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Summer Job? Or Reward from the Universe?

by Hank Phillippi Ryan

 

There was no way around it.  Every summer from the time I turned 16, I had to get a summer job.  All the kids in my family did, as soon as we passed into no-longer-child-labor territory. In fact, there may not have been child labor laws back then (after all there wasn't even color TV, for heaven's sake) but anyway. My step-father insisted. No summer job? Forget about it. That also meant no pool privileges, no car privileges, probably no food privileges.

 

So my first summer, after complaining about it for awhile, and failing at trying to prove to Mom and Boo (as we called him) that no one would hire a teenager with no experience, I went to the Avon Shopping center, I think it was, in suburban Indanapolis. I inquired at the A and P--do you need anyone? No. At Shaeffer's Drugs. No. At Adore Beauty Salon. Pronounced A-dor-ay, of course. No.

 

Next on the strip mall was the dry cleaners, can't remember the name. Oh, yes, Tuchman's.

And they needed a clerk. Great!

Cush job,I thought. Take people's clothes, give them back. Though it did smell a little funny in there. So done deal, I was hired, and then they handed me an employee information form to fill out.

I picked up the pen, and began to write.

 

"Waitaminit," the clerk said. "You're left-handed?"

 

"Yes," I said.

 

He took the paper back. "We can't train a left-handed person," he said, shaking his head. "The machines--"

 

Machines? I remember thinking? Why will I need a machine?  

 

"--the cleaning machines are designed for right-handed people only. No way, sorry, but we need someone right-handed."

 

And with that, adios job.

 

I was crushed, defeated, and went to the Dairy Queen to drown my sorrows in a double chocolate softserv in a cup with pineapple topping and coconut flakes. The Dairy Queen. Where, as it turned out, they needed a person to be a counter girl.

 

And I got the job.  I adored it. I learned to make an ice cream cone with a curl on top, and dip it in chocolate keepng the curl in place. (Bet I could still do it.) I learned customer service, how to be nice even if you didn't feel like it, how much fun it was to make someone happy, how fulfilling it was to give people something delicious, how fantastic it was to get a paycheck, what a good feeling it was to go home tired after a real day's work.

 

And, because you can make ice cream cones left-handed, but not do dry cleaning, I did NOT spend my summer breathing tetrachlorethylene, "perc," the solvent they now know causes cancer and all kinds of other horrible things.

 

Somehow, to me, that's all just--chillingly revealing about the universe. Or maybe it's just a nice story.

 

Summer jobs anyone?

 

 

Fiction is what happens while you're busy making other plans.

by Toni L.P. Kelner

John Lennon wrote, "Life is what happens to you while you're busy making other plans," and that's definitely been my experience. Writing fiction is like that, too. The version of a story the reader sees is rarely anything like what I started out writing. 

This past couple of weeks I've been working on a short story for Death's Excellent Vacation, the next anthology Charlaine and I are editing. The anthology is all about supernatural beings on vacation, kind of an urban fantasy beach book. And even before we decided to do this anthology, I'd had this character in mind to write a short story about:  Pirate Dave.

Pirate Dave was going to be a cranky old guy who works nights as a character at a run-down amusement park in Florida. The twist is that he's a vampire, and really was a pirate. One night he smells that there's a werewolf has entered the park, and being a protective sort, he decides he's going to hunt the beastie down before it can hurt anybody. Except the werewolf isn't the problem at all, and the real danger is a witch who wants to capture the werewolf. Throw in a case of mistaken identity about which park guest is actually the werewolf, and hilarity ensues.

That was the plan, anyway. Unfortunately, I could not make myself write it. I couldn't get the mechanics to work, and I couldn't overcome the problems with the plot and character. In reading this over, I still can't pinpoint what about the story was bad, but it just wasn't working.

Time to reboot.

I still wanted that amusement park setting, and I still wanted a Pirate Dave who was actually a vampire.

Now I've already written one werewolf story:  "Keeping Watch Over His Flock," which appeared in Wolfsbane and Mistletoe. The protagonist is Jake, a teenaged boy who only recently discovered that he was a werewolf and who has been adopted by a clean-cut, loving family of werewolves. So I thought I'd send Jake to see Pirate Dave at Pirate Dave's Funland, and Jake would be the protagonist instead of Dave.

