Nobody Here

I've moved my laptop two feet to the right on my desk. I feel this will make me a new (and presumably, better) writer. You think? Also my writers' group pals are enjoying some success lately. One just got an agent and the other just won the Writers Notes book award in the Young Adult category. In addition to being happy for them, I'm certain their talent and skill will rub off on me and make me a new (and presumably, better) writer. You think?

I will still eat cupcakes, though. That hasn't really changed. I briefly considered Paula's suggestion that I go with salty snacks for the serious writing, but, it just didn't feel right, you know?

Off to down my Diet Coke and see if I can make something resembling a book out of this draft.

In a space of just two weeks since Paula first brought it up, my blog has degenerated into nothing but Thursday Thirteens. That's kind of sad. I could've written a post about how the stupid supermarket didn't have any real Hostess Cupcakes because they're carrying the Easter ones instead which everyone knows suck. But I'm sure that's offensive to people who celebrate Easter, or people who work for Hostess, or people who don't eat cupcakes, or people who do, or supermarkets. I happen to celebrate Easter, but I don't go to church, which means I put my daughter in a froo-froo Easter dress, and then don't go anywhere. Weird huh? Okay, so, you can see why I'm not posting much besides Thursday Thirteens. Today I'm supposed to be cleaning because I have a guest coming in for the weekend, which explains why I'm blogging instead. I donotheart cleaning.

Thirteen greatest* hair ballads, in order:

13. "Amanda" - Boston
12. "The Flame" - Cheap Trick
11. "In My Dreams" - REO Speedwagon
10. "I'll Be There for You" - Bon Jovi
9. "Goodbye" - Night Ranger (and do NOT give me that "Sister Christian" crap)
8. "Foolin" - Def Leppard
7. "Love Walks In" - Van Halen (Van Hagar)
6. "What Does it Take" - Honeymoon Suite
5. "Never Say Goodbye" - Bon Jovi
4. "I Remember You" - Skid Row
3. "Nobody's Fool" - Cinderella
2. "Heaven" - Warrant
1. "Rough Boy" - ZZ Top

*In this context, greatness and cheesiness are closely related

So if you go to Amazon and look at any of the books that have "Search Inside" over their icon, scroll down to the Inside This Book section of the page, and click Text Stats, it will give you the book's word count (among other things). Nice if you're wanting to see how one of your manuscripts stacks up to books in similar markets.

13 great sidekicks (in no particular order):

1. Arthur from The Tick
2. Val Kilmer's Doc Holliday
3. Merry Brandybuck
4. Ron Weasley
5. Mike Wazowski from Monsters, Inc.
6. Lancelot, well, until, you know
7. Inigo Montoya from The Princess Bride
8. Jess and Marie from When Harry Met Sally
9. Zero from Louis Sachar's Holes
10. Trinity from The Matrix, but only the first Matrix, because I don't acknowledge the other two
11. Sancho Panza
12. Agnes DiPesto from Moonlighting
13. Bowden Cable from Jasper Fforde's Thursday Next books

The Movie Of Your Life Is A Black Comedy

In your life, things are so twisted that you just have to laugh. You may end up insane, but you'll have fun on the way to the asylum. Your best movie matches: Being John Malkovich, The Royal Tenenbaums, American Psycho

Swiped from Paula.

*Post title ripped off from The Royal Tenenbaums

For those of you who remember Murray, I'm afraid he's come limping home from his stint in the big city. My agent has decided to focus on other opportunities, as I used to say in my corporate days, leaving me with some strategizing to do with regards to my fiction, ahem, "career." The first book he was repping (let's call that one Julie) has more than made the rounds and is ready to disappear into a desk drawer for at least several years if not forever. But Murray is a tougher case. He's only amassed a couple of rejections and has barely dipped his toe into the vast submission ocean. And I'm not saying he's Newbury material or anything, but I liked him and I was really excited about him. So now I'm faced with the question of:

a.) trying to find a new agent for Murray now;
b.) finishing the book I'm currently working on (new codename: Isaac) and starting the agent search fresh with that one;
c.) finishing Isaac, then deciding which one's better and trying to find an agent with my strongest work;
d.) doing something completely different and unexpected.

Right now I'm leaning toward option c because d seems like too much work. I do want to put my best foot forward, and even though at this point I'm less enthusiastic about Isaac than Murray, it doesn't seem fair to compare a half-baked second draft to a polished (well, except for that mirror thing, but I took it out) manuscript.

