Jennifer Crusie's Blog: Argh Ink

So now that I’m back to writing every second of my life, I’ve moved back into my old office which is a disaster area since we threw stuff in here during the remodel. Like two flamingos. And my SAD light. And a lot of boxes.

Also, I have a new keyboard, the das keyboard, which is very cool because it makes this great retro clicking sound like a real typewriter and which also has no letters on the keys. Yes, all the keys are blank. According to the Das people, your typing times improve radically because you can’t stop to look. Not to mention how cool the all-black keyboard is. Another plus: I won’t wear the letters off. Not so much of a plus: The command key is in a different place which is just ANNOYING.

And then there’s the book. I worked on the first scene. It still sucks. Didn’t get to the second scene. So now it’s back to the first scene as I step over boxes to get to my new keyboard. At least, that was Sunday. What did I do Monday? Well the day isn’t over yet and I’m determined to get that first scene nailed down, but basically, it was a gorgeous, gorgeous day here, so we spent a lot of it outside. The dogs dug in the mulch and I painted chairs and then we sat back and watched the river go by. I can’t do that too often but every time I do, I get healthier, I swear.

And now back to the @#$%%^&* first scene.

We were only in Campfire for an hour, but we got a lot done, mostly resolving the differences in our plots. Bob got exasperated and so did I (couldn’t he see my brilliance?) but we figured the plot out, at least the general structure and the first act, so now the ball’s in my court: rewriting the first scene.

And then he said, “Let’s meet again Tuesday.” Tuesday? Huh. Okay.

So I will be writing my first act scenes between now and then. Trying to do a scene a day, just getting the rough down. Starting now . . . well, after my nap.

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I’m sure I’ve said this before, but first scenes are a bitch. The reader knows nothing and has to be clued into everything without any anvilicious infodump in the course of the regular conflict of the scene. And after you’ve struggled with it for hours, days, weeks, you end up changing it because the first scene is the scene you write last; you don’t really know what it’s about until you see how the book turns out since the first scene really introduces the climax.

If that makes sense.

But I like this new first scene much better. It helps to have been thinking about this for literally months, too, but it’s more interesting and a lot less twee, which is always good. (I think it’s always good, in a book full of outrageous characters, to have the central figures fairly sane and not nearly as colorful. And if there’s one thing this book is chock full of, it’s Colorful.) What the scene desperately needs now is structure, a logical build of conflict. It’s sort of all over the place like any first draft, but Bob has to play the next scene off of this one so . . .

Back to the keyboard.

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So I’m trying something new in the interests of speed. I did a table in Word (yes, I’ve been writing with Bob too long, I’m doing tables, but at least they’re not in Excel) that had six rows across and eight rows down.
I skipped the first cell and wrote in the names of the five characters in the scene in the order they appeared:

M.I. Glenda Maga Dave Ray

Then in the first column, I wrote:

Goal
Beat 1
2
3
4
5
6

Then I filled in the blanks to see how the characters’ attempts to get their goals escalated with each beat. It’s not quite there yet, but I’ll sleep on it and have it tomorrow and then I’ll rewrite it and do the next scene, the best friend scene in the ice cream parlor. The ice cream parlor was probably not a great move for me since I end up eating whatever I put in the book, but so few amusement parks have a salad bar . . .

Onward undaunted. Even if I am working alone until Tuesday. Sheesh.

Well, I’m feeling shame-faced here. I’ve been blundering around in this blog without a plan for months, and you still stick up for me. I am not worthy. (No, Bob, not you, I’m worthy of you.) And I shouldn’t have hung Mollie out to dry; she just ADVISED me that it was a bad idea to post in the comments, she didn’t actually shriek at me. She wanted to shriek, but she’s a lady. Unlike her mother. So I’m going to try to keep this a little more focused and a little less rambling and see if I can’t do better by you all. There may be some long blank stretches in the future, but not for the next twelve days, because tomorrow at 11 AM PT, 1 PM ET, Bob and I will be meeting in Campfire to begin a new experiment–well, new for us– on focused collaboration. Or “Pedal To The Metal and Don’t Look Down, for Two.”

