Good Gravy Marie, don’t we all of us try our best to understand our fathers, even the ones who were in the house with us for however many years it took us to grow up and move along?

Lots of people don’t think they can know themselves until they know their ancestors. Come to think of it, Zelda can’t even know her mother until she knows the man her mother mated with, can she?

I really like the chapter headings, but if you wanted to keep it closer to the character, why not have her writing a letter to her absent/dead/whatever father?

Dear Dad:
Today James and I went to Rosemore and got nothing but trouble for our trouble.

Or something.

I just found this blog today, and it’s very provocative–thought provoking, I mean. And somehow comforting.

Also, I think Susan D’s suggestion is great if you do decide to keep the chapter headings.

I’m a big fan of good Chapter Titles. I use them in all my books, in a bid to bring them back from Writing Style Heaven. Unfortunately, since I’m not published, it hasn’t exactly caught on.

The Great Dane suggests first person headings — nice. Very Dickensian. David Copperfield: Chapter One, I am Born. Of course, DC also had PAGE titles. Maybe that’s going a bit too far.

What kind of perennial expert is Zelda? Is she a landscape architect or a plant breeder or does she have a show on HGN? If she’s a plant breeder, she may have an interest from a purely scientific point of view, which could certainly have been nagging at her, without being an obsession.

Or is she a habitat gardener with a thing about growing native plants? While it is hard to imagine why this would provide an inspiration for wanting to know who her father is (no humans being native to North America, though some are more recent arrivals than others), it might provide a motivation for going to Rosemore. It might be the coup of a lifetime to be able to begin transforming their garden. Or they might have a rare native variety that she wants to try to cultivate for her clients. Since it’s Christmas, almost everything would be dormant (and possibly under snow), but the visit could still be a requirement of the eccentric whoever that controls things.

Now, oddly, I never (or rarely) read quotes — poetry and such — at the heads of chapters. I do feel those detract/distract from the story. Especially since, no matter how carefully they’ve been chosen, they’re still written by somebody else. What you’ve got going there is a whole ‘nother animal, mainly because it jibes with the spooky-wry tone I’m guessing you’re going for.

As for your concern that readers will get jarred out of the world and start seeing the characters as characters instead of people…

Not to worry. ‘Cause most of us will be reading too fast for that particular blip to even register.

I know lots of people are thinking of the Fitzgeralds when they see “Zelda,” but I’m thinking Nintendo. “Your princess is in another castle!” I know, I’m dating myself.

“That might be good except that here comes another angry Crusie heroine.”

ummm, why is that bad? i love your angry Crusie heroines. i like them a lot better than the stories were the women are angry but will be subtle about it and annoyed. i like when they go up to people and say “jerk”.

what made you decide Zelda needed to find her dad? i mean, why find her dad when it could be something about her mom, or her best friend, or what? why’d you pick the dad as the reason this all goes on, instead of something else?

Jenny has just shared a bit of this story, and I’m already doing “what next?” to myself, just like I do when I read her other books. (and I do it again and again with the same books . .. when I already KNOW what!)

10 more Zelda days to go!

I always read chapter headings and I love it when they whet my appetite . One of my favorite books by Connie Willis, “To Say Nothing of the Dog,” is a screwball comedy time-travel story set mostly in Victorian England. She uses the chapter heads in a way that harks back to Jerome K. Jerome’s “Three Men in a Boat, To Say Nothing of the Dog,” and it makes for a wonderful kind of inside joke. I found I enjoyed them even more on rereading. (And by then I’d read Jerome and could recognize more of the connections I’d missed initially–my memory is bad enough I may never catch them all.)

It sounds like Zelda won’t voluntarily go to Rosemore no matter what you (as the author) want. Maybe you should look at ways to COMPEL her to go. Have an external source kick her in the ass to make her go there. She won’t be happy about it, but since it will push her out of her comfort zone, it automatically sets her up for some form of character development.

You’ve talked about the setting being a Christmas house party. That suggests that people were invited to Rosemore.

If the others at the party have ACCEPTED invitations willingly and Zelda has been FORCED to come after she turned down the invitation …This gives her a motivation separate from other houseguests.

– She doesn’t want to be there and they do
– She doesn’t necessarily want the same outcome that they do (all she wants to do is leave).

This makes Zelda an outsider and perhaps helps her stand out from the crowd in James’ mind. It also might be an emotional thing that you can fold into whatever development is going to occur between Zelda and her dad (the outsider looking in).

Also, regarding Zelda’s search for her father, I offer this. My father was adopted and being a sterotypical accountant, really didn’t have the curiosity to learn more. The people who adopted him were his parents. Period. But not me–loved Grandpa and Grandma, yes, but I had to know. Who was this other family I had out there? What were they like? Did somebody on that tree look like me? I didn’t necessarily want to get to know them, I just had to know. What if Zelda just had to know?

Dad ended up finding them, I ended up meeting them and a lot more questions were raised once once I did. Zelda may not know what she wants beyond “Why?” but once she finds the answer, she may find a lot more questions.

I like the chapter headings (but then, I’m always trying to fit complicated titles and epigraphs and stuff into my own writing). I think that, together with the large, named, apparently slightly sinister house, they kind of make the setting a character in itself, if that makes any sense.

I get a kick out of Kasey Michaels, and I enjoyed her chapter headings in The Butler Did It.

There are lots of positive goal reasons for Zelda to want to find the father. There are silly things, like, where did I get the dumb cowlick at the back of my head? How come I can make the throw from third to first, but can’t bat worth a damn? To more serious abandonment questions. I think of that John Mayer song “Daughters” and sometimes it fits for the emotionally stunted, or it can be trite.

With the setting I’m not sure anything except dark, twisted, read it again -you’ll get it-, humor would pass muster.