The plot was that Jake comes to the park with his family, but goes off on his own to meet with his buddies for the day. Only his buddies have ditched him, and instead of meeting him at the park, they've gone to a martial arts film festival because ninjas are way cooler than pirates. Jake is left alone and cranky, and gets abducted by Pirate Dave the vampire. At first Pirate Dave was an aristocratic kind of vamp, aloof and lonely. Then he was a young guy, or at least he looked young because he'd been bitten as a youngster. Either way, it was going to be a buddy plot in which the werewolf and the vampire teamed up to defeat some sort of supernatural threat that had to do with children disappearing from the park.  And since the names "Jake" and "Dave" were too similar, I changed it to Pirate Bob.

I worked on that version for several days, but at some point, realized I already had 2,000 words and it was mostly introductory stuff that established the characters. This wouldn't be so bad for a novel, but the word limit for the anthology is 10,000 words--I couldn't spend a fifth of the story introducing the situation. Again, it just wasn't working.

Time for another reboot.

I still wanted my amusement park and my vampire pirate. Since I wasn't using Jake, I brought back Pirate Dave. I still liked the werewolf/vampire dynamic, so I needed a werewolf with less back story than Jake. That's when Hannah showed up. After toying with the idea of doing half the story from Hannah's viewpoint, and half from Dave's, I settled on using Hannah's viewpoint and it went pretty smoothly from there, other than changing Hannah to Joyce and from third-person to first-person.

For whatever mysterious reason, this version of the story worked. Tomorrow I'll take a final look at "Pirate Dave's Haunted Amusement Park" before sending it off. Then I can start making plans for the next project. Any bets about whether it will turn out the way I plan?

Observations on Filming

I was on the set of "True Blood," the wonderful HBO show made from my Sookie Stackhouse novels, last week. I am learning to accept my new reality, in which such a visit is not anything extraordinary, yet I think something inside me will always squeal, "It's me, here! Look at the cool thing I'm doing!"

I noted some things that surprised me. And here we go -- here's banal and obvious observation Number One. PEOPLE ARE THERE TO WORK. When the actors are not being filmed, they slump in their chairs, texting or making phone calls or staring into space . . . passing time while they wait for their next scene. The wardrobe people and makeup people wait to spring into action between takes, when they circulate around the set, tweaking and powdering. No one is excited. No one is overwhelmed by the glamor of the end product. But everyone is glad to have a job.

Number Two. The working conditions are not great. The air conditioning has to be turned off because it makes noise. The smoke machine has to be going because of the way the cameras film an interior, and though I don't really understand that, it must be so. The alcohol served in Merlotte's is not real alcohol, and the food served in Merlotte's was on a prop table covered with wrap to save its appearance for the scene.

What struck me most about the little scene I'm going to appear in is this: the extreme attention to detail. The action in the scene is simple, and it's no major emotional scene. Sam(Sam Trammell) is talking to me when the scene starts, and then he moves to his right down the bar to pour me a drink and talk to Tara (Rutina Wesley). The troublesome moment came when they met and talked. The scene was filmed with Sam starting more to his right, Rutina crossing him; then Sam starting from another position, and Rutina standing in a slightly different spot. Then Sam giving his line a different inflection. And so on. Until this little big of film was right. On the screen, this may last a minute.

I was also impressed with the power of the director. This episode was directed by Michael Cuesta, and when he said, "Quiet!" people were quiet. (For a few minutes, anyway.) He was thoughtful, intense, and in control. He was not thinking about looking good, or where he was going to eat lunch. He was there to work.

I came away with a new respect for an industry that, in its work-week clothes, is not glamorous or easy. These people are working, and mostly it's work that's fun, but exhausting. This is hardly an original thought, but it was my first experience with watching a filming, and I think I came away with a different perspective on what's involved.

Character rehab

by Dana

I'm working on a point of view character and I have a problem.  She…isn't nice.  She's made crappy choices in her life, and her professional career is a shambles, through bad luck and her own actions.  She drinks too much.  She pushes people away…and yet, and yet, and yet, she is the protagonist.  Heroine, even, for she does act heroically in the end of the story.  Let's call her Anna.  Thing is…right now, Anna's such a misery-guts that she's coming off as sullen, not tough.  A basket case, not quirky.  Worse than that:  she's not interesting.  Sure, it's only a first draft, something I'm just noodling around with, but (not to sound too Carrie Bradshaw or anything) what do you do when you're not sure your character is someone you'd want to hang out with? 

