I believe that as human beings, we need story. We crave it. We take the random events of the day and arrange them into a pleasing narrative so that the day makes sense as a whole. We take isolated incidents and embroider them with commentary and invest them with meaning and they too become stories with clear themes. But it isn’t just that we need events to make sense; we need them to satisfy our hunger for drama, for surprise and reversal and climax. A story isn’t enough, it has to be a good story.

So Sarah Palin resigns as governor and the reader expectation begins, the speculation for what’s really happening, for the how the story is going to end. Thinking Sarah Palin’s story is ever going to end is a fool’s game; you couldn’t put that woman down with a stake through the heart. But how this episode in her life is going to play out, that’s the stuff of great drama.

Take character. I watched the press conference with a friend who said, “She’s furious.” And that’s what she looked like to me, too: so angry that her smile was set in concrete, her words spit out between those lipsticked pit-bull lips. But I read other people who said she sounded tearful, still others who said she sounded confident and positive. Any writer knows that the reader’s take on your protagonist makes or breaks your story, so think of us all as different readers, some of whom see her as ruthlessly ambitious and who therefore see anger as something forces her out of office, others who see her as a persecuted heroine and who therefore see distress because she’s being forced to give up something she loves to save her family, and still others who see her as a true voice in a dark time and who therefore see bravery as she leaves a prestigious office because she can better serve in other ways. Never underestimate the power of a reader who wants a certain kind of story. She’ll write it right over whatever is on the page or screen.

And in this case, nobody really knows what was on that screen, so the reader can really dig in. I’m a firm believer in white space in a story, giving the reader enough room to make the story her own without hijacking it completely so that the end result is a collaboration between audience and storyteller. The story Palin told tried to control the white space–she was leaving because her family wanted her to, she was leaving for the good of the people of Alaska, she was leaving because she had more important work outside the political structure–but the problem with all those narratives is that they cancelled each other out. You need one main story line and then some subplots, not several storylines thrown out hoping one of them sticks. When that happens, you sound like you’re not in control of your narrative which is when the reader is forced to take over: you didn’t focus the story so she’ll have to.

That’s where the speculation comes in, and that speculation is what I find so fascinating from a story-telling viewpoint. One storyline speaks to people’s need to see relationships between narratives, to see a Big Picture at work. That’s the one where Palin is one of Gov. Sanford’s other women. It’s pretty ludicrous, but it does pull an insane week together and give the increasingly chaotic news cycle some balance. Any editor would approve of weaving those threads together, it’s just reality that snorts and moves on to the next theory.

That theory speaks to people’s need to love Palin as a heroine, and it says that she’s got a master plan here and that this will turn out to be a brilliant political move. As a story, that’s another good approach: the underdog who does something that the entire world laughs at or condemns and who then turns out to be crazy like a fox, showing everybody who’s the real winner, a just reward for a risk-taker who rejects conventional thinking, Sarah Palin as Susan Boyle. Every political commentator I’ve heard, both Republican and Democrat, has said, “She’s toast,” but she’s been toast before and popped up again. So this story is by no means as far out as hiking the Appalachian Trail with Sanford.

Then there are the lovers of mystery and tragedy, those who see her as suffering from hubris, riding for a fall. Those are the ones who saw anger in her speech and who are waiting for the next revelation, the bombshell that forced her into resigning so that she could leave office on her own terms instead of being thrown out, the rumblings about criminal proceedings and possibly the IRS. That’s pure schadenfreude, and it derives, I think, from our deep enjoyment of righteous indignation and craving for justice as we think it should be served. If Palin’s campaign made you loathe her, then you’re rooting for a criminal indictment next week.

But the best story may be one of the ones Palin told herself, the one about the smart, brave, modest point guard who throws the ball to someone else for the good of the team. If that one sticks, she’s a heroine no matter what the full-court press reveals about her in the days to come. It’s a good story, probably the story she should have concentrated on instead of the anthology of reasons she rambled through in her seventeen-minute Friday night epic, and I think it probably speaks for the way Palin sees herself right now. As I said, the protagonist is everything in storytelling, and Palin has pretty clearly always told herself a story with a great protagonist. All she has to do is sell that story to her readership at large, and she’s made herself bullet-proof.

