Lucy Kemnitzer

Think about the rhythm of the person's speech and find a way to represent that. Lars Eighner does this thing where he never uses contractions, and it perfectly matches the rhythm of Texas speech , even though Texans use contractions all the time. I wouldn't stick in a lot of comments like "he said in his Southern twang." I'd mention it a couple of times, max. And if there's a big pronunciation situation going on, I'd choose one or two words to demonstrate with. And I'd think about the consequences of the accent. Does the accent sound harsh to the narrator? Does it sound clipped, or slow-minded, or is it hard to understand? A funny thing happened in sixth grade when I moved from a rural neighborhood in California (where a lot of my neighbors were from Texas and Oklahoma) to a neighborhood in Philadelphia where most of my fellow students were black and from Virginia, and the rest were from Appalachia. The teacher had a student give me a spelling test for placement. I wrote down the wrong word for every word she gave me (but I spelled the wrong words right!). I didn't run into the Philadelphia accent until I went to high school. But I think the key principles are these: -- use the minimum clues to establish the accent. -- use clues that also reveal something else about the story, the plot, the characters, etc. -- let every detail have some degree of consequence.

Well, also, eating is like sex in terms of what it does for stories (except there are some things sex can do that eating doesn't). When characters in stories eat, there are a lot of little details you can put there to advance the story in various ways. Who do they eat with? or do they eat alone? And where? How do they eat -- in a hurry, savoring every bite, furtively, or ??? What does the taste of the food tell you about the characters, their situations, their state of mind? There's a lot of potential there. Am I the only one old enough to have seen the movie "Tom Jones" at an impressionable age? (if you haven't seen it, do, and wait for the dinner scene. You'll know what I'm talking about)

I also had a blood pressure situation very young, but it was what they call "labile" meaning it went up and down. Nowadays I think I might have started on blood pressure medication fifteen years earlier than I did. I kept it below the cutoff (which was higher then than it is now) mostly by eating moderately low salt, engaging in informal meditation, and wishful thinking. Now I take a diuretic and a different blood pressure medicine. I was on lisinopril for years until my doctor said "oh hey, the lisinopril causes a chronic cough in some people -- maybe it's part of your coughing problem." (this is of no relevance to you unless you develop a chronic cough that you can't get rid of by other means) What I'd say about the salt -- temporarily, go all the way to no salt at all, to reset your taste for salt. When you've done that for a while try adding the allowed amount of salt at the very last minute (i.e., don't cook with salt at all). What will happen is that you'll taste the salt more and you'll be able to get that salt enjoyment from a lot less salt. Do you see what I mean? You love salt. You have a condition which can often be improved by eating less salt. So you get yourself used to almost none, and then eensy weensy amounts are suddenly enough.

Yeah, but I wouldn't hold my breath waiting for the climactic conversion moment when he understands himself and reforms. Sometimes it happens, sometimes it doesn't.

I've been in a monogamous relationship for 34 years, I don't ever flirt, not online, not in person, never, however . . . I think the answer to every single one of those questions is "it depends." 1. Is it understood by everyone -- both correspondents and their mates -- to be play only? Is it open or hidden? Is it wordplay, or is it a devious little way to mess with somebody's head? Or escape activity for a person who's not honestly happy in their relationship? 2. Does it feel like cheating to any of the people involved? 3. What were the understandings of the couple in the first place? How exclusive were they intending to be? What did they consider to be sex and what did they consider to be conversation? 4. Is the person saving all his best lines for his correspondent, and ignoring his actual sweetie, or giving them only perfunctory attention? As for why people stay: -- maybe they don't think fidelity is as important as you do. -- maybe they expect the situation to resolve reasonably soon. -- maybe they are afraid getting into the single world again. -- maybe they think the guy has more advantages than disadvantages. -- maybe they're two-timing themselves and feel guilty. It all depends . . .

Can you be with your dog when they do the deed? We were able to do that: three of us (my younger kid didn't want to) sat on the floor of the examining room with the dog between us, and the vet gave her an injection to make her sleepy and another that actually killed her. It made things so much easier. And in this case, the cremation service had connection with a piece of land where the ashes are scattered in the forest, and we could have even gone to where the ashes went if we had wanted. The reason you're grieving your dog more is that your dog is the thing you have to deal with on your own, and with your uncle you're busy being the go-to guy.