Lots of rotten characters are, if not likable, compelling.  Defoe's Roxana, Tony Soprano, Scarlett O'Hara--none of these are sterling personalities, but they have…something.   Something admirable:  cunning, charisma, guts, quick wit.  Something that makes you want to see them…succeed?  Make the right choice?  A better choice?  You stick around even when they do awful things.  I need Anna to get some of that.

I began to wish for some kind of Character Rehab, a spa where I could send Anna off for a couple of weeks to find herself.  She could enjoy the benefits of the Sea-Salt Personality Exfoliation, the Swiss Pomegranate Backstory Peel, and the Rejuvenating Hot Rock Empathy Massage.  All this pampering would shape her bad attitude into just the right degree of tragic misunderstanding, turn her sharp comments into quips, and soft-brush those rough edges into endearing gruffness…

There being no such thing, just me in my office with my iPod, I resorted to chewing her out.  Okay, so I'm being childish, I figured, but it will make me feel better.  The writing books say to go with what is moving you at the moment, channel that.  So I did.

I started listing what I was so annoyed about, and because Anna was there with me, she started answering back.  Tartly.  That turned into dialogue, and my chewing out started to sound more like her cousin and less like me.  Okay, I can work with this, I thought, and kept going.  A bit of her backstory crept into it, and then I found out a little about her cousin, and where he might end up.  I kept writing. 

I haven't solved the Anna problem, not yet.  And I may never use that dialogue, or it may not end up being dialogue, or it may end up taking place between different characters.  But I know more now, than I did.  Sometimes, in the midst of frustration, you luck out and stumble onto curiosity, which will lead you to answers you can work with. 

The Great Internet Drought of 2009

by Donna

Lately, Life's been giving me a stern and prolonged lesson on . . . something.  I'm  not yet sure what, which probably means the lesson wasn't as effective as it should be.  Sorry, Life, but I've been a bit too distracted to pay attention.

Spring was crazy, but I had a plan.  On May 25, when I got back from Mayhem in the Midland--which for ten years has been the milestone marking the beginning of my summer--I was planning a running start on a great season.  A productive summer of writing my next book (working title: Stork Raving Mad). A fun-filled summer of spending quality time with my family.  An efficient summer of zeroing out my paper and email inboxes.  An organized summer of getting the garage and basement in shape.  A lush, verdant summer in the garden.  And a lively, communicative summer in the blogosphere and on the Twitterscape.  And . . . 

You get the idea.  As usual, I was planning too much--but I always do at the beginning of summer; that's a tradition that goes back as far as high school.

My first clue that summer wasn't going to go as planned happened on May 13 when my Internet connection went out. Waiting through Comcast's horrible phone system didn't put me in a very good mood, and it was even worse when they told me the technician couldn't come till Friday the 15th.  

I'll skip the rest of the blow-by-blow.  I've had three visits from technicians. I've spent countless hours on the phone with Comcast, mostly listening to annoying hold music.  And the net result? The intermittent problem that began May 13 has been a complete outage since May 31.  The technician who came June 8 says it could take up to two weeks for them to install the new cable that he thinks will solve the problem.

I understand that it takes time to schedule the cable laying, and that they have to check with Miss Utility before they dig and that there are other people with problems.  Probably a lot of them if my experience with Comcast is typical.  But if either of the previous technicians had done their jobs properly, I'd have my Internet back by now.  I'm still waiting.  And did I mention that twice, customer service reps promised their supervisors would call me back to talk to me, and maybe tell me when the work was scheduled?  No supervisors have called to date. I'm not holding my breath.  I could call again . . .

But why bother?  Verizon FIOS has come to my neighborhood.  I'm switching. 

Of course, I still have to get through the remaining time until Verizon can come to install.  

So what useful lessons have I learned from this experience?