I have no idea what’s going on up in Alaska, but I know that the stories people are spinning from the opening Palin gave them are probably more satisfying than anything reality will deliver because they’re the stories that people want to hear. Still, I’m going to be glued to my TV next week, with Rachel and Jon because I trust them to deliver my kind of narrative. Sarah Palin started a hell of a tale today. I can’t wait to see how it ends.

So a period does mean that a complete thought has been concluded with a subject and a verb, but it also means a full stop followed by a long pause.

Like this.

And a comma is short pause, really just an intake of breath. Like this.

And a semi-colon is a longer pause, a little more break, a little more time to switch gears as it were.
Like this.

If you think of periods, semi-colons, and commas as lengths of time, they become crucially important as a way of giving meaning and emphasis and creating rhythm, and their technical correctness becomes moot. That’s why you find run-on sentences in love scenes: the POV character isn’t taking a breath, all her thoughts are flowing together as her mind rushes. That’s why you find fragments in the speech of somebody who’s out of breath: that character needs those full stops or ellipses to take in oxygen. That’s why short, parallel independent clauses are linked with a comma: “I win, you lose” doesn’t have a semi-colon length pause in it because, to a writer, that’s not a comma splice, that’s a complete thought.

Ellipses and dashes are even stronger. An ellipsis (. . .) is technically an indication that words are missing. A dash (there are two, en-dashes and em-dashes, and we’re talking em-dashes here) is usually used for a parenthetical construction. But to me an ellipsis is a long thoughtful pause, indicating that the speaker is suppressing something, while an em-dash indicates an abrupt interruption, something that makes the speaker leave off speaking, or a break to show that somebody else is speaking at the same time.

So I use ellipses at the end of dialogue sentences to show that the speaker’s voice trails off as she thinks or sees something that distracts her, or in the middle of dialogue sentences to show that he or she is self-censoring:

“The medium would produce ectoplasm,” Dennis said. “Usually cloth of some kind, although one medium used part of a sheep’s stomach.”

“And nobody noticed she brought it in with her.”

“She had it hidden in her . . . .” Dennis faltered and made a scooping motion with his hand.

“Bag?” Emme said.

“No, in her . . . ,” Dennis said, a flush starting.

“Oh. Vagina or rectum?”

“V-vagina.” Dennis looked around to see if anyone had heard.

“Well, some women will put anything in there,” Emme said, looking at Suzie.

And I use dashes to show a stronger break, probably not of the speaker’s choosing.

“You and North,” Suzie said, impervious. “You’re back together?”

“No,” Emme said.

“Because if so, you and I must–”

“Here you are, darling,” Southie said, shoving a glass full of booze in Suzie’s face. “Come over here and tell me about your day.” He took her elbow and turned her in the direction of the couch, mouthing “sorry” over her head. “Did you find a ghost? Tell me everything.”

“Emme and I were just–”

“Oh, you go on ahead,” Emme said. “I’ll go check on the kids.”

I don’t think parentheticals belong in speech or thought–those are more appropriate in non-fiction–so I don’t like dashes being used that way in my fiction because since I write in close third limited, the whole book is speech or thought.

And don’t get me started on exclamation points! Which should be used only when the speaker feels violently about something, the way I do feel about exclamation points! I feel they should be used to rarely that when one shows up, the reader is truly galvanized! Because otherwise the POV character sounds like she’s hyperventilating! Exclamation points: Just Say No!!! I confess that I also like exclamation points for when a character is trying too hard. As in false enthusiasm:

When she opened the door, there was Southie’s foolish, handsome face beaming at her.

“Emme!” he said, sounding like he was in a Broadway musical.

“Southie,” she said, sounding like she wasn’t.

And then there’s italic type, which technically is not punctuation but has just as much impact on cadence and meaning. Conventionally, you italicize all direct thoughts and do not italicize indirect thoughts, but you also italicize for emphasis wherever you need to disrupt the natural rhythm of the sentence or wherever you want to make one word stand out in order to characterize the speaker. So italics have a huge impact, not only on a scene but also on the point of view character who’s using that emphasis. If the character is normally calm, one or two instances of italics are all you need because any more and she’ll sound like she’s hyperventilating:

“I’m trying to exterminate this house for you, North, but first somebody has to burn those damn bodies. If that doesn’t work, I’ll go to plan B.”

“Go to Plan B.”

