HE WROTE: Agnes, A Storm, Books on Writing, Agents

Amidst everything, we are still writing Agnes. Yesterday I worked backwards. I was kind of stuck, so I started with the climactic scene, and, like the famous Seinfeld episode of the wedding in India, I went backward in time. I kept going: And prior to that . . ..

I worked all the way back to where I was stuck. Through the darkest moments for Agnes and Shane. Of course, this was not easy. Gave me a headache. This morning I took this rough outline I made backward yesterday and cut and past the paragraphs in reverse order and, voila, I have an outline in correct order. Now I just have to get rid of the 'And prior to that' lines.

It's raining here, but the storm is passing far off-shore. Wasn't even worth bringing the kayak in from the floating dock.

There's a book getting a lot of reviews-- Sunday in the NY Times and today in USA Today-- for writers titled READING LIKE A WRITER. Which is good advice. I also advise writing like a reader. One point the author, Francine Prose (interesting name), makes is that "one difficulty faced by writing teachers is the lack of interest many students show in reading." This is very true. She also says you should 'savor' books rather than race through them. I know I read slower now than I used to. Maybe because I appreciate that every word, every sentence, in the book is important, so I focus on everything.

There was an articule in the Aug 28 USA Today about another book: THE CREATING BRAIN. I liked one question: What is the relationship between creativity and mental illness? The author studied people attending the Univ. of Iowa's Writers' Workshop and found many had a history of depression or bipolar disorder. (Bob chuckles evilly). Then the author gives some suggestion to 'give your brain a workout.' One was: 'Spend time each day thinking.' Huh? That one is deep. Actually, I make mock, but the truth is most people don't think. That's why creative writers are kind of bonkers. Every day you're trying to create something completely new. Very few jobs require that.

So I am still holding to my 9 September deadline of giving Jenny the draft of Agnes with my parts done. This is in the midst of other stuff going on, but no rest for the wicked or the crazy. I'm still rewriting CHASING THE DEAD and really cutting, paring it down to focus on the character. I'm cutting every line that makes me the slightest bit uncomfortable.

Did anyone see the season finale of ENTOURAGE the other night? I thought it was a really good reflection on agents and the 'corporate' mentality that has afflicted Hollywood. One thing that is really causing problems there and is seeping into New York is the clash between the corporate mindset and the artist mindset. I think that's where an agent is really the key. The agent has to bridge that gap. I think the episode did a good job of showing what is meant by that. The artist often is very emotional, while the corporate mentality is very logical. The agent has to be able to handle both very well. For example, an agent has to be able to tell a writer bad news, yet make the writer feel positive about it. But that also means the agent has to pick clients they'll know can take bad news and make positive spin out of it. There's a synergy involved. More on this in the future.

SHE WROTE: Heidi's DLD 3: Wonder Woman

Bob is not worried about the hurricane. He says it's only a tropical storm and it's still over Florida. However, he is bringing in the kayak, so that tells you he's taking it seriously.

And now back to Heidi's Don't Look Down and page 3 which is Wonder Woman. I have no idea where Wonder Woman came from, although I'm fairly sure Corrina Lavitt had something to do with it since she's my source for all things comic/graphic novel. I know it was Alex Ross's version of Wonder Woman that I collated with Lucy Lawless for Lucy, and it was definitely the Ross action figure that shows up in the book. And then there's the rope. And the blue background with stars, that's a big motif, the starry sky and the stars on the underwear and the whole fighting for America thing.



But there's other stuff going on in there. I did a lot of Wonder Woman research--there's a twisted action hero for you--and talk about somebody who shifted with the times and got a lot of male fantasy and anger reflected onto her. That woman's going to be in therapy for eternity; hell, the costume alone is good for years of primal scream. Mostly she just turned out to be a really good analogy for Lucy, an avatar if you will. Plus, there's Wonder Woman's thing for military guys which worked out nicely for J.T. And Superman. The whole motif just kept getting better, the more I worked with it. Sometimes things turn up and you just run with them.

