Elle Lothlorien's Blog

Curioser and Curioser!

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Yeah, I know what you mean. Pass the mushroom tea.
“Who in the world am I? Ah, that’s the great puzzle.”

-Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland

On April 25, 2004, I was sitting in my car in a hotel parking lot in Colorado Springs, crying. How do I remember the date with such specificity? Because that was the day my life changed. That was the day that I changed.

To be fair, if someone had said to me at that moment, “Your miserable existence is about to get much, much better,” I would’ve immediately asked them for a hit of whatever they were smoking. Because back in 2004, I was trapped in a marriage to an emotionally and physically abusive alcoholic. In the years I’d been with him,  he had effectively suctioned away about ninety-five percent of my self-esteem, leaving me crippled with a horrific social phobia. Luckily for me, I’d discovered the perfect form of escape: writing.

With the first few chapters of a historical thriller firmly in-hand, I’d nervously set off for the Pikes Peak Writers Conference, a regional writer’s conference held annually in Colorado Springs. It was the first one I’d ever attended. There may have been all of two hundred people there that weekend—max. Walking into that hotel to pick up my registration packet and name-tag was one of the hardest things I’ve ever done. I felt like I was like shuffling into a formal cocktail party wearing hair curlers, a kilt, and a snorkel. Everyone seemed to know everyone, each person belonging to one joyful huddle of laughing friends or another, and they all seemed to possess a level of positivity and confidence that was only possible with the aid of illicit drugs. Everyone but me, that is.

Once I’d been issued my packet, whatever courage I’d mustered up to go inside in the first place had evaporated. “I don’t belong here,” I told myself before rushing back to my car and bursting into tears. Eventually, the waterworks slowed to a trickle (and an occasional, forlorn sniffle). I can’t go back in, I thought. I just can’t. The only other choice was to accept that I’d paid hundreds of dollars to attend the conference—not to mention the countless hours I’d spent agonizing over my manuscript—all for nothing.

I was reaching for the keys, ready to start the car and drive home, when mystery/thriller author Mark Bouton happened by. My conference name-tag having caught his eye, he glanced over. Never breaking stride, he said, “You’re here for the conference?”

I nodded, mute.

His smile was kind. “I guess I’ll see you inside.” And then he was gone.

Okay, I  know one person, I thought. Sort of.

And now I also had a mission: to find that man and talk to him. Even after all these years, I’ve never been able to shake my fear of walking around in a strange place among strangers, but I can tell you that appearing to look for somebody feels a whole lot less pathetic than shuffling along by your lonesome, staring dejectedly at the floor. I mean, whether the person you seek is comprised of actual flesh and blood or is just an imaginary friend, other people will notice you scanning the crowds, looking determined, and they’ll assume that there must be at least one other human being in the place who finds you acceptable company. Eventually, someone will smile at you and say, “Are you looking for someone?” or “Can I help you find something?” Voila! Yet another connection made.*

Left to right: T. Dawn Richard, Mark Bouton, Elle Lothlorien.

After my ten-second parking lot conversation with Mark Bouton, I forced myself to get out of my car and rejoin the conference. I didn’t see Mark again until the next day (believe me, I looked!) but when I did, we hit it off. We’ve been friends ever since. Now, back in 2004, I never dreamed I’d ever be published–and if I was, I was sure it would be through a traditional, Big Six publisher, and that it would be my thrillers that would get me there. I certainly never entertained the notion that I’d one day write a romantic comedy. Or self-publish. Or become a bestseller. Or, most astonishing to me, be a public speaker.  Ah, but sometimes the universe has a sick, twisted sense of humor, doesn’t it?

It was years before I was able to tell Mark that he was the crucial, if unwitting, catalyst that set in motion everything that came after. (His response? “You know, I’d never spoken to a woman sitting in a car before, and I don’t think I ever did it again.”) Over the last eleven years, one thing I have always wanted is the chance to share this story with other aspiring writers–not just in a blog or as a throwaway anecdote at the start of a workshop, but before a banquet hall crowd at a writer’s conference with Mark sitting nearby.

Earlier this month, I finally got that chance when the Kansas Authors Club invited me to be the keynote speaker at their annual conference. Mark sat on the dais as I opened my speech with the story; I couldn’t have been more thrilled. After the banquet was over, I was amazed to find out that no one there had ever heard the story before—not the selection committee members or his friends in the audience. The fact that he never felt tempted to name-drop (c’mon, just a little bit; everyone loves to brag) shows you just what type of man he is, the same type of man who would offer a kind and much-needed word to a stranger, never guessing what such a small gesture might do.

For whatever caused you to speak to a stranger in a car that day in April 2004, I thank you, Mark Bouton, from the bottom of my heart. ♥

*It bears mentioning that by my third conference, I’d discovered a strategy that works much better than roving a conference like some Platonic nomad forever searching for their other half: volunteering. Tear tickets for the Saturday night banquet, stuff goodie-bags, work the registration desk–whatever. One is instantly thrown in with a group of people with a common goal, people who, by the end of that two-hour shift, say, organizing agent-author pitch meetings, may just become lifelong friends. More importantly, you won’t spend the duration of the conference looking like someone who will later be described in news accounts of your wild-eyed shooting spree as, “She always seemed like kind of a loner, you know? Kept to herself.” 

Be a Blog Post, Unless You Can Be a Unicorn

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It would seem that we have a unicorn controversy on our hands.

One day, many moons ago, I wrote a romantic comedy called Alice in Wonderland, which takes place in Australia (i.e. Wonderland). As befits a book inspired by Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, the protagonist, Alice Faye Dahl, and her siblings–as well as her suitor and his sister–often do and say things that don’t seem to make any damn sense.

One day, about nine moons ago, another author asked me how I created all those “little promotional cards” with my book quotes on them. Since I had no idea what he was talking about, I googled my name, clicked on “images” and marveled.

Now, for all I know, these could be the result of some internet, auto-generated quote machine, but hey–they’re out there, right? (File this under “There’s no such thing as bad publicity.”) Then I noticed that one of these quotes appeared with more frequency than any of the others:

“Be yourself. Unless you can be a unicorn, then always be a unicorn.” 

Not only that, but there were dozens and dozens of pages where people argued over the actual wording of the quote and its origin.

Just to clarify, this particular quote is part of an exchange in Chapter 22 between Alice Faye Dahl and her sister, Dee:

[Alice] “That doesn’t mean I pretend to be someone else. I don’t know how to be something I’m not, okay? I don’t know what you learned in that fantasy world of yours growing up, but I was told to just be myself.”

“Unless you can be a unicorn,” Dee says. “In that case, you should always be a unicorn.”

I turn on her, furious. “And why don’t you shut up? I know you think you’re the funniest person in the room, but you might want to take note of the fact that no one here is laughing!”

I’d barely recovered from the shock of watching people resorting to virtual fisticuffs over a unicorn when I received an email from a merchandising company called BlueQ.com that appeared to sell novelty products that were inspired by my morbid sense of humor. Such as:

Hand sanitizer for people who text while on the toilet


A lip balm brand with the rather unappetizing (but simultaneously amazing) name of “Lip Shit”
Socks with the words “Motherfucking Girl Power” on them

So…guess who wanted to turn my Alice unicorn quote into a pack of gum? Don’t believe me? Take a peek at the barely legible, microscopic words on the lid: “Artificial Flavor DIVA PRESS ©2015 FS1040.” Diva Press, Inc is the name of my company, and I don’t think you can get any more artificial than me, right?

So I signed a licensing agreement with them and then I kind of forgot about it until the FedEx guy had the audacity to wake me up at the ungodly hour of 10AM one day to deliver these:

The moral of this story is this:

Be yourself. Unless you can sell out and make some money; then you should always be as mercenary as humanly possible.  

And you’re welcome. ♥

Read Chapters 1-3 of Alice in Wonderland (a Romantic Comedy). 

Available for 99¢ through August 24th, 2015 on: Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, iBookstore, All Romance eBooks, Inktera, and Smashwords. Also available on Oyster.

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Sharks Can Bite Me

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Don’t let that friendly grin fool you; trust me, this motherfucker wants to eat you.I am scared of sharks.

