Real Adventures Versus Sham Ones

Thanks to bad seasonal allergies, which some health insurance companies that Puntitas has applied to consider an incurable disease and reason for charging higher premiums (incidentally, , one of Puntitas’ friends says the same of that dreaded preexisting condition menopause), and insomnia (hello, Insomnia, my old friend), Puntitas has read an entire book by Victoria Alexander. The book didn’t actually grab Puntitas very much from the beginning, but she read it all the way through because she read an article last year citing Amanda Quick and Victoria Alexander as queen’s of what she thinks of as “the sparkling period romance,” the more-or-less Regency era love story with repartee, intrigue, and a handful of scenes involving extraordinary impropriety.

Puntitas likes Amanda Quick for her smart, spunky heroines and for her tension, both sexual and suspenseful, though the plots themselves, especially the mystery component are flawed and underdeveloped, even as subplots: pivotal events just sort of happen without an abundance of preparation or explanation, and one event doesn’t necessarily follow clearly from another.

So Puntitas decided to try Victoria Alexander, and the conclusions she has come to are (1) that there’s no pressing need to read more by the same author right away and (2) that Puntitas’ problem with the adventure genre is the concept of adventure for its own sake.

The book Puntitas just read is about a foreign princess who seeks out her estranged English husband, claiming to need his help to research the life of a self-exiled great aunt. The princess’ story, which fails to convince either her husband or the reader, covers a more sinister plot—restoring her country’s crown jewels to their rightful place despite the efforts of a distant cousin, also hoping to recover them in order to gain the throne, a chain of events as probable, intrinsically compelling, and realistic as the ones on General Hospital, the soap Puntitas follows while getting her nails done.

But she digresses.

Being a person of depth and numerous emotional demons, Alexander’s heroine distrusts, omits, and lies every chance she gets, inadvertently and advertently bringing more adventure and sexual tension upon herself and Hubby, neither of which does much for Puntitas, who has been wondering from Page One why the princess doesn’t just take the more direct route of laying the matter out before her great aunt’s English descendents, who have proven themselves loyal to her father but who figure no where in her scheme until ….

Yes, as luck would have it, the climactic scene takes place in the home of the great aunt’s descendents, where the jewels have been waiting for the heroine simply to come and get ‘em. Well, it would have been that simple if she’d done that in the first place. What happens instead is that all her intrigue has led the rival distant cousin to the jewels, so the princess must confront a pistol toting virago in a private sitting room and choose between duty and love in a ballroom filled with gala clad Nobility.

Of course, the princess’ motives are as layered and complex as her lies are convincing. She wants to restore the jewels to her country both to serve her royal house and people and to gain personal autonomy. She wants to involve her estranged husband (this is a sequel to another book in which the princess escapes her minders, falls in love, gets married, and goes back home a la Roman Holiday, the 1953 film starring Gregory Peck and Audrey Hepburn) in order to regain his love, and she repeatedly justifies both courses of action by saying she wants to have an adventure.

This last is the reason Puntitas hasn’t been able to make much headway in the Lord of the Rings trilogy. The plot of that work is simple too: take the ring and leave it where it belongs. The characters so charged don’t know where that is, so they must ask around to find out where that place may be or who may know more about how to find it. Puntitas understands all that and is willing to play along as difficulties arise on the way to the next clue or informant, but she loses all sympathy for everyone as characters are asked, “Do you want to take the shortcut, or would you rather go the long way and have adventures?” and reply, “Oh, I want adventures.”

Life offers complications aplenty without needlessly manufacturing drama and adventures that put people and relationships at risk. Puntitas supposes that for those who enjoy adventure for its own sake (and drama too—The Tempest is an utter mystery to Puntitas), there’s probably a high in activity even when the activity is purposeless in general (as in The Tempest) or purposeless to achieving a goal (for Alexander’s princess, lying to her estranged husband doesn’t actually win him back, one reported goal, and not-visiting the great aunt’s descendents prevents her from going to the most likely source of information about the jewels, another reported goal). But for Puntitas, the high lies in knowing what is to be accomplished and in doing what needs to be done, two things that are difficult and adventurous enough on their own.