The same thing's happening in Agnes with the flamingos and the anger therapy and the cake. They turned up at different times and I thought, "Well, okay," and folded them into the mix and now they keep revolving around. It's sort of like folding something into cake batter (to keep the cake motif going). You drop something fairly small in, like a half a cup of cranberries into a huge bowl of pound cake batter, and then you stir, and all of a sudden, these little pink berries are popping up, spread throughout, not obnoxious, it's still mostly pound cake, but they're just quietly everywhere. That's when you know you have a motif. When there's a cranberry waving at you at regular intervals.

Anyway, Wonder Woman. Huge motif in Don't Look Down. I miss her. But I have the action figure on my shelf to remind me. Next to the poker-playing clams.

HE WROTE: Heidi's DLD 2: The Swamp

Originally, the book was going to be set in Cincinatti. Somehow it ended up in South Carolina. With a lot of the action happening in a swamp.

The reason for this was that I wrote a lot of the action and I have to 'walk the terrain' when I write action. On the right side you have Tyler, the sniper, whose infamous opening lin was "In the darkness there is death." Which somehow got cut. But is now in my book LOST GIRLS which will be out next year from Tor.

On the left you have Pepper. With her binoculars. She didn't have the binoculars originally. One of the problems we had with Tyler was that he was too remote, too removed from the the rest of the characters because, well, he was in the damn swamp. O by giving Pepper the binoculars, we gave him a contact with someone.

Then there are the ding-dongs which Bryce kept throwing to Moot to feed her. I ended up getting a lot of ding-dongs on the book tour.

I'm not sure if there is a shell circle there as I can't see the detail, but there is a shell circle here on the barrier island I live on. And it is a neat place. You can actually something there. It's the first place where JT and Lucy 'do it'. And there were no mosquitoes. Although, interestingly, in AGNES, there seem to be one or two buzzing around.

So these pages are really the main setting of the book, which is critical to any novel.

SHE WROTE: Heidi's DLD 1: Title Page

Well, Heidi pretty much put it all on the first page. You open the book and get Bob and Gary Cooper (that's redundant) and a 3D helicopter with a thick gold rope and then Wonder Woman and me and in the middle Moot and Pepper. But she's got some great stuff sprinkled in, too, like a bottle cap labeled "Adventure" (Adventure Beer, maybe?)glued on top of a piece of cloth with the definition of romance printed on it and a button that says "TEAMWORK/TRUST." Basically, she's got the whole book right there.

You know, when we were writing it, we couldn't have done that, summarized it into a double page spread like that. I don't think we could do it now for Agnes. Oh, there'd be a frying pan and a flamingo for sure, and a bloodhound, but not the essence of the book the way Heidi distilled Don't Look Down here because it isn't just the things that we know are important in the book, it's the things that readers respond to. Every book really is a collaboration; whatever we write, you take to the next level because you make it your story, you make the characters yours, you write into the white spaces what happens behind the scenes, what the characters sound like, look like, think about in the scenes that aren't their POV scenes. It's the reasons movies made from books are so often a disappointment; the moviemakers are filming their collaborationi with the writer, not yours.

And this is the first page of Heidi's collaboration. Gotta love that bottle cap.

SHE WROTE: Heidi's Altered DLD

About a million years ago, give or take four months, Heidi Cullinan came to our booksigning in Kansas City and gave us a gorgeous Don't Look Down altered book. An altered book, according to the International Society of Altered Book Artists, is "any book, old or new that has been recycled by creative means into a work of art. They can be ... rebound, painted, cut, burned, folded, added to, collaged in, gold-leafed, rubber stamped, drilled or otherwise adorned ..."

The first altered book I ever saw was one of Susan Elizabeth Phillip's that Pokey Bolton--also known at the editor of Quilting Arts magazine and Cloth, Paper, Scissors--had made for her. Pokey showed it to me at RWA National and said anxiously, "Do you think SEP will be offended?" I said, "Are you out of your mind? She'll adore it." Which of course, she did.

Fast forward to Kansas City and Heidi who gave us the Don't Look Down masterpiece which I ripped out of Bob's hands and brought home with me, wrapped carefully, put in a safe place, and promptly lost. Well, not lost, it was in that safe place, which I found when I finished cleaning my office and moved the last of the boxes away from my bookshelves. The book was still neatly packed away in a safe box where no dust or dirt could settle on it, no animal could use it for a chew toy, and, of course, no camera could record it. Argh.

