Stop the madness!

I was so decidedly un-curmudgeonly this year that I relaxed my restriction on Christmas carols being played before the first of December, and allowed—nay, encouraged—the Mont to play a few on the car radio the day after Thanksgiving. Almost immediately, however, I wished I hadn’t, because I heard a song on the traditional Christmas station that set my teeth on edge. It wasn’t that horrible Gayla Peevey song about wanting a hippopotamus for Christmas, though that might have done the job, too. No, it was perfectly respectable, boozy Dean Martin, singing the Irving Berlin standard, “I’ve Got My Love to Keep Me Warm.”

Now, I’m aware that the religious carols have a lot more material at hand, with Christmas being a religious holiday, nominally at least. Religious carols have an entire cast of exotic characters going for them, from round yon virgins to the infant holy infant lowly. There’s the we three kings and Harold the harking angel and the heavenly host, whom I always imagine to be like a particularly friendly karaoke host, only sparklier. Christmas carols have a huge cast of supporting players that would make Cecil B. DeMille envious—from the little drummer boy and the busy innkeeper to people who never appear again anywhere in Biblical literature, like Jeanette and Isabella and some dude named Emmanuel. (What’s he’s coming, o coming for, anyway? Dessert?)

Secular Christmas songs, on the other hand, I feel sorry for. They’ve got their songs about Santa, who’s either admonishing children to watch out and not cry, or who’s coming down the chimney or making out with some kid’s mom, or running over grandma with his reindeer. They’ve got the songs about bells—silver, jingling, and ring-ting-ringling, too. And then they’ve got the songs about snow. I know there are scant pickings for the secular carol writers. But I’m sorry, “I’ve Got My Love to Keep Me Warm” is going too far.

Yes, I know it’s been included on several Christmas albums, including by Dean Martin and Tony Bennet and even Bette Midler. Yes, I know that Irving Berlin is America’s beloved composer of “White Christmas” and that the song even concludes the stage musical version of the same name. But you know White Christmas the musical (and movie) also includes “Sisters,” and you don’t see Taylor Swift and Lady Gaga performing a very special holiday rendition of that on The NBC Paris Hilton Holiday Cavalcade, do you?

I’m also thoroughly aware that I’m willing to accept songs about cold weather as traditional holiday songs. I have no qualms about “Sleigh Ride,” for example, particularly if it’s Steve Lawrence and Eydie Gorme’s whip-cracking S&M version with Eydie’s maniacal laughter. (By the way, the LP in the background of that YouTube video, Goodyear's Great Songs of Christmas Album 5, is probably my favorite Christmas album ever. My parents got a free copy with a fill-up of gas in 1965, and I still have it. I wish it were available on CD.) I’m not even vaguely bothered by the inclusion of “Baby, It’s Cold Outside” in the repertoire, although watching Nick Lachey and Jessica Simpson mug their way through it traumatized me a little, a few years ago.

But “I’ve Got My Love to Keep Me Warm”? I’m sorry. It was written for On the Avenue, which has nothing to do with Christmas at all. I suppose I draw the line here: if I’m likely to hear the song sung in a karaoke bar in mid-March without irony, it doesn’t belong on a holiday playlist. Do we really want to lump all songs including any cold-weather metaphors in the Christmas bins? Really?

Because it’s a slippery slope, my friends, and those of you who are rolling your eyes and saying to yourselves, Good lord, it’s just a song, get over it! are going to be regretting your leniency in another thirty years when the hottest pop star of 2040 is duetting with a gray and grizzled Adam Lambert in a holiday rendition of Madonna’s “Frozen,” and the Rockettes are doing a kick-line in Santa hats and fuzzy red boots to Radio City Music Hall’s grand finale of “Ice, Ice Baby.” Mark my words.

Well-baked

Wednesday morning I noticed that Fred had disappeared. Usually when I’m working, in cooler weather, she’ll stake her claim on my belly. There she can warm herself while simultaneously monitoring the squirrels on the deck, from the comfort of the sofa and my midsection.Trust me, when she’s not around, I really notice that missing twelve pounds of compact tabby.

Her absence didn’t concern me much at first. I did my work in the morning, ate lunch, and puttered around for a little while after. At that point, I realized that I’d not seen Fred in hours. So I checked her usual haunts—the niche behind the curtain where she can spy on the squirrels, the cubby beneath the sofa where she can nap in peace. She wasn’t there.

Nor was she in any of the places she goes to hide when she’s frightened of something—beneath the basement stairs, or in the crawl space beneath our den. I was beginning to panic when at last I spied a lump beneath the covers, on our bed. When I pulled them up slightly, I found her blinking back at me. She’d managed to nose back both blankets so she could crawl underneath. Between the fleece sheets (yes, I have fleece sheets in winter. It’s Michigan. What of it?) she’d snoozed for hours. Since I didn’t have a compelling reason to interrupt her, I let her slumber on.

She was still there when the Mont came home a few hours later. And she didn’t emerge until five-thirty, when we were about to leave the house for dinner. Her tail was in the air. Her fur crackled with static electricity from the sheets. She practically radiated steam as she wandered, well-baked and hot to the touch, into the den after her nine-hour nap. Did I miss anything? she seemed to be asking, as she prickled her nose in our direction.

God. I wish I could be a cat, some days.

The Good Wife

My mother was an avid reader, growing up. It was thanks to her voracious appetite for serial fiction and seemingly unlimited teenaged babysitting funds that as a kid I inherited her Stratemeyer Syndicate collection. There were the Bobbsey Twins, insipid and seemingly shoehorned into a mystery format that even they seemed to resent. There was Tom Swift, whose gee-whiz plucky grin and can-do attitude made me a little ill.

And then there were her obvious favorites, the sparring teen detective titans: the Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew. The Hardy Boys always made me feel uneasy. Fenton Hardy was obviously the pushy type who was trying to plump up his sons’ college resumes, and resorted to withholding approval and affection unless Frank and Joe did him proud by figuring out the mystery of the sinister signpost. It was perfectly obvious that the Hardys were doomed to a life of solving mystery after mystery just for that one token of their father’s love that was perpetually out of reach. Nancy Drew, on the other hand was self-motivated. She and her gay band of chums solved mysteries for the love of it, sometimes in their clam-diggers! Nancy Drew had Ned Nickerson. Nancy had titian hair, and a roadster. Nancy Drew had Hannah Gruen making German pastries in the kitchen.

I was surprised to find a television show this fall that pushes all the same pleasure buttons as the Nancy Drew stories used to. I originally tuned into The Good Wife because it starred Julianna Margulies, a lovely woman whose performance was about the only thing I used to enjoy on ER. In The Good Wife she stars as Alicia Florrik, a woman whose husband has resigned as State Attorney after a scandal involving hookers and corruption. With her husband in jail, back to work she goes, for another favorite actor of mine, Christine Baranski, a senior partner who walks around the sets of her swanky law firm with a pole wedged firmly up her fundament. At first I must confess my heart sank when I saw that most of the show’s action was going to be within the law firm and in the courtroom, because courtroom procedurals are among my least favorite genres of television.

The show makes it palatable to me, though, by giving it all a citrusy, Nancy Drew-like girl detective twist. The character of Alicia, thanks to the public rigors through which her husband has put her, has a decided empathy with the put-upon pro bono cases to which she’s assigned as a junior associate. Like Nancy, she’s almost supernaturally observant, and always manages to spot the critical difference between an original memo and its photocopied duplicate that manages to thwart the evildoers trying to wring pension money out of mourning widows. With her chum Kalinda, played stubbornly and opaquely by the excellent Archie Panjabi, she snoops and detects and finds the loopholes in cases that others cannot.

The writers have given Alicia two adolescent children who have a detection plot of their own, as they try to figure out exactly who has been leaving mysterious photographs of their father with other women on their doorstep—and who exactly has been haunting their landing to take photographs of their apartment. Alicia’s son is a smart cookie armed with his computer software, his internet research, and his video-recording iPod; he and his younger sister are conducting their own investigations without their mother’s knowledge.

The cases on which Alicia works are not really any more complicated than the average Encyclopedia Brown mystery, but the acting is compelling and the way the series mingles Alicia’s personal afflictions with her everyday work is quite well done. Sure, Alicia Florrik is thirty years older than Nancy and much more worn and tired, and she may have swapped in her roadster for an SUV, but within her breast beats the heart of a true teen detective. When she’s sniffing around, she’s never more alert and alive.

The Final Map

It was only Friday morning that I was crowing about receiving the draft of the map my illustrator was doing for The Buccaneer's Apprentice. I got a copy of the final map—missing only the labels for places that my publisher will add—less than twenty-four hours later. It's totally gorgeous.


(There's a big picture behind the link.)

I always envy people who've skills I haven't.

Cartographers and why I love them

After the torture I went through with The Glass Maker’s Daughter, when it came to making a draft the map that appeared in the front of the book, I learned my lesson. When I was writing both The Buccaneer’s Apprentice and A Traveler to Nascenza, I was completely aware of the geography I was traversing in a way that I never had been with the first book in the series. I kept things straight, so that I’d have a finished draft done when the publisher needed.

But I still can’t draw. That’s why I’m always delighted when I encounter the work of someone who can make sense of my scrawls. I submitted the map draft for The Buccaneer’s Apprentice a long while back.



I actually wrote more about it than I sketched anything. My email to the editor was full of cautions, like, The island of Gallina is supposed to be an active volcano, not a quesadilla, or I have drawn Cassaforte so that it looks massive when it should be weak and small compared to the country of Pays d’Azur, can you shrink it?

This week I got from the artist a rough and very preliminary sketch of how’s he interpreting my scribbles. Holy crap, is it ever nice.



I am always amazed when someone has skills that I don’t personally possess, and the fellow who has been doing my maps for this series has them in abundance. I would name children after him if I could.

A Musical Morsel Supreme

My favorite toy during my single-digit years was probably the Toot Sweet.