To be genuinely exciting, adventures need to be meaningful for the characters and for the world they live in. Having characters create them simply to test their metal is like attempting suicide to understand how important life is or doing drugs or booze to get a sense of happiness or relief. The events are almost always meaningless, and the insights they produce are unsatisfying counterfeits of real thought. An adventure story is particularly meaningless if, as in this case, there would be no story (in its present form) had the character taken the most obvious course of action, given her realistic options, in the first place.

Puntitas reads _Her Highness, My Wife_ by V. Alexander, which is less exciting than Puntitas made it sound.

Say It Again

I’m going to try working on a poem today. It’s current title is “My Dog Licks His Balls While the PCP Addict Next Door Talks to a Tree.” Yes, it’s a working title only, but I’m happy about it. I’ve had this poem in my head for about five years, and I even wrote a stanza out at one point, but the pieces didn’t come together as a poem until the night of the Komunyakaa reading. I think now that I didn’t have enough material then to make it a poem because the events didn’t play out until last year, but it’s my experience that writing is like that: a seed is planted in an idea or an image, and the writer must wait for recall or time to make a plant grow.

For the last three days, I’ve been down with a bad flu, so I’m not quite coherent. Today is that miraculous day of feeling significantly better, but despite a pleasant sense of psychological well being, I’m still physically exhausted, my desire to spend an hour on the treadmill overridden by dizzying fatigue after ten minutes of being on my feet. If I have a good night, I should be well enough to be back at work tomorrow. Naturally, I had appointments scheduled for today—none tomorrow. Así es la vida.

At any rate, my treatment plan has included liquids, antibiotics, sleep, and wonderfully mindless reading. The book I’m almost done with now has been surprising. I got it thinking it was one of those tame regency romances in which the female lead is a virgin until about three fourths of the way through the book, when she is deflowered by the male lead whom she loves and happily marries fifty to eighty pages later. Well, well, A Gentleman’s Wager has only one virgin, a secondary character, who loses her maidenhead to her dildo wielding best friend early on and drops all squeamishness about giving hand jobs by the middle of the book. There is so much sex, in fact, that the bed/stable/hallway/drawing room/… scenes in the last third of the book are omitted or abbreviated to keep them from losing their affect.

One sign of how incredibly ill I’ve been is that this last has been my literary revelation of the moment. I think I really understood that unescalating repetition, especially of intense events or emotions, weakens affect, when I went to a showing of the movie A Mighty Heart, about the disappearance and murder of Wall Street Journal correspondent Daniel Pearl. It’s actually the story of his pregnant wife’s experience during that ordeal. He goes missing near the beginning of the film. She contacts the right people to search and later investigate the disappearance and has three or four screaming fits throughout the movie to get it started or keep it moving. When she finds out he’s been beheaded on film, she breaks down into an agony of sobs that is painful to sit through. She refuses to watch the tape until the very end of the movie. When she does, she breaks into similar wails of grief. While I can’t even begin to imagine how horrible that moment must have been for the widow, I did notice that for myself, as an audience member, the second intense emotional outburst was far less moving, because I’d already experienced the smaller ones connected to the investigation and because the first one over the news of his death, was so big. The director seems to have anticipated such a response because he kept the second outburst short and used it to lead into her labor and delivery. But my own sense is that the scenes would have been more effective, from a craft standpoint, if there had been fewer little outbursts, if the first outburst had been kept small, and if the second had been allowed to grow bigger.

I thought of that a few days ago while reading The Haunting of Hill House. The book is not only different from any of the movie versions I know of but much creepier as well. Four people spend some time in a house known to be haunted. Most paranormal manifestations happen at night, and while they do not happen every night, they do escalate each time they occur. After about a week, two more people come to the house. The first paranormal manifestation happens again. Affect isn’t weakened for several reasons: (1) characters acknowledge that this is a repetition; (2) characters react differently to the phenomena, so the reader is able to gauge how much they’ve changed; (3) the addition of the new characters, who don’t experience the phenomena, provides added information about whence the paranormal force draws its power. The manifestation happens again one or two nights later, but it doesn’t produce a sensation of repetitiveness because it is an escalation of itself: it is produced by one of the inhabitants, who has now absorbed the spirit of the house.

