HWSWA: More Brainstorming Anna

~ Jenny

Anna’s plot was all over the place so we talked it through in the latest HWSWA. Then Bob sent me a long doc in e-mail spitballing the simplified plot and I annotated it and sent it back and he annotated it and I did a couple of diagrams and things are better now. Still not great plotting but so much better. The best thing about all of this is that all the what-the-hell-did-I-write-this-for scenes now are crucial. The Girls win again.

Tomorrow we’re talking about romance in Bob’s book. We’ll probably both have to drink for that one.

33 thoughts on “HWSWA: More Brainstorming Anna”

  1. I’m not un-confused yet, but I know I’ll love the final product. All those cross references… the Durer is in Agnes’s Venus de Milo? Well, maybe Anna was delivering a box full of the parts from a Major McGuffin III – the biological warfare version. Hard drive, flash drive, and so on. Made in Wu Han.

  2. I’m loving watching this process. Now I’ve got an image of Anna looking at a Durer and going, “Huh. He looks just like Grandpa.”

  3. “Tomorrow we’re talking about romance in Bob’s book. We’ll probably both have to drink for that one.”

    Hee-hee-hee!

    Bob is putting romance in his book??

    1. It’s one of the reasons he asked me to collaborate in the first place, to learn more about writing romance. Romance sells. He’s actually pretty good at writing romance from the male PoV, which is fun. He’ll have a good time tormenting Shane and Carpenter.

        1. Agnes is in Paris in cooking school, out of harm’s way. He’s never going to leave her and he’d never hurt her, but in Paris, she’s not even going to be collateral damage.

          1. I wish she were there, though! It seems like from the shadowing concept with LL and Carpenter and then Shane and Agnes that it’s onesided for shane without Agnes also there growing into the change.

          2. It’s possible they needed to be apart to grow, to really miss each other. They were pretty solid by the end of Agnes and the Hitman. a book full of Agnes and Shane Talking About the Relationship would be awful.

    2. Relationships. The Duke and the Duchess are getting married– after having been married. Lisa Livia is lusting after Eduard, the head of Andovan security, a fencer and former Foreign Legion. Shane misses Agnes but is also realizing how tentative life is. Xavier is back in town after his fling with Evie didn’t work. Lots of stuff going on.

      2. That was hysterically funny. 🙂

        As for why we go for sugar and fat, that’s our lizard brain taking over. In times of high stress, we look for energy for our fight/flight options. (And of course, the endorphin hit for actually soothing the lizard brain.)

      3. This is one of the reasons I enjoy your blog. It’s when you bring up older posts. I wonder how books are bought for a prison library. Maybe they’re donated, could be that women’s prisons are getting Bob’s.

  5. That was fun to read. I love the whole what-if of you two plotting.

    I probably shouldn’t ask this so early in the story … but which Dürer self-portrait did Grandpa end up with? There’s only 3 and they’re all in seriously impressive European museums. For some reason, this is messing with my suspension of disbelief.

      1. Cool, that works :-). I was lucky enough to see the Louvre’s exhibition of Da Vinci’s St Anne a few years ago. They had Da Vinci’s prep sketches, and versions of the same painting by other artists from Da Vinci’s studio. Apparently he’d done the sketch and then set it as a teaching exercise for his students. It was fascinating.

        1. That makes it way too complicated. I need the forger on site, and a Goodnight Durer would have been painted centuries ago.

  6. I feel better just reading that the two of you are working and thinking. Thank you for letting us peek into the process.

  7. I just wanted to comment that I mostly don’t comment on these posts, but I find them really interesting to read. (In case you were judging interest by comment numbers…)

    1. Thank you, I was. Didn’t want to bore people. “Here, I’m fascinated by this and I’m sure you will be, too.” Argh.

      2. In which case I comment too! I like reading these 😊.

        Also, I could read disagreement without hate all day right now.

    2. Me, too. I don’t have anything useful to say, so I don’t comment, but I find these posts both fascinating and helpful.

  9. I have to say that I laughed out loud when Bob offered the suggestion “kill someone.”

    Talk about a guy’s idea of improving the story…. But cute! Because it’s Bob!

  10. Sorry to post off topic…but since it’s about romance authors coming together to save the world…I guess it does sort of work on a post about you & Bob working together?

    But I just generally thought Arghers might be interested in the Romancing the Runoff effort being spearheaded by romance writers to help the get out the vote effort in Georgia if they hadn’t yet heard about it.

    http://www.romancingtherunoff.com/presskit.html

    1. We don’t really have topics here, so no worries.

      I submitted a proposal critique to donate, but never heard back. Definitely a worthy cause.

      1. Jenny, I saw it listed in the auction items available for bid. And every item has bids now. They’re raising a crazy amount of money so far considering the auction just started a few hours ago.

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