Lucy Kemnitzer

You're going to put more here than in your lj, right? I like reading what you write.

What happens in the second book? Is it Michael and Devon again? Because if they're going to have a story after this scene, that's a more interesting story. If they go off and do not have stories with each other, this is definitely an interesting story ending. Something has to be broken before a story can start. (even if the telling starts before the breaking) A whole egg makes no chicks. Or omelets.

I can almost follow what you wrote about clients. I downloaded one for livejournal but it was not up-to-date with livejournal's features, so I couldn't do everything in it, and I just use the simplest interface livejournal has (that is, the one you get when you go to "update" and not the one you get when you go to "my lj."Well, I guess you'll do your usually excellent job with Michael and Devon, and I'll enjoy it very much and wait patiently for your werewolf. It's not, by the way, that I generally like werewolves (though I have one in mind to write myself, originally conceived as a sequel to The Donor) -- I liked the way you wrote that scene. I liked the sense that the story was going to go its own way, like Busted did.I'm seeing this in white letters on a dark blue on dark blue background. It's eye-wrenching. Is the dark blue with white letters thing your choice or something the blog did automagically?

I agree. It looks like a beginning or a short piece of its own. It's true that a person reading this wants to know how our guy -- a partner in a law firm? partner is a big big deal -- ends up being pimped to a client. But that feels like back story. What feels like a forward story is our guy going out and pursuing the rape charge. It's established that he thinks it will be hard to get representation. This Devon guy (yes, the name is over the top, and you might want to ditch it if you find that it doesn't work with the tone you're working with, but maybe the whole thing is over the top) may be the foil here, but our guy is going to end up with 1) the cop who takes his rape complaint: or 2)the lawyer who represents him in court and/or gets him a new job or 3) the cowboy down the road in the podunk little town he relocates to because it's the only place he can get a new job after the other guys mess him over, and who allies with him in solving some horrible problem there. But what I really want to see? the werewolf one.

My daughter had problems with her leg in high school. At first we thought she had somehow strained her knee and we did home care. Then we thought she was getting worse because of marching band -- besides the sheer hard work of it, she had a lt of stress in that, being the lead bagpipe player (yes, they have a bagpipe unit with their band) and interpersonal conflicts she had to deal with (and did, gracefully, though itr cost her in tears at home). She ended up doing her last two marches in a wheelchair (pushed by me! And the last one was five miles in the Hawaiian heat!) She did physical therapy,steroid therapy, and finally got a laminectomy-discetomy. Here's the deal. Statistically, a lot of people have degenrative discs that show up in MRIs, and a lot of people have sciatica or back pain. A lot of the people in those groups overlap: but a lot of the people in the overlapping group are coincidences -- something else is causing sciatica or back pain. If you do the surgery without doing other treatments first, you'll end up with a group of people who have no better results, statisically, than the group of people who didn't have surgery. So you have to do the physical therapy first, and do it like your life depended on it, and then you have to do the steroid shots as if your life depended on it (the shots turned out to be unpleasant and ineffective for Emma, but that isn't the case for everyone). And in any case you have to keep doing the exercises, at least the ones that work. And bear in mind that there is the possibility that some exercises might not be the right ones for you but that doesn't mean that physical therapy is wrong for you. Go back with any complaints you have and get the program fine-tuned. Once you've done all these things, if it turns out they're not working for you, and you have the surgery, it's much more likely to be the right thing for you. Sometimes problems persist (I think because they are caused by more than one thing). Go back to the doctor. You can always address them, they can always be made better.

83K words and I'm at best a third of the way done. Bleah. That can't be right. It read like a reasonably-sized novel (which would be your 83K words): 250K words would be the equivalent of 800 pages or so. Or do you mean you're at best a third of the way through the 83K words?

don't use "now" in narration, because stories don't occur "now" This is not good general advice. "Now" is a perfectly good word to use to layer depths of time. As in: "Georgie had been sitting on Cinto's lap every time Mickey saw them. Now he was across the room in a hard backed chair, staring out the window." Or: "First he called his mother, and then his father. Nobody answered. Now he had to think of who else to call." "Tomorrow she would be back, so he had to finish her present now." And so on. Stories don't take place in the actual past. They take place in "story past" which can indicate whatever it needs to. However, if "now" sounds wrong, feels wrong, it should come out. And that's a general rule.