“Oh, come on, North. With your money, you could hire somebody to kill people. All I want is two century-old bodies that nobody cares about dug up and burned.”

“Emme, it’s easier to find somebody to kill people than it is to find a necrophiliac who does cremations. In England.”

Emme tried to be understanding, but he wasn’t helping. “Look, you want to know why you can’t keep a nanny? Your freaking house is haunted. And I can’t take the kids away because Alice breaks down. She’s this close to picking things out of the air as it is. But she’ll leave if the ghosts are gone. I’ve tried asking them to leave, but that’s not working. So get their bodies burned and they’ll have to move on because there’s nothing linking them to this earth.”

“And you learned this where?”

“TV,” Emme said. “Hey, it’s damn hard finding out this kind of information. All Google gave me was exorcisms.”

All of this is to say that The Chicago Manual of Style should never be the last word in punctuation and usage because, while it’s a great guideline, it has nothing to do with making story come to life on the page. It’s the sound that matters, not the rulebook.

Well, it matters to me. Your semi-colon may differ.

No, I didn’t get a picture. Milton got out and rushed them and there was much screaming and then they broke through the screen and flew away like bats out of a screened porch. I do have two feathers, one that I had to take away from Veronica who was being vicious with it. Yes, I know I filed this under “pictures.” I’m hoping to add one when somebody tells me what these birds were. Anyone? Bueller? Anyone?

Addendum:
After searching for juvenile peahen as advised in the comments, I found this:

I’d swear this is the bird, but I don’t see how it can be since this is Ohio.

Note:
I’ve just remembered why I’ve had such easy copy edits on the last books that I did solo. My editor told the copy editors to write any changes they wanted made to the text (as opposed to punctuation, spelling, etc) on post-it notes. That way I could make the change if I thought it was good and pitch the post-it if I didn’t without having to write “stet” on everything. I assumed this didn’t make any extra work for the copy editor since she was just writing what she wanted on a different piece paper. How much of a hassle was that? Because I’m going to remind my editor to do that again.

1. YOUR PORN STAR NAME: (Name of first pet / Street you live on):

2. YOUR MOVIE STAR NAME: (Name of your favorite snack food / Grandfather’s first name):

3. YOUR FASHION DESIGNER NAME: (First word you see on your left / Favorite restaurant)

4. EXOTIC FOREIGNER ALIAS: (Favorite Spice / Last Foreign Vacation Spot):

5. SOCIALITE ALIAS: (Silliest Childhood Nickname / Town Where You First Partied):

6. “FLY Boy” ALIAS (a la J. Lo): (First Initial / First Two or Three Letters of your Last Name):

7. ICON ALIAS: (Something Sweet Within Sight / Any Liquid in Your Kitchen):

8. DETECTIVE ALIAS: (Favorite Baby Animal / Where You Went to High School):

9. BARFLY ALIAS: (Last Snack Food You Ate / Your Favorite Alcoholic Drink):

10. SOAP OPERA ALIAS: (Middle Name / Street Where You First Lived):

11. ROCK STAR ALIAS: (Favorite Candy /Last Name Of Favorite musician ):

My faves for my next pseudonym are:

4. EXOTIC FOREIGNER ALIAS: Rosemary Auckland

6. “FLY Boy” ALIAS (a la J. Lo): J Cru. (Why does that sound familiar?)

7. ICON ALIAS: Veronica Milk

11. ROCK STAR ALIAS: Snickers Springfield

I think it’s got to be Snickers Springfield. I can see that on a book cover. Embossed in foil.

What on YOUR bookcover?

Note: Holly just pointed out that the answers to some of these are also answers to security questions, so you may want to cheat on some of the personal things like “street you live on.” Who would know?

And with all of this, she misses typos. I’m screaming already and I’m only on page 144. All of which is to say that it’s going to be awhile until there’s a new post. BECAUSE I’M WRITING “STET” EVERY TEN SECONDS, THAT’S WHY.

Note to copy editors: If you want to write a book, write yours, not mine. Thank you.

The graph from the pig (see below) was one square to one inch, and most suitcases are standard sizes, so it would probably be in proportion to your suitcase, although if you have pockets on the outside of the case, you may have to get creative and put the face on the upper pocket and the dress on the lower one.

