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.