What would you do? Drinks on the Cabana Deck, or dancing in the Pirate's Cove? And how is it that Isaac was at all times simultaneously tending every bar on that ship?

*Post title ripped off from the theme song from Love Boat

Done, and squeaking in just under my 40k limit. On to draft three starting some time next week, which is just enough time for my peeps to help me with a question of pressing importance. My writers group gets the next draft, so it has to be as close to The Real Story as I can get it, and written in real live book-quality sentences. No more churning out crap just to hit my target word count for the day. So tell me, do you think such a lofty goal is best served with sweet snacks, or salty?

Paula says we have to post a list of thirteen on any subject we like. She did thirteen things she hates to find in a romance novel, so I'm going to kind of copy her answer.

And you know, she's right, lots of peeps are being totally uncooperative by not updating their blogs and forcing me to work, so, you know, it wouldn't kill you to do a Thursday Thirteen of your own.

Thirteen Things I Hate When Novelists Do, Although If I Do Them I'm Sure I Had a Really Really Good Reason:

1. My biggest peeve: anything that makes me look at the man behind the curtain. This includes weird turns of phrase, writing that is too clever, writing that is too stupid, strange affectations, and talking directly to the reader. How am I supposed to believe in your story if your constant, nagging presence keeps reminding me it's a story? Some items on this list are specific things that could fall into this category, but that deserve special mention of their own.

2. Pretty writing, no plot. Especially writing that's pretty just for the sake of showing off. Look, we're not going out on a date, right? Or we're not going to be friends? Have lunch together, mock some people? No? So what do I care that you're clever? I don't. Stop distracting me and tell me your story. And if you don't have a story, shut up.

3. Changes in point of view that don't belong there. Usually these look like sentences or paragraphs that you knew didn't match, but you left in there anyway because you couldn't figure out another way to get that info to the reader. Sloppy. Related: close point of view that still sounds like the author. If you're writing third person close on an 8-year-old protagonist, don't describe things the way an adult would.

4. Logistical mistakes. The time needs to add up. The space needs to match. If you said the kitchen was to the right of the dining room in chapter 3, you can't have someone turn left out of the dining room and end up in the kitchen in chapter 20. Make a timeline, and draw a map.

5. Rules violations. Internal logic is an absolute must.

6. Sex scenes that use laughable euphemisms.

7. No likable characters. You've got to give me at least one to root for.

8. Someone who gets screwed after screwed after screwed, until I'm not so much crying as laughing. Candide aside, I need a believable level of bad fortune.

9. Ridiculous coincidences, except in a Dickens novel.

10. Lame endings, especially in a Stephen King novel.

11. Mentioning something casually that was never there before, just a few pages before you're going to use it.

12. Obvious didacticism.

13. Perky astrophysicists or neurosurgeons with pouty lips and big boobs showing up in chapter three of thrillers or mysteries starring manly men.

Starting a novel with flashback is:

A. Fine
B. Fine, but only if you really have to
C. Confusing
D. Irritating
E. Overdone
F. Lame
G. Are you kidding me? Why don't you just start with a dream sequence, then have your narrator wake up and look in the mirror to describe herself, you freaking amateur?

You may choose more than one answer. Go.

*Post title ripped off from the Fine Young Cannibals' "Don't Look Back"

Paula wanted to see a pic of the new haircut. Apologies to Roy for the exposed tattoo.

For the last dozen years or so I've had this pattern of growing my hair out and then as soon as it's the length I said I wanted, being sick of it and chopping it off. What amuses me each time I do this is the difference in both my attitude and the way other people seem to approach me. It's like putting on a costume. Last week I had long curly hair, the curls thanks to a perm. This said, "The eighties are alive and well in my house." The blunt bob says something entirely different: "What I lack in beauty I make up for in moxie," or maybe "Watch it, I could be a hired assassin."

*Post title ripped off from the F. Scott Fitzgerald short story by the same name. Special thanks to Roy for reminding me of the word moxie.

Pursuant to this post, I've gotten a hair cut and now look like a flapper. As a result, my story has become infused with drunken debauchery and not a few characters wildly dancing the charleston. Much like the actual twenties, it's all very expensive and makes very little sense, but it's a good time. Until, you know, the crash.