But today it got recorded, and as I photographed each page I remembered that part of the story all over again. This is going to sound like a major justification, but I'm glad I put the book on the shelf and just found it now because now all the shouting and the bustle is over and we can take time to look at what Heidi did and remember what it was like writing the book. So for the next week or two it's going to be memory lane time. And for those of you who are waiting for the paperback, consider this your spoiler alert.

Here's the cover. I'm loving the beads:

SHE WROTE: The Years Have Been Jam-Packed

We just had an anniversary.

Last year I got all soppy about it. "It's our anniversary," I said. "We've been writing together an entire year. Isn't that amazing?"

"What?" he said.

I took the little umbrella out of his ear. (We were in Maui.) "It's our anniversary today. We've been writing together for a year. Did you ever think we'd make it this long?"

"I don't think we should set Agnes in Cincinnati," he said. "The South is better."

So this year I e-mailed him (a day late, just to see if he'd remember, he didn't):
"You asked me to collaborate with you two years ago yesterday. Happy anniversary."

He e-mailed back:
"You, too. We've got too much stuff here. The AC and the generator. Maybe it should be one or the other. Plus you want the tv. Let's see. The first thing on her list would be a generator since her power keeps going out because that would really [expletive deleted] up the wedding, right? So I think that's the first thing he gets on Wed. Thursday he can do the AC after they sweat a lot boinking."



Happy anniversary, Bob, you sentimental fool.

HE WROTE: On Publishing And Critiquing.

I’ve done several critiques recently of cover letters, synopses, and excerpts of manuscripts. I’ve also critiqued my own CHASING THE DEAD and had it critiqued by my primary reader. First thing about critiques: you’ve got to be willing to accept feedback. CHASING was written originally over twelve years ago. So some of the writing is, uh, old? And not very good. It was also written in first person and now is in third person. What I’ve learned in changing from first to third is you initially go to third omniscient, not third limited. Lots of info-dump. Lots of over-view. Which has to be cut. So when my reader came in and said: “Love the character, love the plot, but the book is un-sellable as is” I had to do some serious re-evaluating of what I had. And I realized that I had to re-write those old scenes that were over-views. Make them sharper, more third limited, than third omniscient, put conflict in them, and cut a lot of the info-dump. I had to punch up a supporting character, cut a lot of ‘thinking’ and add more dialogue. Basically, the hardest thing I had to do, was do all the things I pontificate about when I teach, and apply them in my own manuscript.

In doing my submission critiques for other people, I constantly get asked: what are agents and editors looking for? How do you stand out, how does a new writer get published? Well, they’re looking for the same things readers are looking for: interesting and intriguing characters in interesting and intriguing situations. I just finished the second season of DEADWOOD and really enjoyed watching it. Why? The same reason. The characters had depth to them. They weren’t one-sided. The ‘hero’ had a flaw. The ‘bad guy’ had a soft spot. There was love, brutality, intrigue, double-crosses, manipulations, surprises, but most of all: conflict. The setting was unique: a town with no law. Every character thought the story was about them. People make mistakes. No one’s perfect.

What I recommend doing is watching movies or TV series on DVD and listening to the commentaries. I think most people will be shocked at the amount of discussion and detail that goes into every little thing. How writers and directors and actors all focus on little details and what they mean and most of all they focus on the emotional effect.

It’s the same when watching INSIDE THE ACTOR’S STUDIO. Where you learn how there was a large degree of luck involved, but also the years and years of hard work involved.

I’ve got all the emails of Jenny’s ‘patterns’ printed out and am pulling pieces and parts from them and trying to fit them into a linear outline for Acts Three and Four of AGNES. Along with notes for what I have to rewrite for Acts One and Two. Jenny also just emailed me how she would like the climactic scene of the book to go. Considering I’m still outlining Act Three that’s very nice of her. I told her I would have my part of the entire book done by 9 September. We shall see.

SHE WROTE: Death & Cake

As Bob presses on with Acts Three and Four in which Shane gets closer to the Big Bad and kills more people, I press on with Act Two in which Agnes decorates two wedding cakes. Well, somebody has to. And really, the way Agnes is decorating these two cakes is an act of aggression against her Big Bad so she's being violent, too, in her own way. So I'm studying up on fondant and royal icing and cake construction--yes, I'm watching Ace of Cakes, isn't everybody?--and Bob is doing no research at all for killing people. Once again, life is unfair.