All of this was clear to me, but it didn’t quite click until I noticed that the sex scenes near the end of my trashy novel of the moment were shorter the further I read. The first time a scene was truncated, I thought, “What, no straddling of the hips after a round of oral stimulation?” Those words had no sooner crossed my mind than I realized that there was no point in putting it on the page since I knew it was cumming.

Puntitas reads _What Was She Thinking: Notes on a Scandal_ by Z. Heller and _A Gentleman’s Wager_ by M. Ellis.

Missing Ingredient

My two latest reads were recommended by a friend. She’s a fan of the formula romance. For her, the ending must be happy, and the final chapter must be followed by an epilog, which tells readers that the couple has two children, great sex, and a thriving ranch. That sense of resolution is so important that she doesn’t buy a book without first reading the last few pages to make sure it delivers.

For me, the ending is not a problem, but what I learned over this last long week and a half is that something must happen in addition to two people falling in saccharin love, having the occasional tiff, and settling it quickly to return to an idyll of precious moments and specialness. I need a dose of intrigue, inner conflict, self-awareness, a struggle against society to keep me going, and no, the clichéd soul searching of lovers wondering if they’re moving too fast or stressing because they suspect their beloveds of being unfaithful don’t keep me interested because that kind of turmoil isn’t described in a way that makes it even a little reminiscent of the real.

Yes, yes, I know the real is not always the goal. Some people read to escape, hence the happy ending and the thriving ranch. But the assumption seems to be that a more realistic love isn’t as sweet, fumbling, and fanciful as these tales of attraction, doubt, and commitment suggest. My own observation is that ordinary love stories are fabulous, profound, and lasting. The ones that end in nothing are the ones that sound more like the books. So why not celebrate the ordinary, teach readers to find joy in flaws and minor miracles?

My own formula romance is about an unattractive woman who has feelings for a family friend. Most of the energy of the narrative is spent on her coming to terms with being plain, an important step for a young woman (yes, Puntitas is plain enough to have been mistaken for the campus tranny at an early teaching job) and on making the shift from friend to something other. The typical romance novel misunderstandings do happen, but they’re secondary to this other storyline.

Okay, I hear the alarm bells too: I’ve set out to write a love story, and I’m having trouble focusing on … uh … the love story. This is not good.

Puntitas reads _Smitten_ by J. Evanovich and _At First Sight_ by N. Sparks.

What’s in a Love Story?

Despite the fact that I’ve written all but the last two chapters of a formula romance, I’ve actually read very few. I know what is expected because I grew up on Spanish language radio dramas and telenovelas and because ninety percent of the books, movies, songs, etc., ever written center around a very finite set of romantic love plots.

I didn’t just start writing out of my butt, however. Before I began my own adventure into the form, I dropped by the Harlequin submission guidelines page and pondered the various categories. I understood what each involved though some aspects (like sparkling dialog and fiery heroines) were a bit nebulous to the hammer-and-nail part of my mind. Then once the story was more fully formed, I made a point of reading real trashy romances. Now the features that were once nebulous to me have reshaped into hammers and nails, tools I think I can handle, so I know what category my story belongs to and have a sense of what to do to guide it more firmly there.

I read two formula romances this week. I do gravitate more toward some forms (Yay to the Regency novels) and less toward others (Boo to the ones about ditzy smart chicks). Over all, the genre never stops puzzling me. Characters spend a lot of time misreading one another. Men are brutes and louts. Women are passive or manipulative. I don’t really know if people fall in love like that. Having the disposition of a eunuch, I draw most of my experience from thirty years of playing mother confessor to a life-time of friends. Even in our forties,, the true stories aren’t all that different from the formula pieces, but I feel much more satisfied with my friends’ accounts of love and loss (the really laughable ones included) than with the dramas I read.

I haven’t quite figured out why that is. Mostly, I think the clever dialog, the complicating disconnects, and the romantic flourishes of the books go on longer than needed to move the action forward, maintain tension, or explain events. In one, the leading man picks up and carries the leading lady every other page. In the other, the leading lady keeps insisting that the leading man loves her only as a friend, even after four steamy make-out sessions and an hour of impromptu sex. Another reason for my preference is that, knowing my friends better, I probably attribute greater depths to them than to the fairly flat characters of the books, but given some of the love sagas I’ve endured, this reason isn’t as compelling as the first. I’ll have to think more about why the published stories feel less complete and pay special attention to romance ingredient overkill when rereading my own piece.

