Mac why he had gotten so weird and defensive with Drew.

They walked to the EDR together, went through the line together, got a table and had already started eating before he asked him, so I’m not sure “wasted no time” applies here.

Actually, no, I’m certain it doesn’t apply here. But there I go again, expecting too much from this book.

Mac tells Tad all about what’s going on and warns him not to tell anyone because he and Zoylent Leen are keeping things private for now. Tad points out that if that’s the case, Mac can’t run around getting all weird about guys wanting to ask her out.

Tad started laughing as a thought hit him. “Ha! I called it! Don’t forget that. But I’m glad. After all, it’s about time you spent some time with someone pretty, besides me. […]”

What is it with all the men in this book either describing themselves as pretty or being described as pretty? I’m not saying that the word must remain strictly gendered or that guys never use the word to describe themselves, but why is it happening so often? Is this more of Sarem thinking she’s absolutely hilarious?

Tad tells Mac to be careful trying to keep things secret because the show is a rumor mill and there are already things being said about Zarla. But who would ever spread malicious gossip about her?

Tad rolled his eyes. “Just friggin’ Sofie. She’s basically pissed Zade knocked her off her high horse–and sleeping with C.S. isn’t getting her the part back or her star spot on the billboard.”

She didn’t get knocked off her high horse. She got knocked off her pedestal. Plus, are we learning that Sofie was on the billboard for the show? But now Lee is on it? Is there a single billboard for a major show in Vegas right now that’s advertising unknown side performers, or are we learning that Zoobie is famous enough that David Copperfield is willing to share a billboard with her? I would have thought there would have been a scene where the billboard was unveiled and Lilly Zane spilled her coffee all over Sofphiea and lots of paparazzi took pictures.

“Well, that’s not a surprise. Most people in this place have nothing better to do than to worry about everyone else, especially Sofia,” Mac said, disgruntled.

“Yeah. Definitely. One thing’s for sure–she really hates Zade.”

Same.

Tad rolled his eyes and frowned, he didn’t understand why Sofia couldn’t just be a better person. It really wouldn’t be that hard, he thought to himself.

I don’t understand why the author doesn’t know the difference between a comma and a period, but whatever.

“You think she could be nicer to the girl that saved her life,” Mac asserted, annoyed by Sofia’s lack of ability to care about anything but herself.

DON’T YOU JUST HATE SOFIA?

“You’re saying that like Sofie could act like a regular human being,” Tad interjected with a smirk.

Mac nodded and remarked, “Yeah, well. One can always hope.”

And that’s the end of the chapter.

“Wait, Jenny!” you cry. “That can’t be the end of the chapter because that would mean that you just wasted precious hours of your life reading and recapping a scene that didn’t advance the narrative at all, and which only existed to reinforce how sexy and attractive all the male characters find the heroine and loathe the other female character!”

“Yes,” I whisper with a desperate laugh, a sound that indicates I’ve long ago forgotten what hope feels like. “Yes, that’s exactly what it means.”

The Big Damn Writer Advice Column

It’s been a while! I have no excuse for the lapse in BDWAC posts except the fact that I often forget what day it is. All of that aside, this is the time of the week when I answer your questions about writing and other things. Let’s get started!

Q: Put it in the box!

Jealous Haters Book Club: Handbook For Mortals Chapter 8 (part three) or “Carrie, but with lemonade”

Now, this may be me being overcautious, but there’s a very small instance in this recap where I quote lines that sound like the language used in abuse situations. I’m just giving you a heads up. Because it’s fairly creepy. It’s very brief and comes during an altercation at a lemonade stand.

Yeah, that’s what you’re in for with this one.

During the tarot video last week, I mentioned that the action shifts from Zani to her mother. It’s another of those triple goddess map or astrology chart whatever page ornament preceding italics section.

“Oh, Zade. You have a very difficult journey ahead. I don’t know how, but after everything falls apart, it will all be okay again.”

In the tarot video, I covered why there is no way everything is going to be okay. Zade received the worst possible outcome in her spread. There’s no way everything is going to be okay.

I mean, it will be. But it shouldn’t be, and super great tarot reader Dela would know that if her author hadn’t tried to go all in on the drama.

She’d been doing readings every day on Zade and looking in. She still missed Zade’s voice and actual interaction with her, but she knew she needed to let Zade be–for now. It wouldn’t be like that forever, but Dela needed to be patient till it was time for them to reconnect.

This sounds like some toxic-parent-absolving-themself-of-responsibility bullshit. “I lied to and gaslighted her for most of her life, so she left. I’ll wait until she reaches out to me, rather than confront my wrongdoing and apologize.” It doesn’t work like that. If you fucked your kid up, you apologize first then wait for them to throw the ball into your court. Dela–and basically every other toxic parent out there–is doing it wrong, assuming forgiveness is owed after a passage of time, not an admission of guilt and expression of apology.

Plus, doing a tarot reading to snoop on your own adult child without their knowledge is basically just new age surveillance. You might as well wiretap her phone, Dela.

The door in front of Dela opened, and a young woman in her early twenties entered. She was dressed modestly in jeans and a loosely fitted blouse. Her stringy brunette hair was brushed but not styled and she didn’t seem to have on any make-up. She was skinny, amost too skinny, and she looked sad–and slightly scared.

Wait, Anastasia Rose Steele-Grey is in this book, too?

The girl introduces herself as April. She says she’s there because she wants a reading, and Dela is like, it’s because someone broke your heart.

The reality was that more than half of the people who came to see Dela came because of some matter of the heart. It wasn’t too terribly hard to guess that was probably the reason why anyone, including April, would darken Dela’s doorstep. Dela, however, wasn’t guessing.

No, she’s not guessing. She did a cold reading. Next, she’s going to be like, “I feel like I’m getting a letter…it’s an m…no, it’s an s. A J? Did you know somebody connected to a J?” This is something that good readers actually work against because you can do it unconsciously if you don’t know what to look out for.

Dela had a general speech for anyone who came in to see her for the first time. She had said the same words thousands of times. She had tweaked what she would say here or there but it was basically the same thing and she always said it with just the right amount of dramatic flare.

Was the thing she said always the same? I feel like it might be the same, but it’s only described as being the same three times in that paragraph and I really need this book to tell me things four or five times to get it.

“So, before we begin, I need to explain to you a little of how this works. I will tell you what I see, good or bad. I do not sugarcoat. What I tell you is based on the path you are now on–and the path that those you ask about will take. I can look and see what they will do, but because this is your reading, and you are gaining the knowledge, you will have the chance to change the path, if you so desire, to get the outcome you wish. I can tell you what you will need to do to get your most desired outcome. If you follow what I say, you will see happen what you wish.”

Read your fortune, I will.

“Now, with that said, there are things that are set in stone. Our paths are not destined, but Destiny is within everything we do.

I…wait…

Some things you cannot change–and if this is the case I will tell you so. Perhaps you have heard the saying, ‘You can’t fight fate.’ Well, if it is fate’s desire then–regardless of the path you take–you will end up in the same place. Do you understand?”

First of all, why does Destiny get to be a proper noun, but fate is just like, there? Does fate not have a personality and consciousness as is implied of Destiny through the bestowing of a capital letter?

Second, how can your path not be destined if everything you do is connected to your destiny? And how are things not fated to happen unless fate wants them to happen? Wouldn’t literally anything that happens, ever, be fate’s desire by default, then? That’s a pretty convenient way to look at the world, isn’t it? “This shitty thing happened to you? Must have been fate’s desire. Oh well.” Dela’s little speech here really renders anything anyone ever does as fully pointless and futile, because no matter what we do, we’re going to end up in whatever place fate feels like dumping us off in. Her big speech here doesn’t just contradict itself; it annihilates hope.

Much like the very existence of this book.

Another handy way that, “Well, I guess it was what fate wanted!” thing works for Dela is, she’s a fortune teller. She hands out this disclaimer and when people come back and say, “This thing didn’t happen,” she can say, “Well, must have been fate.” Which is cheap. Readers and psychics and mediums are all human and fully fallible. We can get it wrong. Good readers just accept that they got it wrong and say, “Hey, I got it wrong.”

Oh, were you wondering what happens to the girl getting the reading from Dela? Don’t. Because that last line of dialogue there ends it. We just needed the girl as a vehicle for the speech. Now, we’re back to Zim’s POV.

It wasn’t but a few days later when I found myself back in the mall. I may not be super keen on shopping but I had finally realized how few “going out” clothes I really owned.

Don’t worry, guys! She’s only there because she wants to shop for clothes. It’s not like she’s there shopping for clothes. She’s still Not Like Other Girls™.

Because malls quickly made me tired and cranky quickly,

Quickly, you say?

I figured I deserved some lemonade for the suffering I was enduring.

Me the fuck too.

She goes to Hot Dog On A Stick, where the cashier is male:

He was like most teenagers and some of his body were more manly–like his filled-out arms–while other parts like his scrawny legs sticking out of his shorts still looked more like those of a boy. He couldn’t have been older than about nineteen or twenty years old.

How did she see his legs? Also, isn’t this supposed to be a YA novel? What’s with the “teenagers are funny looking, even if they’re adults” nonsense? I’m sure that’ll be endearing to all those YA readers.