I am also bouncing all over the plot. I've told Bob what happens to Agnes at the third turning point and given him half a dozen scenes for her there, even though I don't know the scene progression for her for Act Three yet. I also know what happens right before the end of the book at the end of Act Four because it's part of a pattern I can see in the book as it shapes up in my mind. Bob doesn't do patterns. Bob does straight lines. My patterns used to screw up his straight lines, but now he just sighs and says, "Bring it on, I can make anything work." He was busy with family stuff all weekend so things piled up and now he has a stack of e-mails from me, some of them multi-paragraph which he hates and some of them only a couple of words, but all of them on Agnes and her plot, talking about patterns or details (two of his least favorite words) none of it linear, and what he really needs is what Agnes does in Act Two.

Well, she's really concerned about these wedding cakes, Bob.

Wait'll he finds out that the next plot point is the wedding dress. But it's going to be okay. Shane can pick up the stuff Agnes needs for her cakes when he goes to Savannah to beat up the Tootaloo brothers and then drive Rocko to the swamp to see Moot. As long as he doesn't get blood on her fondant, Agnes will never know.

Which is how she prefers it.

HE WROTE: What’s In A Name?

I’ve always found I have to think long and hard about character names in a book. I just don’t grab them out of the air. They have to ‘fit’ the character. This is true in books and movies and tv. A good example is the series I’m now about at the end of Season Two in: DEADWOOD. Some of the names almost seem over the top: Swearingen. Who swears a lot. Then you have the sheriff: Bullock. Think what the combination is there. Then the whore: Trixie. Lots of thought went into that one. But you have Swearingen’s first name, Al and Mrs. Garrett’s first name, Alma, and how the two of them end up being the powers in the town. Do you think that’s coincidence? Nothing in a book or movie is done by coincidence.

I always say THE SOPRANOS is I, CLAUDIUS done in the Jersey mob. Remember what the name of the grandmother in Sopranos was? Livia. Do you think that was by chance?

We have to change a name in AGNES. Right now Shane’s handler’s name is Wilson. Jenny wanted that because of the name Tom Hanks gave the volleyball in CASTAWAY. Ask her. I don’t know. But the problem is Jenny has never seen or read SHANE (just as she never saw HIGH NOON for DLD). In SHANE, the name of the hired gunslinger Shane has to face down at the end is named Wilson. So we can’t have his handler have that name. Too confusing.

I’m also getting confused, sometimes mixing Shane and Chase, as I work on the two books. I’ve also tried using Angelina for three different characters in AGNES and I don’t know what’s going on there.

Meanwhile, we’re discussing having Agnes arrested for murder. Which would definitely put a crimp on her putting on the wedding. Part of escalating conflict. I think I’m reprieving Rocko from Moot, although that doesn’t necessarily mean a reprieve over-all. And lots of frying pans with blood on them.

The body count is currently at four. Or five.

SHE WROTE: Degree of Masters

Don't you people have school supplies to buy or something? I haven't been reading the comments but you're at 309. You're going to break Blogger.

Bob and I are working. Here's e-mail proof (with key words Xed out as usual):

BOB:
Ok-- let me rewrite the Rocko scene and send it to you tomorrow.
I think what I'll do if I have any rewriting is just do scenes and send them to you since you have the masters of both acts.
This is starting to come together for me. I was too focused on the X as you noticed. Shane's TP is just before it with X.
Agnes's might be right after.

JENNY:
Do you want the masters back? Because I'm writing off them, not in them.

BOB:
Nope. All yours.
I'm moving forward.
I'll send you scenes if I do any rewriting.

JENNY:
So I am Master of Our Domain.

BOB:
The Act One and Two Domain.
I am Master of Domain Three and Four.


That's it. That and the sound of two keyboards clicking. There's nothing to see here so move it along. Go talk to your kids about not smoking. Buy hand sanitizer and tennis balls and book covers and kleenex. Tell them how hard you had it when you were in school and there weren't any pudding packs or iPods. Go on.

