The other books grabbed me right away, but I’m on page 26 and I still don’t have the slightest clue what’s going on.  He said he’s on a rescue mission? but I don’t know who he’s rescuing, and that’s key.  The biggest reader demand there is: Make Me Care.  I don’t think Murderbot’s going to die, and I’m hoping we don’t lose Three, but I don’t know what the hell Murderbot is breaking into this place for, and I’m actually skimming at this point.  What is this about, damn it?  And then on page 38, he gave me a hint and said, “Now you know why this was such a big fucking deal.”  Yes, Murderbot, I do . . . thirty-eight fucking pages in.

Bob and I have this argument all the time: Do not keep secrets from the reader.  Really good authors do it all the time–Dick Francis did it once and I threw the book across the room, and I really love Dick Francis–but it’s always a mistake.  Tell the reader everything the PoV character knows, anything else is a cheat.

Oh, yeah, and what did you read this week?

Forcing comedic situations into romantic comedies kills the comedy: write characters with great sense of humor, coping with the insanity around them.

If you try to write comedy action in romcoms, you end up doing things to your characters to be funny, or making them do things that aren’t really part of who they are that are imposed on them to make them do funny things (keeping in mind that “funny” is in the psyche of the beholder). If the characters can see the humor in the things around them and comment on that, it helps characterizes them. Always start with character.

If you’re talking farce, that’s a different genre. In farce, the reader looks down on the characters, feels superior to them. In Airplane, to take a classic example, everybody is dumb as a rock. The actors take their roles seriously, but the viewer does not, so it’s not a character based genre and nobody gets upset when somebody hits himself in the head with a glass. Farce is also really hard to write; P.G. Wodehouse is a master: the paragraph where Baxter falls down the stairs may be my favorite farce writing ever; see Leave It To Psmith.

Romcom, in contrast, is all character because in comedy, the reader sees the characters as equals, like them, wants the characters they care about to do well (happy ending!), wants to laugh with them, not at them. Romcom doesn’t hurt or humiliate its characters, that’s anti-comedy (but not anti-farce). So give your characters great senses of humor, give them supporting characters that make them insane, something to cope with that demands a good sense of humor/balanced character, and antagonists of equal intelligence so the conversations aren’t dull.  Remember, romance is about characters struggling to build a relationship, so it’s a natural for comedy: if you can’t laugh at romantic disasters, you cry.

Romcom is character first, last, and always.  Funny comes from character.

My good intention this week is to get the kitchen and bathroom finished and it’s finally very close to that, too.  I have stuff coming from Amazon to finish it this coming week, so with any luck, it’ll be done by the next Good Monday.  I am optimistic and enthusiastic.  I’m also thinking of buying myself a dinette set for Mother’s Day, although that kitchen is really small.  So my other good intention is not to buy it unless I feel I really have to.

So what’s your good intention for this week?  And how did last week’s go (no pressure, no pressure)?

And now its a rainy Sunday afternoon and I’m curled up with my dog ready to work on our book again (Bob’s and mine, not Johnny’s and mine), and now it’s going well, I finally think it’s going to be good, maybe, and I am very happy.  Nothing but good times.

What good thing happened for you today?

Actually, what DID you read this week?

Thank god he doesn’t read this blog.

Former intention was to get the wall art up, and I did get some up, but mostly I just planned where it would go and why.  I know, do better, Jenny.  I did get my small base cabinet cleared out with racks installed so nothing is stacked any more.  But basically, this week I better get my counters cleared off AND the art up.  It’s really hard to walk around in here.

So what’s your good intention this week?  Any news on last week’s (two weeks ago)?  No pressure.

What’s your good thing for the week?

So I thought that might be interesting, to sit down each morning and write a scene at a random; that’s the way most of my books have started, just people talking in my head.  And I have to pay more attention to my scene work anyway, I’m getting very very sloppy.  And then I could post it in here and let some of the best readers (and writers) I know have at it, working on it, too.  That’s balm for my ego, people paying attention to my work.

And then sanity reappeared.  Every freaking day?  No.  No no no no.  But maybe once a week.  Or whenever I felt like it.  Just to stretch that muscle, work on those particular skills.  And then at 4PM, a string quartet (that would be you all, stretching the meaning of “quartet”) would take it out for a spin, arguing (politely as ever) what works and doesn’t, etc.  Nothing at stake, just talking about this scene, scene structure and all it entails.

I think that’s a good idea.  Should have thought of it on Good Monday, but I’m still having troubles with days of the week because they don’t really matter to me.  Time, as Bob will tell you, is relative.  And irrelevant.  And I like the idea of not attaching it to any specific day, given my ineptitude with specific days.

Of course tomorrow I will think that’s a terrible idea and probably not post this at all (it’s four AM on Thursday morning, and as we all know, Thursdays are set in stone for one kind of post), but I need to get off this three-goal rat race (book, apartment, taxes) and slow done.  (Somewhere Bob is screaming in his sleep.).

So if you’re reading this, I’m seriously considering doing this.  Maybe.

I did have this idea: What if I went ahead and set up a couple of months of GBT so you’d always have a place to talk even if I forget what the hell day it is?  If I’m on top of things I can still go and amend the post but that way, you’ve always got a chat space.

Oh, and what did you read this week?

What good thing happened to you this week?