I picked up Curtis Sittenfeld’s Prep because I wanted to see what all the fuss was about (and yes, it was on the much-favored 3 for 2 table at Borders). It’s not the sort of book I’d ordinarily pick up, or would like if I did. For starters, its author has all the credentials of a Serious Writer, something I am always deeply suspicious of. It hasn’t got any plot to speak of, in the way I normally define plot: there isn’t any overarching goal, any problem to solve. There is a journey but it’s not a quest, it's the journey through time, things I learned on the way from year x to year y. Perhaps most damning, the years in question are high school, possibly the least appealing novel fodder I can imagine. Finally, the point of view is First Person Unfiltered Teenage (1PUT), which is to say, the narrator is unlikable, in the way we all are when all the self-absorbed angst is laid bare. But the genius of using 1PUT is that nobody expects the narrator to be likeable, so rather than blame them for it they applaud the book’s honesty.

But that’s not why I liked Prep, and I did like it. I thought it was brilliant, and the whole time I was reading it, I kept asking myself why a book that was such a departure from my taste would capture me so. I finally realized that I liked Prep because this quote from A Separate Peace (a book to which Prep has been compared, though aside from a similar setting I have no idea why) has stuck in my mind since the tenth grade:

“Everyone has a moment in history which belongs to him. . . when you say to this person 'the world today' or 'life' or 'reality' he will assume that you mean this moment.”

Pretty much every novel is about showing the reader this time in a character’s life. A good one will lead the reader to understand that character, to feel what they feel. A great one might take that a little further and leave the reader with something having to do with the world or themselves that they didn’t have before.

But it’s a rare book – and I’m not suggesting this correlates with greatness, but I do think it’s almost impossible to achieve – that leads the reader to leave themselves behind entirely and experience that reality completely as the character, so that for the space of time it takes them to read the book, they know – not understand, not feel, but really know – what it is to be that person. Salinger does this in Catcher in the Rye (another book Prep is always being compared to, maybe more appropriately). Sittenfeld does it here. And when the book is over, you know you’ve just been through that John Knowles moment, that for this girl there will never be any reality more real than school, that everything that comes after (including the ten years hence point from which she’s talking) will be lesser, duller; it will be aftermath. Even if Prep didn’t do anything else right, this alone is a big achievement.

On the other hand, maybe I just dig reading about rich peeps. Hard to say.

*Post title ripped off from Pink Floyd, is there really anyone who needs that said?

This is my third novel (not counting two before that that don't count), and it'll come as no shock that food is prominently mentioned in all of them. In this one, it's actually necessary to the plot. It follows that I'd write that way since I like reading about food. I might not be so into Rowling's wizarding world if they didn't have such cool things to eat. My old favorite Du Maurier loves to linger over detailed descriptions of meals. And then of course there is C. S. Lewis, father of my lifelong obsession with Turkish Delight (and I'm not the only one). That ended, as lifelong obsessions must, in cruel disappointment, but I'll always remember the good times.

Of course, it's not food for everyone. Stephen King can go on for days about a car, Dickens for even longer about a single room. Romance and historical novelists have to spend a lot of time on what peeps are wearing. As a reader I tend to enjoy descriptions of setting (except gadgets and cars, cause I'm not a boy) but not a character's physical appearance. That's because I almost always cast the characters myself and either ignore or mentally adjust the author's descriptions to match my image of them. Not surprisingly since I don't like reading it, I don't like writing physical description either, and often forget about it until one of my critiquers writes "What does he look like?" on the manuscript.

Some people have no patience for any of it. I have a friend who hates the things I like best about the Potter books: the meals, the castle, the classes, the daily routine. He just wants to get to the action, whereas for me, the true escapist, the events sometimes become secondary to just living in the world for a while.

What details do you like to read or write about?

*Post title ripped off from No Doubt's "Just a Girl"

I've finally hit the sweet spot where the story has more momentum than its flaws. I still make no claims of finishing this draft any time soon. Half the nights I think what a waste of time this particular book is, and I read or hang out with my family instead. The other half I have Hostess Cupcakes in my office, and that, as is widely known about me, will always get me into the chair. Some day when I've got as many books on the shelf as Judy Blume (actually, I think I've passed the age where this is mathematically possible, but roll with me, k?), I will be a desireable interview candidate, and someone will interview me, and they will ask, what is the key to success as a writer, and I will shrug off the standard talk of persistence and practice, and instead I will say: never keep the cupcakes where the couch is. And the everyone who reads it will say, that Jen, she is wise.