As always, one of the joys of reading is that, however comfortable a piece of writing, it can’t help but yield an unexpected gem. Off hand, I don’t remember what it was in one book, a small gesture that made a character vulnerable and briefly real. In the other, the moment is vivid and large. The female villain gets her comeuppance in an ugly scene involving most of the important characters. When it’s over, she escapes upstairs to be alone. As she reaches the hall, she runs into the hero’s best friend, one of the characters she’d just been arguing with, and unable to keep herself together any longer, she breaks into tears. Wordlessly, he draws her into his arms to comfort her, even though he dislikes her, has just finished arguing with her, and has no romantic inclinations toward her (even the hidden kind that are so common in this sort of book). The scene was sketched in a paragraph, but the moment was so profound an expression of compassion that it felt like the kernel of a greater story. I’d like to write that story someday, figure out why he would do that and how that would affect them both.

Puntitas reads _The Alibi Club_ by F. Matthews, _To Die For_ by L. Howard, and _The Heir_ by J. Lindsey.

Struck by the Cold

Last weekend, I was knitting and listening to a formula romance, a Regency tale very similar to the sort of stuff I read as a teen, when I was struck by a description of the cold. The scene was the one where the heroine is forced by inclement weather to take refuge in a shelter with the hero, much steaminess ensuing. In this variation, a looming storm causes her to take a shortcut across thin ice (bringing in the damsel in distress motif), which breaks, providing him the perfect opportunity to save her (heroic action leading to indebtedness), take her into the hunting shack, strip her clothes off in front of a blazing fire, and … well, the rest can be surmised (passion aroused or rekindled through circumstances beyond control—though why that isn’t a form of psychological abuse is a subject for a novel I plan to write after I finish the manuscripts on my hard drive).

I don’t remember what detail struck me, but it was one or maybe two that put the cold on my skin and into my hands. Two things happened:

1. I marveled at the power of language. I was fine one minute, knitting cozily in a well heated house. A few sentences later, I was tucking my fingertips under my legs to warm them, noticing they weren’t cold only after I pressed them on my palms.

2. I got an idea for a poem. I spent the rest of the weekend surfing the web for information on hypothermia, exposure, and other topics connected to my idea. I haven’t written anything. In fact, the idea as inspiration (as physical lightness) is gone, but I’m interested enough in it to try writing anyway. I’m not sure of the point of view. I had one notion of that when the idea first came to me, but as I read, that changed, and now it’s going back to the original.

My plan for the weekend is to update my NOTE TAKER in order to write a draft. I have other things I need to do (get a writing sample sent off and get some manuscripts ready for the mail), so I may not get to the draft by Monday. I don’t normally write anywhere except at this computer, Pax, a sturdy desktop in my office at home), but since I want to start writing on Chulo, the NOTE TAKER, I’m going to experiment drafting this poem on it.

Old habits are hard to break. The transition from writing by hand to typing into a keyboard was not easy. I’m expecting the transition from qwerty to Perkins to be rough too.

Past and Present

Because one of the therapists I work with told me there’s a place in town that shreds crap for three dollars per cubic foot, I spent most of Tuesday cleaning out my office. I got rid of some of the boxes and clothes baskets on the floor and all of the kindling under my computer keyboard.

On Wednesday, I woke up with incredible lower back pain, which was mild when I was merely standing, sitting or walking, but excruciating the second I tried reaching, bending, or doing any of the things one does when shifting from one position to another—really an unfortunate set of limitations where the bowels and bladder are concerned. Dressing was a long slow process, and managing shoes and socks involved third party assistance.

I spent the day sitting in a plywood frame, knitting a sock, and finishing The Woman in White. I don’t usually take this long to finish a book, but this month has been a month of mood swings and distractions, so progress has been slow.