If your case is light-colored, used a soft pencil to sketch in the outline; if it’s dark, get a white pencil. The best way to transfer a graph drawing is to first draw the graph squares on the thing you’re transferring the drawing to, which in this case would give you a checkerboard background which could be kind of snappy. Once the graph is on–one inch squares–then you match the lines on the graph drawing to the lines on the suitcase. It doesn’t have to be perfect, it just has to vaguely resemble a pig. And this drawing is so simple, it’s mostly squashy circles anyway:

Note: I added the feet later, but they’re just a curved line at the bottom of the case.)

Once you have the drawing transferred to the suitcase in pencil, go over it in permanent Sharpie. Don’t worry about a few messed up lines, you’re going to make them a lot thicker on the finished pig: On a black suitcase, forget the Sharpie lines and just paint the pig on in white, then add the pink and black details on top of the paint with the Sharpie

The pinks in the dress were done in rose and pink Sharpies.

If you have a light colored suitcase, go back over the lines, making them about 1/2″ thick. You have some leeway since you’re going to cover the pig in white primer. If you’ve already painted the white on your black suitcase, just make the interior lines the 1/2 inch.

After that, it’s just going over the thick black lines about a thousand times (okay, about six times) with the marker, and painting in the white areas in thin coats (about four) so that it doesn’t bead up. And you’ll have a pig. Oh, and put a little dot of white in each eye for a catchlight. It makes a huge difference. (No, I didn’t put them in Krissie’s Pig’s eyes yet, I’m still going over lines with marker.)

Now I’m really intrigued about doing a white pig on a black suitcase, but I have all this drywall to paint. And copy edits. And a book to write. Hmmmm.

I’m pretty sure Krissie will be able to find it on the baggage carousel now.

So back to the pig. Previously on Argh:

My pal Krissie has the ugliest suitcase on the planet, a dingy pink monstrosity she affectionately calls the Pig. We’ve travelled all over the world with the Pig, and while you’d think its ugliness would become more endearing, it remains the Embarrassment on the Baggage Carousel. Then I painted silver stars on my luggage and Krissie said, “Fix the Pig.” Except we were never together long enough for me to do it, so when she left this time, I handed her my silver star suitcase and said, “Leave the Pig. I can’t stand it anymore, I’m fixing it.”

So the Stars went to Vermont and the Pig stayed home.

In retrospect, I was too harsh. The Pig is not the ugliest suitcase on the planet, but as Opus would say, “Lord, it’s not good.” So fast forward five weeks and I’m still staring at the Pig. It’s sitting in my sunroom, and it’s sneering at me, and I am still fresh out of ideas beyond “make it a pig.” So I decide the hell with it, just DO it, which is always what happens when I’m stumped on a book, too.

I began by making a drawing to scale of the Pig as it is:

Here’s the photo of the pig for reference:

Then I pulled out the two photos of real pigs that I’d decided were going to be the most help:

And then I began to draw. I knew I wanted to stay within the inner section and I wanted to use those pointed areas at the top for ears. After that, I had nothing. So for about an hour I drew pigs inside that rectangle, starting with ears, and no matter what I did, they looked like cows. The thing is, if you look at real pigs, they are cows: rectangles with tiny eyes, huge nostrils, and pointy ears. So I broke away from the pictures of the real pigs and went to a rounder head, and I finally had something that looked like a pig. Wasn’t very exciting though. Then my eye fell on the gift bag I’d bought for Callie’s birthday present (yes, Callie is about to become one year old) and on this bag was a Famous Logo that Krissie loves, and I thought, There it is, and I drew this:

If Krissie approves, that’s going on the Pig. I’d say “Stay tuned for Day Three,” but I’m swamped here and I have until the end of July when I have to take the Pig back to Krissie, so I’ll just say, “And at a later date, I’ll be painting the Pig.”

You know, this blog is just nothing but cutting edge class.

But that’s techie stuff, the structure, the bones in the story. The things that truly sell the book or movie and bring readers and viewers back to read and see again are most often not those turning points, they’re usually the moments where the reader or viewer connects most strongly emotionally, gets the most pleasure or the biggest thrill. For example, the scene most often cited in Fast Women is the diner scene; it has nothing to do with structure, everything to do with showing how much Nell and Gabe and especially Suze have changed, how much stronger and smarter they are, how much more they’re worth rooting for. So while I’ll tell you that the turning points are the most efficient and effective way of describing a story, readers or viewers are likely to tell you The Really Good Parts.

