The Twelve Days of Anna: Day Six: Images

One of the problems of writing this so long ago and in two different narratives is that Things Change.  Not just the story as I write it with Bob, I change.  What I’m interested in, how I see things, what I think is important, all of that changes.  That’s why I need images.

The big important images are the collages I make, but the collage I made for Anna so long ago doesn’t jive with the Anna I have now.  So I’m trying to reconfigure Anna, and in a comment on yesterday’s post, I compared her to a Weeble, a toy from the seventies that had a round bottom so you couldn’t knock it over: the ads said “Weebles Wobble But They Don’t Fall Down.”  I took Weebles to be a touchstone; every time a catastrophe struck, I’d think, “Weebles wobble but they don’t fall down.  Be a Weeble, Jenny.”  And then I typed that comment earlier and thought, “What the hell did Weebles look like anyway?” and went to the source for discontinued toys, eBay, and found this:

That’s Anna, who is now wearing a pink and white tee and green cargo pants as she heads into work in that first chapter.  And which made me go digging for the images on my hard drive that I’d had for Anna, some of which were no longer right, some of which I wasn’t sure about (I think Bob chose Nate’s image but I’m not sure) and some I had to go looking for new pix for.  It’s not a collage (yet) because I just threw stuff on there, but it reminded me of the settings–still the same as before–and let me get a better grip on the characters.  Here’s where I am now: (more…)

The Twelve Days of Anna: Day Five: The Meet

But first, a request was made for the Anna blurb, so here it is:

Anna Jones is having a bad day.

Her boyfriend dumps her in an e-mail, her boss orders her to go to an Atlantic City casino to deliver a suspicious package, and her best friend urges her to have sex with a billionaire while she’s down there.

Nate Sadler is having a worse day.

The intel on his no-knock warrant is bad, he gets transferred to the weirdest team in the FBI, and he’s sent to Atlantic City to work with the team leader who doesn’t know what she’s doing with orders to surveille a guy they don’t have identification for.

But then a fed-up redhead picks him up in the casino bar (he’s not a billionaire, but she’s not fussy), and the next morning they both leave Atlantic City feeling a lot better about life even though they’re never going to see each other again.  Until it turns out that the FBI really wants to know what was in that package Anna delivered since it was addressed to the guy they were surveilling. And everybody wants to know why the minion who delivered the package spent the night with the FBI agent sent to arrest her.

As Nate and Anna try to work out the tangle they’ve found themselves in, they’re dealing with gun-toting minions and matchmaking mamas, nefarious bosses and deranged workmates, an alien-looking rescue dog and a chatty nemesis, and the most dangerous people of all, each other.

Arresting Anna: Sometimes a bad day is the start of something good.

And now, lets get those two tired millennials together.

(more…)

This Is A Good Book Thursday: I’m Spending Time with the Time Police

The new Smallhope and Pennyroyal book by Jodi Taylor dropped (that would be A Family Affair), and I devoured that after rereading the first book, but there are only two in the series.  So hungry for more, I restarted the Time Police books.  I think there are six of them, and I love Team Weird, so I’m dug in there for a while.  I’m on Book Two now, Saving Time, so I have a ways to go, especially since I’m also doing the last revisions on Arresting Anna.

Somebody asked me today if I read books.  It took me awhile to understand.  Who the hell doesn’t read books???

Do you read books?  If so, what books?  Tell All.

The Twelve Days of Anna: Day Four: Figuring Out Antagonists and Minions

So about Bad Guys.

Actually, antagonists are not always bad, especially if they’re scene antagonists (every scene needs one).  Sometimes they want something good for our protagonists that the protagonist doesn’t want.  Gracie is an antagonist in that first scene because she’s trying to convince Anna to sleep with a billionaire (Joke.  Kinda).  Madeline is the scene antagonist for Nate because she’s shoving him into a unit where he doesn’t want to go.  Neither of them means harm.  And then there’s Chad.

There are some writers who make antagonists so bad you want the bad guys bleeding on the page.  Dick Francis springs to mind.  Jodi Taylor.  Since I tend to the romcom side, my antagonists are more self-involved and clueless than actively evil.   Even the stalker boyfriend in Crazy for You was losing his mind and thought he was doing what was best for whatshername.  But then I started writing with Bob, and Evil entered the picture.  You would not believe some of the Antagonist Actions I have talked him out of.  “It’s a comedy, Bob.  We don’t want readers throwing up on the pages.”  Or my favorite moment from sixteen years ago, “Bob, you can’t keep killing my characters; readers get attached to them.”  “Then stop giving them names.” (more…)

The Twelve Days of Anna: Day Three: Rebooting a Protagonist

Okay, so Anna was not engaging on the page.  When you all said, “Start with the casino” or at least “Cut the bit with Mom,” I realized that I needed to reboot Anna completely.  No more twin sets or get-along girl; she could have flaws that weren’t boring.  And also since Nate’s Chapter Two was coming right up and he was going to blow Anna off the page, syntactically speaking, I had to really up her game.

So I talked about it with Bob and then did the rewrite and sent it to him, and he did some tweaking, and we now have the rewrite, which will not be the last but is pretty close.

If you don’t like it, it’s your fault.

Arresting Anna Part One, the Rewrite

(We’ll get to Chad tomorrow.)