I know, I know, a person has a better chance of having their body cavities probed by aliens than being eaten by a shark. Fear is a powerful thing, though, especially when it forms during one’s impressionable years. The first time I saw the movie Jaws was the last time I entered the water without fear. And the drain in the deep end of the neighborhood pool…well, let’s just say that I knew long before my peers that the urine-revealing chemical that was allegedly added to pool water in those days was nothing but an urban myth, because that sharky looking drain scared the piss out of me more than once.

You know how lifeguards would blow their whistle at you if you didn’t exit the deep end fast enough after jumping off the diving board? Yeah, that shit never happened to me. I got out of the water so fast that my swimsuit was dry before my foot touched the top rung of the ladder.

“I have a totally unhealthy and unrealistic fear of being eaten by a great white shark. This is because I belong to a very specific demographic called American Child Whose Parents Made the Ill-Advised Decision To Allow Her To Watch the Movie Jaws At a Sleepover During Her Formative Years.” -Alice Faye Dahl in Alice in Wonderland (a Romantic Comedy)

Then there were my dad’s weekend water-skiing trips to the lake. Yes, it was fresh water, not the ocean; yes, those were snapping turtles, not sharks. But being stalked by any kind of species from the deep tends to kick your “fight or flight” response into high gear. Unfortunately, whipping out one’s mad ninja skills is a bit of a challenge when you’re in a life jacket in the open water, legs tucked into a set of water skis, your ass-cheeks bobbing around like a shark treat. Once I successfully stood up from a deep-water start, I transformed into the Youth Water-Skiing Champion of the Universe, bravely withstanding choppy waters, fallen skiers, and the telltale ripples of man-eating snapping turtle-sharks in order to thwart my dad’s sadistic attempts to turn me into chum.

“I grimace, thinking someone should come up with a new phrase for ‘I left the ocean without a kiwi-sized chunk of my lower-left butt cheek’ to replace the rather nebulous term ‘exploratory bite.'” -Alice Faye Dahl in Alice in Wonderland (a Romantic Comedy)

Sure, self-preservation is a powerful thing, but after a while the constant terror tends to chip away at your psyche. Which is why I like to write fictional characters, like Alice Faye Dahl in Alice in Wonderland, who are brave enough to do what I won’t—namely, stride boldly into the ocean until the water’s up to her waist—and then mercilessly mock her for 300+ pages after the shark bites her in the ass.

Thank you, Congress.

As a grownup, I learned that an irrational fear of sharks has a fancy name, “galeophobia,” which is derived from the Greek words “galeos” (i.e. “shark with markings resembling those on a weasel”) and “phobos” (i.e. “scared shitless of sharks”). Later, I learned that galeophobia is also used as an alternate term to describe someone who is afraid of cats. On the face of it, this makes absolutely no sense, but remember that ancient Greeks sat around all day sipping crack-laced ambrosia and hallucinating all sorts of unnatural animal hybrids. But don’t worry; in 2005, Congress passed S659, preemptively thwarting any future attempts to unleash animal-human hybrids on an unsuspecting American public.

But I avoid cats now, too. You know, just to be extra-sure.

Because cat-sharks, bitches.

Read Chapters 1-3 of Alice in Wonderland (a Romantic Comedy). 

Available for 99¢ through August 24th, 2015 on: Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, iBookstore, All Romance eBooks, Inktera, and Smashwords. Also available on Oyster.

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Straight Down the Rabbit Hole: Elle’s Top 10-ish Australia Travel Tips

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I am not a spontaneous person. In fact, my days, weeks and months tend to be pre-planned down to the minute, so even small changes can trigger a control-freak panic attack. My dear friend, bestselling thriller/paranormal author Alexandra Sokoloff, however, happens to be a very spontaneous person. Here’s an afterthought in an email I received from her on August 3, 2012: “Also, come to Australia with me if you feel like it—I’m at Surfer’s Paradise on the Gold Coast from Aug. 14-19 (everything paid) and then just driving wherever for a week—you’re always welcome!”

Please note that she invited me to join her on an international adventure eleven days before said adventure. I gave the idea some hard thought and decided that it was a terrible idea. Alex, however, can be very persuasive. Five days before she was set to depart, I booked myself on a flight to Brisbane, Australia, where the two of us planned to meet up and set out for Surfer’s Paradise.

Now, here’s why a person like me should never, ever attempt anything resembling spontaneity. Without getting into the wheres and whyfores of the International Date Line, let’s just say that the concept of arriving in a country two days after I left my place of origin (in this case, Denver, Colorado), was just too much for my poor little brain to process. As a result, on the evening of August 12th I found myself at LAX, buckled into a seat on a Qantas flight. Via text, I shared my excitement with Alex, who was set to depart from the same airport just a few hours after me. That was the horrifying moment when I discovered:

1) Alex’s flight to Australia didn’t leave until the next day;

2) In 14 hours, I would be arriving in a country where I didn’t know a single soul, where I had no international phone service, no contact phone numbers, no transportation, and (since I was essentially piggy-backing on Alex’s trip) no idea where the hell I was even supposed to go when I got there.

While I sat on the plane, basically crapping my pants, contemplating an exit strategy that involved deplaning and running, screaming, through the terminal, Alex flew into action from her home in L.A. A few minutes later, she texted: ‘Looks like best option is to cab to QT hotel unless I get someone who can pick you up. I don’t actually know where these people live.’ This rather unpromising communication was interrupted by the flight attendant’s announcement to turn off and stow all electronic devises in preparation for takeoff. As the plane pulled away from the gate, my final message to Alex was the text equivalent of a death rattle: ‘Hopefully all will be sorted out on the other side.’ By “the other side,” I’m not sure if I meant “Australia” or “the afterlife.” Maybe a little of both.

Fortunately, Australians are some of the friendliest people on the planet, and Alex was able to find a total stranger to pick me up from the airport and drive me to the hotel in Surfer’s Paradise. (Fun fact: Zoe, the stylist who appears at the beginning of Alice to help her with her hair and makeup, was named for the lovely woman who picked me up!) Alex arrived the next day, and with that rather large travel hiccup out of the way, the adventure began. After a few days in Surfer’s Paradise, the two of us rented a car and drove to Sydney—stopping off in picturesque little towns along the way, such as Coffs Harbour and Nambucca Heads—where we spent a few days touring the city and hiking in the Blue Mountains. My romantic comedy Alice in Wonderland is partially based on this trip “down the rabbit hole”

For those of you considering a last-minute, whirlwind trip Down Under to Wonderland, I have compiled a Lonely Planet-worthy list of helpful travel tips for your convenience:

#1 No Thanks, I Brought My Own Snugi. 

Upon boarding your Qantas flight to Australia, you will be issued a kit containing a blanket, a sleep mask, a toothbrush, and a small tube of toothpaste, all tightly wrapped in plastic. When one inquires about the hermetically sealed blanket, one is informed that fears of bird flu and Ebola pandemics had prompted the airlines to do their part in lowering the risk by eliminating recycled blankets of yesteryear. Whatever you do, don’t jokingly respond with “Oh, you mean like how we accidentally wiped out Native Americans by giving them smallpox blankets?” Because that nice rice pudding everyone else seems to be enjoying will be withheld from your dinner tray.

#2 Yes, We Know Australia is Big.

When you inform your new Aussie friends about your plans to drive by car from Surfer’s Paradise to Sydney (a distance of approximately 529 miles), be prepared for them to cut you off with “You know that it’s a really long way, right?” Gently explain that, while we may not be our own continent and everything, we have a pretty big country over in America too. (Plus, we kind of invented the road trip.)

#3 You Are Here. Maybe.

There’s no consensus—even among Australians—about which continent Australia or the neighboring country of New Zealand belongs to, with the populace evenly split between “Australia,” and “Somewhere Else.” Ironically, the latter is closer to the truth. According to Wikipedia, New Zealand is part of Zealandia, “a submerged continental fragment that sank after breaking away from Australia 60-85 million years ago.” Not only that, but both Australia and New Zealand are part of the continent of Oceania, which is actually not a continent. (My brain is still chewing on the logic of that.) Whatever you do, do not ask Australians or New Zealanders if they are also citizens of Atlantis.

Also, if you hail from Brooklyn, Miami or Palm Springs, USA, don’t be alarmed when you pass your home town as you drive from Surfer’s Paradise to Sydney.  That’s because Australians show a remarkable lack of imagination when it comes to place-names. “Miami,” for example, is the name of a Native American tribe, so I’m pretty confident that we had that one first.