You will not have to rip out a whole plot. You can't, anyway: you need it all or it falls over.

You know that thing where they say "kill your darlings?" They mean that sometimes you have to get rid of your finest words. But you're also right, sometimes you get to put them back later, in truncated or expanded versions, maybe in another place in the story, or maybe even in another story.

It is utterly untrue that straight men do not care for and worry about other people they're not sexually attracted to, any more than gay men have to be sexually attracted to someone to care for and worry about them, or women of any description have to be sexually attracted to someone to care for and worry about them. It's a basic urge of people, whatever their orientation, and quite apart from the basic sexual urges (though all the basic urges can be freely mixed and matched, which is the thing about being human, I think)

Busted is a much better title than Revenants and Shadows. Much better. Much much better. If you feel the need to include a reference to the supernatural in the title, make it with a verb in it, like maybe "seeing things" or something. When you go all fanboy on Jules, also ask her to tell you a bit about the submission process at Loose Id, and tell her I told you to.

You're definitely going to write those guys, definitely. This is the kind of thing you excel at -- almost-ordinary guys in extraordinary circumstances, acting all guy-like. My werewolf book that I abandoned on page 100 (I used to do that a lot: wait, I still do) involved a sweet bartender who gets implicated in a raft of attacks, and the people who help him figure out who's really doing them and what to do with the person who is doing them. My friend Jules Jones has written three shape-shifter novels, two about silkies and one about dolphins. (Silkies are Scottish folklore shapechanging seals) You might like the rest of Jules' books too. You might think about running the cop book past Loose Id yourself. The audience over there is mostly women, but they pay. Jules is making a respectable amount writing "smut romance science-fiction and fantasy."

I can't resist the urge to smugly point out that if you had Word Perfect instead of stupid old Word, not only would you have good old Reveal Codes (and a much better capacity for changing formatting and special characters with find-and-replace), but you'd have Master Document, which allows you to link a bunch of files the way you link webpages to an index page. You can then open ("expand") all the files at once, or any number of them in any combination. But you can do this to find your way around the whole thing, even in Word. Since the parts are about what, 1.5K each? they're not such bad units to use for search purposes. Use the "find" part of "find and replace" to get around. Like: find "part 72." Or if you'r just skimming along looking for something and you're not sure what word you used and you're not sure which part it's in, just find "part"over and over till you get where you want to go. 80+K words is a big file, but since you've got those part number headings it shouldn't be too bad. Just -- when you're pasting the (copied! not cut!) parts together, pay attention to where you are and don't paste out of order, as I have done on more than one occasion (and I'll admit it's kind of annoying to try to fix that in Master Document). As for comments -- me, too, later.

And if two married people separate, and one party obsesses for the first month of that separation about working things out

Chekhov said if there's a gun on the mantelpiece in Act I it had better be fired before the end of Act III. I say if there's a gun, it had better be fired, or else not fired in an interesting way. Metaphorically, you're firing all your guns, which is nicely done. Literally, I think that gun's getting not-fired in an interesting way. Nice that Joe's forgotten abotu the inside-out jacket right after he's done it. And you're right about the page not needing to show everything you know about the characters and the story.