We're writin' a book here.

SHE WROTE: Random Thoughts

Still typing, so random thoughts:

It must be getting closer to fall. The first walnut just fell on my roof. It's going to sound like the house is under bombardment for a while now. May be time to call in Louis the Tree Guy.

Monty Python: I think the first time I ever saw Bob smile was at Spamalot when Arthur proposed to the Lady of the Lake and she said, "Let me think. Yes," and ripped off her dress. But we also do our fair share of "Not dead yet" and "Always look on the bright side of life." Which come to think of it were also in Spamalot. That was kind of the Greatest Hits, wasn't it?

Crispin: I have all his mysteries but my fave is probably Glimpses of the Moon (the last book which he wrote fifteen years after the rest) if only for this:
"Here he paused by the mirror, from which, not unexpectedly his own face looked out at him. In the fifteen years since his last appearance, he appear to have changed very little. Peering at his image now, he saw the same tall lean body, the same ruddy, scrubbed-looking, clean-shaved face, the same blue eyes, the same brown hair ineffectually plastered down with water, so that it stood up in a spike at the crown of his head. Somewhere or other he still had his extraordinary hat. Good. At this rate, he felt, he might even live to see the day when novelists described their characters by some other device that that of manoeuvering them into examining themselves in mirrors."

Every time I see a writer describe a character by having her look at herself in a mirror, I want to send her Glimpses of the Moon. You really just can't after you read that.

Oh, and I now have both Acts One and Two since Bob sent One stumbling back across the bridge to me last night. I've fed them both hearty meals, wrapped them in wool blankets, and diagrammed them on graph paper, looking for Agnes's arc. I am, as Bob screams, circling the plot, going around and around in larger circles as I look for patterns. Actually, Bob's not screaming at all, he's being very patient and I should give him all kinds of credit for that.

And now I have to go finish my notes to him so that he knows what the hell Agnes is doing in Act Two so he can move forward. Or maybe he should just sit on his dock for awhile. He was sounding fried yesterday. Do not harass the GAM today, grasshoppers. He needs what peace there may be in silence.

So he can shoot at the pleasure boats that bespoil his nice intercoastal.

HE WROTE: Prisoner Exchange

Jenny and I, her and I, just swapped Acts One and Two of Agnes. It was like a prisoner exchange. We stood at either end of a long bridge in the middle of the night, fog swirling. Then we sent the Acts stumbling forward, blind-folded across the bridge past each other.

So now I have to read Act One and she has to read Act Two. Then we each write up our comments and questions and exchange those tomorrow. Then iron things out. Then I rewrite One and send it back to her. Then she does the same with Two. Then I restructure the plot, then she writes in Agnes' scenes in Two while I move forward into Three. At least that's the theory.

And Moot did a bad, bad thing in Act Two. No, she didn't eat Princess. But poor Rocko. As Shane thinks as he drives back to Wilkes: They don't make 'em like Rocko any more.

And Princess will be re-appearing in Act Three.

Meanwhile on Chasing the Dead I'm rewriting the opening scene and also adjusting Chase's back-story. The work is never done.

HE WROTE: It’s a Marathon

Written on Wednesday:
Writing a novel is like running a marathon. I used to run those things back when I was younger. Actually ran Boston a couple of times. Anyway, you’re not going to finish a novel in a day. Or a couple of days. It’s a long haul.

The key is to work at it all the time. You work in increments. A little bit at a time, all the time, gets you there.

One of the questions that constantly comes up is “what is your work day like as a writer?” There are some writers who follow rigid schedules. X number of pages every day. I don’t do that, but I guess I do follow a pretty rigid schedule of working pretty much every day. I’m thinking in November of taking maybe a day or two off if AGNES is in with no major rewrites required, CHASING is on the market, or even better sold, and nothing else unexpected comes up. But something always comes up. Right now on my desk I have the notes for Agnes (two spreadsheets: the story grid and a week calendar along with numerous emails); a printout of CHASING THE DEAD where I just did a rewrite of a couple of key scenes today to tighten down the plot and printed those scenes out; and the galleys for a book coming out next year that I have to get back soon to the publisher (I hate reading galleys). On Jenny’s own blog, she mentions all the books she’s working on. It starts to pile up after a while. Not that we’re complaining. We love what we do.