But first a word about Campfire (http://www.campfirenow.com/). Campfire is basically a private chat room service, IMing for groups. You create a room, invite only the people in your group (that would be Bob and I), and set a time to meet. It allows you to upload images to illustrate what you’re talking about, share files (wonderful for trading drafts), and keep a transcript of all your talks. I use it a lot, so I pay the monthly fee for more space and no ads, but you can use it for free if you don’t mind the ads popping up. If you’re collaborating or discussing anything in a group, you should check out Campfire.

But back to faster-than-a-speeding-bullet collaboration. Krissie, Lani, and I tried it last November and December for D&G and it worked out well although by the end of it we were sick of the book and sick of each other. Fortunately a couple of weeks later the feeling had passed, but while you’re in the middle of it, writing frantically on a collaboration just makes everybody feel driven and toward the end, hostile. So of course, Bob and I are going to try it. Because we don’t have enough things to fight about already. This morning (Friday) we sent each other our outlines for the book along with other notes, just to make sure we were both still writing the same book. Evidently we weren’t since there weren’t a lot of similarities, but Bob says, “We can work this out.” Which usually means, “I’ll pretend to agree with you and then shift the plot back where I want it when you’re not looking,” but after two books, I’ve got his number. And I’ve already written scenes. That makes my plot real while his is theoretical.

So tomorrow will be Day One of Wild Ride (even though we’ve been working on it sporadically all along) and we’ll go to Campfire and fight out our differences in the plot, and I’ll scrap my third version of the first scene and start all over again, but that’s all right because I know where I’m going. For once in my life, I have a book planned out. Well, my half of it. I’ll let you know tomorrow if Bob survives his first Campfire. He refuses to IM with me because he says he needs time to think, but I can’t take another 46 e-mails a day, all with “Hey” in the subject line followed by a two word message. We’re going to Campfire.

Bob will be complaining about that on his blog next Tuesday.

I began this blog because my daughter told me to. She was redesigning my website (some of you may remember the Medea site that came before the current one) and she said, “You need new content and a blog is a good way to get that.” I said, “I don’t know anything about blogs,” and she said, “You’ll learn.” Then I found out that blogs were a chance to say anything I wanted and I was hooked. For awhile, everything was lovely, and then I posted something a lot of people didn’t like. I can’t remember what it was now, but it was the first time somebody said to me, “You know, you should stop blogging, it’s going to hurt your career.” I said, “How is that possible?” and she said, “If they don’t like what you say on your blog, they’ll stop buying your books.” That was incomprehensible to me then, and it’s still puzzling to me now. P.G. Wodehouse did broadcasts for the Nazis, but I’m not giving up Bertie and Jeeves. Georgette Heyer made disparaging comments about her readers but they’ll get my copy of The Grand Sophy when they pry my cold, dead, chocolate-stained fingers from around it. Robert Frost was one of the biggest bastards who ever lived, but “Two Tramps at Mudtime” is still the most beautiful evocation of work and love that I’ve ever read. I don’t want to have lunch with these people, I just want their words. So I shrugged off my friend’s comment and went on blogging.

Then I tripped again, this time because I was thoughtless (this happens a lot). One of my friends got a ludicrous letter from a reader and I posted it with her first name on it. That was flat out wrong of me, and I did apologize and take the name off the blog but basically, I screwed up. First lesson: Never blog when you’re really angry but not admitting it to yourself. Practical application: Wait twenty-four hours before you post something you’ve written.

Then while I was being careful on Argh–well, careful for me–I lost my temper on somebody else’s blog and became The Author Who Is Pro-Plagiarism (because that was more fun for people to get upset about than The Author Who Thinks This Is Being Handled Badly and People Should Stop Author-Bashing Until They Know the Facts). This annoyed some people so much that they’re still mad at me; some of them cornered Bob at Thrillerfest to tell them just how awful I am, as if he didn’t know the black depths of my heart already. And of course, they’re never going to read me again. (Actually my fave comment about the whole mess was on another blog: a reader said she was never going to read me again and then followed it up by saying she’d never read me before either. I kept thinking of the old “Doctor, will I be able to play the piano after my broken arm heals?”/”Of course”/”Funny, I couldn’t play it before” joke, but that’s probably just more evidence of how depraved I am.) After that, I quit the romance blogosphere. There was no point in explaining that I had never said plagiarism was all right since nobody would listen anyway. My words were there if anybody wanted to go back and see what I really said. Life is short and mine is good and that whole mess was just toxic for everybody. Moving on . . .