#4 Planes,Trains, and Automobiles. But Mostly Automobiles.

Australians drive on the left side of the road. When, upon leaving the car rental lot, your traveling companion enthusiastically attempts to use the windshield wipers as a turn signal before abruptly bringing the car to a stop and muttering, “Okay, I just need a second to recover from THAT”—don’t laugh. For one thing, the steering wheel and all important automobile-related amenities are on the wrong side of the vehicle. For another thing, your turn at frantic, windshield-wiper-signaling, and nervous breakdowns while navigating the Roundabouts of Death is definitely coming; it’s just a matter of time.

#5 The Ass-Eating Toilet Spider is Not an Urban Legend.

They have a hotline and everything. It’s the equivalent of Colorado rattlesnakes, only rattlesnakes don’t cause you to avoid using a toilet until your kidneys threaten to shut down.

#6 Wascally Woos

Don’t complain about your life, even in a trivial, throwaway-remark-sort-of-way, because Australians will always follow-up with an anecdote that will make your existence look positively dull and possibly not worth living by comparison. Case in point: I was grumbling to my new Australian friend that if my dog sees a rabbit when we go for a walk, he’ll chase it. She sighed and said, “Yeah, if there’s a kangaroo in the yard when my dog goes out, he’ll chase it, and then I have to run after him.” She may have said other things after this, but I was busy picking up my brain, which had blown out of my skull after trying to process how a dog chasing a kangaroo down the street could ever be considered an event so routine as to be annoying.

#7 What I Got, I Wanna Get and Put It In You.

No, the American plug will not go into the Aussie socket no matter how you twist and turn the plug.

#8 Cow-Tipping Okay 

If you’ve ever wanted to feel stupider than you already do when you have to decide how much to tip your U.S. dog shampooer/valet/cab driver/barista/proctologist, stop whatever you’re doing, get thee to Australia, and offer a tip to someone. (It doesn’t really matter what their profession is). For Australians, I suppose there’s a trace of pleasure to be derived from telling a cash-brandishing American tourist (i.e. Yours Truly, who had just had the first full-service fill-up at a gas station in twenty years): “There is no tipping in this country.” I walked away from that encounter feeling like I’d just used the wrong words for “thank you,” and had instead solicited the guy for sex. Then I remembered that Australians speak English. Sort of.

#9 Come Go with Me

Once you leave the state of Queensland behind you and enter New South Wales, you’ll notice that the locals will greet you with “How’re you going?” Just smile and say, “Great, thanks.” Do not try to be a smartass and answer “by koala.” Because Australians are very possessive of their marsupials, and will proceed to regale you with stories of a deadly, carnivorous creature called a “Drop Bear” that will make you purposely avoid every tree in the country for the rest of the trip.

#10 Are You Propping the Door Open, or Are You Just Happy To See Me?

Americans are notoriously puritanical when it comes to sex and body parts, but I spent my formative years in Italy, where all sorts of nakedness and ladybits were splashed through every commercial, TV show, and newscast, so I’m not normally the type of person who lets off sexually repressed steam by pointing out phallus-shaped vegetables or toothbrush holders every time I see one. That said, are Aussies aware that their door stops look like dildos? Seriously, after three days of white dildos springing at me from behind every door, I finally had to point out the white, ribbed elephant in the room by interrupting Alex and announcing: “I’m sorry, but why is there a dildo on the wall by the closet?” C’mon, they’re ribbed, people! If you like your door stops firm and man-shaped, that’s fine I suppose. But I’m a little concerned at how frequently I found these loose or missing altogether throughout the hotel. Consider asking your hotel concierge to throw some condoms in with the complimentary tea bags/coffee packets in the rooms, yo.

#11 Slow Children Ahead

Everyone in Australia goes the speed limit. Everyone. Even worse, most stretches of the highway are restricted to 60 kilometers per hour, which is how fast Americans go when we’re, like, passing a stopped school bus disembarking small children, or driving through a herd of puppies in the road. Penalties come in the form of huge fines, loss of license, and death. Drivers found in an unrested state, openly flouting the “STOP-REVIVE-SURVIVE” campaign, are heavily sedated and taken to “speeding re-education camps,” to be released only after they agree to drive 40kph no matter what the signs read. For this reason, most Australians have given up on interstate travel by car, which has allowed a kind of state-by-state isolationist mentality to take hold. This, in turn, has led to dangerously conflicting laws, such as whether or not you can hug a koala. And given the fact that Australian road signs seem to have been designed by a pedantic, professorial windbag with a love for multisyllabic words, I’m skeptical that a tiered, conditional speed limit sign like this one is particularly useful: 

90KPH (EXCEPT WHEN RAINING)

80 KPH WHEN RAINING

The real problem is that the sign has lots of room at the bottom for new tiers to be added. Keep your eyes peeled as you drive, because I predict that those tiers will be filled within a few months as follows:

70KPH WHEN RAINING KOALAS

60KPH WHEN SPRINKLING

50KPH DURING SHARK SIGHTINGS

40KPH WHEN “SPITTING”

30 KPH DURING CONSTRUCTION

20KPH ALL OTHER TIMES

#12 Good Morning, Sunshine

When your traveling companion wakes you up at 4am on your second day in Sydney with a frantic “the bathroom’s flooding—you need to get up!” know this: She’s not telling you this so you’ll make yourself useful by 1) stopping the boiling hot water arcing across the bathroom like the Trevi Fountain; 2) helping her track down the nighttime emergency contact for the hotel so they can come and turn off the leak; 3) reminding her of the universal emergency phone number in Australia (hint: 1-1-1). No, no, no, no, no. The simple fact is that misery loves company. After said emergency had passed, Misery was kind enough to order Company onto awaiting ferry, which led to an eleven-hour death march through Sydney that quickly morphed into The Trail of Tears. By way of retaliation, Company got Misery hopelessly hooked on Royal Copenhagen’s Honeycomb Butterscotch ice cream, leaving Company secretly delighted for the next three days every time Misery mentioned her gastrointestinal symptoms.

 

Alice in Wonderland is available for 99¢ through August 24th, 2015 on the following platforms:

Amazon Barnes & Noble iBookstore Kobo

All Romance eBooks Inktera Smashwords

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Gilding the Lily-pad: It’s a Guy Thing

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Have you ever wanted to know just what it is that men think about all day? The correct answer is “No, I haven’t.” If you answered “Yes, all the time!” trust me: you don’t.

My first novel, the romantic comedy The Frog Prince, is by far the most beloved of all my books. In fact, much like Lady Gaga’s “Little Monsters” and Benedict Cumberbatch’s “Cumberbitches,” fans of the book often refer to themselves on social media as being proud members of “The Frog Nation.” Immediately following the release of The Frog Prince, I was inundated with requests from Frog Nation readers (some might characterize them as “desperate pleas”) for a sequel to The Frog Prince, an appeal I’ve consistently rejected over the years. Why? There were lots of different reasons, really, but my most common response to those who asked was as follows:

“Leigh Fromm and Roman Lorraine von Habsburg will never be happier than they are at the end of The Frog Prince. They will never be more in love, never have better sex, and never be in better shape than they are in Chapter 32. What happens next? They get married, he starts leaving his dirty underwear on the floor, she never puts the lid on the toothpaste, they both let themselves go, and over the next twenty years, they slowly start to despise each other. If they have children, it happens in half that time.”

The real reason I didn’t write a sequel was that I couldn’t think of an interesting way to continue the story. And when I’m not intellectually and emotionally invested in the writing of a novel—mind, heart, and soul—trust me: that shit ain’t gettin’ written.

And then something wonderful happened. It came in the form of an email from a fan who had just read and fallen in love with The Frog Prince. Predictably, she asked if I was planning to write a sequel. I gave her my boilerplate response which she countered with what seemed like an odd question: “Have you ever read Stephenie Meyer’s Midnight Sun?”