So I started working on Agnes at 7:30 this morning and it’s 7:30 in the evening now. In between I did go for a bike ride. But other than that, I’ve been at my desk pretty much the entire time. Nibbling away. Well, ok, I went over and laid down for about a half hour trying to figure out who they would suspect was sending the first hit man to whack Agnes. Not who was actually sending the hit man, mind you, but who they (Shane and Joey the Gent and Carpenter) would think was sending the hit man. That’s when you really start getting headaches, when you have to get into the mind of your characters and figure out what they’re thinking and feeling.

Written on Friday-- aka Today:
I watched the first two episodes of Season One: DEADWOOD last night, because I’d heard it was a good series and I watched some of a current season episode last week and I was sufficiently intrigued and confused that I knew I had to start at the beginning. Buffy it aint. I told Jenny she wouldn’t like it. I just went and rented episodes Three through Seven for my weekend entertainment in between writing Agnes. I knew Deadwood was going to be wicked from the opening scene when the sheriff hangs the man and helps him die by grabbing his legs and pulling down on them to help break his neck. Yep. Larry McMurtry would write something like that. Which reminds me of MAN ON FIRE with Denzel Washington which I watched again the other night, which is sort of a movie for ex-SF guys, like Roland the Headless Thompson Gunner by Warren Zevon was our song. I love the scene where Christopher Walken is explaining Creasy (Denzel) and he says: “A man can be an artist... in anything, food, whatever. It depends on how good he is at it. Creasey's art is death. He's about to paint his masterpiece.” And then Creasy goes out and does it. Or one of his targets begs for a last wish and he answers: “I wish you had more time.” And kills him. Ok. See, that gets me in the mood to write Shane meeting the infamous Tootaloo brothers in Savannah trying to find out who put the contract out on Agnes. Except maybe the contract isn’t on Agnes. Maybe it’s on Shane. Who knows? Where, Moot, by the way, makes a cameo appearance.

So where was I?

Lisa: What are you gonna do?
Creasy: What I do best. I’m gonna kill ‘em. Anyone who involved. Anybody who profited from it. Anybody who opens their eyes at me.

So. I’ve blogged. Back to the book.

SHE WROTE: Okay, Okay

I'll blog, but Bob's going to have to do the next two because I'm swamped here.

So what are we doing? He's working ahead on Act Two, but he's having fits because I haven't given him my outline stuff on Act Two and he needs details. I'm restructuring Act One because his conflict wasn't deep enough and because I realized that Agnes wasn't vulnerable enough and that I'd set up the antagonist as a straw man. If the antagonist is too easy to defeat, no tension in the reader, so go back and make the anatagonist somebody you're worried about. Which coincidentally we are also doing in the other collab book I'm working on. Along with the reissue I'm working on which doesn't exactly have antagonist problems, more focus problems, but it's too late for that, I'm just tightening that sucker. And then there are the two essays I have due on Aug. 15th that I forgot about totally. Where was I?

Agnes. Bob needs to know what Agnes's plan is in the second act and I'm still cogitating on that; I know what she's going to do but her exact step-by-step plan is a little fuzzy yet. But I do know what the romance arc is, which he couldn't care less about because the romance plot is my plot, and I have arced and written the sex scenes except for the one he has to write, and again, he doesn't care, he just wants to know how Agnes's revenge plot is going to screw up his nice hitman plot. While I'm restructuring his stuff so that Shane and his boss aren't just sitting on the dock chatting about how the Office of Super Secret Stuff is going to hell in a handbasket since their intel sucks so bad that Shane is killing the wrong people which is really screwing up his day, let me tell you.

While up at the house, Agnes is shoving a meat fork through her ex-fiance's neck. Agnes has anger issues.

Meanwhile somewhere on a barrier island off the coast of South Carolina, a romantic adventure author is screaming, "YOU'RE GIVING AWAY THE PLOT!!!!!!!!!"

Then get in here and blog yourself, Robert. It was your turn.

SHE WROTE: Living the Dream in Atlanta

I know I haven't blogged. I"m working here.
But here for your enjoyment are two pictures from our YEX & Violence speech. Bob's speaking. I'm listening.