Dom -- I remember when you were sort of burned out on "Desert Dropping." You wrote some other wonderful stuff for a while and then came back to it refreshed and did very well. You can take that two ways -- either it's a hint that you might want to take another look at "Harrison," or something else, or it's an expression of confidence that all will be well. Choose the interpretation that suits you better.

Like Modesto's any different. Well, you know -- the Valley . In general. Weird. (there's a local slogan "Keep Santa Cruz Weird" but that's about whether we should make life hard for street musicians, jugglers, comedians, poetry peddlars, and petition pushers: actually Santa Cruz is normal and its all that hinterland stuff that's weird)

One of the things I like about the way you write sex scenes is that they are consistent with the characters. Inexperienced adolescents, especially conflicted ones, should not act out a porn movie (or if they do, it ought to be humorous). Anyway, as far as hotness goes, well -- on the one hand,. you never know what other people will react to(*), and on the other hand, what's hot is what's engaging, what pulls the reader in and makes them feel the characters' feelings. Another thing I like is the way that these scenes advance the story. Milo is perfect in this scene, in every way. We're beginning to get a handle on just what those scowls really mean (not hostility: consternation, more like). And the relationship between these two kids has definitely become that much more interesting. It's natural for people who have enjoyed a particular aspect of your writing to want more of it, and to sometimes be somewhat disappointed when they encounter something different where they were expecting it. Just nod and smile and say "maybe I'll do that again sometime later, where it fits better."

I know a boy who used to eat ants because he liked them. They taste kind of hot. He said.

Yeah, I've backed off of sex I originally planned for characters -- sex which I originally thought had to happen in a particular place in the story because of the development of the plot and characters -- because it was so hard to write. I have a rule for writing sex scenes that almost makes it possible: the rule is, write them like dinner scenes. That is, you put as much detail in as moves the story forward in some way or another. And I have another rule: every thing in the story has to do at least two things for the story: develop character, setting, plot, establish motivation, build a coherent style, whatever, any two of them (though they ought to be the right two for the moment). So that makes it better, but almost every time I end up writing less sex than I originally thought the story called for. I think it's for the same reason I prefer to wear sleeves. jfinn, where can I read other works of yours? I really liked The Human Condition.

I think that the thing I said could have been interpreted that way, if the person stopped after I said that the phone call could have stood by itself as a good ending: but then I did go on to say that I wasn't saying that it should have. Because -- as I say at intervals, and haven't said for a while -- Dom, I completely trust your sense of story by this time. The message boards are the playground of your fans. It's not the best place for you to interact with your readers. I'd suggest staying out of them except I know if I were in your position I wouldn't be able to resist poking my nose in now and then.

Not literally weddings, usually, but they usually end with the couple agreeing to wed. The old saying is the difference between a comedy and a tragedy is that a tragedy ends in a funeral and a comedy ends in a wedding. That's left over from when comedy and tragedy was all there was (Greek drama, about which you now know almost everything I do). I've been taking an older lady (I can't say "old lady," can I, since that would probably have to include me!) to her hairdresser's on Fridays. I go to a barber myself. Anyway, while I wait for her, first I walk her dog and then I read the books they keep for the customers, which are mostly romances and mysteries with a smattering of literature. I've noticed that modern romances are different -- more variety, more complicated, more progressive in some ways. But there's always a female and a male who end up together affirming family values. Online ones, though I'm not sure, tend to have more out-there sex and less complicated story lines. Yes, Matt's one of the writers on my "always read" list.

I've been watching people and dogs approaching death . . . I think there comes a moment when there is a shift, and if you're sensitive you can feel it, when the agenda no changes for the organism: one one side of the shift, the agenda is how to stay alive, and on the other side of the shift, the agenda is how to die. I think you'll know that for your old dog, and I think you'll know whether he needs help with it. On a more lively note: "With Trust" is delightful. The best thing about it is the humor -- it's really hard to write humor, the timing has to be right, and deadpan humor is even harder. Now I want to start all my conversations with my family with "I'm Lucy, and I . . ." (parenting class indeed) I've been trying to add a comment on hetero online romance fiction. I think it tends to be less interesting too, and I think it's because the details of the outcome are not in question. Maybe. It's not that I have anything against people getting married at some point or another if they want to. I mean, well, I did and all, and that's been okay enough. But dramatically, I have to say it's just not as interesting as a situation with less defined upshots.