For those of you who aren’t familiar with Midnight Sun, it’s theTwilight story…told from the point-of-view of Edward Cullen, Bella Swann’s adolescent-appearing, vampire love interest. Meyer abandoned the novel about halfway through, choosing instead to share the uncompleted draft with fans on her website. Since I am in no way a literary snob, I’ll admit that I found Twilight to be an intriguing series, but I also must confess that I enjoyed Meyer’s half-finished Midnight Sun much, much more. (Well, once I was able to deliberately box up and set aside any moral squeamishness I might’ve had over what is essentially the story of a centenarian vampire’s pedophilic obsession with a teenage girl). In my opinion, being in the head of 104-year-old Edward and discovering his motivations for courting the somewhat dreary 17-year-old Bella Swann made for a far more interesting read than the other way around.

In any case, my new Frog Nation fan suggested that instead of a sequel to The Frog Prince, I try a Midnight Sun-like project—in short, a novel from The Frog Prince’s Roman von Habsburg’s point of view. And so the seed for Gilding the Lily-pad was planted. I published Gilding in October of 2013, describing it as “a companion novel to The Frog Prince,” mostly for lack of a better term for the project. (Meyer refers to Midnight Sun as “an exercise in character development that got wildly out of hand,” a description that definitely lacks the oomph needed for a book jacket.)

My writing methods are somewhat unconventional. Instead of penning an entire book before turning it over for editing, I take an unusual “edit-as-you-go” approach. Once I finish the first chapter of a novel, it goes to a group of a dozen randomly chosen “beta-readers” before moving downstream to a team of professional editors and proofreaders. In this way, I can address critique as I write, before I get too far down the rabbit hole with a huge mess of a story.

In the case of Gilding the Lily-pad, it was a damn good thing that I did this, because I learned one very important truth right out of the gate: no matter how much women claim the opposite, they absolutely, positively DO NOT want to know what men are thinking.

One beta-reader didn’t even make it through the first chapter before letting me know that, although she’d found Roman in The Frog Prince (written from Leigh Fromm’s POV) “charming,” she felt the Gilding Roman was “callous” and “unsympathetic.” Furthermore, she was disturbed by what she felt was the inordinate amount of time that Roman spent “checking Leigh out” at their first meeting and during subsequent encounters.

Here are a few excerpts from Chapter One, just to give you an idea of what was so troubling to this reader. Keep in mind that you’re reading from the man’s point of view:

I turn around and instead of an elderly woman, I find her—the tall, hot brunette. I stand there, frozen in my tracks, staring at her like a gape-mouthed moron, using every ounce of willpower I have to keep my eyes above her neckline. All I can do is hope that I’ll be able to look away before she catches me ogling her.

***

I look over the back of her from head to toe. Her hair is long, about halfway down her back, and she’s tall. I glance at her feet. Okay, I think, so she’s wearing heels. Still, she’s got to be at least five-nine, five-ten. I’m discreetly (I hope) checking out her ass when a man’s voice interrupts my appraisal.

Based just on these two excerpts, the beta-reader’s opinion of Roman von Habsburg was basically that he was a skeevy pervert. Honestly, I was shocked by her reaction, especially since it was my belief that I was practicing restraint to a degree that stretched belief. Why did this particular beta-reader and I hold such dramatically different opinions on the matter? Probably because I’m what’s known as “a guy’s girl.”

After I graduated from high school, I joined a volunteer fire department. Now, this was in the early 90s when fire and rescue was an almost exclusively male-dominated profession. The guys in my battalion (Bat 4, yo) did almost nothing to rein in the man-fest in progress, even after women began infiltrating their ranks. Their lewd behavior and blatantly raunchy comments shocked me at first. But after six years of running calls with those guys, enduring their juvenile antics and ribald jokes, I had transformed into “a guy’s girl,” a chick who could give as good as she got, and who always had a tart rejoinder on the tip of her tongue, loaded and ready to fire at any man foolish enough to take her on. In the years that followed, I found myself in one male-dominated profession after another—everything from underground utility locating to clinical research to writing thrillers—which served to open the door to the mysterious male mind even wider (for better or for worse).

Love me, love my 80s hair.

And here’s what I know for a fact: even if a man is outwardly kind and respectful to women, even if he’s the very pinnacle of human decency and the strongest proponent of women’s rights alive, 75% of his inner thoughts—beginning roughly at the age of 13 and ending roughly when he draws his last breath—go something like this: Nice ass. Great tits; wonder if they’re real. Who cares if they’re real? Where did I leave my phone? Oh, heeeeey, check at the legs on this one! They’d look even better wrapped around me. Mmm-MMM! Why is this goddamn coffee taking so long?

In other words, if I were really writing a man, the majority of Roman’s internal dialogue would basically consist of: ‘Stop looking at her tits. Stop looking at her tits.’ Look at it another way: Edward Cullen, vampire extraordinaire, spends the majority of Twilight stalking and gawking at Bella Swann in locales ranging from flower-filled meadows to school cafeterias—“checking her out,” as any 104-year-old man with easy access to a Viagra prescription is wont to do. Edward’s fixation with Bella spans three novels, but his bloodlust is just a literary fig leaf for what he’s really thinking about the entire time: SEX. Meyer was able to pull off Edward being consumed by physical fantasies of Bella Swann—even though the book’s audience is Young Adult—because Edward didn’t want Bella “that way.” He only wanted to eat her. (Heh.) It is no coincidence that the Twilight series spawned the fan-fiction-turned bestselling phenomenon Fifty Shades of Grey. It was simply a matter of removing the literary fig leaf, and letting the true nature of the story—sexual obsession—stand up and firmly demand to be counted. (Ahem.)

Anyhoo, with few exceptions, readers of Gilding the Lily-padended up adoring “the man’s side of the story.” I had so much fun writing this companion novel that I’ve decided to go on and write The Frog King, which will have the odd distinction of being a sequel to two novels which are not sequels to each other. So whose point of view will The Frog King be from—Leigh’s or Roman’s? Since fans were so delighted by Roman’s version of events in Gilding, I decided that I would write The Frog King chapters with alternating POVs, with Chapter One being from Leigh’s, Chapter Two from Roman’s, and so on.

And yes, even after a whirlwind courtship, a romantic engagement, and nuptials on the horizon, Roman will still be checking out Leigh’s ass while she’s not watching. When it comes to “writing a man,” some romance authors embrace reality whole-hog, while others prefer to dial back a man’s obsession with sex. Which begs the question: if an author fails to document a male character’s desire to check out a woman’s breasts, does that man still sneak a peek at her cleavage?

Trust me, you don’t want to know.

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12 Things I Learned As A Middle-Aged Groupie

[image error]In the summer of 2012, I was fortunate enough to score (through a mutual friend of Lita Ford guitarist Mitch Perry) backstage passes on the Deff Leppard/Poison/Lita Ford “Rock Of Ages” tour when they played in Denver, Colorado, Jones Beach Pavilion in New York, and Albuquerque, New Mexico. From these three concert experiences, I compiled the following observations (so you didn’t have to).

1. Please—Make Yourself Uncomfortable.

During the show, when someone backstage says to you in a kind, soothing voice “no, no, no…you’re fine where you are”—MOVE IMMEDIATELY. This is because you’re about to be run down by: 1) A rock star frantically switching out a guitar; 2) A rock star frantically looking for his cell phone to call his girlfriend/wife during the crucial Pre-Set Window before he finds himself single/divorced; 3) A rock star frantically switching out a roadie; 4) A throng of fans who won “meet & greet” passes from their local radio station, each of whom considers you One Small Obstacle on their way to The Target; 5) A small child—most likely the offspring of one of the many rock stars wandering around—wearing noise reduction headphones, traversing the backstage area at 300mph on a Razr scooter.

2. Fire In the Hole!

Tour buses are “no fly zones” for personal photography. If you are stupid enough to take a photograph on one of the buses, you will be wrestled to the ground by a member of the road crew and held there while a bomb squad from a nearby military base uses remote-control robots to detonate your iPhone, “Monsters, Inc-style.”

With Lita Ford guitarist Mitch Perry.
3. Ask Me How I Know.

If it looks like a RV on steroids, it is *not* a bus—it is somebody’s home. This is a helpful fact I wish I’d known before I barged into one particular rock star’s non-bus home without knocking. Luckily, that happened on Day 2 of the three shows I attended, so I only had to die of embarrassment over my groupie faux pas for one day. Also, I cannot look that person in the eye. Also, it is seared in my brain forever. Also, it is a constant reminder of why I will never be one of the cool kids. Ever.

