A Rock To Tie A String Around

In the security line at Denver International Airport on Saturday I got caught behind the guy who didn’t want to take off his shoes.  You’ve all probably seen this guy if you fly often enough, and some of you have probably been unfortunate enough to be caught directly behind him.  But Shoe Guy decided that he was the exception to the rule and that he shouldn’t have to take off his $10 sneakers because then he’d have to go the trouble of putting them back on.

This happened to my husband rather recently while on a business trip with a business partner.  The business partner raised hell with the security officers and demanded that they bring him a shoehorn so he wouldn’t injure his overpriced business guy shoes.  Surprisingly enough, they opted to haul him to the security office instead of complying with his shoehorn demands, and in the process slowed the security line to a crawl.

My Shoe Guy wasn’t nearly this dramatic; there were no demands made, no negotiations at all actually.  DIA security was remarkably patient with him and after fifteen minutes of heated discussion, he walked through the security line in his socks.

The best part is coming up.  I wasn’t particularly put out by Shoe Guy.  I always get to the airport obnoxiously early when I have to fly so I wasn’t worried about missing my flight.  I was actually feeling pretty neutral when it was my turn to walk through the metal detector despite the hullabaloo that had just taken place in front of me.

But, as I proceeded through the gate, the security officer looked at me and said the worst possible thing.

“Smile!”

I went immediately from feeling neutral bordering on happy to being angry bordering on irate.  Why does this guy care if I’m smiling?  And what exactly do I have to be smiling about?  Am I ridiculously happy that Shoe Guy made me wait fifteen extra minutes and witness his insanity?  Am I really excited to see if my necklace will set off the metal detector?  Am I dimwitted enough to just blindly smile at everything and everyone with no reason attached whatsoever?

It’s not the first time it’s happened.

I get told to ‘Smile!”  quite a bit.  I think my neutral face looks like a scowl, when in fact it’s actually reflective of some mundane dilemma I’m trying to figure out.  Most of the time I’m thinking deep thoughts such as “Did I bring the coupons for paper towels?”  or “Are we actually out of milk?”  or “Man, it’s a sunny today.”

But when I’m ordered to smile by the happy police, I automatically have to refrain from punching them in the nose or launching into a litany of reasons why I’m not walking down the street smiling like a moron.  I don’t think I’m alone in this.  I think telling strangers to ‘Smile!’ should be at least a misdemeanor offense, like shouting ‘Fire’ in a crowded theatre.  You are ruining my perfectly neutral mood when you order me to act happy.  Allah help you if you actually catch me when I’m ticked off about something.

I’m curious as to why the happy police think they need to intervene in other’s facial expressions.  Does my lack of smile make you not want to smile?  Are you trying to save me from what you have deemed to be chronic grumpiness?  Are you more comfortable if I’m wandering around blindly smiling at nothing like some kind of modern day Lenny?  I might add that behind Lenny’s big dumb grin, he had a squished mouse in his pocket.  Maybe you should worry more if I was smiling all the time.

Maybe all the chronic smilers out there are hiding some kind of dark secret.  Perhaps I should start walking up to them and ordering them to ‘Frown!’

Hmmm…..

I thought I’d add the link to my CBS interview even though I’ve been throwing it around Facebook for a couple of days now.  I figure I might have like three or four readers that aren’t Facebookers that might want to see me dramatically overpronounce the word ‘book’ and ramble about food co-ops.  I’m just glad I didn’t start laughing hysterically or fall off the chair.

So, here ya go, for your viewing pleasure:

http://cbs4denver.com/video/?id=61048@kcnc.dayport.com

I’m currently paralyzed by a seemingly easy question. I have an interview this weekend and I know one of the questions is going to be ‘So what is the book about?’ You’d think since I wrote it, that question would be a slam-dunk, right?
Not so much.
Maybe I’m too involved, maybe I lack public speaking skills, maybe I need more coffee, but coming up with a coherent answer to that question is killing me. I can tell you all about the book if you have an hour to let me ramble. But the thought of answering that question in two sentences or less is making me break out in a cold sweat.
Early on in the process, I tried to convince my husband into hiring an actress to play me for the purpose of public appearances. It would be an easy gig, we do live in Los Angeles after all, out of work actresses are everywhere. Surely I could find someone to fly to Denver and do an interview for CBS. I would want someone articulate, interesting with perfect teeth, maybe someone tall… It’d be perfect.
I don’t want to sound ungrateful in the least for the opportunity. I’m actually quite blown away that this is even happening. I’m more afraid of fucking it up. I’ve thought about a few ways I could handle this situation so as to calm my nerves. I’ve considered going out there Jim Morrison style – you know, get completely wasted (which wouldn’t take much in my case) and stumble into the studio and ramble about my ‘art’ until the studio security has to haul me away.
I’ve considered doing the interview Toni Morrison style – those of you who have seen her speak know what I’m talking about. She has a way of observing the room that makes it look a bit like she’s smashing you into pieces with her eyes. She reminds of how royalty must have looked back in the day, sitting at the head table during a feast. I’d like to do this, but I can’t pull it off, not in this lifetime.
I could go Joaquin Phoenix on the CBS crew. Wander in unkempt and crazy looking and then act offended that they want to talk about my book. Although I’m afraid that I’m going to do this without any provocation.
What I’m most afraid of is looking precious. As in ‘look how cute, she wrote a little story!’ I would rather look like a crazed hippie socialist (which I lean to anyway) or a drunken buffoon than come off looking adorable. I’m afraid in my attempt to get away from adorable; I’m going to lean too far in the other direction.
Agh.
For those interested, and those who get this station, I’ll be on CBS Denver at 7:20am for their Project Green moment. If I walk on set wearing a giant fake wig or carrying a whiskey bottle, you’ll know that logic and professionalism lost out to crazy.