As I dug through my purse for the exact change, I could feel his gaze on me. I hadn’t really been paying him any attention but once I looked up I noticed he was just staring at me with the biggest puppy-dog eyes. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I’m not trying to be weird. You just have really great hair.”

I smiled back mostly as a reaction to the compliment. He was not at all my type even though when you looked past the braces and acne he was actually decently cute. Talk to me in ten years.

In ten years? When he’s pushing thirty? I thought this was supposed to be a YA novel. But of course, their hands brush as they exchange cash and he tells her she has “striking” eyes.

Do the Hot Dog On A Stick people get tips? Asking so I can defend Alan’s poor judgment.

Zardon fiddles with her phone so she doesn’t have to engage the absolutely smitten teenaged-hot-dog-adult. Alas:

I glaced up to see if Alan was still staring at me and he was, so he caught me looking at him. He obviously took it as me eyeing him, considering the way he was eyeing me while I was barely paying any attention to the next customer or their order.

Listen, Zlartibartfast isn’t into this guy. It’s not her fault that she’s so sexually alluring to all men everywhere.

If only the tragic, ugly, fat girls of the land could understand that. Alas, again:

A short, stocky girl with mousey brown hair was behind the booth preparing orders. She had obviously noticed the attention I was getting from Alan, and she didn’t seem too happy about it either.

Sidebar: Who the fuck does this clown think he is? SHE just wants attention? You wrote a whole song about it and put it all over the radio, crybaby.

“Hey!” she yelled, and even though I was already looking at her through my hair she startled me with her sharp voice. “He’s taken.”

What’s with the looking through her hair thing? All I can think of is:

I frowned in confusion and raised my right eyebrow.

How could she see it if you’re hiding under your technicolor dream hair?

The girl stormed out from behind the stand, coming in front of it to get closer to me. She tried to raise herself to my face, but I towered over her. She coudln’t have been more than 5’2″, perhaps not even that tall, and was struggling to look tough or mean. She glowered. “I said, he’s taken. So you can cut it out with that cute routine you’ve got going.”

Of course, Zooboomafoo knows how it’s going down. She’s the tough one.

“I’m just waiting for my drink,’ I said frostily. I squared my jaw and looked her directly in the eye. I was not afraid of much, and I was definitely not afraid of an eighteen-year-old girl with a jealousy issue.

You can tell how not threatened she is by the way she’s telling us how tough she is. And how she fully overreacts to the entire situation.

“Don’t give me that, you little skank,” the girl spat as her voice got louder. You could visibly see her blood pressure rising.

Thanks for clearing that up, but I cause though I might be audibly seeing her blood pressure rising.

“I saw you batting your eyes.”

Okay, but that’s not her fault, Lemonade Girl. She’s a self-insert.

“Listen,” I said, in a much lower and more matter-of-fact tone than her high-pitched bark.

God, Lori is even bragging about how she can get into an argument better than this girl.

I even leaned toward her some before speaking to try to keep the altercation just between us. “You don’t want to start anything with me. I suggest you back down now.” I formed my hands into fists. As I did so, the vat of lemonade on the counter began to rattle. It was probably unnoticeable to most people–just a slight tremor–but it was definitely rattling.

This is like Mystery Men, when Ben Stiller transforms into “Mr. Fury,” or whatever, and all he’s doing is fighting some imaginary internal struggle that makes his forehead veins pop out.

The girl stepped back, but only a small bit, and folded her arms. “I’ll back off when I want to back off, you miserable bitch.” I’m not really sure why I had allowed some lemonade girl to bother me–or what I did what I did next.

Uh, yeah, I’m not really sure why you’re getting into a fight with a teenager at a lemonade stand, either. I mean, let’s look at this from the parameters Leslie set. The guy at the register is a gangly, awkward kid at the age of nineteen or twenty. She says this girl is eighteen and totally non-threatening and not scary to Zivian. Zippy here is a grown woman with a successful career, two hot guys fighting over her, and the ability to do actual real life honest to fucking god witch magick with a k. So, I don’t get why she gave a shit about this girl. Especially since the last time she was attacked at this mall (read that again, it gets funnier the second time you think about it) she found out that men are always going to be attracted to her and women are going to hate her and it’s a totally uncontrollable thing. Knowing that you’d think she could go, “Okay, I was a teenager once, and this isn’t her fault, she’s reacting to my unintentional sorcery,” and move on.

Scratch all that. I do know why Zinfandel is getting so packed up about fighting this girl. This chick is 5′ 2″, and we already know Zowie has a hard-on for how tall she is and how intimidating people find it, and she’s already told us twice now how short this lemonade girl is.

Sometimes I guess someone just pushes you over the edge. I wanted to teach her a lesson. Sadly, though I doubt I actually taught her anything, I’m sure she will never forget our encounter.

Read this in Daniel Stern’s voice from The Wonder Years and it sounds like Kevin Arnold murdered somebody. But wow, the language in that paragraph almost makes me want to slap a content warning on this whole recap, because that sounds like some scary abuse shit.

Actually, let me hop up there and do that right quick.

As soon as the last word left her mouth, I snapped inside. I squeezed my eyes shut tight and shook my clenched fists once more.

I can’t even begin to describe the mental image I get from this. Like, not even enough to make fun of it. There’s just uncontrollable laughter to the point of tears. In my head, she’s making this really scrunched up, constipated expression and like, maybe she’ll get so mad that she poops herself? I’m sorry, I can’t handle this shit. I have to move on.

The vat of lemonade exploded, sending yellow liquid and shards of glass in every direction. I opened my eyes to see what I had done. When the vat broke and the lemonade went everywhere it had bowled her over and knocked her to the ground. She was drenched in sticky, sugary lemonade. I had made sure that the other customers and any passerby had all “miraculously” been spared being hit. After all, there was no need for anyone else to suffer because of her. She was soaked–dripping from her hair to her fingertips and as she struggled to get back up, lemonade started pooling around her shoes.

And lo, our magikal heroine did vanquish the loathsome fat girl, even though it was super important that our heroine’s fearsome magik like, totally didn’t, like…get out, and junk? Whatever, I’m sure the satisfaction of this moment will outlast the consequences of going Super Saiyan and acting out a scene from Carrie in the middle of a fucking mall.

Don’t worry, she even has a clever line that totally would have made it into the trailer:

I shrugged and declared, “When life hands you lemons…,” then turned and left her on the ground.

You can just hear the crunchy early ’00s girl rock guitar rift on the soundtrack. It’s probably this:

But here’s the thing, Limbo: those kids are getting fired. An expensive piece of equipment, an expensive, critically necessary to manufacture one of the store’s trademark products piece of equipment, broke during an altercation with a customer. And nothing’s going to happen to you. You would have been fine if you just walked away, because you know there’s a magikal reason both the guy and the girl behaved the way they did and it’s no their fault or something they can control.

But guess what bitch?

You didn’t get your lemonade.

And they still have your two dollars.

 

The Worst Person I’ve Ever Met (Part 2) or “No, it’s my wedding day.”

Miss Part 1? Read it here.

Note: While I believe “Cathy” was very likely mentally ill, I’d appreciate it if we could refrain from diagnosing her in the comments. Cathy was a terrible person and probably mentally ill. She wasn’t a terrible person because she was probably mentally ill.

Around the time my son was about to turn three, and when I was living in an entirely different city, Cathy called me from out of the blue. I don’t know why, exactly, I felt so happy to hear from her. Probably because despite making some wonderful friends in my new home, they didn’t have as many interests in common with me as Cathy did. That may have been due to a tendency she had to passionately adopt the interests and hobbies of those around her. It forced an intimacy between her and others, making it easier to manipulate them. I believe to this day that this was, if not intentional, at least something she was aware could work to her advantage.

I also didn’t have as many friends as I’d had before. Many of the people I knew from local theater had drifted away due to my association with Cathy, who had made bad impressions within the community. Other friends and acquaintances believed that I had shunned Cathy because of my then strong pro-life beliefs. At the time, I didn’t know this was the case. I’d simply thought that in moving away, I’d lost touch. Imagine my relief when an old friend had remembered me.

After we caught each other up on what had happened in the time since we’d last spoken, she said, “What I was calling you about was, Sam and I are engaged. And since you introduced us, I want you to be my maid of honor.”

I was so flattered by the request (and the idea that I had played matchmaker) that I accepted right away. I’d only ever been maid of honor once before in my life, at my mother’s wedding. My stepfather and his attendants wore cow-print vests under their tuxedo jackets and my mother went down the aisle barefoot under her giant Disney princess-esque dress. My grandfather gave her away with a shotgun tucked under his arm, and the whole thing took place in the woods behind my aunt’s house. I went into being Cathy’s bridesmaid woefully unprepared for what was in store.

The first alarm bell rang in that very phone conversation. I asked Cathy if they’d set a date yet, and she said it would be on July fifteenth, 2006. “July fifteenth, that’s my birthday!” I exclaimed happily.

There was a long silence.

Her voice went deathly cold. “No. It’s my wedding day.”

There was another long pause, in which I could hear my own breathing over the receiver. Klaxons in my brain went off frantically. What had I gotten myself into?