I can't say that I've learned how to get along without the Internet.  Instead, I've learned exactly how profoundly the Internet has entwined its tendrils into every facet of my daily life.  What's on TV? Check TVguide.com.  What's the weather tomorrow?  Weather.com.  If I need to find a business's phone number, I Google it.  Is so-and-so's new book out?  Check Amazon or BN.com.  What's the song playing in the background of that episode of House?  There's a site for that. There's a site for everything if you look hard enough.

Apparently I'm addicted to finding things out.  My college roommate figured out at one point that if she asked me the spelling or definition of a word and I didn't know, I'd go to look it up, even if the dictionary was across the room at her elbow.  When visiting my parents' house, where there was only dialup and that pretty slow, I realized that at any given moment at least half a dozen volumes of their ancient encyclopedia would be lying around wherever I was sitting.  And I'd still have an orgy of Googling when I got home.  I miss the feeling of having any information I want quite literally at my finger tips.

The need intensifies when I'm writing.  Already, in the first few chapters of Stork, I've needed to know some basics about the regime of Franco, the Spanish dictator; what Tawaret, the Egyptian goddess of pregnancy and childbirth, looks like; what ingredients go into paella; and whether Animal Planet or The Animal Planet is the proper name of the cable station.  Normally a quick visit to Google solves all.  Now, by the end of a writing session, I feel as if my attention has been shredded by the ghosts of all those small but nagging unanswered questions.

Luckily I have friends and family who let me visit to use their Internet.  I try not to monopolize their computers.  Sooner or later, they'll get tired of seeing me.   I dread the day one of them says, "Oh, we're so sorry, but our Internet's out too right now."  And they all keep fairly early hours.  I miss my midnight email fests.

It's not a new lesson, but I've also had a refresher course in how very, very useful writing things down can be.  I knew this already, of course, both from my interest in GTD (aka Getting Things Done, the productivity system by David Allen) and my observation of how effectively my heroine, Meg Langslow, uses her "notebook-that-tells-me-when to breathe." When you're out of your usual setting or deprived of your usual tools, the importance of a methodical system becomes unmistakable. Say I get an email from someone asking about my availability on a particular day.  If I haven't brought my calendar--and it's a big, unwieldy wall model, so often as not I don't--answering the question requires making a note so I will remember to check my calendar when I go home, and then making a note of the answer so I can reply the next time I get back to the computer.  A small thing, but multiply that by dozens, even hundreds of tasks that arrive by email every week and it all becomes overwhelming without a system.  And not that easy even with a system.

My system's getting better.

The maddening thing is that ninety percent of these tasks are things I wouldn't have had to write down before, because I would have just done them in my next email session, under the GTD two minute rule—which is that if you can take care of a task in two minutes or less, you should do it immediately, because that's the point where you'd spend more time writing it down and tracking it that you would to just go ahead and do it.  My to do lists are now crammed with minutiae.

But at least the minutiae are getting done. Slowly and more painfully, but they're happening.  And I'm only a few pages behind where I'd like to be in my book schedule.  And even the total Internet withdrawal is easing a little since I bit the bullet and traded up to an iPhone.  It's not helping my eyesight, peering at that little screen, but at least I got answers to those questions about Franco and Tawaret. 

And now I will save this draft blog in a text file, and save the text file to my thumb drive, and put my shoes back on, and drive over to my friends' house to post it.  

And when my blogging responsibilities are done, I'm going to kick back and plan a new book.  I'm thinking maybe it's time I wrote a dark, violent, grisly serial killer book.  One with a body count higher than my blood pressure, in which a disgruntled customer of a large corporation takes bloody revenge. 

Isn't it a good thing we mystery writers can get things like this out of our systems in fiction?

Growing Words

by Kris

You would not believe how much greenery grows in the Arizona high desert, especially in the spring and summer. Well, it surprised me anyway. We get virtually no rain, have low humidity and only limited irrigation. Still, weeds flourish.

People here do everything possible to impede their growth. They pull them, of course, and break up their roots with a variety of tools. With grim determination and ruthless efficiency, some people also shoot gallons of weed killer at them. That usually knocks out an individual sprig, but it doesn’t stop a clone from popping up right beside it. But then, there’s always more weed killer.