4. Who’s There?

Fun fact: Knocking on a tour bus door makes you feel like an ass-hat. Picture yourself knocking on, say, an airplane, or an industrial-sized grill, and that’s sort of what it feels like. As an added bonus, no one actually ever answers the tour bus door, leaving you with plenty of time on your hands to imagine the people on the bus looking out at you through the impenetrable, tinted windows, and pointing and laughing until they pee their pants.

5. Does This Spandex Make Me Look Fat?

When you are told that there is a “Wardrobe Manager” traveling with the tour, don’t laugh. Although it looks to the untrained eye as if the guys in the various bands simply wear whatever on the floor of their bus is “least stinky”, the fact is that the Nonchalant Rock Star Persona has nothing whatsoever to do with long hair, stage makeup, or musicality, and everything to do with that fashionably torn “Pour Some Sugar On Me” t-shirt. Rock Star Fashion: It’s all about subtlety, baby.

6. Call Me.

If a rock star and an attractive woman sitting in close proximity look cozy and comfortable with each other and tell you that they’ve known each other for years, don’t congratulate them for their determination to stay together despite the tour/the odds/the fates/the surplus of vaginas wandering around. Trust me: despite the genetic proof of their sexual union wandering around backstage somewhere, these two are not still together (if they ever were in the first place). Forcing this fact into the open may result in the rock star expressing inappropriate, overt relief in the form of poorly concealed grinning while his baby-momma glares at you as she sulkily adjusts her tourniquet-like spandex.

7. No, Seriously: I’m Friends With the Band

Waiting at the security checkpoint to get backstage will give you plenty of time to work on your “bored, indifferent” look that makes it clear to the nearby audience that you are a seasoned, Almost Famous, Penny Lane-type groupie, and not some Sticky Booger-type amateur. Perfecting this look of haughty contempt will remove any suspicions they may be harboring that you’ve been, say, traded to Guns N Roses for a six-pack of beer, and you’re simply staging there before being collected by the road crew and loaded onto a tractor trailer with the sound boards. If any audience member has the audacity to ask you how long you plan to stand there before you give up on getting backstage to meet the band, cut them short with: “Just think, man…any other city in the world besides Albuquerque and you’d still be a virgin.”

8. Who Is Your Daddy, and What Does He Do?

Rock stars’ kids think their parents are just as uncool as YOUR kids think YOU are. The only difference? Dude, you actually are fucking uncool.

9. We’ll Leave the Light On For You

When the reservations person at the venue resort hotel says that there are no vacancies because the entire place is booked due to the concert that night, and he offers you the number for a “nice Motel 6 right down the road,” what he really means is that there are no vacancies for someone as unimportant as you.

10. What Can I Getcha?

A better title for the Tour Manager is “Ticketmaster Concierge Magician Mom.” Need a room in the completely-booked venue hotel? Why, here’s a nice suite for the same price (and you’re welcome). Hungry? Meal vouchers AND a 10lb bag of trail mix will suddenly materialize from his jeans pocket. Lost your phone/girlfriend/tour bus/sanity? He just happens to have a burner phone, a map, a hug, and a coupon to a nearby brothel for you. Seriously, the guy exudes an aura of “It’s All Taken Care Of.”

11. TMI

Sure, listen with the proper combination of interest and sympathy as every rock star and member of the road crew recounts their recent projectile vomiting/food poisoning story, but don’t consider this an open invitation to tell them how part of your long skirt ended up falling into the toilet an hour earlier, and you had to wash it in the sink with hand soap and water. Trust me: They won’t think it’s the fascinating gut-buster that you do.

12. The Hardest Job You’ll Ever Love.

What’s a rock ‘n’ roll tour like? Imagine YOUR one-week childhood summer camp experience—complete with interpersonal minefields, dubious buffet “mystery foods,” girl’s camp panty raids, emotional breakdowns, homesickness, and humidity—take away the lake and the latrine, add guitars and a good beat you can dance to, put it all on wheels, and drive it across the country. Sure, it’s a lot more fun than your job as Senior Pencil Pusher at Soul-Sucking & Mindnumbing, LLC, but trust me: being a rock star is a fucking job.

Goodbye, My Only Friend. (Oh, Did You Think I Meant You?)

WARNING: This post contains things like the F-word, the S-word, and scores of other words—hundreds of them, in fact—that start with a variety of letters from A-Z. If words that start with any of the letters of the alphabet offend you, I’d skip this.

You know how sometimes in a film when two people are on the phone, they exchange information and then one of them just sort of hangs up without saying “goodbye” or  “cheers” or “thank you for this information” or “go fuck yourself” or ANYTHING? They just click!— drop the receiver into the cradle with no fanfare. (Metaphorically, of course, because anyone who still owns a phone like that probably has the ringer turned off and hides it in their sock drawer next to their vibrator.) Why can’t we do that in real life? (Hanging up on people, that is; not reverting back to phones that weigh ten pounds and require you to turn a crank to get a dial tone.)

Here’s what used to happen at the end of a conversation: I said “goodbye,” then you said “goodbye,” and then we performed the time-honored, socially accepted ritual of simultaneously hanging up on each other. I’ve gotten a lot of grief in years past for saying “goodbye” and then hanging up the phone before the other person has a chance to do likewise. My mother, in particular, calls this “rude” but, in my opinion, it’s not like it’s any big mystery what she’s going to say next. I mean, is it really, truly necessary that I hang out for a few more seconds to register her two-syllable valediction?

In my mind, what I do isn’t any different than saying “How are you doing today?” when one is walking past an acquaintance. Do you stop in your tracks and wait for them to say “I’m good” or “Fine, how are you?” before walking on? Of course you don’t! Everyone understands that your question is complete bullshit, because you don’t actually care how they’re doing today at all. In fact, if they were to stop you and start regaling you with how crappy their day’s going, THEY would be considered the rude party by breaking the unspoken but understood social contract of not really giving a shit.

In the last year, I’ve noticed a real breakdown in etiquette in the form of people who simply don’t know how the fuck to hang up the phone. It’s like everyone suddenly has the worst case of Asperger’s ever, and the tone of voice and all those special words you would normally use to signal your desire for them to go away—“Well, I’d better get going…” “Hey, I’m heading out the door, so…” or the time honored falsetto tone of “♫♪Alright then, I guess I’ll let you go now…♪♫”—have somehow transformed into invitations for them to keep right on yakking.

The worst offenders are customer service reps. Now, I’m a huge proponent of excellent customer service, but the clingy, fawning people I’ve dealt with of late have me pining for the days when some grumpy, apathetic bitch on the other end of the line made it crystal clear that she wasn’t getting paid enough to care about your problem, and that you were wasting her time and interrupting her fucking smoke break. Here’s the end of a conversation I had this morning with a rep at my health insurance company. Please note how long it takes for her to actually go away.

Me: “Okay, well thank you so much for your help, Sharon; I think I have everything I need now.”

Rep: “Good, good! Here at Up Your Ass and In Your Business Health Insurance, we pride ourselves on ensuring that you have all the tools necessary in order for you to access the care you need, Ms. Lortonhearsawho.”

Me: “Well, I definitely feel like I have the tools I need, so…”

Rep: “And if you have any further questions or concerns, Ms. Lungsporium, don’t hesitate to call the 1-800 customer service number. Do you have that number?”

Me: “You mean the one I just dialed to speak to you?”

Rep: “Yes, ma’am, that number is 1-800-555-1234 in case you don’t have it. There’s also a local Colorado number you can call. Would you like that local number, Ms. Leviathan?”

Me: “No, I think I’m good. Thanks again for your help.”

Rep: “Thank you, Ms. Luftansabrien; you have a nice weekend.”

Me: “I will. Bye.”

Rep: “And have a good rest of your day AND a good weekend.”

Me: “I’ll try to do that, thank you.”

Rep: “And thank you for calling Up Your Ass and In Your Business Health Insurance, Ms. Lexluthorian. Is there anything else I can help you with today?”

Me: “No.”

Rep: “Okay then, thank you again for calling. Buh-bye.”