I thought of all of this because of a new blog that I read, thanks once again to The Dish. It’s Movies in Frames, a site where people can send in their synopses of movies, done in four pictures. I’d never seen most of the movies on there so I was hampered as far as plot analysis, but I was struck by how beautiful some of the four-picture strips were and by how far some of them missed capturing the movie even though they’d obviously put thought into their choices.

Take this character list from one of my favorite movies, Dogma:

which l like because it reminds me of the great cast of both actors and characters –the Buddy Jesus standing in for George Carlin–but it doesn’t give me the sense of the movie itself, the insane sanity of its well-structured plot and bizarro world design. Plus it’s not linked visually in anyway beyond the “they’re all characters” aspect; that is, they’re not all staring into your eyes or interacting with each other, they’re just . . . there.

Then this one for Heat is visually beautiful and well-designed . . .

. . . but wasn’t Heat a cop movie? (I didn’t see it, that’s a real question, not a rhetorical one). Clearly for this viewer it was a romance, though, which brings us to what these strips are about, not the movie that the writer and director designed, but the movie that the viewer saw.

Which made me wonder what it would be like to pick out the four most indelible moments in a book I loved, to say, “These are the things I remember. Say The Grand Sophy. Off the top of my head, I loved Sophy shooting the card in the dining room, Sophy saving the family after the monkey debacle, Sophy facing down the moneylender, and Sophy and Charles at the Marquesa’s house as all Sophy’s plans come undone and she steams on ahead anyway. Clearly for me, The Grand Sophy is about Sophy not taking any crap from anybody, be it the man she loves, the woman he’s engaged to, a criminal she’s tracked down, or good old Fate. That may not be what Heyer intended since she was writing a great romance novel, not women’s fiction. Of course three of those four scenes have Charles in them, so I may not be that far off the mark.

Or there’s Going Postal, a Terry Pratchett novel, one of the best he’s ever written. It’s wonderful because of the major players: Moist Von Lipwig, Lord Vetinari, Adorabelle Dearhart, and Reacher Gilt, so there’s your strip of four indelible characters, all of whom would stare back at you defiantly from a photo. But I also like the list that’s on the Going Postal page at TerryPratchett.com:

But if the bold and undoable are what’s called for, Moist’s the man for the job — to move the mail, continue breathing, get the girl, and specially deliver that invaluable commodity that every being, human or otherwise, requires: hope.

So there you have a nice strip of Moist’s accomplishments in the book: bring the moribund post office back to life, avoid being murdered by the dead letters and Reacher Gilt, win the stony heart of the chain-smoking Adorabelle, and return justice to the world by bringing down the too-powerful-to-be-defeated Reacher. Pretty good for a long-time small-time crook who has to introduce himself by saying, “I’m Moist.” (Miraculously, that joke never gets old.) I like that strip even better because it puts Moist in the frame for all four and yet captures the never-say-die spirit of the book, even if it takes a golem to keep Moist from running away through most of the first act.

I think Movies in Frames is a great exercise for writers and for readers looking to understand their visceral reactions to the stories they’re engaged with. We don’t have actual photos, that stuff is in our heads, but we can visualize the moments that grab us and then see how they relate to each other visually (see Heat above) to find the core of the story, at least the story we read or saw. That may be another way to intuitively structure stories at the macro level. Or to do very short synopses.

Story in Four. Try it.

Lani and Krissie have both rummaged in my fridge frequently, and Bob has blazed many a trail to beer in there, and that never bothered me, but to have someone take everything out was like an autopsy. It was my identity in food spread out on my counter. Some of it I was very proud of–fresh spinach!–and some of it, uh, less so. Like the four kinds of ice cream in my freezer. Not to mention the Hello Kitty icepacks. We may not be what we eat, but the picture our open fridge makes is probably pretty indicative of our hopes (fresh spinach will make me healthy and thin), our dreams (I hate cranberry juice but I’ll drink it anyway because it’s good for me), and our secrets (yes, I do have a lot of salad dressing in there; I LIKE salad dressing). So when I found out from The Dish that Good Magazine had a gallery of open refrigerators, I was fascinated.