It was interesting to read a Victorian version of the sort of light reading I do now. Characters really haven’t changed much: the brave hero, the smart sidekick, the intriguing villain, the damsel in distress. Nowadays the smart sidekick would be the heroine and the damsel would be someone’s sister or dear but useless friend. I like the multivoice narrative and plan to use it sooner or later, and I was gratified to discover that such familiar motifs as evading the tail and the fruitless recourse to the authorities have been with us for over a hundred fifty years.

What was more surprising still was how much more modern the novel felt than the literary works of the era. This one talked about everyday things–like indoor plumbing, matches, the business of going out to work, the practical points of day-to-day etiquette—in ways that were far less ethereal than anything George Eliot or even the more commonplace Charles Dickens put together, and the characters themselves had a sense about them of being modern people that made them indistinguishable from their twenty-first century counterparts.

By Thursday I was well enough to help with the Thanksgiving Day preparations (i.e., slicing, chopping, kneading, tossing, and yes, dishwashing).

Today I’m almost sound of back. I’m reading something called The Labyrinth While working on the same sock. I’m hoping that tomorrow I’ll have finished the sock and feel well enough to write.

Art As Metaphor for Art

Today is a day of completions. The maestro finished replastering the house and painting the trim, and I finished my seamless slippers. Both events are worthy of record because

• both began weeks ago,
• both evolved over time,
• both required input from others,
• both lapsed into immobility and meditation,
• both concluded satisfactorily after a low point of frustration near the end.

The work on the house began in early October. It started with a simple replastering/repainting (both substances shooting out of a compressor hose at the same time). After a week or so of rest, my mom thought it would be a good time to fix the sagging overhang above the stoop, cover a brick wall with the same paint/plaster mixture as the rest of the house, frame an outdoor shrine, properly finish the eaves below the roofing, and whitewash the trim. The maestro did it all—between real construction jobs and mysterious absences.

As the house progressed, the sound of sawing, filing, scraping, brushing drifted down in short, unobtrusive puffs, and I worked on my swatches, read patterns, thought about drab Amanda, a teacher of what used to be called Home Economics. I imagined her knitting some slippers of her own in a glitzy rayon blend for Hernan’s design gallery. Yes, he is a designer of women’s clothing.

She would do exactly as I was doing: sit over the slippers, her needles idle, reviewing what she knows, brooding—very much the antithesis of Ursula, a short story character who went from poet to knitter during my last bout of revision. Ursula casts on, experiments, frogs, her mind elsewhere.

Amanda is constant, steady. That is her predominant characteristic. She perseveres with her work, perseveres with her secret love of Hernan, perseveres with her theories about her sister, perseveres with her job and her seething obedience at home, perseveres.

I haven’t quite figured out what Ursula’s thang is, what makes her give up her craft, what motivates her very strong, very negative reaction to another character: protectiveness, scorn, pity, satisfaction.

I’m at the low point of frustration with the short story. With Amanda, I’m at immobility and meditation, but I’ve got the maestro to draw inspiration from: plodding, intermittent, and unobtrusive. The slippers are a good symbol to take strength from too.

While Not Writing

The life of a writer is full of the tedious and ordinary. I liked that about the last Harry Potter book: the great hero of the wizzarding world spent at least half of the book sulking and cooling his heels in a succession of camp sites while he figured out what to do.

Most of my energy this week has been taken up by work. For the last two years, my employer has been reading parts of our contract literally and pretending other parts mean the opposite of what they say (i.e., the-whole-is-unrelated-to-the-sum-of-its-parts syndrome), so my coworkers and I have been banding together. Last night we met to plan strategy for a big meeting today. Before that, I just stewed and felt bitter, picking out elements of this situation for my novella, which is about an awful person with a more awful boss.

When I drafted it, I had a boss I didn’t like, so many of her attributes made their way into the manuscript. Since then, I’ve had other noisome employers, and over the years, more of my characters, like the boss’ secretary, who were nondescript in the original draft, absorbed their personalities as well.

Makes me question scholars who spend their careers tracking down the source of this character or that. In my own case, I steal details from people who embody a Type, recreate the characters or moments that help me understand how to represent something, or amalgamate people so I can vent all my puke and pus.