Typically in Arizona, when people landscape a yard, they spread plastic tarps on the ground and pile gravel on top of them to choke off any impulse to fulfill their destiny of reaching the sunlight the weeds might experience. Plastic, everyone will tell you, isn’t biodegradable. Maybe not, but it does weaken over time, and not even much time. When it does, those pesky, wild, opportunistic plants pierce right through it.

Of course, “weeds” is what we call any greenery we didn’t decide to plant. But that doesn’t necessarily mean they’re ugly. In my yard, what I refer to by that term might cover colorful wildflowers or sturdy desert plants that have grown in this space for centuries. That’s the key. Mostly, they’re plants that want to grow in a particular spot, instead of the finicky non-native varieties that, when I decide to use them, usually don’t survive.

By now you’re probably saying, “Why the #@$# should I care what grows in her yard?” But stay with me — I’m getting to a writing connection.

It occurred to me recently how often, when writers get together, the subject of writers’ block comes up. But what exactly is blocked?

Not words, certainly. Words and images fill our minds all day long. All night, too, apparently, though we’re usually less aware of them then. Words fill our minds as relentlessly as weeds grow in the Upper Sonoran Desert, and most other places. It’s actually impossible to stop the verbal flow. If you’ve ever tried meditating, you know how hard it is to clear your mind for long.

Sure, the string of words passing through your mind aren’t necessarily the right ones for your WIP. They don’t seem to describe your story the way you see it progressing. But if you haven’t written it yet — or haven’t written it all — how can you say for sure that the proliferation of weedy words in your mind are wrong?

Maybe, by choking off the flow of words and imagery we considered wrong for our books, we block all useful thought.

Successful gardeners say, for a really successful yard, we should simply plant, in particular spots, the greenery that wants to grow there. Those plants will flourish and will make you look good as a gardener, rather than try to force an alliance between plant and location and soil that isn’t meant to be. Maybe that’s good advice for successful wordsmithing, too.

No, I’m not suggesting that you write gibberish simply because those are the words flowing through your mind at any moment, merely that you not be too quick to shut down that flow, or judge where it might lead your story. In first drafts especially, we need to be open to surprises. If you’re too quick to label whatever comes to you as the verbal equivalent of weeds, if you’re squirting too much verbal weed killer, you might render your mental soil too barren to grow anything. Give the weeds a chance. They might surprise you.

That’s what my yard has taught me. 

BOOKS FROM THE FUTURE

By Hank Phillippi Ryan

 

Christmas in June.  My October birthday in June. Or maybe what we should call BEA is a candy store without the added sugar. And I was a kid in it.  (It's the national book show, Book Expo America, where publishers show off their latest, and authors and librarians and booksellers sell and shmooze and try to predict the future.) 

 

Oh, yes, I had a wonderful signing at MIRA.  Here’s the line!

 

And AIR TIME arcs went like—well, candy. (But then I hear there’s one for sale on ebay. Can’t decide if that’s terrible: How could they do that? Or terrific: wow, they think it’s worth something.)

 

And a signing of  the new PRIME TIME at MWA.  What a treat, and lots of wonderful pals.  (See Chris Grabenstein? And Ken Isaacson? And Keith Raffel? Alex Sokoloff is hidden by fans. And I'm so bummed I didn't get a photo of our Toni. Thanks Margery (and Steve) Flax for a wonderful event.))

 

But here’s the point. (Yes, I know, you were wondering.)

 

BEA is filled with books. Free books. Free free free. And the authors are often there to sign them. But the intriguing thing is, they’re all new. And many of them you’ve never heard of .

 

YET.

 

Because these are the books that are coming out  in the next few months. They’re often advance reading copies. They are books from the future.

So the trick is to figure out which are going to be the big sellers and the hot reads. It’s very exciting.

 

For instance, I waited in line—oh, half an hour, maybe? To get Lorrie Moore’s  A GATE AT THE STAIRS.  People were on their cell phones in line, swooning: “Yes, it’s a horrible line. But it’s for LORRIE

MOORE.”  Great buzz on this one.

 

Have you heard about BEAUTIFUL CREATURES?  By Kami Garcia and Margaret Stohl. I’m betting on this one to be very very popular. I’ve read about four pages, waiting in another line, and wow. Can’t wait to get back to it.