It’s amazing the visceral reaction I had to just pictures of fridges. The almost-empty ones were melancholy, that was to be expected, but the over-full ones were, too, expecially the overfull ones that were full of take-out cartons. How can I know who these people are if they hide themselves inside styrofoam boxes? And then there was the freezer full of bloody venison. Ew. But even the bad ones were good: by the time I finished the gallery, I wanted to see more, to go to my friends’ houses and open their refrigerator doors and see how they lived. Instead I opened my own and got out the olives and cheese and snacked. Well, it was right there.

So in the spirit of full disclosure, here’s my fridge:

I feel it’s important that you know that I’m not the one drinking the un-ecological bottled water, that’s Krissie who hates Ohio water. I am also not responsible for the Peach Snapple, that’s Krissie’s, too. And the container with the red stuff in it is leftover White Trash Chicken that Lani made when she was here (with the apricot jam which normally would not be in there) so I should probably just throw that away without opening it. The petrifying ham sandwich on the plate is in there because I keep meaning to cut it into three pieces and give it to the dogs as a treat. But I forget. It’s amazing how different your fridge looks when you’re looking at it in a photograph instead of just standing in front of it in your kitchen, looking for your next nosh. Suddenly you’re responsible for it. It’s you.

So I’ve explained the bottle water, Snapple, and ancient ham and chicken, and flaunted my spinach and peppers and carrots. Now it’s your turn.

What story does your fridge tell?

So one day when Ralph Keyes, the author of all three, e-mailed me to get some background on a writer’s conference he was going to be teaching at, I did the fan squee. By myself. He didn’t know. Well, I may have gushed a little. Ralph Keyes was writing ME. And besides I owed this guy. Even if all he’d ever written was The Courage to Write, I’d be his fan for life.

Ralph just wrote again to check in and tell me his new website is up–must be the season for new websites- and it’s great, very clear, just like Ralph’s books, and easy to navigate, just like Ralph’s books, with lots of fascinating stuff in it, just like Ralph’s books. For example, there’s Ralph’s chrome toaster museum.

Yes, there are mixers and blenders in there. Ralph is not a close-minded guy.

Ralph has a new book out that I have not read but that I am sure is wonderful called I Love It When You Talk Retro. I’ll get to that once I read The Post-Truth Era which is about lies and which I got for the research for Nadine’s book. Basically, Ralph Keyes is a guy you should read, starting with The Courage to Write. Best book on writing, ever.

I know, I know, fan squee on my blog. I’m just saying, Ralph is good. You should read him.

The problem with this prequel is that it’s grim. It has to be grim to set up the real story. But who wants to read about death and betrayal and orphans, for God’s sake? So I’m thinking maybe we truncate this a little, not take it to its real conclusion but just to the point where they go into battle, like the end of Angel, before the disaster happens and everybody cries. Of course, that’s exactly Bob’s kind of ending so I may not be successful here. Also, I think it’s wimping out.

But I really don’t want to write about everything going wrong. It’s so . . . depressing.

Bleah.

It’s beautiful and disturbing, but somehow not as disturbing as “Wonder Woman of the Spheres” by TheMouse:

Granted, I have a thing for Wonder Woman, but to me, Galatea looks like she’s made of flesh bubbles, floating in time, while Wonder Woman looks as though she’s exploding, radiating sex and possibly rage (although that could just be me because I have a thing for rage, too). The differences are Wonder Woman’s bright colors, open eyes, and that red, red mouth, and they send me back to look at Galatea again, making me notice the deadness of her image, the corpselike hues of her skin. One is resignation and death, and one is action and life. I see Dali’s painting with new eyes, and I see Wonder Woman in more detail than ever before.

I think this is what a homage should do, not slavishly imitate but ring a change on an old theme so that both the old and the new are seen in a different light. Miro’s Charlie Brown is infinitely sadder than the Charlie Brown I remember, but he’s also the same Charlie. Disney’s Aladdin heroine and villain are both more disturbing in a Giger painting and also more convincing, liberated from their candy-colored world, while Giger’s sterile images take on new life and even become more threatening because there are people in there. The Wizards in the Durer painting look more at home there than they did in their apocalyptic cartoon universe and more menacing, more human if that’s possible, while Durer’s landscape takes on energy from the threat of the magic riders.