One can tell by the strange, Victorian-broadside-meets-psychedelia packaging and the orange-and-purple color scheme that Mattel released it in the late sixties, shortly after the Summer of Love and roughly concurrent with the movie of Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. “Toot Sweets” is the name of a musical number within the film, in which Sally Ann Howe waltzes around in a long Edwardian skirt whilst playing melodies through a candy cane with holes in it. Mattel, desperately searching for something to sell while slapping From the Movie Chitty Chitty Bang Bang! on the front, abandoned the candy cane idea and decided to introduce kiddies into the wonders of injection mold manufacturing.

And I loved it.

The basic idea behind the Toot Sweet is to make whistles out of Tootsie Rolls. The Toot Sweet machine itself is fairly simple, consisting of a sturdy base, a lever that retracts a plunger, and a screw-on-top to hold various molds included with the toy.



To make a whistle required two miniature Tootsie Rolls, which would have to be warmed and rolled thin in order to fit into the machine’s narrow bore. Once inside, one would pick a mold for half a whistle, fasten it on the top, and then very gently push down on the lever in order to force the candy into the mold. When the top was unscrewed, viola! Half a whistle.




When you’d made two halves, all you’d have to do would be to press them together to complete your edible musical instrument.



As my mother could have attested, and my cat Fred, who was hanging this morning around to leave cat hairs all over the candy and who went running when I blew through the slightly crushed glob of Tootsie Roll, the whistles actually work. They emit a loud and shrieking toot that, while not perhaps as melodious as what Truly Scrumptious produced in the movie, is probably more delicious than any ol’ candy cane.

But the fun of the Toot Sweet doesn’t stop there. Oh no. The machine came with other molds with which you were supposed to decorate your whistles, by affixing them to the whistle’s butt.



So if you really wanted to personalize your sticky, spitty whistle by giving it a skull, a fish, a teddy bear, a mouse, a scary clown, or a child molester in a trench coat, you could!



Trust me. When you’re six and your father is a sugar freak who keeps a never-ending supply of miniature Tootsie Rolls in the house, the Toot Sweet was the delicious gift that kept on giving.

NaLoFoProFirDraWriMo

November for me is the great prelude to the bleakness of Michigan’s winters, a month of damp and chill and leaves that fall and then are quickly crusted under ice. I know that to many others, however, it’s thirty days of industry and self-recrimination known as National Novel Writing Month, or NaNoWriMo.

I have a few minor objections to NaNoWriMo that I’ve made known in the past, though they shouldn’t stop anyone from participating. For one thing, the fifty-thousand-word goal to which people aspire is only half a novel, really. It’s a novella. Or a longer-form project. For another, NaNoWriMo's advertisement of writing a mere fifteen hundred words a day makes the composition process sound like a cakewalk, when even fifty thousand words is a marathon. It’s easy for people to miss their daily goal. What I end up seeing on the pages of my friends’ journals, starting even as early as the fourth day of the month, is usually an unending stream of self-reproach and even outright scolding for falling behind. Often that leads to people writing filler, padding scenes with unnecessary dialogue or utter nonsense in order to make a word count.

And finally (and probably most upsetting for me), NaNoWriMo tends to act as if the writing of the first draft is really all there is to completing a novel. The month’s over! You’ve got a novel! Call Random House! To me, revision is an essential part of the process. I usually go through three drafts of a manuscript before I dare submit it to my publisher. And I’m not talking about minor word correction and polishing. I mean rigorous, front-to-back deconstruction of the infrastructure I’ve created and taking the time to make it right.

Somehow, though, National Longer Form Project First Draft Writing Month, or NaLoFoProFirDraWriMo, isn’t as catchy.

Those quibbles aside, NaNoWriMo does give people an easy-sounding structure to work with. A deadline can be helpful for many people to give them the momentum to work. It makes writing approachable, and the results satisfying. It fires people’s imaginations and creativity and sometimes inspires people who might not ordinarily attempt a novel to sit down and write, and I’m all for that.

As the author of sixteen published novels and therefore allowed to claim the status as An Authority In The Field, I therefore offer a few little tips for my friends who are attempting the Herculean feat of writing a long manuscript.

1. Be aware that the first third of the novel is likely the most difficult stretch of writing you’ll encounter. You might have a vision of your story in your mind, shining and bright, completely with richly realized characters and scintillating dialogue, but the moment you start writing, it comes out kludgy and drab. Or else you have a brilliant start for a few pages, and then it all seems to fall apart. Yes. It’s going to be like that for a little bit, until you get into the rhythm of your characters and their patterns of speech. You’re also going to be trying to figure out the voice of your narrator, who is a character to himself, even if he’s narrating in the third person. There’s also the chance that you’ve overanalyzed all your characters so that once they start doing their stuff, they seem dull and lifeless. If that’s the case, you need to let them do something unexpected and see where that carries you.

The first third of a novel is always a tough haul for me. I usually give myself three and a half months to write a manuscript, and my manuscripts tend to be about a hundred thousand words, or three hundred typed pages. Usually it takes me a month and a half to write the first hundred pages, another month to write the last two hundred, and then a month to revise everything. Notice how disproportionately long it takes me to write that first third of the book? I accept it now, after doing it so many times. But in the beginning, it was awfully frustrating.

2. Picking up from the day before is difficult. You will want to do anything but write, when you sit down to your computer at your appointed writing time. You will want to surf the web or clean the toilets or give yourself that colonic you’ve always thought about, but you will not want to write. You may even feel vaguely nauseated at the thought of stringing words together. You will feel uncreative and void of any ideas. This is totally normal. It doesn’t necessarily go away, either. I still encounter the same feelings each and every time I sit down to work.

However. If you’re serious about getting your word count in for the day, you will need to hold yourself to it. Disconnect your ethernet cord or turn off your WiFi. Don’t let yourself open up that Bejeweled application. Sit there in front of your word processor and stare at it until grudgingly your brain taps out a few words, and then a few more. It might take a half hour or even an hour to kick in, but eventually the rusty pipes will groan and a trickle will emerge. Eventually that trickle will turn into a steady flow. Maybe not the gush you were hoping for, but enough to get by.

Want to know my simplest tip for picking up on your narrative the next day? Tempting as it may be to finish out a chapter at the end of your writing period, resist. Stop writing in the middle of a fiercely exciting scene. Oh, you might be tempted to continue, but that’s the entire point. Your mind will work on that scene in your downtime, even as you sleep. When you sit down the next day and open up your document, you’ll be itching to continue and get to the exciting resolution. The carrot-on-a-stick of completing something exciting is more potent a lure day-to-day lure than having to start something fresh. Trust me on this one.

3. And finally, be kind to yourself. Jesus, are you a professional novelist with a deadline? Some of you may be, but the vast majority of you aren’t. Sure, you may want to have the satisfied glow of knowing you’ve made your word count, and be able to show off your fifty-thousand-word badge on December first. But honestly, it’s more valuable an experience to write, to continue writing regularly, and to enjoy and learn from the process than it is to pound out random words and hate every minute of it. It’s better to take a year to write fifty thousand words than it is to feel guilty and berate yourself for thirty days for not keeping up. Your manuscript will be better for it, too.

Writing a novel is difficult enough. A writer needs to have confidence in what he or she is doing, or else the project will fizzle. Drowning out the litany of self-reproach—all the internal editor’s cries of Well THAT’S no good! and This chapter is going nowhere!—while listening to the story and its characters as a reader might, is nigh on impossible as it is. Pummeling oneself for not adhering to what is (let’s face it) an arbitrary and meaningless deadline is not going to make your compositional process any easier.

So be kind to yourself. Enjoy NaNoWriMo for the creative kick in the ass that it is, and don’t fret about the daily word count. Make it the start of a year of writing on a regular basis. In the end, you’ll be a better person for having followed your muse.

Glee

I have friends who would shriek with abject horror to hear me say these words, but here they are: I’m really iffy about this season’s hit show, Glee.

One would have to have taken up residence under a mighty big rock not to know Glee’s basic premise, in which a pretty but witless Spanish teacher takes over his high school’s glee club, which is filled with misfits of every archetype—the overachieving girl, the doe-eyed jock with a heart of gold, the effeminate gay guy, the sassy black girl, and a few others designed to have as minimal screen time as possible. We’ve seen them all before. It’s as if someone spliced up film from Election and Bring It On and every other teen movie of the last fifteen years and dropped them into a fishbowl and asked the writers to draw out a few at random.

There’s some nonsense in the story that involves Jane Lynch as a rival cheerleading coach, and there are too many pregnancy plots and totally illogical loopholes surrounding the pregnancies. The show has too many preposterous character reversals and this-would-never-happen-in-television-much-less-real-life story choices that send Glee off into the Lost realm of absurdist storytelling. They might as well throw in a nuclear bomb and some time travel and call it a day, and they’re only a half-dozen episodes into the first season.

But my real objections are as follows.

1. The musical numbers in Glee are inconsistent. They're inconsistent with the talent level of actual high school students, for one thing. The kids get thrown some sheet music and without even so much as glancing at it, they’re all jammin’ and producing professional tracks destined for hitdom. Even in the first couple of episodes in which the kids were supposed to be awful, they were far better than the highest-jury-scoring school choirs I’ve ever heard. Same for when a group of the male teachers decided to form their own a cappella group—they were effortlessly perfect, instantly.

Which, you know, is fine in the world of screen musicals, in which an invisible orchestra swells up and an entire town sings about the Atchison, Topeka, and the Santa Fe before going back about its business. Glee is supposed to be about a scrappy substandard vocal group straining to be better than the sum of its parts. But it’s too good. Why should the kids work any harder? Their songs are already best-sellers every Thursday morning on iTunes.

I’m also not fond of the show’s wishy-washiness over how to handle its musical numbers, either. For a while there it seemed as if it would stick to having the kids singing only in rehearsals or performances, but then it would veer off unexpectedly into singing revenge fantasies in individual characters’ heads, or a let’s-pretend rehearsal session in which the idiot director would announce at the end of an impeccably-sung sight reading, “That’s the way it will sound some day!” But then, for almost every awkwardness, there’ll be nice moments. The episode with Kristen Chenoweth, for example, featured a nice number in which the guest star and the girl lead sang Cabaret’s “Maybe This Time” to great effect.