Then she laughed. “Just kidding!”

That was such a relief. Because obviously, even though I had seen her say whatever evil, selfish thing on her mind only to follow it up with “just kidding!” dozens of times before, she couldn’t possibly be using it that way toward me. I was her maid of honor!

Cathy and I started talking on the phone more often. By some stroke of diseased fate, Sam had a job working for an audiobook store that had two locations in the area. One of them was right at the end of our street, and Sam worked there every other Saturday. When those days lined up on weekends when they didn’t have Marvin, Cathy would come to Grand Rapids with Sam and spend the day with me. Most of the time, they stayed overnight so we could get drunk and play board games or watch movies.

A frequent topic of conversation was the wedding. Cathy would bring books with song and reading suggestions. “‘There Can Be Miracles’ from The Prince Of Egypt as a first dance song?” I asked incredulously, and Cathy quipped, “That’s what you play if two really ugly people were getting married.” We laughed so hard at some of the descriptions in the Pagan wedding book with vows that described the groom as “like unto Pan’s wild, sacred dance.” We had fun together. Sure, sometimes she said weird things, like, “What diet are you going to do to fit into your bridesmaid’s dress?” But I had come to terms with the fact that Cathy had inherited her mother’s lack of tact, and figured that the odd off remark was a fair trade for the good times we had.

Usually, I would send my son would go stay with a grandparent overnight so we didn’t have to bring him along on our outings. As I was a stay-at-home mom, I loved the days when Cathy and I could get out and do things that just weren’t as fun in mom-mode. We would go to new age stores, boutiques downtown, spend hours at Barnes & Noble or going to lunch somewhere that didn’t have a kid’s menu. It was such an important escape for me that it was a total bummer when I couldn’t find a babysitter for one Saturday. My son was very well behaved, though, so I had no problem bringing him with me to do our usual shopping and lunch date.

Cathy was sullen. “I’m sorry, I just consider this my ‘kid-free’ time,” she snapped. I don’t think she said a single word to my son all day, but she didn’t complain or act upset after her initial reaction. There were no major incidents during our day. My son rode in his stroller and occasionally needed to use the potty. Sure, he’d touched a few things and I’d had to remind him not to, but there weren’t any screaming tantrums or passive-aggressive seat kickings. So, it shocked me when, shortly after dinner that night, I heard Cathy bark a sharp, “no!” from the living room.

I looked in from the kitchen to see Mr. Jen picking up our son and taking him to his room, and Cathy and Sam scowling at each other. They didn’t notice me and tried to keep their voices down as they argued.

“Just chill out, okay? He’s three-years-old,” Sam whispered tersely.

“He was going to knock my bookmark out!” Cathy hissed back. “He’s been acting up all day long and she doesn’t do anything about it!”

“Oh, and you’re so great with Marvin.”

My jaw dropped. On one hand, I was furious that Cathy had yelled at my son for something as silly as almost knocking a bookmark out of her book. On the other hand, I was horrified that Sam would say something like that to her about her own child.

Mr. Jen came out of our son’s bedroom and said it would be better if we scrapped our drinking and trivia plans for the night. Cathy stormed off to the car, leaving Sam to apologize. “She’s been really stressed out over some stuff with Dan and Marvin,” he explained and said he would have her call me when she cooled down.

A couple of days went by before Cathy called. She apologized for snapping at my son and confessed that her visits with Marvin had been restricted by the court after he had been found wandering alone down a busy street downtown. When the police brought him back, Cathy had been so absorbed in reading a Harry Potter book that she hadn’t even noticed he was gone. “It was probably only an hour,” she said, as though losing a five-year-old for an hour was perfectly reasonable. “But now I only get to see him every other Sunday.” As a mother, I was horrified at the idea of becoming so distracted as to lose my child. I didn’t want to say, “I would never do something like that,” because I knew how disastrously brains could malfunction on tired parents. I’d once slept through my son flooding the bathroom by repeatedly flushing hand towels down the toilet. And I could sympathize, I supposed, with her lashing out at my son because she missed hers, or criticizing my parenting to feel better about her own. Our friendship wasn’t shattered by the incident. In fact, what bothered me most about it was how Sam had reacted, and how he’d used the incident against her the way he had. Sam was a dear friend to me, and I didn’t like the side of him I saw around Cathy.

Around this same time, I sold my first book. Cathy, an English major, was quick to remind all of our mutual friends that I’d written a “Harlequin.” My first book was a Harlequin. It was published by their women’s fiction imprint, Mira. I was and am still ferociously romance positive, so when she told me, “Oh, I thought you meant one of those secret baby books,” I was quick to inform her that I happened to like “those secret baby books,” and she insisted that she was “just kidding!” and didn’t judge anyone for what they liked to read. But Cathy did her best to downplay my first book sale. She told me she’d gone to my old literature professor to tell her the good news. “She remembered you! And she was so impressed that you’d written a book. I even told her, it’s just a Harlequin, but she was still really proud.” It was such a slap in the face, I convinced myself that I’d misheard, or Cathy had just phrased it wrong, that she was genuinely supportive of me but couldn’t express it well.

Around this time, my husband and I moved back to my hometown and bought the house I’d grown up it. Our son would have a big yard to play in, and we could even get a dog, something my husband had always dreamed about as a kid but, due to circumstances, was never able to do. Cathy and Sam helped us move, over the moon that we’d finally be close enough to their city to see each other more than a couple of times a month. We resumed our weekly karaoke nights with Sam and Cathy and our other friends. In May, Mr. Jen and I decided to get married.

When I told Cathy that we’d set a date for September, she grew icy. “But remember, my wedding comes first.” I was confused. Did she not hear me when I said we’d be having it in September? “I know. Ours is two months after yours.”

“No,” she replied. “I mean, mine comes first. You’re my maid of honor. You should be worrying about my day, not planning yours.”

I realized then that things were going downhill fast, and I had no idea how to get out. I could only hope things would go back to normal after the wedding.

Next up: Part 3, “The Bachelorette Implosion”

Jealous Hater Book Club: Handbook For Mortals, Chapter 8 The Star (part 2) or “Have you ever noticed how much I say ‘um’? YOU WILL TODAY.”

I’ve just spent three days working on the longest video in the history of long videos. Like, “pointless story about how much I love fall on a foodie blog” long. So, so long. If you don’t watch it, that’s cool. You’ll only miss me getting frustrated to boring visuals.

I’m also going to include (because I’m like this), a short scene from the first draft of Baby Makes Three, in which Penny gives herself a three card Lenormand reading. I actually did the reading for Penny and as a result, it made sense in the text. Because it’s a real reading and not just someone picking out the cards that describe what they think is happening (but isn’t really happening) in their story.

Well, let’s get into what is so far the most perplexing and frustrating chapter of this book so far.

I walked through my tiny apartment and into my bedroom.

We’ve never been in her bedroom, so a description of it would be perfect here. If, you know, you wanted to include one.

No? Okay, moving on then.

Zani lays back on her bed and thinks about “everything that had happened in the past twenty-four hours.” But she doesn’t, really, because all she actually thinks about is the limp, pointless love triangle and not the girl in the Lambo who attacked her with magical wind.

I really liked Mac and something kept drawing me to him, but I also really liked Jackson–and there was something about him, too, something beyond the killer smile and sparkly eyes.

Is there? Because your author didn’t bother showing us any of that.

I guess I liked them both, and that had never happened before.

I’m glad she cleared up that she a) likes them both and b) has very little experience with such a situation, as we haven’t picked up those subtle clues yet.

I might have simply let things go along for a while if the situation wasn’t so complicated.

I ran a search on the word “complicated” and according to my Kindle, it’s only in here six times. But that can’t be right. It’s been used at least four hundred times so far to describe what is basically a really simple and not-dramatic thing going on in her life. She isn’t about to walk down the aisle torn in two by her love for another. She kissed a dude and went to see the other dude’s band. Shit doesn’t get complicated until we’re in an end-of-Mrs.-Doubtfire-two-dinners-at-once scenario.

Zindi does point out that working together and Mac and Jackson being friends is what complicates the matter, and fair enough, it does, a little. But only one dude seems totally chill with that, and it’s not the dude who gets so emotionally wrapped up in his relationships that he can’t have a one-night stand without his heart getting irreparably shattered. So…maybe your choice on this one isn’t that complicated?

Just in case Sarem hasn’t driven the point home hard enough, she includes the text of one of her favorite Christopher Poindexter poems.

Oh, you haven’t heard of Christopher Poindexter? Author of Lavender and Naked Human? Well, he’s an Instagram poet who writes stream-of-consciousness stuff.

You know

Like when you write what you feel

with random line breaks

To make it a poem

When you could just

write

the

 

sentence.

He’s an Instagram sensation who’s thanked in the acknowledgments section, with the disclaimer that Sarem has never met him. So…does she have permission to reproduce one of his poems wholesale in her novel?

The poem (which I can reproduce under terms of fair use), is:

“is it possible to love more than one person at a time?”

i asked, staring grievously at

the bottom of my glass.

“of course,” she replied,

“just not with the same intensity.

they don’t tell you that because

it scares them shitless.

love is an energy thing.”