Then somebody e-mailed me and said, “They’re after X now.” X is a friend of mine. She writes superb books and she had a terrific blog and beyond that, she’s just good people. So I went to see if she needed somebody to hold her coat, and it turned out that she hadn’t caused the kerfluffle, she’d commented on it with a joke and people created a new kerflufle because they were appalled that she’d joke about anything so serious and she must be a horrible person if she thought that was funny and they were, yes, never going to read her books again. So my pal quit blogging, not because she was intimidated by the threats–this is one tough lady–but because life was too short and she didn’t need to blog, it had just been her way of giving back to the writing community. Of course, after that some people said she was wimpy for not staying around so they could kick her again, evidently missing the point that sticking around to get insulted by a bunch of people with no sense of humor had no upside for her.

Which made me think: Who are these people and why are they so upset? I’m not talking about people who disagree with her; people did that without getting personal. In fact, it was the people who thoughtfully disagreed with me on that rabid-reader-criticism post that made me cool my jets and realized I’d gone over the line. I’m talking about the people who said she was malicious, the people who posted they were so disappointed in her, the people who were downright abusive in their reactions. The people who will never read her again, in fact. I’ve been thinking about this for quite awhile, and I think blogging may be at the bottom of all the rage. If you read a lot of an author’s books, you begin to feel that you know him or her (Jane Austen and I would be BFFs, I’m sure of it), but there’s still some distance there. But when an author starts to blog, the distance disappears. She’s putting her thoughts out there, she’s not acting as a character or an authorial voice, she’s saying, “Look, here’s the dog I just adopted” or “Here’s how I write my books,” so she becomes an internet pal, somebody her blog readers know. I think there’s a sense of comradeship there, especially if the author responds in the comments (or as Mollie always says, “WILL YOU STOP COMMENTING ON YOUR OWN BLOG PLEASE”). Which means when the blogger says something that conflicts with the blog reader’s idea of who that author is, there’s real disappointment. Hence all the “I’m so disappointed in you” flack I got from the people who decided I was pro-plagiarism and my pal got from all the people who thought that her joke wasn’t funny. They thought we were better than that.

I think most people just file the disappointment away under Things I Know About That Author without going after her as someone unclean who must be eradicated from publishing blogs or books. But there are some whose disappointment is so great, whose sense of betrayal is so strong, that they stoop to name-calling and vituperation and cornering innocent writing partners at conferences and telling him that he’s guilty by association. These people, I would argue, need to take a step back. I feel strongly that anybody who evaluates the rest of the people in the world by how closely their attitudes and statements agree with her worldview is in danger of structuring a life much like the Alberto Gonzales Justice Department. We don’t learn from the people who agree with us, we learn from the people who make us say, “Wait a minute,” and that learning goes both ways. I learn a lot from the critics who intelligently analyze my books and find them wanting; I’ve also learned a lot from the people who have thoughfully and calmly disagreed with me on this blog. Haven’t learned a thing from the shriekers and condemners, though. And the only thing my pal learned was that blogging was just too expensive a hobby in the balance of her life. I think a lot of people miss her blog; I doubt that she does.