2. Glee doesn’t live up to its title. There’s no joy in it. There’s no euphoria. The characters are either smart and cynical and throughly unlikeable (are we really supposed to forget that female lead Rachel, in the show’s first thirty seconds, ruined the former director’s career by falsely accusing him of molesting one of his students?), or gullible idiots. Everyone’s miserable and unpleasant. Everyone’s chewing on their own discontents and spewing bile.

That would be fine and dandy if the characters let the music transform them, or if singing made them feel happy—but it doesn’t. The musical numbers tend to be shouty, frantic, and rife with somersaulting acrobatics seemingly intended to distract from the vocal auto-tuning going on. After the big musical moments, they’re back to their glum lives. The limitation of being a weekly TV series is partly to blame. In a two-hour movie, it’s possible to have the happy ending that an open-ended series cannot. But jeez. I’ve never seen a show so dour.

I keep watching and hoping that the show will find its groove. Yet as with Paula Abdul and MC Scat Kat, it’s always two steps forward and one step back, with Glee.

Oh, and P.S., Glee writers. The thing you keep calling a mashup is really a medley, God damn it.

Laundry day (tomorrow)

My freshman roommate in college was a kid from one of the most exclusive prep schools in the nation, the scion of a family of not inconsiderate means. The amount of monthly allowance he received above and beyond expenses for books and board exceeded my entire personal budget for an entire semester, yet he managed to run through it all in the course of two or three blowout days whenever the check would come in.

Of all his boorish mannerisms, though, the one that bothered me the most was when, toward the end of each of the two semesters in which we were forced to live together, my roommate would waken in the morning, crawl through the near-darkness of the Jefferson dormitory basement rooms, and settle next to his overflowing laundry basket. Then he’d remove a pair of underwear from its depths, sniff it gingerly, and hold the increasing pile in his lap until he’d found a pair that, while not fresh, were at least not reeking. Then he’d proceed to wear it for another week. The actual process of laundering his clothing during the course of a semester was beyond him. In the autumn and again in January he arrived at school with a mass of dry-cleaned prepwear that would grow progressively more grungy and moldy as he used them week after week. Then at semester’s end, he’d haul home several bags of stinking clothing for his parents to take care of, one way or another.

It seems to me these days that my freshman roommate was a highly resourceful man.

I’d like to blame the fact that I have no clean clothing today on the fact that when I’m trying to finish up writing and revising a book, I’m highly blinkered and absent-minded about things like laundry, bill-paying, and bathing. The truth, however, is that while in college I might have fastidiously washed and ironed my things on a weekly basis, after a good twenty-eight years of taking care of myself I’m no longer as particular. I have enough boxer briefs and socks in my drawer that I can go for a few weeks without worrying about running out. Ironing? Pfeh. A t-shirt and a pair of jeans that aren’t actually caked with filth are good enough for the likes of me. When my basket of dirties gets full, my first instinct isn’t, My, I really should have a busy laundry day! No, it’s, I wonder if Target carries bigger laundry baskets?

On mornings like today, though, after weeks of neglecting my washperson duties, I find myself running my fingers along the bare bottoms of my dresser drawers and contemplating an outfit that consists of the only clean clothes I have left: an outsized caftan from my larger days, a pair of sweatpants with legs that stop mid-calf, an ancient jockstrap, and a pair of striped clown socks from 1993. And it seems to me and my nose that my college roommate had a pretty good thing going.

Not that it means I’ll actually do any laundry, mind you. I’ll spend time writing about it instead.

Red Dawn

It was a few weeks ago that our friend and neighbor, Chad, informed me that one of his young daughters had met a teen idol. “We were walking the puppy down the street and guess who we saw?” he asked.

“Um,” I said, not having a clue. Chad can be like an excitable puppy who barks like mad at the sight of a leaf blown by the wind, so for all I knew, he and his daughter could’ve seen a squirrel. “I give up.”

“Josh Peck!” he crowed.

“Josh Peck!” I replied in surprised.

“I know! Josh Peck! Right there on the sidewalk! Right?”

I caved. “Who’s Josh Peck?”

Josh Peck turned out to be one of the stars of Drake & Josh, a teen comedy on Nickelodeon, of which Chad’s daughter is apparently a huge fan. I, being somewhat outside the demographically either mentally (Chad) or physically (his daughter), had never heard of it. “They’re in town for the remake of Red Dawn,” Chad explained. “They’re filming right around the corner.”

“Did she get to talk to this Josh Peck guy?” I asked.

“No,” admitted Chad. “But he petted the dog!”

I’m willing to bet that’s one dog who never gets washed again.

Michigan’s been used more and more over the last couple of years for the filming of a lot of Hollywood projects, and it’s seemed as if my little suburb has been one of the epicenters of it. Probably the most visible project with which we had to cope was Sigourney Weaver’s Prayers for Bobby a couple of years ago, which tied up the Mont’s church, the restaurant next door (a stylish enough eatery that somehow doubled as both a scary, seedy gay bar and the fern-covered restaurant frequented by middle-class suburban moms), as well as most of Royal Oak’s downtown streets. There was also a month in which it was impossible to dodge the filming of dueling Christina Ricci and Drew Barrymore movies, no matter where we seemed to go.

Lately the neighborhood’s been completely invaded by Red Dawn, however. Whenever I drive out on an errand, I see signs for cast and crew parking. The other day when I drove home from Target, I passed a small battalion of armed and uniformed communists taking a Doritos break on the side of the road. Even when we leave Royal Oak, we’re running into the production. One night when we went to our favorite karaoke bar, a good ten miles north, we found the street in front completely blocked off and shut down. Tanks were pointed at the bar’s front door and military vehicles completely surrounded it. Despite the loud music and the festive atmosphere inside, the place looked as if it were under siege. A glum security guard stood on guard to make sure no one climbed on the tanks. Which was tempting.

But honestly. Isn’t Red Dawn one of those movies that should never be remade? And no, I’m not saying it in the way that some movie executive should have when they heard that Melanie Griffith wanted to one-up Born Yesterday. I’m saying it more like this: wasn’t one Red Dawn enough? I think the death of Patrick Swayze has made some people a little sentimental for his movies, but surely this was among the least of them.

Preorder The Buccaneer's Apprentice

Amazon's made available for preorder the second book in my Cassaforte Chronicles, The Buccaneer's Apprentice.



Click here to reserve yourself a copy!

From the back cover:

On his first sea voyage away from the magical city of Cassaforte, seventeen-year-old Nic Dattore awakens to find the vessel overrun by marauding pirates—and everyone else on board kidnapped or killed. After slaying the pirate who attacked him, Nic tosses a torch into a cache of gunpowder and blows up the ship.

Washed up on a deserted island, Nic and a motley crew of castaways decide to commandeer the pirate ship to get home. They battle pirates, assassins, and a cursed ship with a powerful secret while racing against time to save Cassaforte from a diabolical plot.

A Traveler to Nascenza

It is so nice—so nice, I tell you—to read a book you’ve just finished writing and realize that it isn’t a piece of crap.

A Traveler to Nascenza is the third fantasy set in my medieval Venice-inspired country of Cassaforte. It’s the story of Petro Divetri, the younger brother of Risa Divetri, who was at the center of The Glass Maker’s Daughter. Petro’s main problem is that he has a remarkable sister—a hero several times over who occupies a singular place in her city’s history—when he is not at all remarkable himself. He finds himself either falsely admired for his connection, or bullied and despised for it. When the persecution gets out of hand, he’s sent away from the school where he’s lived for several years on a pilgrimage to the remote religious shrine of Nascenza, deep in the countryside. His best friend accompanies him, and Petro is so anxious not to be dogged by his own reputation that the two boys decide to play a schoolboy prank on the other pilgrims and swap identities, pretending to be one another.

It’s a piece of mischief that goes awry when Petro’s friend is kidnapped for political motivations along the way. The rest of Petro’s path to Nascenza is frantic and desperate as he tries to find his friend once more and uncovers a plot that threatens to ruin not only his country’s future, but his sister’s wedding. And boy, nobody wants to upset hot-tempered Risa Divetri when her marriage is at stake.

I envisioned and plotted the story before last year’s elections, and thought of it as a commentary on what happens when a reactionary minority group, incensed by the background of a country’s leader, resorts to domestic terrorism as a means not only to force the country’s hand, but to reduce its citizens into a state of panicked fear. It turned out to be more of a timely topic than I imagined.

The night I finished A Traveler to Nascenza, I stayed up until two in the morning to get it done. I knew early that evening I only had a little bit to go and that I needed to get it out of me while the words were flowing. Besides, I wanted to see how it ended! I’d drawn up a broad sketch of the story last year, true, but as always, I deviated some from the outline. The guard that Petro works with after the kidnapping discovers his true identity well before I originally intended—but she was smarter than I anticipated, and not easily duped. I’d planned for Petro to run across a younger child in the book who in the outline was outright antagonistic. As I wrote the story, Petro ended up treating the kid very decently and as a little brother, so I had to make the child more sympathetic than I envisioned, and give him an opportunity to prove himself worthy of Petro’s faith.

Most of all, though, I wanted to see if the story’s primary antagonist bit it in the end. I honestly had no idea whether or not he was going to die until I actually got to the sentence that decided it. When I penned the book's last sentence a few minutes later, I was so pumped up and excited—despite the fact that it was two in the morning and I'd been working since nine a.m.—that I couldn’t calm down for hours after. I finally was able to shut my eyes at six, to grab three hours of sleep.

Now that I’m reading the book a once-over before sending it off, I’m really pleased, and a little bit surprised, how exciting it all is. It’s lively, and funny, and action-packed in the parts where it’s needed. I’d been a little worried because The Buccaneer’s Apprentice was a whirlwind of swashbuckling, pirate fights, enemy armadas, and hammy acting, and I thought A Traveler to Nascenza might come off a little slow after that. It’s true that the death toll is three thousand, two hundred, and seventeen less than The Buccaneer’s Apprentice. But there’s intrigue, fireworks, teenaged infatuation, underaged drinking, an adolescent erection, and a whole page of two teenaged boys making nut jokes. How could it be anything other than thrilling?