So, okay, e. e. cummings, hit me with that sweet, sweet lower case alphabet.

But I’m not here to make fun of poetry. I can do that in my spare time, for pleasure. Levar Zurton thinks about how she isn’t in love with either guy yet, but she could be.

The truth was, I wasn’t looking or a boyfriend or even a date, so I’m not sure how I ended up with two. Regardless, I was where I was. I just needed to figure out what I was actually doing.

Your author needs to figure out how to create and sustain interesting conflict. Because “heroine walks blankly through life having things just happen to her through no action or decision-making of her own” ain’t one.

I made sure when I bought my bedside table that it was pretty oversized and large enough to lay my cards out.

That’s a pretty god damn big table, because as you’ll see in the video, whatever rando spread Sarem made up to stick in the book and look mhahjhikhal is huge. She opens her drawer and notes she has several different sets of cards she’s organized by the situations they cover. Which people do, that’s a normal thing. Then she shuffles them and cuts them into three piles.

To get a proper reading you must make sure your mind is clear and focused only on what you are trying to read about. If anything else creeps into your mind it will throw off the answers, or the answers won’t make sense, or you will even get wrong answers.

Or maybe the thing that does creep into your mind is the thing that you’re supposed to be asking about. You know, like, for example…

For a split second another issue flashed through my mind: It dawned on me I should really be worried much more about the strange girl who I encountered at the mall and what that was about.

Yes! You absolutely should be more worried about that! For one thing, she physically attacked you. Getting physically attacked in a mall parking garage isn’t something that just sometimes golly gee happens to you. That’s a major event. If you’re going to do a reading on anything, do a reading on that. That is exactly why it crept into your head at this moment.

As much as I knew I should be trying to figure out who she was and what she wanted–and why that whole encounter had occurred in the first place–I just wasn’t as concerned with her at the moment as I was with my love life.

“As much as I knew I should be writing about my heroine finding out who the girl who attacked her in a parking garage was and what she wanted–and why I threw in that random encounter with no follow through in the first place–I just wasn’t as concerned with that as I was with writing out my adolescent fantasies about two boys fighting over me.”

I promised myself to do a reading on her when I was done with this. (For what it’s worth, I did–and I came up with nothing. The cards made no sense, which told me that someone had gone to great lengths for me to not get a reading on the situation at all. Short of calling my mom and telling her what was going on–which I wasn’t going to do because she’d insist I come straight home–there wasn’t anything I could do about it. So I pushed the whole incident–and the girl–out of my mind and decided not to worry about it till it came up again.)

That’s what you should do, too, reader! Stop worrying about all that plot I set up and got bored with and don’t want to write anymore! I wish one of the three (imaginary) editors who worked on this would have just said, “Look, if you don’t want to write the magick girl plotline? You can take the majik out and just leave the regular magic show in.” Of course, they might have done, if they actually existed. But clearly, the mahjik had to stay, because it makes Livia so much more interesting and special.

The POV-skewed parenthetical there gives us the perfect example of a scene written ass backwards. Actually, the last chapter, even. Let’s Jenga some things around and see if we can’t make a more interesting sequence of events that follow to logical conclusions and don’t require Sarem to back-burner the romance at all:

The shopping and rubbing elbows with Vegas royalty happens off screen. Sorry, Carrot Top.
Everything at the bar can go down exactly as written (if she wants it to remain that badly written), but she gets her first glimpse of Lambo girl in the bar.
When she leaves the bar, that’s when Lambo girl attacks her.
Lindy goes home and does a reading about the girl, but winds up getting all these dead ends and realizes that the girl is somehow shielding herself from view.
Zandar goes, oh well, this is obviously going to require more than just a tarot reading, might as well check on this other thing.

That’s really all it would have taken to keep the paranormal plot without shoving it aside. But it was more interesting and magical, I guess, to give us the tarot reading about the guys (which also could have been way more interesting, and if you brave the long-ass video, you’ll find out why).

My mother taught me that everyone has guides–spirit guides who are incorporeal beings and are assigned to us before we ae born. They help nudge and guide us through life.

Really? Is that what your guides do? They guide you? I appreciate you pointing that out, because I would never have gotten it if you hadn’t. PS., is it possible that your guides were trying to tell you not to focus on dudes and focus instead on the fact that you’ve got a weirdo sneak-attack witch after you, and that’s why she just popped into your head? Imagine that.

We all have guides, not just people like me (though mine are probably just more like me).

Mine are just a little more, you know, special? Because I’m just a little bit more interesting and mysterious than everyone else?

You’ve probably noticed yours before and just not known who they were.

Oh, please, Lani Sarem, educate us on who are spirit guides are, since none of us are quite as mystical and majikkkkkkkkal enough to know anything about it. I shouldn’t be so pissed off at how condescending this passage is, considering it’s the first time this has been anything like a handbook, as per the title.

Your guides are the little voices that tell you to “slow down” or “buy bread” or “take notice of the cute guy in line in front of you”-all of those are direct communication from your guides or higher self.

No. Those are direct communication from your brain and your memory and your eyes. A guide’s message is more like when, for no reason at all, you decide on a whim to take a different way to work and then the highway overpass collapses on your normal route and everyone dies. Apologies to those of you who don’t believe a bunch of new age hooey, but I’m just saying. If you’re going to include new age hooey in your book in a condescending way, maybe don’t simplify it all down to shit like, “I saw a cute guy, my spirit guides must have been telling me to look at him.”

Thi is why a lot of people think of their guides as guardian angels, cause they are in a way, guardian angels with great advice.

This is the kind of crushed-velvet pagan bullshit I loathe. “You believe this, but I believe this, so let me explain why what you believe is really my belief masquerading as something more quaint and simple and not as enlightened as what I believe.” No. Shut up. Let people believe what they want to believe. Angels, fairies, spirit guides, power animals, all that shit is different, even if it doesn’t fit into what you believe. Not everything has to be about you.

Sorry, I have lots of these types of rants in me. I’m sure you’re shocked at my strong opinions since I rarely express those.

Many people dismiss their voices–also called “intuition”–because what they hear is not always pleasant or what they want to hear. Do not mistake your ego for your intuition, however. Following your gut instinct is also a manner in which guides try to direct you.

“The filename Jenny eye roll.jpg is already in use”

This is some advice Lani Sarem needed to take from her heroine. Oh, but I’m sure it was definitely her spirit guides and not her ego directing her to scam her way onto the bestseller lists.

This is the part where I split off into video land. I do apologize for the length and I know some of you are going to be disappointed that I don’t go over this in text because you read these at work or whatever. Mea culpa.

HOWEVER. Allow me to include this section in which she shamelessly plagiarizes a card meaning, word for word:

The fool doesn’t mean you’re stupid or even silly, but rather it is the card of infinite possibilities. The most traditional version of this card has a young person starting out on a journey. The bag he is carrying on his staff indicates that he has all he needs so that he can do or be anything he wants, he has only to stop and unpack. He is on his way to a brand new beginning.

But the Fool carries a little “bark” of warning, as well. He’s depicted as being so busy being happy and excited that he doesn’t notice that there is a huge cliff coming up and his dog is barking at him trying to get his attention. In other words, while it’s wonderful to be entralled with all around you and excited by all life has to offer, you still need to watch your step, lest you fall and end up looking the fool.

Though I haven’t been able to find the original source of the plagiarized material, this is a card meaning that’s reproduced on dozens of tarot websites, which leads me to believe it was probably written by Robin Wood, who is often plagiarized on tarot and new age websites.

For example, this is from Aeclectic Tarot:

At #0 (or, in some decks, #22, the last card as much as the first of the Majors) the Fool is the card of infinite possibilities. The bag on the staff indicates that he has all he needs to do or be anything he wants, he has only to stop and unpack. He is on his way to a brand new beginning.

But the card carries a little bark of warning as well. While it’s wonderful to be enthralled with all around you, excited by all life has to offer, you still need to watch your step, lest you fall and end up looking the fool.

And then this, from 78 Nights of Tarot:

Basic Tarot Meaning: At #0 (or, in some decks, #22, the last card as much as the first of the Majors) the Fool is the card of infinite possibilities. The bag on the staff indicates that he has all he needs to do or be anything he wants, he has only to stop and unpack. He is on his way to a brand new beginning.

But the card carries a little bark of warning as well. While it’s wonderful to be enthralled with all around you, excited by all life has to offer, you still need to watch your step, lest you fall and end up looking the fool.

And I could copy/paste more examples, but if you google, “little bark of warning tarot” you’ll be stunned. It’s something that happens a lot with new age and pagan sites. Something someone read in a book makes it onto their website as though they wrote it themselves. Just because it happens a lot, though, doesn’t mean that it’s totally cool to do it, and putting it in a published book just feels extra skeezy to me.

So, add “plagiarism” to your Jealous Haters Book Club bingo card.

Anyway, here’s “Wonderwall”:

 

There are captions on the video, but depending on how early you’re tuning into this after I’ve posted it, the hand-transcribed captions might not yet be available. I promise they’re just going through timing.

