Jennifer Crusie's Blog: Argh Ink

This post was supposed to go up on October 23. I have no idea why it didn’t. I probably just wandered off . . .

Actually, I’m off the road now. In fact, I’m home with three dogs draped over me (it’s a three dog night), so I’m doing this from memory instead of a play by play, and the whole thing was really very mellow, considering it was Bob and I, in a car five hours each way, going to an amusement park, so this is not going to be riveting.

Bob arrived Thursday night and I managed to make a wrong turn from the cell phone lot to the pick-up island and had to yell to get his attention and then get glared at by the bus lady because I ended up in the bus lane. Look, it wasn’t on purpose. Then we did our usual “Are you hungry?” “Sure.” “Do you want to go iHop? Olive Garden? [Bob is suspicious of Fancy Eating Places.] Dennys?” “Sure.” “Which one?” “Any of them.” “WILL YOU PLEASE PICK ONE?” “Whatever.” Some of our traditions I could lose without regret.

So we went home and I fed him sandwiches and potato chips while we watched a DVD on Kennywood, the amusement park near Pittsburgh that we’re using as a general source for our much smaller park in Wild Ride. It was a PBS documentary, and it was . . . odd. Illuminating but odd. Bob’s favorite part was the stunt man who was there one summer and whose trick was to blow himself up. They put him in a paper box and then he set off an explosion that blew the box apart, and the announcer said, “He’s fine, folks, he’s just stunned; come back at four-thirty for the next show,” and the film switched topics. Bob laughed. Well, I did, too. Imagine a job that stunned the hell out of you twice a day for an entire summer; I know, I know, at least he was in show biz. Except, as Bob pointed out, it wasn’t much of a show. Sit down, see the guy climb in the box, see the box blow up, see the guy stagger around, get up, go get a funnel cake. Although I would bet you anything, if the guy was still there, Bob would show up to watch every show.

Thus prepared, we started out the next day on a five hour drive during which we argued about everything in the book. Sounds awful but we got a lot done including simplifying everything. Simple is good. Halfway there, we switched seats and Bob drove for which I am very grateful because the hotel was hard to find, and then Kennywood was worse. The whole area is one of those You-Can’t-Get-There-From-Here places. So we were tired and frustrated and really not in the mood by the time we parked the car and hit the park.

Here’s the deal with amusement parks in October: they close for the week and then open weekends as Halloween parks. Kennywood goes all out: they only open at night and they make the most of it by putting orange and purple and green bulbs in the street lights and firing up what must have been at least two dozen fog machines and then sending out actors in horror film costumes to, uh, scare you. (One woman who looked like Mrs. Lovett came up to us with a tray and said, “Bloody Mary? Severed fingers? Brains?” and I said to Bob, “You know, we could use some brains.”) The thing that scared me was the smoke machines. I’m asthmatic, so every time I walked through another cloud, I tried not to breathe which actually isn’t a help. The worst of it was the tunnel you go through at the entrance; it goes under the highway so it’s long, and for Halloween it’s filled with lots of smoke machine smoke and red light and then these people come out of the fog at you with chainsaws. That was what shook Bob; we got through the tunnel and he said, “That kid had a real chainsaw.” I hope Kennywood has LOTS of insurance.

I’d been to the park before, and it was beautiful, but this time it was mostly really, really dark, which was great for us since so much of our book takes place at night. Plus the book is full of demons and the park was full of people with chainsaws, so that was a help. But the biggest help was that we were walking the place together, so we could talk about what parts we’d use and how we’d change things. It’s Bob’s old walking-the-terrain bit which I am now a firm believer in. I’d felt guilty about dragging him all that way right up to the time we got into the park. Then it was so clear that it was going to be a huge help that I ditched the guilt. We’ve got the colored lights, the fog machines, the sound of wooden roller coasters (SO much better than the metal ones), the beer pavilion, the screams in the night . . . it was great. There’s more, but Bob was the one taking notes, or at least muttering them into his recorder.

Even so, we could only stand it so long. We are not amusement park people. So we called it a night and the next day argued for five hours on the way home. At that point, we were pretty much brainstormed out, so we watched Ironman, one of the few movies in the history of cinema that we both liked. The next day, we dragged out my giant white board and he typed in his Excel spreadsheet while we argued and I blocked out the scenes on the board. But mostly we fought out the details, trying to figure out what things needed to stay and what things one of us was holding onto just because. It was relatively painless compared to the previous two books. I think we’ve just learned when to let go of things.

The hardest things to let go of were the plot points. Bob would say, “The Big Bad wants this,” and I’d say, “WHY? In the name of god, WHY WOULD HE WANT THAT?” Because it didn’t make any sense. Meanwhile, I was clinging to my Etruscan mythology like a limpet. In the end, we got the best of both worlds and it all makes sense. I think. Maybe Bob just talked me into it. Anyway, we’re good, the plot makes sense, the characters are shaping up, I love the setting, and now we both see it the same way.

Next up: Demon rules. Because they can’t just go running around the park doing anything they want, there must be RULES.

So now it’s two months later . . .
And enough with the italics because they’re hard to read. Bob and I are in the last two weeks (we hope) of the truck draft, good stuff popping up all over the place, hammering down the home stretch. The process has been fraught with illness, guilt, and stress on both sides, but it’s coming together, as it always seems to do, and closer we get to the end, the more it’s clear what needs to stay or go. We have Act Three in front of us and then it’ll probably be a day or two to pull Act Four together since most of it is written. And then we will look at the vastness of the finished first draft and hand it over to the betas.

I really need a finished book fix. I plan on wallowing in the moment that it is done for all of fifteen minutes before I go back to Always Kiss Me Goodnight. But this one has been fun, really different, and well worth the smoke machines and wrangling with Bob over how many pirates his hero vanquishes. (He said two, I’m arguing for twelve, because a character’s reach should exceed his grasp or what’s a hero for?) Two more weeks. Expect more link posts for awhile, I’m finishing a book here.