Arf!

I’m trying to squeeze out the last couple of chapters on A Traveler to Nascenza. Taking quick breaks to do things other than writing, I tell myself, gives me some time to knit loose ends together in my head before I commit them to paper. Yesterday, during a troublesome spot, I spent a little more time in the kitchen than I did on my laptop.

First I chopped tomatoes and basil from the garden and mixed them with a touch of oil and garlic so I could chill them and serve it as a bruschetta for dinner. Then I made some yogurt brownies. And finally, because I had the ingredients and the nerve, I made dog treats, intending them for Clark and Jeffrey’s dog, Stella. Because no matter how mean Mike and Brian are about the shirts I wear, their dog is always sweet to me.

The dog biscuits involved mixing peanut butter in hot chicken stock to break it down, then adding egg and molasses and cooking oil, then stirring in cornmeal and whole wheat flour. When it was somewhat cohesive, I rolled the dough out into a log that I cut into slices, and then halved each slice before putting the bite-sized nuggets on a cookie sheet for baking. The scent of peanut butter and chicken stock baking was, oddly enough, not reminiscent of a chicken satay or anything savory. Mostly it was pretty stanky, so I was grateful when the little morsels had been reduced to little cookies and had cooled, so I could seal them away in a plastic bag to take down to Clark and Jeffrey later.

When the Mont came home from school, I was back to work. “Hi honey,” I called out from the sofa in the den, where I was writing.

“What have you been doing?” he asked, putting down his briefcase. “Mmm. Brownies,” he said, after seeing the pan sitting on the oven. “What are these chocolate things?”

“Chocolate things?” I asked, a little muzzy-headed from making fiction.

“These.” He walked toward the den with the bag in his hand.

“They’re not chocolate,” I said.

“What are they?”

“Well, smell them,” I suggested. He opened up the bag and inhaled. Not finding anything out of the ordinary, he stuck his hand inside and, before I could stop him, popped one in his mouth and began chewing. My jaw dropped open. Barely able to contain my laughter, I said, “They’re dog biscuits.”

Oh, the look on his face. There are too few moments in life as fully satisfactory as the few seconds immediately following my announcement. I haven’t laughed so much since the Mont was mistaken for my father.

Later in the evening, when I burst into a spontaneous fit of laughter remembering it, he glared at me from the sofa. “It wasn’t as if you put dog food in them,” he complained.

He didn’t have a retort when I pointed out the obvious, however. “But you didn’t know that!”

That Shirt

The best part of a recession—and I know some of you are feeling me out there—is the sales. Desperate retailers plus desperately trying to move stock equals some really good buys, when one stumbles upon them. It was last week, when the Mont and I were window shopping our way around one of those department stores that mysteriously seems to hang on for month after month despite never having any actual customers, that we happened upon a cluster of sales racks of designer clothing that had been steeply discounted. I mean, the original prices had already been cut in half, and the store was inviting us to remove an additional eighty-five percent or more.

Unfortunately, it was also the kind of store that stocked very little in my spindly size. From the small section of the rack I plucked a shirt that normally for which I’d never fork over legal tender. In my head I rapidly did some calculations, then double-checked them on my phone’s calculator. “What do you think of this one?” I asked the Mont. “It’s a ninety-dollar Perry Ellis shirt. Now it’s six dollars.” Even my depressed wallet could afford six dollars.

He looked up, then startled back. “AIEE!” he shrieked.

I blinked a few times. Sure, the shirt was a little . . . well . . . loud, with its busy pattern of cornflower blue poppies on a bright white cotton background. Yes, it was the kind of obnoxious shirt one ordinarily sees on party boys out for a night of shots and tapas. But I liked it. “I’m buying it,” I told him, ignoring his eye-rolling.

Once home, I tried the shirt on with some jeans, and rather liked the effect. It suited me. I liked the inner lining, and the way it was made. I walked downstairs and stood in front of the Mont in the den. “How’s it look?” I asked.

He glanced up from his computer and flinched away. “Good god!” he yelled. “Don’t do that to me!”

“Oh, come on,” I chided. “It’s not that bad. Is it?”

He smiled in a conciliatory manner and said, with the utmost of sincerity, “No, it will be fine. Once you have a sweater over it.”

Butt-wipe.

Saturday night, feeling feisty, I announced, “I am wearing the shirt.”

“You’re not really,” said the Mont.

“Yes. I am.”

“Airplanes will mistake you for a landing strip.”

“I’m wearing it!”

I must have sounded determined, because he shrugged in that sort of it’s your funeral way and let me go change. I put on the shirt and looked at myself in the mirror. It fit well. It didn’t billow around the waist, the way so many slim-fitting shirts tend to. I still liked it. It was in that kind of proud and feisty mood that a couple of minutes later we pulled up in front of Clark and Jeffrey’s house down the street, to pick them up before we went to the bar. “Good evening, Clark and Jeffrey, people to whom I am speaking this evening,” I said.

There was a moment of silence as they both settled in. Then Clark said, “Oh, are you not talking to the Mont because he said something about you wearing his mother’s blouse?”

The whole, long evening was like that. My so-called friends had the bar’s owner come over and ask me if I’d like him to find a tablecloth to match my shirt, and enlisted the karaoke mistress to call me to the microphone using my drag-name-if-I-had-a-drag-name. (If you must know, it’s Pansy Pots. Because once we were driving by a garden center that had a sign advertising Pansy Pots 3 for $5, and I said, “You know, that would make a great drag name.”) By the end of the night, even my friend ‘Drew’s partner, Stee, was in on the joke. When the Mont went up to the mic and ended up soloing “Something Stupid,” on which we normally duet, I complained loud and long that ordinarily he asked me to sing with him.

“Maybe it’s the shirt,” said Stee, sounding apologetic.

I don’t care. I like the shirt. It was six dollars. Maybe there was a reason it was discounted so steeply. I’m wearing it, dammit. I'M WEARING IT ALL THE TIME.

This day cannot pass unnoticed...

Happy second birthday, Fred!

Bacteria-fest

I’ve been on a kick lately of making certain kitchen staples from scratch. First it was black beans, soaked overnight and then simmered with onions and garlic, for use in burritos and as a side dish. So much tastier than the canned ones. From that it was easy to branch out into homemade refried beans that I could make as garlicky as I pleased. Then, tired of the flat taste of the bottled stuff, I began making my own salsa. It turned out to be so delicious that I keep some on hand all the time.

My latest project, though, has been homemade yogurt. I read an article about how allegedly simple it was to make, and how it cost mere pennies in comparison to the more expensive store-bought containers, so I thought I’d brave the world of bacteria and give it a try.

I make my yogurt in a crock pot, because I don’t have to pay much attention to it that way, and it really is easy; I pour in a half-gallon of lowfat milk, heat it on low for two and a half hours, then turn it off and let it sit for another three. At that point, I mix a little gelatin in some starter culture—simply a half-cup of store-bought plain yogurt works, though I can use my own for the next batch—and blend it with the warm milk. Then I wrap a towel around the crock pot and let it sit overnight.

When I open the lid the next morning, I’m rewarded with a scent that’s tough to describe. It’s flowery, but not sweet—yeasty, but not smelling of earth. And there’s something magical to the reveal that’s actually a little bit exciting. Every single time I open the pot I look at the white surface that looks so unchanged, and think to myself, Oh crap, it’s just a pot of sour milk. Then I’ll drag a spoon through the stuff, and feel the soft, pudding-like custard resisting its pull, and know that the transformation has taken place. It’s a little bit of Hogwarts, in my own kitchen.

Cyberkitten

“Fred’s checking her email again,” is a familiar cry around our house. Ever since she was a kitten, our youngest cat has always made time to keep in touch with her friends and family over the internet. In the late afternoons when I’m done writing for the day, I’ll set down my laptop and walk away, and Fred will take over.

She’s not content to look at the screen and browse the web. No, Fred likes to put her paws on the keyboard and press as many keys as she can before hitting the return key and startling my friends with long and incomprehensible instant messages. She enjoys pressing the function key that will increase the computer’s volume and listen to the alert sound play over and over and over again at an ear-shattering intensity. She uses spotlight to search for and pull up the most obscure files lurking in forgotten corners of my hard drive. And when the lure of her email and chat buddies loses some of its luster, she’ll active the screen saver, swat at it to clear the monitor, and start all over again.

If I try to chase her away from the computer, she gets testy and complains that she’s not done and couldn’t I just give her a goddamn minute to check the auction house and pick up some gear for her night elf priest? I haven’t figured out how she’s become such a cyber-connected cat; she definitely has her own thing going on when she’s online, though. When the feds track her down for hacking, though . . . that's when I’m putting my foot down.

Rollercoaster

I’m roughly a third of the way through the third book in the Cassaforte series, currently called A Traveler to Nascenza. Today I found myself stalling over a particular scene toward the end of the first section. Originally the scene had occupied all of an entire paragraph—it was just a little incident told in passing, as my travelers vainly tried to move from one town in the countryside to the next. A blip. Yesterday I decided to expand it, although the scene isn’t mentioned in the detailed outline I originally wrote for the project. It seemed as if it would offer some unique opportunities for tension that I couldn’t pass up. And now, here I am up past midnight, dragged out of bed because when I was nearly entirely unconscious, I had the inkling of an idea of how to expand the scene even further—in fact, to make the scene the lynchpin of the entire first section. My brain insisted on poking around online researching the tenuous trail it wanted to follow, rather than sleep.

I worry about all my books, of course, but it seems as if I’m being especially fretful about this one. Particularly when I compare it to the previous entry in the series. The Buccaneer’s Apprentice is all about kidnappings! And murder! And sword fights! And explosions! And more abductions! And political plotting! And shipwrecks! And bad actors! And that’s just in the novel’s first twenty pages! (Really.)