I’m going to split the chapter here because, with the video and all of that, it’s quite labor intensive. However, let me share what it looks like when you do a card reading for a character and write about it, rather than plan a card reading to fit the simplest definitions possible for your plot. This is from Penny’s version of Baby Makes Three, and as I noted in the beginning, it’s still the very first draft, so don’t go, “Oh my god, Jenny, you’re such a horrible writer. Because everyone is a horrible writer on a first draft.

I sighed and rolled over and reached for the box of Lenormand cards I’d left on the shelf beneath our coffee table. I had a minute before Ian got home, so I could do a quick three-card spread. It wasn’t that he’d forbidden me from doing readings for us, but it seemed to make him a little uncomfortable.

Ouija boards, though…those, he’d outright forbidden on account of The Exorcist. I went along with it because he seemed so genuinely spooked.

I shuffled the cards and held my breath, concentrating on the issue that consumed my mind most these days. Then I turned them over one at a time. The Ship. Not so bad. And made a ton of sense, considering the fact that we were about to take a trip. Then came The Lady, the center card. Obviously, that was me. I studied the image of the woman, dreamily looking up from her book. Then I turned over the next card.

The Snake.

The beautifully rendered serpent taunted me. I was supposed to look out for betrayal somehow, but I was the center freaking card. Was I the one betraying me? My eyes darted frantically over the cards. Was the ship about our upcoming trip? Would something bad happen there? Or did it represent the fact that we’d moved here? The Lady was occupied with her thoughts and her book…did that mean college was getting in the way of our starting a family? God, I hoped that wasn’t the case because I wasn’t sure I would be willing to give it up.

So, what was I supposed to do? Tell Ian, “Sorry, we can’t go to your nephew’s wedding because this cardboard snake might attack our hypothetical future baby?” As respectful as we tried to be of each other’s beliefs, there was no way he would accept that. And I couldn’t see a link between my fertility and college unless it was the physical stress of being exhausted all the time.

What Penny just described was a reading I did for her when I’d first set out to write the book, and I still had a little . The reason this worked so well was that I did the spread for my heroine to refine her journey. I didn’t tailor the spread to my heroine and her journey. And that’s all that tarot or Lenormand is about. Refining your journey, figuring out the parts you can’t see in the stuff you’ve already got figured out.

If you’re interested in finding out more about how you can incorporate cartomancy in your writing, author Sierra Godfrey has created a tarot spread based on The Hero’s Journey, and it’s available at her blog. There’s also a link that post to a longer post about tarot and writing.

Next week, we’ll take on Delia and a rumble with an unworthy fat girl at a lemonade stand.

The Worst Person I’ve Ever Met (Part One) or, “I blame you, J.K. Rowling.”

Last year, I wrote a post about the worst writer person I ever met, a person who started writing M/M romance for the money while being unabashedly anti-gay in her personal life. I named names, and everyone freaked out because I might hurt her career. And I was like, “I’m going to be a better person and not do that again,” despite my belief that someone who hides behind a pseudonym to profit from fetishizing gay men while voting and advocating against them in real life doesn’t actually deserve to have a career doing that and maybe that’s a position that a queer person is allowed to take and has a right to call out but whatever let’s not rehash that.

I’m not going to name names in this series of posts, not because I’ve grown as a person or I’m suddenly nice to wretched people, but because I’m legitimately afraid that speaking the name of evil will summon it forth. She’s also not profiting from the misery she causes, so revealing her identity wouldn’t be merited. However, I have been itching for a long time to tell you this story, and I know there are more of you out there who will have had similar bad experiences with people whose toxic and destructive behavior pushes the boundaries of that which can be believed.

It is the story of the worst person I’ve ever met.

Some of it is funny, in a “can you believe the nerve of this woman?” way. Some of it is sad, in a “what happened to this person that she’s like this,” way, and a “how horrible that she maimed so many innocent bystanders with her shitty, shitty behavior” way. Some of it is heartwrenching to me, because of the severe emotional and spiritual damage my brief association with her was. I guarantee you will not believe some parts of the story, either because they are too bizarre, or because they deal with spirituality and not everyone is into that. But I’m still going to tell it. Because it’s a doozy.

In the fall of 2001, I enrolled in what was to be a short-lived attempt at earning a college degree. My mortuary science major required a surprising amount of art history classes. That’s where I met Cathy. I saw that she had a copy of Vanity Fair featuring a young, not-yet-famous Daniel Radcliffe on the cover promoting the upcoming movie adaptation of Harry Potter And The Sorcerer’s Stone. I eagerly engaged her in conversation, and we hit it off instantly.

Cathy was only a couple of years older than me, but she really seemed to have her life together. She was engaged to Dan, the father of her one-year-old son, Marvin, and she lived with them in their own apartment in a decent part of town. As someone who had just quit two jobs on a capricious whim and had to move in with her grandparents, I was in awe that anyone so close to my age could go to college, work, and raise a kid at the same time. She also prided herself on her street smarts; she’d been homeless before, couch surfing and struggling to make ends meet when her Marvin was first born. She would come to campus straight from her job at a local daycare and change from her polo shirt and khakis into a broomstick skirt, long sweater, and pentacle jewelry. She stashed her work clothes in the baby changing station, because “I’ve never seen anyone use it.” Artistic, witchy, and unapologetically Cathy, she seemed like someone I should aspire to be, not someone to avoid.

I’ve since learned that people like Cathy are good at hiding the worst parts of themselves so that they can draw you in.

My first indication that something might be slightly odd about Cathy was her tendency to say hurtful things, then follow them up with “just kidding!” Most of these comments were related to my weight; my 140lbs.on a 5’8″ frame struck her as grotesquely obese–just kidding! of course–and she had an almost pathological need to compare our bodies. Once, when we were getting ready for a night out, she emerged from her bathroom completely nude and said, “Look how thin I am! If someone looked at the two of us side-by-side, they would think you were the one who had a kid, not me.”

Before this incident, I had disclosed to her that I was insecure about my weight and had been going on starvation diets with restrictions of five hundred calories a day. She had responded that she, too, had been struggling with an eating disorder, restricting herself to two hundred calories a day. I thought she was commiserating; I realize now that she was competing.

Cathy and I shared a love of community theater. She could rattle off an impressive list of starring credits racked up in her hometown: Sophie Scholl in The White Rose. Mary Magdalene in Jesus Christ, Superstar. The Narrator in Joseph And The Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat (which I had once told her was a dream role of mine). When I mentioned I would be auditioning for a play at a small experimental theater, she asked if I would be too intimidated if she auditioned, too. I bristled at that question, but I’d learned at this point that Cathy wasn’t always good at being tactful. I didn’t think her question was mean-spirited.

At the audition, I realized that either Cathy had greatly exaggerated her theater resume or the theater scene in her hometown was very small. Maybe she was just having an off night. Either way, only seven people tried out for the six available roles, and Cathy got a part.

Also in the production was a longtime friend of mine, Sam. He was one of those guys who made it clear he wanted to date you, even after you made it clear you weren’t interested. I was naive enough at that point to think guys like that could still be good friends, and since he was supportive and fun to be around otherwise, I just brushed off any sexual comments he made. Sam and Cathy met at auditions; by the second week of rehearsals, Cathy called off her engagement to her Dan and abandoned Marvin.

In a matter of two weeks, Cathy went from being a working mom with an infant at home and a college degree on the horizon to a woman who only went home for a few hours once every three days. She believed doing so fulfilled a technicality that would prevent Dan from getting sole custody in family court. The child she credited with “saving my life,” and who was, “my whole world,” suddenly became a hassle and a pawn to punish her ex, who had gone from the perfect romantic partner and devoted father she bragged about to a selfish, abusive demon Cathy desperately needed to escape. The nights she spent on couches at friends’ homes–Sam lived with his parents, who wisely shut down the idea of her moving in with them–exhausted her; she lost her job at the daycare when she fell into a sound sleep in a room full of toddlers she was supposed to be supervising.

Cathy’s fall elicited nothing but sympathy from me. After all, she was fleeing an abusive relationship. When people pointed out that she had fled without her Marvin, I argued that women and children are most at risk of being killed when they try to leave the situation. When they countered that she had no problem returning to her alleged abuser’s apartment every third night–sometimes, with Sam in tow–I would insist that we might not know all the facts. And to this day, I don’t see this as an unreasonable position to take. I believe people when they say they’re being abused or are in a bad situation. Sam did, too, so I assumed he accompanied her to Dan’s house to protect both her and Marvin.

Later, I learned it was so they would have a place to have sex. On the couch, in the apartment Cathy had shared with Dan, while Dan and Marvin slept in the other room.

Cathy’s toxicity consumed not just herself, but the people around her. She got a job at the store where Sam worked when he personally vouched for her, but she called off on the first day, resulting in her termination. At a New Year’s Eve party, she had sex with a stranger in the bathroom of our castmate’s house while Sam slept only a few feet away. They had an “open relationship” that consisted mostly of Cathy seeking out anyone I’d ever dated in an attempt to have sex with them. “I would never betray a friend like that,” she’d sworn when her Dan started a relationship with a woman Cathy had considered a close friend. Yet, within months of knowing her, Cathy had coincidentally met and fucked four men I’d previously dated and whose existence she’d learned of through private conversations with me. She bragged about having sex with two married men, not out of attraction to them but as a victory over their wives, who’d committed the cardinal sin of not liking her.