Which brings me back to Star Trek. Had it just been a clever revision, drawing on the original source without ringing in changes, I would not be enthusiastic. It’s Star Trek. How many times can you exploit the myth? But to take the original, turn it sideways, and the set up a new story from the ashes of the old, honoring both . . . It’s that kind of give and take between source and homage that raises the level of the homage to art, or at least to more than a clever play on words and images, to a work that stands on its own even if the reader/viewer isn’t familiar with the original. If you haven’t seen Dali’s “Galatea,” “Wonder Woman of the Spheres” still has meaning, still startles. If you’ve never seen the original Star Trek, the new Star Trek is still visually stunning and brilliantly written. But if you’ve seen the originals, there’s a richness to the new versions that is only possible with familiarity with both.

Yes, I am thinking about Always Kiss Me Goodnight. I’m cogitating. I should have deeper cogitation shortly–although the next post could be about the Pig, too, you never know–so feel free to weigh in here. Not that you wouldn’t anyway.

Among other things, the construction guys putting in a new bedroom in the attic stepped through the rafters and put a hole in my bathroom ceiling. I was not happy, but they repaired it and now I have to paint in there so there’s this big white splotch which is annoying but at least no hole.

Then the next day I was sitting at my desk in my office and I heard a crash behind me and turned and saw a foot sticking through my office ceiling. I was pretty outspoken about that one. It is also repaired, but now I must paint . . .

Then the next day I came home to find a gaping hole in my bedroom ceiling because some construction guy had . . .

I’d love to make a pithy observation here about the meaning of this–there were three holes so it’s the rule of the three; it’s a sign I need more light in my private life (private rooms); three holes in the ceiling, which one will the ceiling bless??–but it was just a pain in the butt so I’m not going to assign arbitrary meaning. Sometimes three holes in the ceilings are just three damn holes.

But now all the holes are repaired so I have a lot of painting, but later for that because I’m getting a house guest tomorrow and we are going to live large: Hobby Lobby, Steak N Shake, and Star Trek at Imax.

And then Lowes to get paint . . .

We started in February using a project center that Joelle set up that was very efficient and really easy to use. She and Mollie and I talked about the general things we wanted changed–better organization, the ability to update the site on my own, integration between the blog and the website–and then she asked me what I wanted the place to look like.

So I started with this:

We can’t use cartoons because romance fiction went through a period of cartoon covers that was not good and now cartoons in association with romance are pretty much marketing death. I like collage images, mixed media, things that are a little bit off the wall, generally not hearts and roses or other traditionally romance-y things. I’m very happy to be a romance writer, but the books are not traditional romances so we don’t want to send the wrong message.

I have an antique postcard of a Christmas witch that I’m very fond of at the moment that I’m leaning toward using as part of the background image, but I’m open to other things, too. I’m attaching that and a photo of the courthouse in the town where I grew up, since I wanted to put that into the landscape below, to give you an idea of what I wanted. None of this has to go into the design, they’re just here to start the dialogue.

Joelle asked for examples of websites I liked, and I gave her some and then added this:

For the collage, not black and white. Probably sepia tones, antique greens, creams with pops of color like ochres and rusts and roses. I really love the look of Imogen Heap’s “Goodnight and Go” video (it’s on YouTube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z9athUdhH40) especially the colors, and a lot of my books are tending in that direction now, darker and quirkier than before. I realize I’m creating a nightmare for you on the tabs and links and we can certainly talk about that.

When I think about the books I have upcoming, Always Kiss Me Goodnight and You Again are retro, old-fashioned forties ghost story and classic mystery. Slow Men is more film noir but cheerful. Nadine’s book is about magicians, so that whole spooky retro look is still good. Wild Ride which is coming out next is set in an old amusement park built in the 20s. Then there’s a fairy tale book I’m thinking about that would be an actual fairy tale, fantasy, so the whole Goodnight and Go look would work there. And another project I’m working on is about two writers in the present time researching writers in the thirties. So everything has a retro/fantasy/quirkiness to it. By the time I finish all of those, I’ll be too old to write, so I think we’re safe with that kind of feeling.

That wasn’t much to give her, but as I’ve said other places, Joelle is a genius, so when she sent the first mock-up, it was very close to this. We changed some fonts and moved some things around, got rid of some of the images and made the whole thing lighter, but if you put the first one beside the finished design, you wouldn’t see a lot of obvious differences. For example, Joelle had used antique playing cards, and we swapped those out for the tarot cards that Mab uses in Wild Ride. At first glance, you wouldn’t notice that at all. And so many of the images she found like the old typewriter and the stars were just perfect as they were.