 

I was so thrilled to get MT Anderson’s new YA! It’s called PALS IN PERIL.  He’s the funniest person I have ever met. The book begins:  “When Lily Gefelty got out of bed on the morning of the big game, she looked out the window to see what kind of a day it was going to be.  She discovered it was the kind of day when a million beetles crawl out of the ground and swarm the streets, forecasting evil.”

 

WITCH AND WIZARD by James Patterson has a red plastic over-cover that hides certain words. There’s  FIRE by Kristin Cashore. And FLESH AND FIRE by Laura Anne Gilman.

 

THE PRIVATE PAPERS OF EASTER JEWEL by Maureen Lindley has a gorgeous cover.  IMPOSSIBLE by Nancy Werlin has a quote from Gregory Maguire on the cover. The new Alan Furst--my husband was so happy. STARDUST  by Joseph Kanon—It looks like it’s about the blacklist, and he told me this book took a very long time to write.

 

My own books are books of the future, thinking of it. PRIME TIME comes out again June 30 (from MIRA in a fabulous new cover. But more on all that later.).  And it goes into the swirl of all those books I got at BEA, and so many many more. And some of the authors will be thrilled and happy, and new readers will be curled up in big chairs, happy to be in the new world the author created.

 

But that’s in the future. And we’ll see.

When is a Sherlock not a Sherlock?

by Toni L.P. Kelner

So my daughters and I were watching a DVD of the Nicktoons show Wolverine and the X-Men, and naturally conversation turned to how continuity had changed with this version. Iceman is the same age as Shadowcat, though he was originally older. Jean Gray is missing in action, Rogue is with the Brotherhood of Evil Mutants, and Emma Frost was apparently never part of the Hellfire Club. But of course, the biggest change was making Wolverine the leader of the team, rather than Cyclops or even Storm.

I've now lost about about ninety percent of you, haven't I?

I'll move on past the movie X-Men: Wolverine, because I haven't seen it and don't want you to think that all I think about is comic books. Instead let's try something a little more familiar. Have you seen the new movie Star Trek? Kirk as a punk, Uhura spending more time communicating with Kirk than her console, and a much funnier Scotty. The planet Vulcan and Spock's mother gone, Kirk's father a distant memory, and Chekov with an even heavier accent. And while Leonard Nimoy shows up, William Shatner is nowhere in sight.

I've lost you again, haven't I? 

Okay, let's bring it back to mysteries. What do you think of early footage from the new movie Sherlock Holmes, with Robert Downey Jr. as Holmes and Jude Law as Dr. Watson? It's definitely going to be a new vision. A much punchier Holmes, and a much better looking Watson. Sexual innuendo. More overt drug use. Martial arts. We aren't talking Basil Rathbone, or even Jeremy Brett.

But is it still Sherlock Holmes?

Lately I've seen a whole lot of series and franchises rebooted and reinvented, from James Bond to Iron Man. And of course there are plenty of reasons why. One is the commercial: building on a known name, while adding new excitement. Another is pure love for the characters: I can't imagine myself ever getting tired of Kirk or the X-Men, let alone Sherlock Holmes. Lastly sometimes the creators just want to shake off the dust of old continuity, and do something different.

That got me thinking about how far a new version can stretch from the original, and still be true to the original. What can you change, and what must you keep?

Obviously, the X-Men brand has gone through all kinds of changes, just from the various comic books artists and writers over the years, let alone the movies and animated shows. So I'm pretty forgiving of that. You can change the ages, and the costumes. As long as there are mutants in spandex, they've got the right powers, and certain heroes stay heroes, I'll play along.

Speaking of mutants, Star Trek has mutated a lot already, with six TV series so far, plus movies, novelizations, and comic books. As long as the Federation is in place, and somebody yells "Phasers on stun!" I'm willing to give it a shot.

For Sherlock? Sherlock has to be scary smart, I need it to be in Victorian London, and I insist on rational solutions the mysteries--no woo-woo in my Sherlock Holmes canon. He doesn't have to wear the deerstalker cap and Inverness cape all the time, as long as they show up at some point.

But I'll tell you this much. If they ever trim Wolverine's claws or Spock's ears, or dump Dr. Watson, then they'll have gone too far for this gal geek!