But I started by commenting on how ordinary life is between writing sessions, how easy it is to get sidetracked by going to work, planning the month’s expenses, and remembering that this weekend the toilet must be scrubbed. I’ve only thought about writing once or twice since my last post and only fleetingly while confessing to a couple of friends that I have a blog, and really, those giggly admissions aren’t actual thoughts about writing.

The first writerly thought I had came to me Tuesday morning. I’m forty-one and have matching skin, so moisturizer has been integrated into the hygiene routine. When I got out of the shower, I realized that the single remaining droplet would not meet my needs. I went to work sans dermal hydration, and as soon as my first appointment was out of the way, I hurried over to the nearest drugstore, replenished, and slathered myself flexible as soon as I got back in the van.

Not a woman to wear make up, I had my first moment of sisterhood with the millions of women who put on their faces on their way to work and touch up in staffrooms and on lunch breaks the world over. Until then, I had never imagined writing about anyone who would bother with that because I could never imagine her leaning over the makeup counter deciding on the shades. That is, I didn’t know where she’d be coming from, What she would be doing after the purchase, and whom she’d have in mind as she chose (herself or the people who would see her).

But suddenly, I was her, standing in front of the shelves of bottles, tubes, and jars, comparing labels, deciding that anti-redness is good, but anti-wrinkle, premature. I had a tiny twinge of sympathy for Gabriela, her cosmetics boxes, and her pleasure at seeing herself as even better than she is, and a smaller moment of annoyance with drab Amanda, whose plain, round face rises like a watery moon when she can be a sun.

The other writerly thought came at today’s meeting. One of my coworkers objected to an issue. He railed so theatrically that I thought, “If he were a character in a book, he would not be believable.” Funny how some fiction is more believable than fact and some fact less believable than fiction.

I did have one of those I’m-a-poet-and-I-can’t-help-it moments while I was listening to him. His railing took the form of long impassioned pleas, lots of emotional appeals and personal attacks. the whole thing went along the lines of “Here I am: just trying to do an honest day’s work in the best way I know how, when I find that my own friends are stabbing me in the back, even though I soldier on …, punctuated by the refrain, “But little did I know that there was an invisible hand.” At one point, when he seemed to be at a loss for words, I prompted flatly, “The invisible hand.”

Getting to Know the Book

The working title is Fat Girl. Yeah, I know, it’s awful and politically incorrect. At the time I started, I needed a title that would help me keep track of the book’s controlling idea. When I was a student taking first- and third-year comp, I wrote papers called “Abortion” and “Sex Education: Why It’s So Important” for the same reason. Now that I read and write a lot more than I did then (and now that I’ve read ten years worth of student essays as stunning [and that really is the word] as my own), I know that the title and the controlling idea are two separate entities and that getting the former to express the latter takes a great deal of thought and experience. I also know that titles can be changed, so I’ll leave mine alone for now and deal with it later.

The plot is simple:

Amanda, the plain and plump, and Hernan have grown up together. She’s madly in love with him, but she knows he’s got a crush on her beautiful but disdainful sister Gabriela.

Those really are the only characters in the novel. A few other people (their parents, Gabriela’s boyfriend, some of the people who work with them) wander through the text from time to time, but they’re not well developed, serving as window dressing, as one of my professors would say.

The setting is a spacious house in an upscale neighborhood and an equally upscale boutique. Having just skimmed the first chapter, I think I’ll tone the upscale down. Most likely, I was going through my Danielle-Steel-diamond-cage phase.

The point of view is first person singular: Amanda. I remember that at one time it was third person, but I think I may have gone through the text and changed that twice.

The first paragraph is this. I’m not sure that I like it:

I stood on the landing above the great room surrounded by potted plants and cooking smells, looking myself over in the mirror beside the fanlight, and wondering if the dress I’d tried on in Hernan’s shop would really help. Hernan had said it would, and they always did. But scanning the homely face and the plump body in the oversized T-shirt with baggy jeans, I reminded myself that Illusions could only do so much.

The third paragraph may be a better start:

I shook my hips in the landing mirror, remembering the feel of the dress: the gauzy fabric, the dark background, the discrete white bouquet print. It had taken at least twenty pounds off me, and if I kept my back straight and my chin up, it actually gave me breasts, a waist, and hips.

Or deciding now may be premature.