So as my life shifts (and it’s shifting a lot right now), this blog is one of the things I’m looking at because I’m not sure how valuable it is anymore to me or to you, definitely not sure if it’s valuable enough to put up with the hassles. (This is not an attempt to get “No, you’re so PRETTY” comments, by the way. I know I’m darling. The ego is in fine shape here.) I like Bob’s plan of blogging every Tuesday, it gives some shape to the blog, but what if I don’t have anything to say on Tuesday? I like doing the “Twelve Days Of” focused writing series and the blog keeps me honest on those, but I don’t see how they’re valuable to other people. (The Twelve Days of Cleaning My Office, however, I’m very proud of, not only for the offices that got cleaned from inspiration, but for all the people who looked at their offices and felt immensely better.) I’ve thought about writing about the things I’m researching now–alternate fictional structures, amusement parks, the tarot, collaboration, romantic comedy–or reviewing movies and books or anything else that has purpose and possible value for a reader, but I always end up posting rambles about road trips or pictures of the dogs. I seem to have lost my blogging POV which means that Argh is sinking into the Not Really Very Interesting category. Which probably explains why nobody’s told me she’s disappointed in me lately which is another reason to stop blogging: If I’m not doing anything interesting enough for people to disagree with me, why should I waste the virtual ink?

Thus the double-edged sword: If your blogging pleases everybody, you’re probably not adding much to the world. If your blogging pisses people off, they rant about you to everybody who will listen, damaging your rep. It really comes down to how much time, energy, and ego you’re willing to put into something that takes away from your writing time and disrupts your peace of mind, to how much pleasure and usefulness you and the blog readers gain from the effort. Right now, I don’t see me adding much to the world with Argh. So I either need to revamp this blog so it has some shape and content, or retire it for awhile until I get some direction for it.

I’m thinking, I’m thinking.

It really is lovely to be home again. I have a hellacious amount of work to do, but it’s all work I want to do, so life is good. I was going to write On The Road blogs, but the days were just packed, as Calvin would say, so I didn’t. And now I can’t remember much. Except:

Kennywood is the perfect model for our park in Wild Ride. I took many pictures, but for some reason the iPhone didn’t record the last forty or so which is annoying. Of course it did record the first 170, which I now have to catalog and label for Bob, so maybe it’s not annoying.

I ended up in West Virginia and Maryland at one point because my car’s GPS took me there. I was on my way to Gaffney’s house, which is not in West Virginia or Maryland, and I kept calling her and saying, “Why the hell am I in Maryland?” and she’d say, “I have no idea,” and then I’d go down into a valley and the cell service would cut out, and I’d have to call her again at the top of the next hill and say, “I’m not dead.” She finally said, “I know you’re not dead. Why are you in Maryland?” Anyway, somewhere in there I saw a sign for the Forks of Cheat Winery. I thought, “WTF?” and puzzled on it for about ten miles until I hit this bridge over Cheat Lake at which point it all became clear. Is that a great name for a winery or what?

There is no cell service at Gaffney’s and she doesn’t have wireless and I was too lazy to go find a USB cord so I was without cellphone or internet for quite a while. When you consider how peaceful it is at Gaffney’s–no noise except for the dogs and the bear who broke her birdfeeder the night before I left–it really was a vacation.

Then there was visiting The Most Beautiful Baby in the World, and the time really flew. Meg took the train down from New York to meet the new kid in the dynasty and it turns out that she’s a Baby Whisperer: Callie cooed and smiled and waved her arms whenever Meg smiled at her. Explains why she’s so good with authors.

Then back on the road to spend more time with Gaffney and then home. Many adventures along the way, but I can’t remember any of them now. Oh, except that on I70 somewhere between Cincy and Columbus there are these two black billboards. Going north, they have the ten commandments on them, written in white. Going south they have some question on them like “Where will you go when you die?” followed by “HELL IS REAL.” I’ve seen these billboards a lot since I’m on that road a lot, but coming home this time I was really tired and I saw them and thought, “Dear God, help the people who have to live with that whack job.” Can you imagine the dinner table every night, with somebody who feels the need to harangue people on their way to the Jefferson Outlets?

Then I got home and I was really tired and didn’t move fast enough and Milton leapt up and frenched me. That’ll teach me to breathe through my mouth. And today I slept most of the day so I’m still groggy which is why this post rambles. I’d love to promise you a better post tomorrow, but I wouldn’t count on it. I think my brain is going to be tapioca for awhile. But I had a wonderful time, so it was all worth it.