While I wanted to be a good, supportive friend to someone going through a rough time, Cathy’s behavior was becoming difficult to rationalize or sympathize with. At a dinner with an acquaintance and one of his good friends, Cathy mocked the woman for being overweight, to the point of making pig noises at her–followed, of course, by “Just kidding!”

“Just kidding!” was always delivered in the same tone and rhythm, an obnoxious sing-song with an emphasis on the shrill, high-pitched “JUST” and a nasal, drawn-out “kid-DING”.

She constantly asked me for money, needing cigarettes, bus fare, coffee at the local, trendy coffee shop where she liked to sit and be seen reading important literature. She couldn’t apply for government assistance, citing her lack of a driver’s license and debilitating arthritis in her knees as the reason she couldn’t look for a job as the program required. Sam, however, scraped together enough money to put down a first month’s rent and security deposit so they could have somewhere to live together. While I was hospitalized with sepsis caused by a severe kidney infection, Cathy called my grandparents and asked if they could co-sign on the apartment she and Sam had found. That was the last straw. I made excuses to cancel our once weekly karaoke nights–I had been paying for their drinks more often than not, anyway–and stopped returning her calls. She told all of our mutual friends that I’d cut off our friendship because I was Pro-Life (which was true at the time) and she’d had an abortion (which I didn’t know about, but would have supported).

I moved to another city with Mr. Jen and wrote her off as a learning experience. But I didn’t learn anything because two years later, I allowed her into my life again.

Stay tuned for Part 2, or “No, it’s my wedding day.”

 

True Blood Tuesday S05E07 “In The Beginning”

Oh my god, you guys.

The file is here. Start it after the HBO sound and logo fade.

And may God have mercy on your soul.

Jealous Haters Book Club: Handbook For Mortals, Chapter 8 The Star (part 1) or “If you’re in love, show me! Show me!”

I apologize for not having a recap last week, but as you’ll see, there’s so much to deal with in this chapter that it’s required double the time to write it.

If you’re looking for a few eye rolls today, check out this interview with Lani Sarem at Mike Mauthor’s blog, wherein she plays coy about her possible “cameo” in the film, says she believes that acting gives her extra insight into writing (I’m sure her experience as an uncredited extra in Paul Blart: Mall Cop 2 more than qualifies her to be an author), and changes her story about the New York Times debacle yet again:

Well, I’m the only person that’s ever had that happen to them…people jumped to a lot of conclusions without all the facts and then started saying things that weren’t even close to being true…I hope people will take the time to understand what really happened and enjoy the book for what it is….

In case you’re getting liar whiplash, the story so far has gone:

I didn’t cheat, we sold this book at conventions based on Thomas Ian Nicholas’s star power
I didn’t cheat, I did things the way we do them in the music industry
I didn’t cheat, YA authors are just jealous of me
Okay, maybe I cheated, but isn’t it the publishing industry’s fault for not being as smart as me?
Tee hee, I cheated, might as well use it in my marketing

And now we’ve arrived at:

I didn’t cheat, people just jumped to conclusions without all the facts and then lied about me

The thing is, you can’t really say that people jumped to conclusions without facts when it was their dogged pursuit of the facts that got you found out in the first place. This is probably the most well-documented YA scandal in recent memory. The facts are there. A better strategy might be to discourage people from checking into them.

But it’s not all gaslighting and self-aggrandizement, dear readers. No, no. There is so, so much more for me to share with you today.

There’s a book trailer.

 

Note how the lush, verdant forest calls to mind the book’s gritty, Las Vegas Strip setting. Wonder at the clips lifted from copyrighted sources (such as Disney’s Enchanted and Cirque du Soleil). Marvel at how clunky and weird it is to announce a guest appearance by the Plain White T’s in your novel.

This is why I don’t have book trailers, guys. Well, this and the fact that they’re so freaking expensive.

Let’s get recapping the first part of this monster chapter.

Chapter eight opens with Zima standing outside the bar where the band is playing.

I had so many things to think about that my head was starting to hurt. I probably should have worried more about the girl in the parking garage but I just wasn’t ready to deal with her yet.

“I probably should have worried more about the girl in the parking garage, but my author hadn’t quite figured out where that was going, yet.”

Zazu does a lot of thinking about thinking. She should be thinking about something, but she’ll think about it later. I don’t know if there’s a name for this tragic phenomenon, but I’m naming this “Procrastinating Protagonist.” This chapter has an astounding amount of it.

I just wanted to make sure one last time that I looked good. Maggie was right, I had chosen the right dress. I was just the right amount of dressed up.

Just, just,right, right, dress, dressed. My god. It’s a move we’ve never seen in competition before. The Triple Repetition.

But let’s not lose our focus here. She’s hot, and it’s important that we know that.

The night before, after we had made it safely back to town, Mac had invited me back to his place–but I told him I thought it would be best to save that for another night.

So, cautious, never-breaks-the-rules, doesn’t-date-performers-because-an-evil-bitch-broke-his-heart Mac kissed her in the rain and was like, “What the hell, let’s do the sexin’ because that’s exactly how I got emotionally rolled over in the first place.”

Checks out.

Spending time with Mac under that awning was probably the most romantic thing that had happened to me in my small amount of dating experience, and I decided that perfect rain kisses were a great place to leave the “to be continued.”

I feel like (and this could just be my forgetful brain dropping “important” bits of the story) Zod has told us in the past that she never got to date in her hometown because people didn’t like her, but she’s also mentioned she’s kissed guys and has dating experience. I think this is one of those things where, if you’re writing a book with romance in it, you need to be clear with the reader where your heroine is coming from. Consistency in past romantic experience is a big part of what shapes a romance in a story, even if it’s never dwelled on in depth.

Since I hadn’t talked to him all day, I made up my mind that I woudln’t act like anything had happened–unless he did.

In other words, all of the romantic conflict with Mac is going to be lack of communication. At first, the romantic conflict there seemed to ride on his personal rules, but those went out the window the second there was a chance to write a kissing scene. Now that he’s broken the rule, there would have to be an intensely realistic reason for that to come back on the board. But Sarem seems to be falling on the lazy trick of characters just not talking about the one thing they should talk about in order to sustain ~*TEH DRAMAZ*~.

Truth be told, I was kind of hoping he wouldn’t either. After all, Mac was fully aware that Jackson had invited me in a somewhat “date-like” manner.

The strategy, then, is to just never talk about it ever?

I sorta wondered to myself how I got into such messes as this.

See above for answer.

Also, read that last line a la Justin Roiland improvising dialogue on Rick And Morty. You can hear it, can’t you?

Lindsay finally enters the bar, stopping to give the incredulous bouncer her ID:

My baby face always made them double check and usually bouncers would look at me the way he did–they never looked like they believed I was actually old enough to be in a bar.

There are two possible jokes to make here and I’m so torn between them. On the one hand, I could make a crack about how Sarem’s surely written herself out of the starring role now since she couldn’t pass for early-twenties in the first place. On the other hand, I could make a joke about the author’s wishul thinking or blatant insistence that she does, indeed, look young. This is one of those moments in a recap where I’m cursed with too many possibilities.

Despite looking like a fetus, iZarlie somehow gets in and thinks about how she wants to get at least a little time to spend with Mac while she’s there. But then she sees Mac and Tad and Riley standing by the bar and:

I pretended not to have noticed them and looked towards the bartender as if my focus was on getting him to come over.

She’s hoping she’ll get to see Mac, but when she sees him, she pretends not to. I’m not going to say that nobody in the history of ever has pulled this dumb move, but the evidence that Zippy operates like a character in a bad soap opera or a CW teen drama is mounting.

I didn’t have a lot of experience being in a bar, but I tried to be patient and act like I was relaxed and comfortable.

Also, if you don’t have a lot of experience in bars, how do you know how bouncers “usually” look at you?

She finally stops playing coy and looks over at Mac, but someone interrupts their eye contact:

It was Tim, Jackson’s bandmate in our show–and in the Plain White T’s as well; he gave me a quick hug and sweetly remarked, “Good to see you, Zade.”

We know that Tim is in the show band with Jackson and in the Plain White T’s because you already said that in the last chapter. Because I’m not a fucking idiot and I’ve been writing professionally for, oh, something like fifteen years, I already knew that this book didn’t see a single editor. I’m starting to suspect the author herself never read through the book once it was done, or she did and there were long gaps between reading chapters. On the other hand, she probably could have read the entire book cover to cover every day and still not seen how repetitive she is.

I hugged him back before making eye contact with Jackson, who was standing right next to him.

Again, we have an example of Lizzie McZuire seeing people backward. Tim touched her back and got her attention, but when she turned around, the first person she would notice would be Jackson, because he’s been on her mind more and he’s the person she’s come to see. He needed to be mentioned before the Tim hug.

Of course, there’s a Jackson hug to follow:

He startled me just a little bit when, as he started to release me from his hug, he kissed me lightly on the lips. It was one of those kisses that a friend might give you and it would not mean anything–

Whoa, hang on. None of my friends have ever kissed me on the lips, and if they did, I would sure assume it meant something. I mean, if not romantic love, at least very passionate friend love with somewhat misplaced boundaries.