HE WROTE: Everything Serves A Purpose

Perhaps I should have said Princess is tentatively back in. We shall see. Everything in a book has to serve a purpose. Even better, multiple purposes. So if Princess is in the opening scene for Shane, that would, of course, mean that would not be her only appearance in the book. I can’t tell too much more because then it would give away too much of the work in progress.

Watched a very interesting movie last night. CACHE, which is in French with subtitles (in French it means hidden). That’s the extent of my French. Oui. In Special Forces a cache was something we hid to be used later. Like ammunition or weapons. It was a very precise operation. Usually a French movie means there has to be at least one scene of a man on a bicycle with a bacquet riding mournfully in circles around a fountain. There was a man on a bicycle but he did not have a bacquet. It had a brilliant idea at the core and what’s even better was it didn’t ‘explain’ things. There were scenes where you had to actually figure out what had happened. Most particularly at the end where the movie just sort of, well, ends. It’s never really pointed out to you who was doing this thing to the family that was at the core of the movie. Here’s the thing that was done to them: someone simply hid and videotaped them.

There were also scenes where you had to figure out what was going on from gestures and from visuals. For example, the wife is with a male friend in a café crying because her husband had lied to her about who he suspected was sending them these videotapes of the outside of their apartment and the house where the father grew up in. She says she has to get back to the apartment and the friend looks at his watch and says, well, not so soon, perhaps. And then it’s night and she’s back in the apartment. What do you think they were doing? No one ever shows it or says it, but then the son disappears for an entire night, telling no one where he is and the parents are frantic. Well he finally shows up the next day after spending the night at a friends and is cold to the mother. And it never occurs to either of the parents, and it is never shown or said, but don’t you think whoever was videoing the house, videoed the mother with the ‘friend’ in the café and sent the tape to the son? It’s the only thing that explains his abrupt change in behavior and what he says.

Also, there is an Eminem poster prominently displayed in the son’s room all the time. I know he’s not popular with many people but if you know anything about him, he’s literally, no pun intended, the poster child for kids and even adults who are victims of child-hood abuse. For some reason they love his music. So what does that say about the family? Again, nothing is ever made of that poster except it being displayed.

Anyway, I’m off on a tangent, but it was an extremely disturbing movie. Maybe because it was about broken people being shown they were broken and that’s what my book, CHASING THE DEAD is about in terms of character, except in CACHE, (spoiler alert) at the end, the father, simply takes two sleeping pills and goes to bed. Of course, taking the not explaining thing a step further, it can also be considered a very confusing movie. Like MEMENTO, which you either love or you hate.

Anyway. Back to Agnes. Poor Joey the Gent. Everyone’s after him. But Shane isn’t feeling too hot himself because he’s keeping a secret from Agnes. But then again, Agnes hasn’t totally leveled with Shane. And Joey is keeping the biggest secret of all. Well, maybe not. There’s someone there with a whopper. But to top it all off, none of them really knows what happened thirty years ago, the night of the Little Train Robbery. Let me look at my high speed Excel spreadsheet. Does the Don’s consigliore arrive today (today being today in the book, not today, today)? Nope, dang, he comes in tomorrow because we got a lot going on today, such as Four Wheels Thibault showing up and tonight Hit Man #1. Agnes got a lot coming at her. Back to writing.

HE WROTE: 238

This is post #238. Given we started this on 1 January, that covers a lot. I was re-reading some of the posts earlier this year, pre-publication of DON'T LOOK DOWN. As the Grateful Dead wrote, it's been a long strange trip so far.

Apparently there was a picture of our booksigning at RWA in the Metro, a paper distributed for free in a lot of train stations. Work on Agnes continues. The plot is pulling together quite well. I'm writing ahead and every time I get to an Agnes point of view scene I write something like: And now Agnes and Lisa Livia plot revenge and do whatever wedding stuff they need to do. Soon it will be time to write the bachelor and bachelorette parties. That should be interesting. Especially since a bunch of mobsters are coming in to town to attend the wedding.

No more trips for a while, for which I am very grateful. The next two months will just be writing full time.

And oh yes, Princess is back in the book.