Seriously, I’ve had shorter conversations with weepy, stalker ex-boyfriends trying to rekindle our relationship. In short, why can’t we all just do like in the movies and hang up on each other once we’ve said what we need to say? Then the above conversation would’ve sounded like this:

Me: “Okay, well thank you so much for your help, Sharon; I think I have everything I need now.” [Click]

See? It would have saved everyone sixty seconds and about 300 words. And frankly, it’s uncomfortable talking to a stranger who seems so personally invested in my happiness that she’s foaming at the mouth over her desire for me to  have both a good weekend AND a good day. Plus, although etiquette requires me to promise that I will have a good day/weekend/year/life, I’m almost certainly lying through my teeth, because the odds are really excellent that my day’s already spiraled into a massive clusterfuck from which there’s no hope of recovery. Having a perfect stranger order me over and over to turn things around isn’t likely to succeed without a fairy godmother and a whole lot of alcohol to back it up.

After I finally got rid of the sticky booger of a phone rep today, I started thinking about creative ways I could signal my intent to disconnect in the future. By altering a few of the lyrics in Jonathan Coulton’s “Want You Gone” (the delightful song that plays as the credits roll at the end of the video game Portal 2), I plan to serenade my next just-can’t-say-goodbye caller by busting out this sprightly little ditty:

♫♪ Goodbye my only friend

Oh, did you think I meant you?

That would be funny  if it weren’t so sad

You’ve got more calls to make

That’s what I’m counting on

I’ll let you get right to it

Now I only want you gone

Now I only want you gone

Now I only want you gooooooone…♫♪ 

For those who can’t carry a tune or who find themselves short on time, I can attest that a swift, no-nonsense CLICK! works just as well as it does in the movies.

And now I just want to thank you all for reading this post, because I know there are thousands of blogs that you can choose from.  And I really hope you have yourself a nice day, okay? You take care of yourself and enjoy your weekend. And make sure you get outside because I hear it’s going to be sunny all weekend. And if your existence is ever anything short of 24/7 orgasmic butterflies, you just give me a call, because here at ellelothlorien.com, we take pride in making sure—

CLICK.

 

I write contemporary romantic comedies that are loose riffs on the popular fairy tales I read as a child—stories I still love as an adult. You can find The Frog Prince, Gilding the Lily-pad, Alice in Wonderland, Sleeping Beauty, and Sleeping Beauty Wakes Up on Amazon.

Help Me, I Broke Apart My Insides

[Warning: Unguarded language ahead.]

Let me just get this out of the way: childbirth will utterly fuck up your lady bits, as well as other parts of your anatomy that you would just as soon not think about. Which brings me to my small intestine, parts of which, due to botched post-partum repairs performed 16 years ago, are apparently lodged in a rather unfortunate spot. I’ve had surgery twice in the last three years to correct the problem, both times with no success. But more on that exciting topic in a moment.

This morning, I went in for yet another surgical consultation. The surgeon (let’s call her “Dr. Fagina”) performed a physical exam before taking me into her office and drawing me a picture of my vagina.

No, seriously, she drew a fucking picture of my junk—and it was pretty good! To be fair, the picture also included my small and large intestines. And my rectum. The point is that it’s about time that somebody memorialized my vagina for posterity. Dr. Fagina very graciously allowed me to keep her drawing, which I have named “Lady V in Repose, ink on copier paper circa August 21, 2014, 9:30AM, Anonymous.”

My surgeon then informed me that a portion of my small intestine was basically jammed somewhere between my vaginal cavity and my large intestine. This time, she recommended that I have an MRI done before the surgery, to more accurately pinpoint the area in need of repair. And not just any ol’ MRI, you see, but something she called a “defecogram MRI.”

With three years of high school Latin under my belt, I sat there and tried to puzzle out what “defecogram” could be. “-gram” means it’s an image of something, I thought to myself, but of what? Before you could say “defecate,” my surgeon translated for me, explaining (and I’m paraphrasing), “The MRI technicians introduce an imaging paste into your vagina and your rectum, and then ask you to expel it.”

And I started laughing, because I’ve known Dr.  Fagina for years and she’s always good for a bit of fun and a joke or two. (Seriously, how can you talk about people’s junk without cracking a few funnies?) But then I noticed that Dr. Fagina was not laughing and that this “defecogram MRI” must, in fact, be a legitimate medical procedure, and not just something that happens in maximum security prisons or during alien abductions.

I’ll admit that I don’t much care for euphemisms m’self. Words like “introduce an imaging paste in your vagina and your rectum,” make it seem as if my va-jay-jay and my bung hole are going out on a blind date, Bachelor-style, where they’ll be introduced to some lucky guy named Imaging Paste. Same thing goes for the phrase “expel it.” I’d much rather just have a doctor tell me: “The MRI technicians will jam a semi-solid paste up your vagina and your ass and then ask you to take a shit—right on the table—while the MRI captures the event with rotating magnets.”

See? Now that message would be received, like, instantly.

So I stopped laughing and headed down to the Imaging Center to find out when my body cavities’ date with destiny was going to be. After looking over my referral for the “defecogram MRI,” the woman behind the counter asked me a series of questions, including “Are you claustrophobic?” to which I responded “yes.” At this point, the woman became totally fixated on my claustrophobia, assuring me that my doctor can prescribe medications to relax me so I won’t freak out while I’m inside the MRI. When I told her that I was pretty sure that my claustrophobia was going to be the least unpleasant part of the procedure, she barreled right on ahead with her spiel about prescriptions and relaxation techniques, and the whole time I just wanted to scream in her face: “Look, lady, I have to take a shit on a table in front of total strangers, okay? So I’m pretty confident it would be to everyone’s fucking advantage to have me be as claustrophobic as humanly possible, because then the shit will literally be scared right out of my intestines, after which I will take both of my holes and go home, where I will curl up in the fetal position and re-watch the first season of American Horror Story.”

I related these events to my mother, who balked at the methodology of the “defecogram MRI,” suggesting that perhaps the technicians could “attach a string to the paste, and yank it out of your vagina like a tampon.” Look, Mom, I appreciate the commiseration, but this is an MRI we’re talking about here, not a preschool craft project. No one’s interested in making a clay cast of my hoo-ha so that we can pour a ceramic knickknack at a later date.

The whole way home from this appointment, the lyrics to the Nine Inch Nails song “Closer” kept running through my head, with a barbershop quartet of MRI techs crooning:

You let me violate you

You let me desecrate you

You let me penetrate you

You let me complicate you  

I then join them on the stage, expressing my frustration and humiliation by belting out the lyrics that follow:

Help me; I broke apart my insides

Help me; I’ve got no soul to sell

Help me; the only thing that works for me

Help me get away from myself

In reality, though, I don’t need to get away from myself, just from my vagina and rectum. I’ve toyed with the idea of dropping them off at the MRI center on the appointed day and just act like it’s a play date—”And if you two are really good, maybe you’ll get a defecogram before you come home!” Then I can just pick them up when the fun’s all over. Unfortunately, detachable body cavities, much like teleportation and a cure for the common cold, are decades, if not centuries, away.

Shit.

I write contemporary romantic comedies that are loose riffs on the popular fairy tales I read as a child—stories I still love as an adult. You can find The Frog Prince, Gilding the Lily-pad, Alice in Wonderland, Sleeping Beauty, and Sleeping Beauty Wakes Up on Amazon.

Straight Down the Rabbit Hole: When Life Is Stranger (and Hotter) Than Fiction

 

"The writer should never be ashamed of staring. There is nothing that does not require his attention."
-Flannery O'Connor, attributed, Room to Write: Daily Invitations to a Writer's Life

"Before I write down one word, I have to have the character in my mind through and through. I must penetrate into the last wrinkle of his soul."
-Henrik Ibsen
"How do you come up with the characters for your books?
Are they based on real people that you know?"
I get this question all the time—all authors get this question. The short answer is: no. For one thing, that's a terrible idea that could open the door to a slew of lawsuits for (depending on how you're using them in your book) defamation of character, libel, use of likeness without permission, etc, which is why you see that dreadful disclaimer at the beginning of most novels (and at the end of movies): "All characters appearing in this work are fictitious. Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental."

For the purposes of my latest novel Alice in Wonderland, perhaps the disclaimer the Three Stooges used would've suited better: "Any resemblance between these characters and any persons, living or dead, is a miracle."