Anyway, back to the excerpt. And by the way, the em dash where I stopped before is in the text.

or I could have taken it in a much more romantic way. I wasn’t sure how to take it, and of course, I wondered what Mac thought since I was sure he had seen Jackson kiss me.

I feel like so much of this book could have just been a romance novel set at a magic show. It didn’t need to be Urban Fantasy because the “magick” element is hardly there at all. We’ve had one scene of supernatural intrigue and some vague backstory on how her mom apparently used magic to trap her in their town, but every other page is, “Tee hee, two boys fighting over me.”

Now it’s time for another round of “person way more famous and successful than Lani Sarem isn’t recognized by but is eager to meet Lani Sarem Zade”:

Standing next to Jackson was another guy who looked familiar enough to me that I knew he must work at the show in some regards. I noticed that he was looking at me like he was waiting to meet me. Jackson noticed as well and quickly introduced us. “Oh, sorry, I don’t think you’ve officially met. Zade, this is one of our other guitarists, Dave. Dave, this is Zade.”

One of the most boring parts of a book (and the least fun to write) are scenes were people meet other people. We know how introductions are supposed to go, and we suffer through them. But they’re especially bland when written like this:

“Nice to meet you, Zade.”

“Nice to meet you too, Dave.”

I just passed out from extreme boredom. Like 15% of this book is people meeting Zade and us having to see the introductions. And this is absolutely infuriating for reasons I will explain later.

The band has to go on stage, but Lani tells Jackson:

“Sure, sounds great. I’ll be…right here waiting for you.”

Jackson laughed as he caught my reference to his own joke from the day he gave me my tour.

Ah, yes. Another timely and current reference to Richard Marx, whom all the groovy kids are digging these days. Far out.

Mac, Tad, Cam, and Riley approach her, and Mac hugs her so he can whisper in her ear.

“Looks like Tad was right, again. Jackson definitely is hitting on you.”

I started to pull away and just as our faces were directly in front of each other I softly and quietly said–so only he could hear: “Jealous?” I asked, and I raised my eyebrow.

Nobody can say she doesn’t thoroughly tag dialogue. There are two here for a single spoken word.

We have to hear about her greeting and hugging each of the guys, who refer to her as “Sweets” and “Pretty Girl,” because we’ve gone almost twenty minutes without someone reminding us that Zani Larem is so super beautiful.

Zarno explains how the band is about to take the stage and the entire bar is packed.

“They are pretty popular in town and rumor has it they may get a record deal soon. They really are amazing.” He seemed to be genuinely proud of his friends.

Gosh, Lani, it’s awfully nice of you to give the Plain White T’s a shot at the big time.

I noticed an older man walk on to the side of the stage. He was tall and only slightly overweight.

I don’t understand this description. It makes it sound like all middle-aged men are overweight or expected to be.

Lizneyland notes that the crowd goes wild for the guy, so I’m not sure if this is supposed to be some wink wink nudge nudge clever cameo like the woman with the Yorkies in Fifty Shades Darker or something. But speaking of the crowd, there are women in it and they’re all terrible.

Most of the crowd pushing and shoving at the front were female and by the way they reacted you would have thought they had just found out Justin Beiber was coming on to the stage.

Lanzar is way too cool to like Justin Beiber, obviously. Only the other females do that. And she’s Not Like Other Girls™.

I got why they all pushed and shoved their way up, but I chose to hang back. It wasn’t because that’s what Mac, Riley, Cam and Tad were doing–though had they gone up front I would have joined them.

See, she’s not a poser follower like the rest of the people there. She makes up her own mind. Until her friends do something different. But she’s totally not doing stuff just because they are. Even when she is.

Zarni would rather just watch the crowd and let her toxic internalized misogyny leak out like fluids from a damaged mausoleum:

Some of the girls were looking over at the guys with googly eyes and bemused expressions on their faces. Some looked like they were giving the guys their smoldering “come hither” stares. Lastly, there were the girls who were pretending to ignore them as if they weren’t there; when it was even more obvious they were trying hardest to get the boys’ attention. I laughed at how funny the whole thing was.

You know what’s really funny, Zingo? The fact that you constantly talk about not trying too hard, but you tried on something like eight dresses to pick just the perfect outfit for the evening, then you walked into the bar and pretended to ignore one of the guys you’re interested in…kind of like how the girls in the crowd appear to be ignoring the guys in the band. Oh, and remember how after all that, you said you were trying to look like you belonged in the bar? But yeah, women are so stupid and pathetic because they try too hard. Not you, though. You’re Not Like Other Girls™.

PS. to this recent spate of authors using the word incorrectly: bemused means puzzled or confused. It doesn’t mean wryly amused or lusty or dreamy. It means confused.

People-watching was one of my favorite pastimes, and I’m pretty sure I was witnessing people-watching at its finest.

No, you’re witnessing people at their finest. Unless you have a really high opinion of your people-watching skills. Which you might. This is you we’re talking about.

The guys take the stage and the women become even more insufferable to Lozo.

The crowd screamed so loudly and the high pitch of some of the girls was enough to make my ears hurt; I’m fairly positive that I lost a few decibels from my hearing range.

Besides her friends, the middle-aged guy who introduced the band, and the bartender, the only people in this club seem to be women Zendar can’t stand. I wonder why that is…

Time for another pop culture reference the kiddies will go wild over!

I had to yell over the crowd pretty loudly to be heard at all. “Wow, it’s like they’re *NSYNC and they got the band back together or something!” I shouted–to Riley, mainly, though I’m sure Mac, Cam, and Tad heard me too.

Keeping in mind that whether or not this book qualifies as YA, it was marketed as YA and this reference is fifteen years old. And I know this because my son is about to turn fifteen (and is, therefore, the age of a YA reader), and he was born the year *NSYNC “went on hiatus”. Now, obviously, there are going to be teenagers who’ve heard of, are peripherally aware of, or hell, might even be fans of the group. And I don’t have an issue with people making references to things before their intended audience was born, as long as those references make some kind of sense. I wasn’t born when Sonny and Cher had a television show, but it was such a cultural phenomenon that I instantly know who you mean if you say Sonny and Cher. But this was a reference inserted specifically to name drop someone famous that Sarem knows: her cousin, JC Chasez, who is listed in the epic acknowledgment section.

Zando asks Riley about the names of the guys in the band and where they work at the show because twenty percent of the dialogue in this book is wasted on throwing an impossible number of generic male names at the reader. Dave, Tim, Tom, Mike, Cam, Riley, Tad, Trig, Tripp, Track, Bristol, Piper…

I got off track at some point. Anyway, De’Mar Hamilton, the real-life drummer from Plain White T’s, is mentioned by name but doesn’t meet Larnda or fawn over how amazing she is anywhere in this scene. I wonder why…

It’s because he’s a drummer, right?

And though his name is written “De’Mar” in any article I could find, Miss “everyone has a hard time saying my name and oh my god it’s the worst thing ever get it right!” styles it as, “De’mar.”

It’s okay, though, because Zumba is apparently mystified by names. Riley refers to the band on stage, the band that has been called Plain White T’s by name in multiple chapters now, as “the T’s,” and she’s all:

I gathered from Riley’s comment that “the T’s” must be a shortened version of the band’s name.

Thank you, Sherlock Holmes, for your expert analysis there. Way to go, Basil of Baker Street, for clearing up that mystery.

This is another problem with this book: the author thinks the readers are stupid. Hence the over-explaining of everything. Trust your readers to realize that Riley isn’t suddenly talking about another, similarly named band.

Lazi thinks about how great it is that this struggling little band is making good and getting a record contract, that Pete (“Trig”) can never get to a social event on time, what the songs sound like, and how she’s surprised at how packed the venue is:

By my best guess, there actually were close to four hundred people–if not more–who all seemed to know all the words to the band’s original songs and would sing along, scream, and dance. They were true fans of this band. This was a real concert and the band was really good.

She’s told us a few times that the band is good, to the point that it’s starting to sound condescending.

They play “Stay,” a real song that she describes as “sassy”. I braced myself for a list of lyrics, but she must not have been given permission to use them. You can see them here. They are beyond obvious.

Time for a writing tip:

I felt Mac lean into me and I could feel his breath on my neck and ear.

“Mac leaned into me and his breath skated over my neck and ear.” You can you use whatever verb you like for his breath to do. I just pulled that one off the top of my head. The point is, “I felt this happen,” as opposed to “this happens” takes readers a step back from the action, which is what you don’t want to do.

Mac warns Zerg that Jackson is a good guy, but he’s so busy with the band and work that he won’t have much time for romance, and Lipizzan thinks about the kiss in the rain:

Had it been just a one-time thing? Did Mac think we were dating?

Hey, do you know what could clear this up? Asking him, since he’s standing right next to you. But if she did that, the romantic tension would be resolved and she would have to work on the actual magickkkkkkkkkkk subplot. Mac is more direct and asks her if she likes Jackson.