A Traveler to Nascenza, on the other hand, is a gentler tale. It’s not about shipwrecks and pirates. It’s a story focusing on Petro Divetri, the younger brother of the protagonist of The Glass Maker’s Daughter, and it starts off gently enough at the school where he’s living. No one is taken hostage in the first five pages. No one lies in a pool of blood, early on. There’s talk of a ruined wedding—I won’t say whose—and there’s a practical joke that has serious repercussions down the line, and there’s an entire page in which two teenaged boys make terrible dirty jokes with straight faces to a nut farmer. There’s some weirdness, and some suspense, but action? Nothing like The Buccaneer’s Apprentice.

Until the second and third sections of the book, that is. Then there’s death and intrigue and explosions and blood to spare.

Every story has its own shape, I need to remember. The Buccaneer’s Apprentice is like one of those theme park rides that’s fast and wild and relentless the moment the lever’s released—a higher-speed Tilt-a-Whirl or a Loop-O-Puke that’s determined not to let you off until you’re dizzy and breathless. This story is more like a classic roller coaster. There’s the inexorable winching up, the terrible moment of sheer suspense in which you realize there’s no returning, and then the inevitable plunge down. The Glass Maker’s Daughter had much the same shape—it was all woe and teenaged moping, and then suddenly the entire city started to fall down.

I have to keep in mind that nobody likes 24 syndrome, either. That is, it’s tough for a continuing story like television’s 24 to avoid becoming wearying, because every year the pattern and the rhythm of the story is the same. Jack Bauer’s forced to save the world from some awful threat, which turns out to be not as awful as the even more awful threat no one saw coming, which is just an appetizer to the really awful threat that concludes each year. The forces he battles are like a never-ending series of nesting Russian dolls, each one bigger than the last. Now that the show’s locked into an unvarying structure, I think most viewers are pretty numb to any of the threats at all. Oh, pooh. It’s just another few hundred nuclear bombs, Jack. Yawn! No, having the freedom to vary the rhythm of a continuing story line is a good thing.

So. Tomorrow (or later today, technically) I’ll rewrite that scene yet again. Third time should be the charm. Now, if only my brain would let me sleep.

The Buccaneer's Apprentice Cover

I think this draft of the cover is loverly. Not only did they base it on the book's opening chapter, but I got to help pick the model. And yes, I'm aware the apostrophe in the title is missing, and so is the publisher.

Mini-Rant of the Day: Flip-Flops

Flip-flops. I understand the appeal, particularly in summer when, despite the evidence in Michigan that it’s going to be yet another chilly, sweater-worthy July afternoon, one is nurturing the belief that one is foot-loose and fancy-free. They take but a second to slip into. They’re inexpensive. They keep the feet cool. For the ten steps between the back door and the garbage pail when I’m on a trash run, they’re dandy. When I’m standing still in the back yard and watching Fred sniff the hostas, they’re perfectly useful.

I’ll be damned, though, if I can wear the things. First there’s the issue of appearance. My are clean and free from both carbuncles and bunions, I’m certain you’re happy to know, but does anyone really need to be seeing the enormous boats on which I walk around? Do I need to feel as if my toenails are on display, and worry about whether I’ve trimmed them any given week? No, I really don’t, and the public should be spared having to spare my prehensile digits, especially given the fact that my unthinking reflex when I drop something non-edible is to pick it up with my toes and pass it off to my hand, so I don’t have to bend over. People really don’t want to see that.

There’s a more important issue, though. How in the world do people walk in them? When this afternoon I took a half-block stroll down to the post box at the end of my block, when I wasn’t keeping my toes curled up in a little ball, resulting in a constipated gait that looked like something might have been approved by the Ministry of Silly Walks, my flip-flops were flying off my feet and onto the middles of my neighbors’ lawns. Chasing after them, picking them up (with my prehensile toes), and silly-walking back to the sidewalk took up waaaay more time than I would’ve spent putting on some real shoes, back at the house.

Ah, flip-flops. I love what you represent. I simply can’t cope with your deceptive simplicity.

She Blinded Me with Science!

Science used to be my friend, growing up. Science was the smiling, clean-cut guy in the spanking white lab coat with a humorous gleam in his eye. He put test tubes and beakers out for show, and filled them with candy-colored liquids that implicitly promised if I mixed them together very carefully, something nifty would happen, like a big puff of pink smoke, or perhaps some alchemical reaction that would leave gold. Or at least pyrite.

Science, in the picture books of my youth, was always about fixing the future. I loved the illustrations of the moon bases that were just around the corner, or of the sterile and sanitary cutaways of the human cell, neatly diagrammed and explicated in language I could understand. The universe was orderly. Classifiable. Predictable.

These days, however, it seems more as if Science is a bit of a bummer. He’s a big Gloomy Gus, the guy who hangs around parties a little too long and butts in on conversations with people he doesn’t know to remind them that he’s been ignored all evening. No one is really interested in his talk about the nifty new inventions he’s come up with—we take increasing miniaturization and convenience as a given, and hate to be reminded that we should be thankful. So deprived of that topic, he’s reduced to reminding all the guests that life is rottener than we thought.

Civilization’s inevitable demise seems to be Science’s desperate cocktail chatter, lately. When I was growing up, there was only one little way that the world could end. You know. Thermonuclear war. No biggie. Maybe a little ice age. Maybe, if the crying native American had anything to say about it, smog might choke out Los Angeles. But that was it.

These days, though, Science wants to remind us almost continuously that there are unknown asteroids out there waiting to smash into us at some unforeseen point in the future. He tickles our fears by reminding us that a massive electromagnetic storm from the sun could wipe out our infrastructures and reduce us to baboons fighting for the last can of Del Monte creamed corn. He paints horrible pictures of global warming gone amok. He tells us our bodies are messy, and that he doesn’t have all the answers about why they go wrong. Then he prompts us to remember that the universe isn’t orderly at all, what with all those black holes right near our solar system ready to gobble us whole, and if that wasn’t bad enough, why, there’s a particle collider on the other side of the world ready to create one for us, by gosh!

Mr. Apocalypse, once he’s spread his message of doom and gloom, then moves on to the next little cluster of people and comes up with an even more dire scenario to scare them pantless. He really seems to enjoy making a stir.

Oh, Science. The desperation doesn’t suit you. I liked you better in your white lab coat, and wearing those omniscient, horn-rimmed glasses. Please. Don’t let me find out you’ve been bi-polar, all along.

Why I Like School Library Journal

Briceland, V.
The Glass Maker’s Daughter
336p. Flux 2009. pap. $9.95.
ISBN 978-0-7387-1424-0. L
Gr 8 Up

In the medieval canal city of Cassaforte, all noble children between the ages of 11 and 16 are tested, once every 6 years, to determine which school they will attend to learn the enchantments that make the craft work of their families so valuable.

When 16-year-old Risa Divetri, a cazarra of one of the seven most important families, is not chosen for either school, she is convinced the gods have abandoned her. Only after those who can crown a new king are kidnapped does Risa begin to realize that the gods may have something greater in store for her after all.

Cassaforte is a beautifully drawn city of piazzas, gondolas, beauty, and magic. The rules of magic Briceland introduces are clear, and enough hints are present at the beginning of the novel to make Risa’s rise to importance natural. Though the quickly paced plot drives the narrative, Risa’s musings (and occasional bouts of temper) are never cut short. Her relationships with her parents, the glassmakers who work under her father, her treacherous uncle, and the beggar she rescues with the help of young guard Milo are well drawn.

Each of the characters has the feel of greater depth than readers are allowed through Risa’s eyes, and the romantic thread between her and Milo is subtle enough that it does not derail the narrative, but still tugs the heartstrings of romance seekers.

Readers will find much to love in The Glass Maker’s Daughter and its stubborn and strong-willed heroine.

–Alana Abbott, James Blackstone Memorial Library, Branford, CT
School Library Journal

Snark Culture

There’s a passage in Fay Weldon’s Letters to Alice on First Reading Jane Austen (a work I highly recommend, by the way) that sums up how I’ve always felt about writers and writing. Weldon’s conceit, in her letters to an imaginary niece who has sought out the novelist’s help in reading literature for the first time, is that Austen and all writers, through the Houses of the Imagination that they’ve built, book by book, have created a City of Invention. Its inhabitants inform and influence each other; its architecture is rich and multi-layered, with its own hoity-toity neighborhoods and red-light districts. Weldon writes:

Writers are privileged visitors here. They have a house or two of their own in the City, after all. Perhaps even well-thought of, and nicely maintained; or perhaps never much reckoned and falling into disrepair. But to have a house of any kind, even to have brought it only to planning stage, and have given up in despair, is to realize more fully the wonder of the City, and to know how its houses are built: to know also that though one brick may look very much like another, and all builders go about their work in much the same way, some buildings will be good, some bad. And a very few, sometimes the least suspected, will last, and not crumble with the decades. Writers, builders, good or bad, recognizing these things, are usually polite to one another, and a great deal kinder than the people who visit as outsiders.

When I ran across this passage the other day, it got me thinking about something that’s bothered me increasingly throughout the last few years. It seems to me that lately the City of Invention has been overrun with a particular breed of tourist I despise—and let me make it plain here that in the City of Invention we are all tourists, writers and readers alike. Furthermore, I believe the City of Invention includes all the entertainments that feed our dreaming, including the scripted television series we love and the movies we see.

But there’s a particular breed of visitor to the City that bothers me increasingly, of late. They’re loud and shrill, and fill the streets with shouts and catcalls. Their hoots of derision as they drive by in their souped-up jalopies block out the usual civilized, mannered conversations to which its citizens are used. It’s the internet culture of snark that’s invaded, and its celebrants make me want to flee the City for good.

The culture of snark glories in its own cleverness. Its practitioners are like the catty bullies in the middle school lunch room who gather around the exit to the cafeteria line in order to rip to shreds anyone and everyone who steps into their line of sight. One of them sights a flaw, real or imagined, and the rest dogpile onto it, attacking with fangs exposed, until the victim manages to escape. Then they all congratulate themselves. They’ve done a fine job of savagery, yes indeed. They’ve cut that one down to size. But their hunger is never satisfied, because there’s always another target to come.