People often assume that I create the characters for my books by plunking myself down in a chair and churning out character descriptions and backstory like I'm writing a police report:

Name: Lapin Montgomery (aka "Rabbit")
Age: Early thirties
Physical description: Six feet, two inches tall, blond hair, blue eyes. Hot enough to blister paint off the walls.
Identifying marks/tattoos: None
Occupation: Filthy rich sports reporter, international poker champion.
Family: Mother: Alice "Ally" Montgomery, former ambassador to France; sister: Souris Montgomery, personal assistant

That's not really how it works--not for me anyway. In an earlier post ("If This Is Love, Then Why Am I Laboring?") I wrote that if you try to ignore the characters in your head they will "follow you around everywhere you go and beg you to just listen to them. Just for a second, they will say. I have something important to tell you, they will say."

In June, one particular shadowy figure started following me everywhere I went. I tried to ignore him, but he was always there, always lurking behind some corner in the back of my mind. It's sort of like stargazing at this point: you can see stars in your peripheral vision, but as soon as you look at one dead-on, it seems to disappear. So it was with this guy; as long as I didn't try to look right at him I could see the shadow morphing into something solid, a kind of rough outline of a human being. Once he got close enough, I sat down, poured myself a glass of wine, and asked him for his name.

The name is critical for me. If a character isn't ready to share theirs, I'll simply pour him or her a glass of wine and say, "Look, this is how it works: no name, no backstory. No backstory, no book—and I don't care how much you follow me around. So let's hear it."

Somewhere at the end of September or the beginning of October, I finally asked him: "What's your name?"

To his credit, he kicked down immediately. "Rabbit."

"Uh..." I didn't even know how to respond—I wasn't even sure I'd heard him correctly—and I definitely wasn't positive that I could repeat the name with a straight face. "Your—your name is..." I cleared my throat and shifted in my seat. "Your name is, um, Rabbit?"

As I said this, I moved  quietly and slowly for the Prozac that I keep on-hand for all my poor characters (they're gonna need it before it's all over, and I might just chew a few like Pez candy while I'm at it too). All of a sudden, I jerked straight up in my chair. "Wait—Rabbit? Rabbit? As in..."

I trailed off, leaned back in my chair, closed my eyes, and watched a sequence from the opening chapter of   Alice in Wonderland  (A Novel) unfold in my mind:

“What’s going on, Rabbit?”

We both look up, squinting against the sunlight. A tall, overly made-up, bottle-bleach blond comes to a stop in front of my mystery man, her huge fake boobs attempting a jailbreak from her microscopic royal blue bikini top.

Rabbit? I think. Please don’t say his name is Rabbit. I already feel sick enough.

“Nothing, honey,” he says, sounding annoyed. “Just trying to help someone out.” He nods at me. “Turns out she didn’t need my help.”

I feel really strange, like I’m floating. “Hey…you don’t look like a rabbit.” Then I do something completely out of character: I giggle.

Since his poker-playing nickname seemed to be "White Rabbit," making him a towhead blonde was a no-brainer, and now I suddenly had a physical description and a few personality quirks on the heels of that:

Wearing white swim trunks, and holding a white hotel towel and a pair of sunglasses in one hand, a man ambles towards  me. I use the word “man” loosely. A better description would be “the most beautiful specimen of Homo sapiens sapiens with a set of XY chromosomes to grace the planet Earth at this moment, or any other era, epoch, or age in history.” And it’s not just me who thinks this; his good looks and amazing body leave mute, slack-jawed women from eighteen to eighty in his long-legged wake.

He comes to a stop in front of me, and runs a hand through his still-dripping, platinum blond hair. “Are you okay? Did you step on a piece of glass or something?”

“Glass?” I know I sound like a dork, but that’s all I can get out of my mouth. It’s his eyes. They’re a disconcerting, otherworldly blue, flecked with streaks of frost white. Framed by the tanned skin of his face, they glow like an acetylene torch. And his hair. I mean, even wet you can tell it’s white-blond, the kind you normally only see on toddlers, the kind that turns green in chlorinated water.

Before I write a novel, I troll the internet and compile what I call "inspirational images" for each character—photos and graphics I can mull over and amalgamate, turning the shadowy character with a name into one specific, identifiable physical being. (It's very similar to storyboarding for a movie.) This was the "storyboard" I originally created for Lapin "Rabbit" Montgomery. Pay particular attention to the man circled in red:

Fast forward to a month ago. I was in the full throes of marketing for Alice in Wonderland, and I had just uploaded a variation of the images above onto my Facebook page to show fans "images and photographs that inspired the novel." It was getting close to 9:00 PM so I made a final pass through the News Feed to see what my Facebook friends and fans were up to before calling it a night—and that's when I saw this profile photograph float by:

Which, of course, made me do a massive double-take, so much did it remind me of the photo I'd just posted (not to mention a description in the book itself which I'll get to in a moment):

According to Facebook, this mystery guy and I had, like, a gazillion mutual Facebook Friends. When I clicked on his Friends link, the names of old high school and college friends and acquaintances popped up. Now, the ol' brain isn't quite working like it used to, but suffice to say that there was no way this guy looked like that top photo in high school. Uh-uh. Even a dead person would've noticed that strolling through the high school hallways. So I messaged him (and it was all I could to refrain from using the salutation "Dear Rabbit"): "I keep seeing you pop up on "mutual friends" pages...what year did you graduate? [I]t seems like we would at least have been acquainted. Drawing a blank...help a girl out?"

I received a cordial reply which basically amounted to "I don't know you, I don't recognize you. I am a very good-looking man with a limited amount of time on this Earth; please go away while I sit around and grace the world with my beauty." (I kid; his reply didn't read or imply anything of the kind.) Oh, and he added the name of the college he attended and the year he graduated from high school and went off to college...which just happened to be the same year I started at the same college.

So I tried again: "Hmm. Mystery gets deeper then, because I went to [the same university] for two years [at the same time you did] before I transferred."

Now, I don't know what kind of response I was expecting but what I got was certainly not it: "Yep, I remember you. Were you the one dating a fireman? I seem to remember that. I remember your song was that song by Firehouse. Funny. Hope you are doing awesome!"

Okay, full disclosure: it took me until three o'clock the next morning to even remember the name of the firefighter dude I was dating in college, let alone our love song. (And once I clicked over to YouTube and listened to it I realized there was a good reason why I blocked it out. "Love of a Lifetime." Yeesh. Poor guy having to remember that song all those years.) But the fun didn't stop there. He remembered that we'd driven back to our hometown together one weekend; he told me anecdotes about things my roommate and I had done; he recounted talks the three of us had in our dorm room...his recall was incredible.

Since then, we've exchanged emails, text messages, and spoken on the phone a couple of times, but it took a little while for me to work up the courage to tell him the real reason I originally contacted him (I mean seriously—how do you gently tell a virtual stranger that they look like your romance novel hero come to life?). But when I did finally tell him, he got a real kick out of it.

Which turned out be a good thing for me. Why? Because it was coming down to crunch time. It's one thing to cut and paste graphics that you don't hold the rights to from the internet as "inspirational graphics"; it's another thing altogether to put those images into marketing images for your book. Right around the time I was thinking about what good-looking blond, male friends I could rope into letting me use their images for book promotion, I just happened to reconnect with this particular blond, handsome college friend. "Why not?" I thought. So I texted him: "I want to use your photo—the one that reminded me of my book character—in an Alice montage. May I? PRETTY PLEASE?"

He responded: "Yes, you may. Looking forward to seeing it." Here is the montage I came up with:

I'd made montages for Alice and the other characters before I started writing the book as well. But the same problem I had with the Rabbit photos were also true for Alice; in short, mocking them up for private use was fine. Using them for a formal marketing campaign was no bueno. So I bought a red wig, dreamed a little dream about a fabulous party in a great dress, performed some Photoshopping wizardry, and produced a miracle:


I figured that while I was squeezing my virtual self into fabulous formal wear I couldn't afford, I might as well give myself a date worth looking at:

The day I created this montage, my real-life friend texted me to tell that he was at that moment attending a weekend-long workshop. I replied: "No you're not. You're at the Tea Party Ball in Sydney Harbour on a yacht with me, my friend." I sent him the image you see above, adding, "OK...keep in mind that I wrote this BEFORE I ever saw you on the timeline, BEFORE I ever contacted you....now you know why I took another look at your photo on the timeline? Eerie, yeah?" I forwarded him this excerpt from the book:

He disappears, and my backside has no sooner touched the taupe cushion then he’s back. No leather jacket this time, but a gray sports coat over a long-sleeve white button-up shirt. And the gray tinted glasses are back too.