QUOTE Research is good, but fiction is fiction, and in the end you have to make everything up anyway. --me Yep, this is true, but if I'm going to be playing around with things from myths and legends, it does kinda behoove me to get it generally right, or it'll annoy folks who're actually familiar with them. I know that happens to me -- I've got one (otherwise reasonably nice) book where in the opening few pages the vet gets hauled out to someone's horse farm and... he grabs his bag 'o stuff to go. That put me right off, since no large animal vet does that. They've all got pickups with custom cabinetry in the truck bed filled with all sorts of stuff. (You try hauling around enough mineral oil and rubber hosing to flush out a colicking horse in a satchel...) It's one of the major startup costs for a vet practice. It was still a good book, but I almost didn't get past that point, and I don't want to do it to anyone else, at least not more than I have to. Yeah, that's the thing. I say I need to know enough that I don't write anything stupid. Since most of what I write is not what's here but science fiction (not lazer pistols and personal rocket ships and galactic empires, but terraformed worlds and machines that are plants and medicines that are animals), I can get away with a lot if I work it right, but I insist on knowing enough to work it right. As to the spoiler: the first idea is intriguing. The second idea is also. I'm not sure they're mutually inconsistent.

Not always, and certainly not always in the first draft. Research is good, but fiction is fiction, and in the end you have to make everything up anyway. I have a feeling I'm going to be sad about the conenction between grandfather and Alex. Unless Alex is an opposing spirit. But that wouldn't be right, either.

I thoroughly love the environment of this story. I'm a little annoyed with Travis: I want him to spill his guts soon, at least to himself. And is Owen's problem not really that Aiden dumped him but that he doesn't feel like he's worthy of anybody at all? In the first story I felt about Aiden as Owen did, I think -- that he was just the perfect guy, you know? and now I'm kind of mad at him, but I can't quite pinpoint his crime (no, I don't think it's the Owen thing, or at least not entirely or not all of the Owen thing). I do get the thing with Owen and Dennis, on some level or another. Sorry you're working so hard, but I imagine you'll be glad of it later when your ridiculous climate sidelines you for weeks at a time.

Yeah, the Jetta should show up at least once more (three times is a fairy tale motif, but a novel can sometimes use more). I think he just talked about the jacket thing, or thought about it. I don't know if it's wrong for him to do it twice, though: if the first time, he felt foolish and the second time he's desperate.

I actually think you're right, except that I don't think these are mutually exclusive interpretations.

Is it worth fixing that in the rewrite? I'm making notes as to what should be done, and definitely soliciting opinions. Not unless it grabs you and demands being mentioned. I think that some of us are doing the Fan thing and getting way involved in every nuance, which is fun, but not necessarily the way other people read these things. To me Joe seems like a person who is capable of tremendous loyalty, and who probably craves someone to be loyal to -- not justn a lover but also friends -- but he has real reasons to be wary. Chronologically first, there's the fact that his brother and his brother's friends tormented hin: that his earliest relationships were ones he had to flee to save himself: then there's his being, honestly, haunted by his second sight: and then there's fallout from that -- for example, he participates in a social context where drinking is normal and he can't drink. I suspect that part of the reason he fell in love with Alex in the first place, besides the fact that Alex is a shadow of the man he's most drawn to, is that he wanted so much to -- not just for the romantic rush of being in love, but for the intimacy and connectedness of the long haul. See, I got this without any more than what's already there, but if you wanted to underline all this, you could do it with a couple of well-placed phrases here and there.

I think I noticed that regret is coming through -- he's expressing things badly to himself as well as to the rest of the world though. I think all the couples counseling they need can be provided by Chris's friends, though. They're pretty smart folks. Which just made me wonder -- what about Joe's friends? Are they all the people at the club he goes to? Has the (almost) well-adjusted out-the-closet guy been only making superficial friendships? It would make a kind of sense for it to go either way.

Dang, Joe is hasty. He could have thought "Chris is acting out of habit," and remembered what Chris had said earlier. Well, some people could, anyway. Do I get the impression that "grandpa" isn't done with him? And why aren't any of these smart guys thinking about Toby saying that?

Your old laptop is three years old? Poor guy! I just acquired a <a href="http://ritaxis.livejournal.com/2007/03/24/">six year old laptop</a> and I'm stoked. heh.

I had a similar response at first but I think that Chris is going to do the slow double take and later on feel the jolt full force. He's had a few shocks -- notice he also hasn't reacted yet to the "grandpa" part.