It’s easy to be snarky on the internet. There’s no real investment there, often no need to associate one’s name or face to the comments one posts. All one needs is the rallying cry of snark aficionados everywhere, Is it just me, or does anyone else think. . . ? And off they go.

Reading websites visited by those who love snark culture makes clear that they believe they are doing a service the books and shows and movies they rip apart; they are convinced they’re setting things straight, and reclaiming the Houses of the Imagination that are rightfully theirs. They know exactly how to fix 24 or Battlestar Galactica. They use the word Whedonesque as a weapon, thinking they know what’s more Whedonesque than Whedon himself. And the breed has its variants, including the well-meaning crusaders anxious to whip the world into a frenzy. If someone’s written a book about which it’s possible for the crusaders to be outraged, because the author’s built the world differently than the way it is or the way the crusaders believe it should be, they gang up and demand apologies. Puffed up and superior, all of the snark lovers kick and pummel until they imagine they’ve superseded anything the original builder could say, and they move on to the next victim.

They think they’re being constructive. I even suspect they think that the time they spend polishing their knives is time spent erecting their own houses within the City, shining and admired. But they aren’t. Snark doesn’t build anything. It only attempts to erode. It’s the antithesis of the creative act. It’s graffiti of the least colorful and artistic sort, drive-by sniping that’s designed to harm. Clever-clever it may try to be, but in reality it reworks the same tired old tropes, over and over again—the cute nicknames, the attempts to pinpoint the shark-jumping, the eye-rolling, and lately, adding the suffix -fail to whatever it can. On the internet they yell and point and laugh and shrill out any real dialogue, until it all echoes so loudly in their ears that when the ringing stops, they’re convinced that everyone must think like they do.

Never does it occur to its practitioners that there’s an entire vast world outside the internet, and many of them don’t agree, or care. I get tired of hearing the din, though. It makes my head hurt. It dismays me. Because on a fundamental level, I don’t understand how or why culture’s shifted to a point where a new House of Imagination doesn’t get to earn any derision or scorn; it’s automatically entitled to it. Even before the paint’s dry and the front door is open, the graffiti is often there; the snark lovers don’t even have to visit to render judgment.

Erecting fifteen little shanties of my own along the City of Invention’s streets does not give me any more privileges than anyone else visiting, let me say. I’m a tourist too. Often I turn up my nose at what’s been built, and I’ll say so. But like Weldon points out, having a few houses of my own makes me painfully aware of how much work and love goes into building them. When I see a crowd outside one, jeering for the sake of hearing their own voices, my sympathies are always going to be with their builders. No one wants to write a script to a chorus of naysayers who believe their know one’s characters better. No one cares to spend months or years on a book at which a few people are throwing rotten fruit in the hopes that everyone will follow suit. That’s too much time and imagination spent in a life that’s already too short.

I’m aware how old-fashioned I sound, but the City of Invention is thousands of years old, and deserves respect. There’s civilized conversation. And there’s dogpiling, disguised as it may be with righteous intent. Snark culture is built on the latter, and that’s why I steer as clear from it as I can.

See the City of Invention with opened eyes. Be a builder. That's the billboard I want to erect, right on the outskirts of town for everyone to see as they drive in.

Be a builder.

The Other Runway

Bravo has thrived on making facsimiles its popular programs. When Project Runway debuted and became a hit, the network immediately capitalized with Top Chef, which was as entertaining in its own right, though slightly unfocused. From Top Chef sprung even less sharp imitators—Top Design, Shear Genius—that provided some, if not all, of the fun of the vastly superior original. Now Project Runway is moving to Lifetime, and Bravo has been stripped of its flagship property. What they’re left with is The Fashion Show, the fuzziest of all fuzzy photocopies stuck in the maws of the machine.

When I first read the press about The Fashion Show in the months before its premiere, I had gotten the impression that although it would naturally resemble Project Runway in its focus on fashion design, that the two were supposedly to be fundamentally different in some manner. I thought that the new show was going to focus more on the production of completely lines, or something, rather than a single hastily-produced garment for that week’s challenge.

Apparently I was wrong. The Fashion Show appears to have been designed from the ground up as a Project Runway clone. There are the same wacky challenges—“Design an evening gown for a socialite using only ten dollars!”—and the same inevitable episode in which the aspiring designers are asked to create clothing for women smaller than a size zero and spend an entire hour whining about it. Isaac Mizrahi pretends to be Tim Gunn and Kelly Rowland fills in for Heidi Klum. It doesn’t really work. Mizrahi knows what he’s talking about, but seems to have been instructed to copy Gunn’s patented “I’m worried!” expression whenever he visits the designers. Rowland looks pretty and enunciates exquisitely, and that’s pretty much her entire contribution.

It’s the designers who make Project Runway compelling, and here it’s the designers who make The Fashion Show such a wallow in joylessness. It’s as if designers with actual talent were somehow advised to steer clear of this street corner Gucci handbang knockoff of a show, and the casting directors were left only with Z-list designers. Not even that . . . the directors seem to have assembled the cast solely from any fast-food worker they could find who once stared off into space and thought, you know, I wish I could be a fashion designer.

If for some reason my description compels anyone to watch (please don’t let it), I’ll catch you up. There’s a bitchy black guy who’s quick with the finger waving and the head bobbing. There’s a Zoe Deschanel lookalike. There’s a pimply sylph of a fellow of pan-Asian extraction who giggles like a geisha behind his hand every time the camera turns in his direction. And then there’s a special appearance from Tingle, famed fairy from the Zelda series.



I ain’t lyin’.

Squirrel Patrol

Since her kittenhood, Fred has appointed herself as the household squirrel patrol. For the better part of the day she sits at the back door of the house, peering through the glass from behind a curtain, so she can monitor every little movement of any small creature venturing up onto the deck. Sometimes she’ll change position to the side window, propping her fat butt onto the rear sofa cushions and resting her front legs on the sill so she can twitch and chatter and watch in comfort.

Last year she became emboldened by a outdoors encounter in which she body-slammed a squirrel against a fence. I witnessed its sequel over the weekend, when I took her out into the back yard for a supervised roll in the dirt, and was appalled when the first thing she did was to spy one of her rodent enemies and chase it, at the highest speed imaginable, into the neighbor’s yard. Then, almost as quickly, she realized what she’d done, slinked guiltily back, ducked behind a stack of mulch bags, and emerged to squeeze her eyes at me and rub against my leg and attempt to convince me that everything I’d seen had been a hallucination, because she was really a sweet kitty who would never eviscerate small mammal. Unless it was really, really fat and tasty.

Then there was last night. The Mont and I were both sitting in the den at the back of the house after dinner, when Fred spied a squirrel on the roof. It thudded noisily over one of the three skylights, then hopped onto the edge of the next. Fred was fascinated. She craned her neck up to stare at the squirrel’s underbelly as it munched seeds from the maple tree. She hopped onto one of the chair, leapt to a bookshelf, and then sprang onto the top of the entertainment center—the tallest object in the room.

From the edge of the entertainment center Fred watched the squirrel for a good five minutes, until the squirrel moved forward into the last of the skylights, directly above her. I heard the Mont inhale sharply. When I looked up, I saw Fred spring into the air and heard a hollow boom as her body collided with the skylight glass. There was a terrible moment in which time seemed to freeze, like in some Warner Brothers animation in which the coyote is suspended in mid-air after chasing the roadrunner off a cliff’s edge. Fred looked down at me from nine feet in the air, eyes wide, paws extended, her face plainly saying, Uh-oh.

She fell to the ground and landed safely, though immediately she sat down, tucked her tail around her rump, and attempted to look dignified. The Mont and I looked at each other with horror, but once we realized she was fine, we started to laugh. And laugh. And laugh. We couldn’t stop, though tears were stinging the corners of my eyes. Fred tried to ignore us, but it was too late. She stalked to the door, lay down, and tried to pretend that none of it had ever happened.

Whatever, Martha!

One of the television shows I’ve been enjoying lately is a revolutionary little offering from the Fine Living Network that viciously attacks one of the country’s revered figures. It dares to question America’s blind faith in, and deference to, one of its most celebrated characters, and asks the really tough questions that not even seasoned iconoclasts dare. Questions like, why is Martha Stewart entrusting her makeup to a scary Marilyn Manson-looking clown named Peanut Butter?

I am referring, of course, to Whatever, Martha!, which is essentially Mystery Science Theater with irreverent comments directed at episodes of Martha Stewart Living instead of at bad movies. The concept, in fact, was allegedly dreamed up by Martha Stewart herself while watching a late-night episode of MST3K . . . and yes, I know that it’s virtually impossible to imagine Martha Stewart watching television, much less that show, but that’s the way this particular legend goes. Over classic clips of Martha showing her viewers how to frost cakes, pack potted plants for transport from the city apartment to the summer home, and organize your room-sized linen closest, two hosts cackle and giggle and question her fashion choices.

Jennifer Koppelman Hutt and Alexis Stewart shriek and bicker with each other like two long-term friends. While Martha does her self-assured and maddeningly competent thing, they curl up on sofas and bitch about Martha’s anal tendencies, yell at her baggy sweatshirts and ugly shorts, and whoop over Martha’s tendency to flirt shamelessly with young interns on the set. When Martha invites her personal trainer to show viewers how to do crunches, Jennifer and Alexis are the first to point out when Martha is cheating at them. On those occasions when Martha hosts a cupcake decorating party and fires off delightful animal-themed cupcakes with suspicious ease, Jennifer and Alexis stand by with frosting bags and make piles of frosting that look like cow turds. And when Martha takes up her glue gun and makes bead-encrusted candles, Jennifer and Alexis stand by with craft equipment of their own and attempt to ape her, in real time—usually to give up in frustration and howl that they’d rather buy their beaded candles at Pier 1.