“I don’t know. I don’t really know him. But I always keep my word, so I’m going to have a drink with him. I don’t plan to do anything further.” I paused and looked Mac directly in the eye before adding, “He did technically ask me out before anything happened with us, though.” I felt my right eyebrow rise as I looked into his eye and my eyelashes bat unconciously.

Nothing gets me more revved up than when two characters express attraction to each other in exactly the same way as Disney animals. And note that while Zimba spent most of the last chapter agonizing over how she feels torn between Mac and Jackson, she’s now saying she doesn’t know Jackson at all. She’s torn between the love of two men, one who she has spent time with and had these supposedly deep conversations. She’s kissed him dramatically in the rain. And Jackson…well, he plays guitar and calls her pretty. Such a tough choice.

I had come to enjoy the fact that Mac and I always seemed to have frank and honest conversations. Maybe our conversations were so open because our first interactions had started with both of us being very bold and straightforward and telling each other what was on our minds–typically with as much passion as we could muster.

Yeah, the only things you can’t talk about in these frank and honest discussions is shit like, “are we dating?” and “what was that kiss about?” If we’re meant to believe that she and Mac have this truly amazing connection that can’t be denied, they should be able to simply ask these questions of each other.

But then, after much wangst over how she needs answers but she can’t talk to him/hopes they won’t talk about it, they talk about the kiss. She asks Mac if he only kissed her because Jackson hit on her, and he says he doesn’t know. He only asked her to go riding because Jackson hit on her, though.

I already felt anxious about being in the middle between Jackson and Mac. I had never been in that kind of position, and I could tell that it was going to make my life much more complicated.

I thought it was important to include that excerpt so that we’re all aware that she’s torn between two men and she’s confused and everything is really complicated and interesting I SWEAR IT’S INTERESTING PLEASE KEEP READING.

Seriously, you can’t just keep telling your reader, “Don’t worry, the plot is on the way, I swear. No, seriously, any time now, something is going to happen.” You want me to see how complicated Lobot’s life is? Show me. Don’t tell me. Show me.

Drama club gets it.

Obviously, these complications don’t arise right now. Because it’s much easier to put them off until later:

All I could think at the time was that I needed to do some card readings on all of it, but that wasn’t going to happen in the bar. I was going to have to go home and start looking at the possibilities before I took anything too much further.

Further than…kissing a guy and going to a show at a bar? You have to consult your cards over little shit like that? Look, I’m not putting down anyone who does a lot of card readings. I’ve done them for over twenty years now (and this summer I started doing them on Fiverr, so if you ever want your Lenormand or Tarot done on the cheap, hit me up) and when I started out, of course, I did them for everything I could think of. Because I was a teenager. Life is scary and uncertain when you’re a teenager and you need answers to questions like, “Does Bianca like girls?” or risk accidentally outing yourself. But Zindy is an adult, working with other adults, two of whom have expressed direct interest in her. Step one is talking to them to figure out if a reading is actually necessary. Because she might sit down for her drink with Jackson and go, “You know, no reading required here, nothing is clicking.” That won’t be how things go down, obviously, because she’s majjikkkkhaaaal or whatever and clearly when you’re majjjikkkkhaaaaal you don’t need to do anything as mundane as talking to people.

In any case, the “I have to consult the mhystykal forces” thing is only in here at this point as an excuse for not furthering the plot at all.

For the moment I just had to wonder what to do like everyone else. Maybe I didn’t like this “normal” thing so much, after all.

Yeah, those poor mundies, forced to live their lives as norms, totally closed off from teh mhajikks. I’m starting to get a real strong sense that Linda has a lot in common with those obnoxious, crushed-velvet witches who say patronizing things about anyone who isn’t part of some Pagan tradition. And don’t hop in the comments like, “RELIGIOUS PERSECUTION AGAINST WITCHES IS REAL HOW DARE YOU!” because a) religious persecution against anyone not-Christian is present throughout the entire freaking western world and neo-pagans are fairly low on the list when people start gearing up for religious genocide, and b) people executed for witchcraft in other parts of the world aren’t being executed because they held a Mabon ritual in their backyard. Here, you’re more likely to lose your job because you wore a pentacle to work (which is still not okay) but it’s not ZOMG YE OLDE BURNING TYMES. Believe me, I’ve gotten my fair share of “you’re in league with Satan” and “LOL Wiccans” over my on-again-off-again paganism, but sixty-eight percent of the persecution witches face in America is people making fun them for exactly this kind of “I’m not like everyone else and it’s too bad you’re not special and touched by ~*majik*~ like I am,” behavior. And at least ten percent of that is coming from other pagans.

Wow, I’ve had that rant in me a minute, haven’t I? #MyCovenFuckedMeUp

Moving on, how, oh how, oh how how how can we possibly get through a scene where a self-insert goes to see a concert without the obligatory “he’s singing to me” scene?

Towards the end of their set the band launched into another ballad. A slow-grooved rock song with a pretty sparkly pop hook called “Someday You’re Gonna Love Me.” I couldn’t be quite sure, but it almost felt like this song was directed at me. The lyrics said something about allowing the girl time to go have fun cause the guy was going to just wait around because, well, “someday you’re gonna love me.” It was a super sweet, romantic thought. The chorus felt like it was being sung just for me, and Jackson’s eyes were definitely looking directly at mine while he sang.

Jackson was looking directly at her over the heads of four hundred people in a crowded bar. Also, Harry Styles can pick one girl out of the crowded arena and instantly fall in love with her.

At least it sure felt like he was, or maybe I’m just that girl who think she’s being sung to at a concert and really isn’t. Maybe from the stage, with the lights in his eyes, Jackson couldn’t even see me and was just looking at the random faces in the crowd.

Oh, she referenced the trope, so clearly she didn’t just engage in it.

I glanced over toward where Mac was standing, hoping to find him still engulfed in a conversation. I found myself wishes he hadn’t even noticed what I thought had just happened. Instead he was staring right at me and he had clearly witnessed the possible profession from Jackson. I only allowed myself to catch his gaze for a second before looking away and pretending that I hadn’t even seen him staring. I suddenly felt overwhelmed at the possibility of something that may not have even actually happened.

Here’s our confirmation that yes, Jackson was singing directly to Leslie. Another person noticed it. All this does, by the way, is ramp up the internal drama. So far, there’s been barely any external conflict in this passionate, confusing, all-consuming love triangle.

The next three songs are “upbeat,” so dancers from the magic show all run over to get down with Lalan Zalda. After the concert is over and the guys have greeted their fans, it’s time for the long-awaited date with Jackson. I can’t wait to see them engage in witty back and forth to establish the connection between them.

I was quickly learning that he was very easy to talk to and was actually very funny. Although I hadn’t planned it, I found myself flirting with him. His smile was hard to resist and the more time I spent with him, the more I could swear his eyes would sparkle on cue. We talked a lot about music. He suggested that I should come up sometime and play a song with them during a show. I joked that I wasn’t sure he could afford me, but agreed it would be fun and said I would–sometime.

And that’s it. There’s no dialogue at all between Jackson and Zarius Laesar on their date.

Do you know how I can tell that Jackson isn’t really a love interest? Because the author is more interested in writing long, painful introduction scenes with dialogue like, “It’s nice to meet you,” and “It’s nice to meet you, too,” than showing us any meaningful interaction between the protagonist and this guy she’s apparently caught in an anguished dilemma over. Rather than showing us any of the important action, she tells us about the action that happened, only to immediately move on to a long sequence of every other character that has been mentioned so far saying goodbye to each other. 

And the thing is, she’s not even listening to Jackson through much of their conversation. To sum up what happens after just a couple of paragraphs of Lini talking to Jackson (including a part where she notices Mac watching her and they share a secret smile…sorry, Jackson), we see:

Tad asking Mac if he wants to leave
Riley being too drunk to walk out of the bar
All three of them having a conversation together that Larno observes while presumably ignoring Jackson
The conversation includes working out how Tad and Mac are going to get Riley and his car home
Tad hugging everyone and coming over to tell Zader that Jackson was hitting on her
Mac and Zindar sharing a lingering glance
Zeb and Cam working out who’s giving who a ride
Tim and Tom talking about speakers

Despite the fact that Zelicity is so torn and confused over her complicated love triangle, nearly every minor character in this concert scene has more dialogue than Jackson, even when we reach this highly anticipated and totally confusing and emotional date that is the entire point of the chapter, and all of that dialogue is inconsequential nonsense.

Even after Mac (who is clearly the only love interest here, but for some reason, Sarem felt she absolutely had to have a love triangle in the book) leaves, this is all we get:

It was nearly four in the morning when I finally made it home. I’d stayed at the bar with Jackson for a while after everyone else had left, and found that it was much easier to relax around him once Mac was gone.

That’s it. That’s all. Just “it was much easier to relax around him.” Let me reiterate:

THERE IS NOT A SINGLE LINE OF DIALOGUE ON THEIR WHOLE ENTIRE DATE.

This is bad writing, in case you haven’t figure that out.

Well, that’s it for this recap. Next week I’m going to probably do things a little bit differently, because of the grossly inaccurate and stupidly written tarot reading in the next section. I’m thinking of making a video (which I will caption), because it will be difficult to explain it as described in book, and I’d like to rant in real time.