Joelle just nailed the look-and-feel part in general: the site to me is quirky and fun without being zany or light or any of the things my books aren’t any more. One of the biggest problems with evolving as a writer is that it’s impossible to get a website that represents both the books you began with and the books you’re writing now, so the bright covers do look a little odd next to this background design. I can live with that.

So the site is still in progress with Joelle working like crazy to get everything in there and working, but in general, I love it. And Joelle is a genius. Did I mention that? Genius.

Okay, a lot. Joelle Reeder of Moxie Design Studios took my incoherent visual suggestions and Mollie’s very clear web design suggestions and came up with something that was vastly better than either one of us could have imagined. So all our gratitude to Joelle and Moxie and their programmers who almost lost their minds trying to wrangle the vastness of JennyCrusie.com and Argh Ink into submission. But why, you may ask, did we tell them to? Several reasons.

One was that in the roughly fifteen years that I’ve had a website, we’d only done one upgrade, when Mollie came and in and made everything professional. Some of you may remember the first website, the one with Medea on the splash page? I did that on a program called Home Page. I was very proud of it. I was in grad school at OSU at the time and they made us learn the program, and my critique partner Val had been insisting that I get a website up before my first book was out, so I blocked out what I thought needed to be on there and typed everything in. I’d never seen a real author website before–this was before I found the crack that is the internet–so I just guessed. It was thirty pages. I loved it. Then Mollie came on board and made me give up Medea, but I got that peppy yellow and white striped diner-look that was incredibly cheerful and I loved it. Plus it was, you know, programmed well. So when Mollie came back last year and said, “We need to revamp the website,” I said, “Why? I love this website!” And she said, “Because,” and promised me that that this time it would be designed so that I could do the updates myself. That was the clincher.

Then she told me to start thinking about design, the kind of look I wanted, and sent me out to search the net to find inspiration. Which made me think: my stuff really did not fit the cheery yellow stripes any more. That probably ended with Bet Me, but possibly before. Fast Women is not a cheery-yellow-stripes book. Faking It had some fairly dark moments. And then along came Bob and the body count rose for which I am grateful. I learned a lot from old “We’re All Doomed.” For one thing, I learned I don’t really have a dark side. As I’ve said other places, compared to Bob, my dark side is more along the lines of dimly lit. But in that dimly lit place, I’ve been having a good time the past four or five years, and looking ahead to the other things I want to do, I’m not seeing the lights get Harlequin bright again.

So what I needed was something a little more . . . dimly lit. Something more quirky than cute. I told Joelle under no circumstances was there to be pink, hearts, or flowers. And if a cartoon went up there, she’d be hearing screams from Ohio. She was very patient and said, “No problem. What DO you want?” So I sent her this video of Imogen Heap singing “Goodnight and Go.” I loved the colors, I loved the mood, I loved the song. Then I gave her a list of possible images–oddly enough, I didn’t mention monkeys–and sent her a picture of the Wapakoneta Court House from my home town.

And then I braced myself because I am very, very, very picky. So when Joelle sent the first draft, took a deep breath and opened it.

It was amazing. The woman is a genius.

But you know me, it wasn’t quite right, so we went through several revisions, mostly having to do with tweaking images and the nav box, and then it was just what I wanted and we turned it over to the programmers and that’s when Argh and the website went down for a little longer than we expected. But hey, wasn’t that a fabulous splash page Joelle put up there toward the end?

And now everything’s back up and we’re looking for bugs and glitches so if you find any, definitely let us know. Not that you wouldn’t anyway. And while I am typing this blind before the blog goes back up, I’m hoping there’s a polling box to the right here because I think it would be fun to poll people on some of the things we talk about. Like the monkey. I love the monkey but some people were freaked out by him. We could do a poll on that to see how the general Argh populace feels about him. I would like to point out that he’s not the evil clown; it’s not as if I’m deliberately making your flesh creep.

So anyway, we’re back up and I have several things to talk about and I’m sure you do, too, so welcome back and here’s our new look. What do you think?

At any rate, for the next week or so, Argh may go away or just go silent. But then we’ll be back! New look! Different vibe! But basically the same.

Except for the monkey.