Jennifer is sweet and air-headed, but it’s Alexis Stewart, Martha’s daughter, that gives the show its bite. She originally appeared on The Apprentice: Martha Stewart in the Carolyn Kepcher role, and impressed me then as being unusually level-headed without outright kowtowing to her boss. (She must have made an impression on Trump as well, because he shortly thereafter canned Carolyn and hired his own daughter to stand in her place.) Alexis is gorgeous, impossibly leggy, foul-mouthed, and outright crazy—she makes no bones about the fact that she’s on anti-depressants and keeps a squadron of analysts on her speed dial. When Martha coos about her Turkey Hill farm, Alexis is there to point out that it was a pit with no heat or doorknobs, and that her mother’s idea of parenting was to use her daughter as free labor. She will rail against her upbringing at the drop of a hat one moment, then reflexively rattle off what makes a truly exceptional caesar salad the next. She’s like Martha Stewart’s dark shadow, all uncontrolled impulse and id to Martha’s carefully regulated superego. She’s frank about the fact that she’s slept around a lot. She curses like a sailor, is abrasive, and doesn’t give a damn what anyone thinks about it. She’s also the first to laugh at what an ass she can be.

Yes, I secretly want to be Alexis Stewart when I grow up.

Whatever, Martha!, minor amusement though it might be, has a few things going for it—the not inconsiderable charms of its hosts, a chance to see that yes, other people think the same evil things as you when watching Martha Stewart in action, and the general irreverence of its concept. It’s difficult to conceive of America’s frostiest domestic empress green-lighting a show that pokes fun of herself, but it’s the one facet of Martha that I can appreciate.

Revisions, revisions

My new, cool editor contacted me yesterday wondering why I hadn’t responded to his questions about The Buccaneer’s Apprentice. The short answer? I hadn’t actually received his questions about the manuscript. In fact, I’d kind of wondered yesterday morning why I hadn’t heard from him yet.

A tense few minutes followed my response, in which I imagined everything that might be happening in the near future. Things like, Sorry, this isn’t working out, we’re canceling your contract, to Listen, this book sucks. Could you write another by the end of May?, to We like your concept and characters, but could you change the plot and setting and theme in your next draft? All bad things naturally, because lately my imagination has no room for anything else.

But no. New Cool Editor merely wanted to say that the manuscript was spot on, and that he wanted to know if I intended to insert epigraphs from imaginary books at the start of every chapter, the way that I ended up doing for The Glass Maker’s Daughter. And if I could draft up a map, of course. The only change he wanted, in fact, was a slight revamp of the first page. Other than that, he thought it was great.

Which means, of course, that I get to keep the scene in the brothel. And that the hero is essentially the adopted son of a same-sex couple. I like to think of myself as subversive in tiny little ways.

Booklist Review

A really nice review, this time from the American Library Association’s Booklist magazine:

The Glass Maker's Daughter
V. Briceland

This captivating fantasy takes place in a city rich in history and sensory detail. Cassaforte, reminiscent of medieval Venice, is protected by an ancient enchantment tying the king to the seven caza, noble families of craftsmen, by virtue of a nightly fealty rite. Missing the rite is disastrous, and when the king disappears and the prince stages a coup, imprisoning the cazzari and their heirs, everyone is in danger.

Risa Divetri, the youngest daughter of Caza Divetri, has always felt misunderstood: her glasswork is different from her family’s, and because neither god chose her during the ceremony all children of the Seven undergo, she can’t learn the Divetri’s glasswork enchantments. At first ashamed and humiliated, Risa is now the only one who can save Cassaforte, and she realizes that the gods have another fate in mind for her.

Risa is a willful, capable, and caring heroine, and her bantering relationship with a cheeky guard provides a nice touch of romance. With suspenseful plotting and a marvelous cast of characters, this is a strong addition to female-centered fantasies.

— Krista Hutley, Booklist

Locus Review

V. Briceland, The Glass Maker's Daughter

A heroic young woman saves a city in this charming young-adult fantasy. Cassaforte is a city of islands and canals, with seven noble houses, or cazas, each with a magical talent for a particular craft. Risa is a daughter of Caza Divetri, famed for its glass; she enjoys working with glass, and looks forward to going to one of the two schools that teach the children of the cazas the spells they need. But the gods fail to choose her for either school, something unheard of. Without the magic, her glasswork is unwanted, and Risa feels unwanted herself, despised as unchosen, looked down on as a mere female, and her innovative glassmaking ideas rejected. Then she becomes aware that things aren't right in the city, and finds the gods may have a special role for her, as with the help of an odd old man and a young guard she investigates an attempt to overthrow the rightful rulers of the city. --Carolyn Cushman, Locus

Yes, that's me in Locus, the science fiction and fantasy magazine, immediately next to reviews of Alan Dean Foster and Jody Lynn Nye and other people who have three names.

Your phobias are crazy. Mine are real.

Everyone’s phobias tend to look a little flimsy when exposed to reality’s harsh light. Airplanes? Bridges? They don’t really fall down that often. Clowns? Usually aren’t evil serial killers outside of sensational fiction. Meteors? They don’t usually strike just because you’ve stepped foot outside of your house for the first time in three months.

My phobia of car washes, however, is one hundred percent, unshakably, unquestionably genuine and grounded in nothing but fact.

I know, I know. It sounds silly to admit that I’m afraid of car washes, but there it is. It sounds like one of those silly little things one confesses over drinks at a party, hoping to endear oneself as a quirky oddball. But no. I genuinely am afraid of the things. I can’t drive into one to save my life.

What am I afraid of? I’ll tell you. The whole automated car wash is a Rube Goldberg contraption designed solely to reduce my car to a smoking pile of scrap iron. If I don’t align my tires perfectly with the tracks designed to grip them and run the vehicle through the tunnel of suds, if I neglect to put the gear into neutral, if I neglect to wait at the end and shift into drive before the track has let go of the car—well, it’s over, isn’t it? Not only will I induce the wrath of a dozen rag-wiping men, but my car’s wheels will fall off. It’s too much pressure, I tell you. Too much!

I also have an equally well-established phobia of oil change establishments. Frankly put, they scare the heck out of me. I know that when I drive over that pit below, where the men work, that I’m likely to swerve unexpectedly and send three thousand pounds of car crashing down blow, possibly killing someone. But while I really don’t have to wash my car, I do have to get the oil changed on occasion. So while other people rev confidently into their local Jiffylube, I’m the guy who’s creeping forward over the pit, inch by inch, while the fellow trying to guide me in impatiently beckons me forward and looks at his watch, hoping that I’ll make it inside by the time his shift is over.

So basically what I’m saying is that if you’re driving in the metropolitan Detroit area and you see someone with an impossibly dirty car, it’s probably me. But I have reasons.

Author Copies

Yesterday I sent The Buccaneer’s Apprentice off to my editor. Usually by this point in the creative process I’m sick of the book. Not so with the tale of Nic and his friends. That book was a joy to write.

And yesterday, by some kind of weird, fluky chance, I got my author copies of The Glass Maker’s Daughter. It’s a beautiful-looking edition. The cover’s gorgeous. The map is amazing, on the page. It’s a pleasure to hold and to look at.

When I wrote the acknowledgements to The Glass Maker’s Daughter, I dedicated the book to one of my former college professors. I studied playwriting with Dr. Louis Catron at the College of William and Mary for a solid year. His classes were rigidly structured; we wrote a couple of one-act plays per semester, and revised each play three times. Many of the best hours I spent in college were in Dr. Catron’s warm and airless little office, listening to other students read their plays, or reading mine while they closed their eyes and tried to imagine my words on the stage. My belief in the revision process comes almost entirely from the things he taught me. There were times, for example, that the third draft of a play was almost entirely unrecognizable from its original conception—and that can be a good thing. From him I learned that it’s possible and sometimes even desirable to lose entire chunks of text, or even pages and pages, in order to get to the important parts.

Naturally, after my handsome acknowledgements, I wanted to give him a copy of the book. But it’s been twenty-five years, and his website hasn’t been updated in a dog’s age, and I’d known he’d retired a long time ago. I knew I should call and try to find out his current address. In my head, though, I feared doing it. I could’ve made the call months ago, but dragged my feet. What I dreaded, actually, was that I’d ring up the department and have them say, “What kind of former student are you? Didn’t you know he died back in 1993?”

This morning I finally forced myself to call. And luckily, the scenario didn’t play out that way. The fellow who answered the Theatre Department’s phone was very helpful, and offered to forward on the book. Problem solved.

I need to fret less, and do more.

In the third person

One of the reasons I enjoy writing in the first person is that it allows me to leap into a story feet-first with a clear voice. A first-person narrative seems immediate. It can be as personal as a long letter from an old friend, and as intimate as listening to someone talk about his life late at night, while you lie side by side on a mattress on a hot night. There’s no mistaking what’s to come when one encounters a first-person narrative like this:

“If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you’ll probably want to know is where I was born, and what my lousy childhood was like, and how my parents were occupied and all before they had me, and all that David Copperfield kind of crap, but I don’t feel like going into it, if you want to know the truth.”

All of Holden Caulfield’s disaffection with his life, his jadedness, his education, his precociousness—it’s all there in that lazy conjunction of strung-together phrases that opens the book. Whether or not you like him is a different matter. He’s laying it all out as plainly as possible, in the most intimate narrative manner possible.

What many new writers don’t often realize is that third-person chronicles have their own voices as well. The narrator is usually unnamed. He or she rarely appears as a character in the story. It’s therefore easy to assume that all third-person stories are much the same, dispassionately relating a tale without intruding.

This narrator, from For Whom the Bell Tolls, keeps his distance on the book’s first page.

“He lay flat on the brown, pine-needled floor of the forest, his chin on his folded arms, and high overhead the wind blew in the tops of the pine trees.”

There’s so much distance, in fact, that the reader doesn’t even learn the name of the ‘he’ until four pages later. What we have is a flat description of place and action. It couldn’t be more different from another famous first line, from Pride & Prejudice:

“It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.”

Both Hemingway and Austen employ the third person. Austen’s narrator is blatantly cheeky, though, forthright about both her own prejudices and those of her era, and as chock-full of personality as Hemingway’s is carefully devoid of it. You might hire Hemingway’s narrator for a reporting job, but Austen’s is the one you want gossiping next to you at a party.