"Looks cool," my friend wrote, adding what I thought at the time was a joke: "I think I have a shot wearing sunglasses from that [same photo] shoot."

Going along with the joke, I replied, "If you tell me [the sunglasses had] gray tinted lenses, I going to totally freak out." At about 1:30 AM I received an email from him. A photograph was attached to a message that read simply: "The one with the sunglasses."

As Flannery O'Connor once said: "The  writer should never be ashamed of staring. There is nothing that does not require his attention."

So, like a dutiful writer, I paid attention and did a whole lot of staring, the entire time thinking that the situation was starting to feel like a poorly written slapstick comedy, something worthy of the Three Stooges disclaimer: "Any resemblance between these characters and any persons, living or dead, is a miracle."

What can I say? Sometimes you pray to the literary gods and they deliver a miracle.


I write contemporary romantic comedies that are loose riffs on the popular fairy tales I read as a child—stories I still love as an adult. You can find The Frog Prince, Alice in Wonderland, Sleeping Beauty, and Sleeping Beauty Wakes Up on Amazon.

Staying True To Your Characters—Whether You Like Them or Not

 

“Have something to say

and say it as clearly as you can.

That is the only secret.”

~Matthew Arnold

“A writer should create living people;

people, not characters. 

A character is a caricature.”

~Ernest Hemingway

 

The Review

The following is an excerpt from a 1-star review for my romantic comedy The Frog Prince that was posted in June of 2011 on Amazon. Back then, I stalked my review page like it was a Hollywood heartthrob. Since the reviews were generally 4 or 5-star, this 1-star review nearly spun my world off its axis.

“The writers [sic] use of the words retard, retarded, socially retarded and mentally retarded were all used within the first chapter. I have a 3 year old daughter with downs syndrome, [sic] I find her repeated use of these very hurtful words extremely tasteless.”

[Note: You can read more about the interaction that followed between me and the reader after her initial review posted— and how we both tried very hard (and succeeded, I think) to engage each other in meaningful dialogue on a topic where we passionately disagreed—here.]

Whoa, wait a minute! I thought. I used the words ‘retard,’ ‘retarded,’ ‘socially retarded,’ and ‘mentally retarded’—all in the same chapter? REALLY? Honestly, it seemed to reflect a lack of creativity (or a thesaurus) on my part.

I opened my draft of the manuscript, using the search function to find the offending language. And there it was, right there in Chapter One:

Regret is familiar territory. When it comes to dating and men—hell, even having a coherent conversation with people in general—I am something of a social retard. Funerals are meant to comfort the living? God, I’m like Emily Post crossed with Debbie Downer. I queue up in the coffin line so I can say my final goodbyes to Great Aunt Tina before going home to spend a quiet evening in respectful isolation. Sort of like every other night.

The word makes only two more appearances—both in Chapter Two—in a conversation inside a car between Leigh Fromm and her best friend, Kat. There are no other people with them:

“I’m worried about his jaw,” I say, cutting her off.

“His wha’?”

“His jaw,” I snap. “The House of Habsburg-Lorraine was completely inbred. All that inbreeding…some of them had jaws like bulldogs. Charles the Second couldn’t even chew his food because his grandmother was also his aunt. And he was insane, mentally retarded, and impotent.”

Kat shoots a sideways look at me. “You’re effing weird.”

Her insult—contracted curse word and all—is said with the greatest affection and I am not offended. I know how much effort she has expended of late to reform her mouth. Time-honored curses like the F-bomb and sonuvabitch have been replaced with laughable substitutes like “holy old leguva bench” and “Jesus tapdancing Christ.”

“Roman went to law school with Christine at Denver University,” says Kat. “So scratch mentally retarded. He owns some kind of construction company. And I’d be willing to give him a little tumble to check on that impotency thing for you.”

“Thanks, Kat.”

The reason I use this particular review as a “teaching moment” is two-fold:

1) To highlight the difficulties of writing in first-person

2) To stress the importance of staying true to your characters and your story.

First Person POV: Tricky At Best

The Frog Prince is about a Denver sex researcher (Leigh Fromm) who meets the man who would have been the king of Austria—if the monarchy there hadn’t been abolished in 1918. Leigh is a beautiful woman who is generally very ill at ease in social situations. Her internal dialogue—in which she alternately cheers on, berates, and second-guesses herself—make up some of the funniest moments in the book.

The novel is written from Leigh Fromm’s point of view. First person can be a tricky POV to pull off, because readers have to be willing to endure being “in the character’s head” for 300+ pages. When done well, readers may have a hard time distinguishing your novel (fictional) from a memoir (first person, personal account).

In her review, the reader explains: “I have a 3 year old daughter with downs syndrome, I find her repeated use of these very hurtful words extremely tasteless [emphasis mine].”

The word “her” used here gave me pause. Did the reader mean me or did she mean Leigh Fromm? Did readers feel as if we were one and the same? I tried very hard to explain how I felt about my characters in my response:

“…the individuals in my book are like real flesh-and-blood people to me. At the same time it’s important to understand that they are NOT me. They are individuals with their own thoughts and feelings and personalities, their own life experiences, prejudices and self-esteem issues, their own families and taste in clothes and food.’”

From Your Character’s Mouth to the Reader’s Ears

Once thing I can tell you is that readers can sniff out stilted, forced, or “politically correct” dialogue—whether internal or spoken—from two hundred miles away. The example of this that I often give is this: if you were reading a book about a racist sheriff set in the Deep South in 1950, would this dialogue ring true?

“You tell that gosh-darned African American that he’d best be off the property by sundown.”

[Insert eye roll here.]

Perhaps this example is a bit too easy, as “the N-word” has been banned from casual conversation for much longer than “the R word,” but it’s still used in literature and movies when it’s necessary to establish a character’s values or the value system of the time.

The internal dialogue Leigh has with herself in Chapter One (in which she calls herself “a social retard”), or the conversation between Leigh and Kat in Chapter Two, illustrate this point nicely. In the case of the former, Leigh is speaking to herself, in her head. She is not calling another person a “social retard.” I’m not saying that there isn’t a fictional character in my head somewhere who would do such a thing (and perhaps I’ll write that character one day), but Leigh isn’t that kind of person.

That being said, I think if you placed an embargo on words that one thinks to oneself, we’d all be in prison or committed to psychiatric institutions! Extrapolate that restriction to fictional characters, and you’re really tying the hands of writers to create rich, complex, fragile (and yes, sometimes horrible, reviling) people.

Real people behave in different ways, depending on who is around us, where we are, and what capacity we are acting in at that moment. Are we in mixed company at a movie theater? At dinner with siblings? In a car with our best friend? In a meeting with our boss? Friend, daughter, employee, car, workplace, dinner…these are all very different roles and settings that would change how we act and what we say.

In the confines of a car with one’s best friend who one has known for a decade or more, it’s not outlandish to think that Leigh would say: “And he was insane, mentally retarded, and impotent.”

Of course, Leigh could sanitize every word so that it describes nothing and offends nobody: “He was mentally ill, and also suffered from intellectual disabilities, mandibular prognathism, and sexual dysfunction as a result of increased homozygosity due to consanguineous coupling.”

I mean, let’s face it, “increased homozygosity due to consanguineous coupling” isn’t exactly a catchphrase that’s sweeping the nation. If you uttered that to your best friend in a car, she’d probably stop the car and make you get out and walk the rest of the way. I’m not even sure she’d stop the car, now that I think about it, maybe just slow down a little.

A writer staying true to her characters must accept them however they come to life in her head, the good, the bad, and the ugly–especially the ugly–because flesh and blood human beings are all of these things, all at the same time.

I write contemporary romantic comedies that are loose riffs on the popular fairy tales I read as a child—stories I still love as an adult. You can find The Frog Prince, Gilding the Lily-pad, Alice in Wonderland, Sleeping Beauty, and Sleeping Beauty Wakes Up on Amazon.