If you go to the bookstore looking for Philippa Gregorys’ “The Other Boleyn Girl” you will see next to it “The Last Boleyn” by Karen Harper. I’ve never read Harper’s book but from all the Amazon reviews, it’s excellent. But was her account of Anne Boleyn’s life made into a movie with my girl-crush Natalie Portman in the starring role? No. Was it splashed all over the place as the next ‘you’ve just gotta read this’ book of the year? No. Does this mean that Harper work was sub-par to Gregory’s novel? Or does it simply mean that it was ill timed?

I generally agree with the idea that there are no new ideas out there in the universe. I also agree that we operate on somewhat of a collective subconscious, meaning that ideas that stick, stick to the masses because we are collectively interested in that thing at that time. When our collective interest wanes, so do book sales.

So I can see how a rash of Boleyn girl books came out at the same time. It’s a bit like back in high school how it seemed like all the schools in town were doing the same Spring musical, or had picked the exact same prom theme. I saw ten different productions of “West Side Story” my junior year, all of them equally painful.
But why did Gregory become a superstar and all the other myriad writers not? My guess is that she wrote the right book at the right time. It makes me think that writing is 98% luck and 2% talent. “Twilight” supports this theory. My facebook friends all know that I have been ranting about Stephenie Meyer since I started reading the far superior Sookie Stackhouse mysteries by the fabulous Charlaine Harris.

It’s fairly obvious where Meyer got her inspiration for “Twilight”. She stole it from Harris. The characters are carbon copies of Harris’ creations, except Meyer managed to water them down, and make them utterly uninteresting in comparison. But the vampire story itself isn’t new. It’s much like the craze of Boleyn girl books; it’s a hot item right now. Driving down the street, I saw three different billboards for television shows about vampires. They all have the same basic theme which is echoed in both Harris and Meyer’s novels: incredibly dangerous and impossibly sexy vampire falls in love with a mortal (usually a girl) who has spent her life feeling like an outsider for a variety of reasons (she’s psychic, beautiful, smart) and various and sundry chaos ensues as the entanglements of loving the undead get in the way of their passion.

I’m not begrudging the framework.

I do wonder what makes some writers instant superstars and some cult favorites though. My high school students are literally building altars to Edward Cullen in their bedrooms, they waited for days at Comic-Con to meet Kristin Stewart, they fight over who gets to write the report on Meyer when I assign them contemporary author research projects. But have any of them ever asked if they could write their papers on Charlaine Harris? No. Incidentally, I plan on attempting to remedy this when school starts in September, I have some converting of my own to do this year.

When do ideas become proprietary? When do authors cross the line between using a common framework and infringing on someone else’s creation? Should Karen Harper be pissed at Gregory for writing a historic fiction romance? Probably not, after all, it’s not like most of the thinking world didn’t already have an elementary knowledge of Anne Boleyn prior to these books coming out (incidentally, my mother claims that we’re vaguely related to Queen Elizabeth- therefore I count Anne Boleyn as my 57th cousin twice removed). But is it a different story when the characters aren’t based on historical figures? I tend to think so. If I were Charlaine Harris, I would be beyond annoyed. When I think that I also have to remind myself that cult followings are loyal, where teenagers are not, and HBO series stick to the wall where the Twilight movies are eventually going to be relegated to the bargain rack.

As I have before mentioned, I’m steadily working on the next book, steadily meaning that every day I try to sit down for an hour or two and write. I’ve been doing pretty well so far but I’ve hit the 25,000 – 35,000 hurdle where everything I write sounds like it came from a soap opera or from some made for television science fiction movie from the 1980’s. In short, I’ve hit the suck wall. It’s happened before, including The Tree Museum I have two novel length manuscripts under my belt and both times I hit this same, sucky place. I know how to get out of it, you just write and write and write, and let the suck flow freely until it drains out of your system and you feel like you are finally creating something that wouldn’t be better used as kindling.
Part of me knows that I do this to myself. I put my characters in situations that I know relatively little about. Why do I do this? I have no idea, except that’s just where they end up. In my last writing project, which is still sitting on the hard drive begging for editing, I placed both of the main characters in the Hoover Dam. I’ve never been to the Hoover Dam, so there’s about 10,000 words (at least) that sounds like that scene from Throw Momma From The Train. You know the one – the woman is reading her story about a submarine to the class (paraphrased) “And then he pushed the button that made it go. ‘We got ‘em Dave.’ ‘Yeah’. Said Dave.”
There’s a lot of pushing buttons that make it go in that book, as I really have no idea what workers do in the Hoover Dam. I’m guessing not much. In Life After People, they demonstrated how in the event that all the people on the planet disappear mysteriously, the Hoover Dam would run by itself basically until the concrete walls begin to crumble. So, I can’t imagine there’s just a whole lot to do around there to keep it up and running. But I’m probably very, very wrong.
I’ve done it again in the book I’m writing right now. This time my characters are on a ship. The extent of my nautical experience is the ferry that takes you to Alcatraz Island in San Francisco. You might ask why I would choose to set my story in a location that I know so little about. Well, it just doesn’t work anywhere else. To put it anywhere but on a ship would be really strange, not that my buffooning my way through the nautical experience isn’t strange enough. Up till now, I’ve felt alright about it, especially considering that I know by the time it’s properly edited I won’t even recognize what I’m writing now.
But yesterday I hit 30,000 words and all of a sudden I realized that I’ve set my story on The Great Ship Sucktastic, where all you have to do is press the button to make ‘em go, and stand at the steering wheel and drive your ship to the place you need to be.
I’ve heard second books are harder than the first books and I now agree. Even though I know I need to, I absolutely cannot turn off my internal editor. Now I know that the first draft is the easy part and the work comes later.