One of the difficulties I originally had when I started The Buccaneer’s Apprentice was that I couldn’t get the narrative to flow. Using the third person seemed to impede my progress, rather than help me make any. After a couple of abortive pages, I had to stop and do a little exercise. I closed my eyes and tried to picture my narrator—to make him an actual person, rather than a simple device. I settled on the image of a crusty old mariner with weathered skin, surrounded by curious listeners. He carried a pipe, plenty of tobacco, and had nothing but time on his hands to share his tale. He would have a tendency to be garrulous, omniscient, and utterly in control of how he spun his story.

Once I abandoned my initial start and let him start talking, the story started to flow. And flow. His voice carried me through the book’s tougher-to-write stretches. I let him dictate the story’s pace. The decisions of what scenes to portray or elide were his. He’s a strong personality, and as a result, the narration is confident and vigorous.

Like any good narrator, my crusty old mariner might not have played an actual role in the novel’s action. He might be invisible to most readers. But he’s as important a character as any of the protagonists.

The Oracle

I’m always surprised to relearn that the process of writing a novel’s first draft, for me, is more like channeling than anything else. I can’t describe it save in supernatural terms—it’s like speaking in tongues, or acting as medium for a seance. I sit down for a couple of hours at a time and begin typing, slowly and painfully at first. Gradually my conscious mind recedes, and I fall into a trance-like state in which I’m typing away. Then I realize my self-appointed time has elapsed, and that the manuscript has somehow accumulated another five or ten pages.

The Buccaneer’s Apprentice is my fifteenth published book. You’d think by now I’d know my own process.

But no. Yesterday I was reviewing in my head one of the last few scenes left to write. I paused a moment to consider how well one of the plot’s conceits turned out—that its hero assumes the identity and mannerisms of a minor character who disappears early in the book. Oh yes, agreed part of my brain. The editorial part, perhaps. That was my contribution. It seemed a shame to have that character vanish and be disconnected from the rest of the story, so I suggested he return in this way. Didn’t it work out well? Oh, and you know what also really worked, that I contributed? said my brain. That thing with the origami boats. You know the bit.

I did know the bit. It did fit nicely, and it hadn’t been part of the book’s original conception. I settled down, quite happy to realize I’d contributed two little things to what I am thinking is a very good novel.

Then I realized, hey, wait a minute. I wrote the two hundred and eighty-odd pages. I made a lot more contributions to it than just those two elements!

It’s amazing how big the disconnect is between the editor-writer in me and the mystical oracle who drafts the pages. The former is alert and conscious and sees the book’s structure from a more clinical aspect. The latter communes with the ether and produces page after page of automatic writing of which my consciousness has no memory.

Apparently the oracle’s tendency to ban the editor from the room when he’s communing with the muses has created quite the schism between them. Maybe when I give the editor free reign next week and send the oracle back to whatever hippie commune he lives in, they’ll gain a little parity.

Body count

Last night, for the first time in three months, I didn’t fall asleep while reviewing in my head the chapter I was going to write the next day. That’s because yesterday afternoon I finished my big, sprawling draft of The Buccaneer’s Apprentice. Well. Everything except for a tiny little epilogue that I’ll write after I’ve completed the revisions.

I think this novel has the highest body count of any book I’ve written. I killed off:

- Sixteen Frenchified warships carrying approximately 200 sailors apiece;
- Around twelve of the hero’s former masters;
- One ambassador;
- One French assassin;
- One small merchant ship’s captain and his ten or so crew; and
- Four mean pirates who really deserved it.

And the last two items are during the first two chapters alone.

So yes, it’s somewhat less than the average one-hour episode of 24, and yet more than The Glass Maker’s Daughter, which I think had a single death in it. No! Two! I’d forgotten one of them.

In both novels there are probably civilian casualties while the city is under siege, but they’re not discussed, really. It might be interesting to address the issue in the third book in the series, A Traveler to Nascenza.

Into the Breach

I’ve been a bad journal-keeper lately. I’m trying to finish the manuscript for the sequel to The Glass Maker’s Daughter, which currently is titled The Buccaneer’s Apprentice. The book’s reached that point where everything is avalanching into completion. But yesterday a curious thing happened.

The Glass Maker’s Daughter takes place entirely within an imaginary city very much like pseudo-Renaissance Venice. Its main character is part of that culture’s aristocracy; the story takes place very much the city’s largest estates and in its palace. Then there are a few detours to a couple of seedy spots, giving the heroine an awareness for the first time that there are indeed a number of indigents within her city’s walls who are as vital to its future as she. The Buccaneer’s Apprentice focuses on those people. Its protagonist is a poor kid who, thanks to Cassaforte’s draconian system of work-debt, has spent all his life as an indentured servant of one sort or another. He’s only just managed to escape the worst of them and to obtain a spot as servant to a really poor (in every sense of the word) troupe of traveling actors, when the ship on which they’re sailing is attacked by pirates—who are part of a political intrigue that threatens Cassaforte itself. By the end of chapter two, the actors are taken for slaves, the ship is sunk, and poor Nic is left to fend for himself on a deserted island.

The book’s story is how, after so many years of being owned and directed, Nic manages to come into his own independence. It’s about how he manages to bluff and scrape his way home, collecting allies as he does, and how he defends a country that admittedly hasn’t given him any of the advantages boasted by the heroine of The Glass Maker’s Daughter. It’s also about how living on society’s margins have given him an insight and flexibility that the more aristocratic classes might not have.

Anyway. Yesterday I had a fairly straight-forward scene to finish in which Nic and his allies, having made their way to a seedy shipping port before sailing for Cassaforte, had to find a used-boat salesman. They’d been given the address of a tavern where the guy was hanging out, and they’d made their way through the city’s dirty streets while avoiding drunkards, beggars, and buckets of muck being slopped from upper story windows, when suddenly they all balked, en masse. “He’s not in there,” they told me, nodding at the tavern I’d picked out for the scene. It was a nice, smelly tavern, too. “He’s in that place.” They pointed to the doorway across the street.

“But that’s a whorehouse,” I told them. “See? I just wrote a little sentence about the buxom woman sticking her head out of the window and flirting with them. Did you see how she jiggled her breasts? That's because she’s kind of a hooker.”

“He’s in there,” said Nic and company. They crossed their arms.

“You heard me say it’s a whorehouse, didn’t you?” They all nodded at my question. “Are you sure? Tavern? Drinks? I could put in a bawdy tavern wench.”

“You already had a tavern scene,” Nic said. “Chapter four. Remember? When I get traded in a card game? Do you really want to repeat yourself?”

“Yeah,” said the blue-face pirate who had accompanied him throughout most of the book. “I’d like the whorehouse, too. I'm adult. It's been a while.”

“Is a whorehouse even appropriate for a young adult book?” I asked.

They were already stomping ahead of me. “Your editor will love it,” they called back.

So before I really knew what was happening, my characters barged through the whorehouse, looking around with wide-eyed wonderment, giving each other advice on how to behave (and not to kiss the women with sores on their lips), sniffing with disapproval, and generally having the time of their lives as they hunted down the used-boat salesman for ten pages.

They do that sometimes, one’s characters. Sometimes their rationales for running amok aren’t very well justified. At other times, though, they have the right instincts. I think they did, here. Any town can have a seedy tavern. In a port town catering to adventurers and freebooters, however, a nice, grimy whorehouse really can set the mood, plus it gives one’s cast a chance to sound off and show themselves for what they really are—prudes, libertines, or something in between.

The Show that I No Longer Understand

Whenever I watch Lost these days, the experience is a little something like this:

KATE: They can’t take my son!
HUGO: Where are the Fritos, dude?
BEN: We have to go back to the island.
CHARLOTTE: I have a headache.
DANIEL: How is your headache?
CHARLOTTE: I still have a headache. Why are you looking at me like that? Do you know what’s happening to me?
DANIEL: Yes. I mean, nuh-uh.
SAWYER: Watch out for the flaming arrows!

Then, as it cuts to a commercial, I’ll sigh and say, “I don’t understand this show.”

“Me neither,” the Mont will reply. Then we’re into the plot again.

BEN: We have to go back to the island.
RANDOM WOMAN FROM TWO SEASONS AGO: They have to go back to the island.
LOCKE: They have to come back to the island.
DESMOND: This has something to do with the island.
SOME CHICK ON A BOAT: I don’t want you to go back to the island.
HUGO: Dude, where are the Hot Pockets?
DANIEL: How is your headache?
CHARLOTTE: Wow, my head hurts. Why . . . why are you looking at me like that? Do you know something?
DANIEL: I am doing my best to convince you that the nosebleed you get every time the island transports itself through time and space has absolutely nothing to do with anything and is probably just a case of the sniffles, while I wrinkle my eyebrows in obvious worry, and this is how you repay me? With questions, woman?
CHARLOTTE: I can see in your eyes you know something.
DANIEL: Oh, that. It’s probably just a sty.
SAWYER: Duck! It’s a nuclear bomb!

Another commercial. “I don’t understand this show,” I’ll murmur.

And I really haven’t understood Lost at all for the last three seasons. Week after week I watch it, through shocking revelation after shocking revelation, and though I have a vague grasp of the plot—I think it has something to do with them needing to go back to the island—I honestly couldn’t summarize in a succinct way where the show has been or where it might be going.

There are frustrations. I get a little bit baffled at how characters who weren’t introduced until last season are allowed to carry so much of the story now, while good characters like Juliet get to tromp around in the background with an air of “What the hell. I don’t know what’s going on, either.” A lot of the show’s mythology has gotten so complicated that it takes a flow chart or a real Lost-o-phile to get any of the nuances. Flaming arrows, nuclear weapons, time travel, hidden relationships, mysterious figures . . . Lost is so chock-a-block with them that I feel a little bit desensitized when the Next Really Important Thing happens. Explosions? Groovy, but I’ve seen them before. Strangers with guns? Oh, that’s so Season Two. Secret Dharma Initiative installations? Well duh!

I no longer understand the show. But I let it all wash over me and don’t worry about making sense of it all. It’s an enjoyable enough ride, so long as I don’t examine too closely what makes it go.