With Trust really is as good as people have been telling you. You've taken the ideas and situations and feelings you've been working on and you've kind of re-folded them -- as if you were doing one of those origami setpieces -- so that the shapes that emerge are different in an interesting way, still of a piece with what you've been doing so far but also entirely its own. Harrison Polk is a good one too, and I am eager to see where it goes -- the third person is good: it helps that you're writing tight third where you're really right next to each character and not floating around as if it were a movie with multiple cameras (which can be good, but is harder for writers whose first impulse is usually first person). The alternating viewpoints thing does not always work for every story, but it works here, mostly because the boys are seriously thinking different things about the same events.

I'm in a mood today and I'm disagreeing with the ugly vs beautiful thing on all counts. Right now -- oh fooey, this is going to sound trite and cheesy but it's how I feel right now, okay? If it has a human genotype, oh hell, if it's an organism, and it doesn't have nasty associations for me, it's beautiful. I saw my father's wives (the living ones, and including a person who gets called wife sometimes but was really my father's best friend) washing his body Friday morning. So you can see what's going on here. Hell, slime molds are beautiful to me right now. Bad example, they already were. Okay, mildew. It's alive, right? Life is beautiful. Oh ick, I'm the sentimental one. But I'm nbound to tell the truth and there it is.

Well, I'm probably the wrong person to talk about Valentine's Day. But although I adore romantic fiction, I'm really not into it in real life. I like more domesticated kinds of affection. Like family and friends. I think the real success of a romance, for example, is when the couple stops being lovers and starts being family (I don't mean have kids necessarily, though I'm all in favor of that when it's appropriate). Anyway, I'm leading up to saying, yeah, the paper frog from the kid and his mom, that's the best kind, even if it's not what most people have in mind when they think of the day. (my father is in the hospital, probably dying, and I've been observing what his family consists of --it makes me glad he's in the hospital in San Francisco, where you don't have to explain how he's accumulated this huge "immediate family." We did designate his best friend as his daughter to get her complete access, but other than that, well, we're all paper frogs together here)

I hope "getting bored again" is a sort of global thing and not specifically bored with our Arizona guys, who get more interesting to me every minute -- though I think they're getting very close to that not-quite-resolved point where you like to end their stories. Your feelings might reflect that. I read "In Trust," and it's attractive (with the extra added charm of truly amazing HTML errors, at least on my browser -- I'm almost reluctant to report them, because after they get fixed there won't be any story anywhere that has Chinese characters instead of apostrophes and abbreviations!). But the one I'm anxious to see is that other little bit you were running in the side bar for a while. I've had a little ennui the last month myself, but it's reaction to health issues in my family and scary happenings in the Capitol, mostly. I keep telling myself that tomorrow I'll get back to it.

No answer so far. But I go all incommunicative for months at a time myself, so I don't think it's necessarily significant that Matt hasn't answered.

I sent Matt a hello-are-you-ok note a few hours ago.

Oy, do not, do not, do not, take age as an indication of safety when deciding how much precaution to take when having sex, please, please. After steadily dropping, the rate of infection is going up . . . among the young, especially. Did your health teacher tell you that every time you have sex with a person you're also having sex with every person that they've ever had sex with? And that you don't know who those people are? People who mean well and intend to be honest can "forget" to tell you about that one time at that party they went to and got kind of blasted and got it on with somebody that they never saw again, and really they're not the kind of person who does that and they were pretty sure that they didn't do anything really unsafe and the other person was probably nearly a virgin and couldn't have picked up anything scary anyway and it was the only time they ever did anything risky because they're really responsible all the time. And that's all it takes. (My stepmother is an AIDS outreach and education person, just came home from a stint in Africa helping to develop local programs for HIV positive self-care, mutual aid, and peer education/counseling: had a stroke in Tanzania, is recovering at home now: she practically invented her field back at the beginning of the epidemic: so naturally I'm more conscious of this issue than you might expect)

Gee, these questuions are sure prompting long answers. I'll try to keep mine short, but I fear it's not a simple one. I'm seriously an old lady now but I remember vividly what my teenaged years were like. Oy, do I ever, and I am very glad I don't have to do that again, though I can say I wish I could undo some things and do some things I didn't, but not much because regret is a waste of time. Where was I? No story ever made a kid go out and shoot themselves up, even if the kid thinks so. Kids live in a milieu, with a lot of influences. That being said, I agree that writers have some responsibility to contribute to the milieu in constructive ways. But those constructive ways are not "show a negative consequence for every single act of drug use --" it's just not that simple. You could write a story in which the main character uses several heavy drugs several times unscathed and still, because of the whole story and all the things in it , end up with a conclusion that he probably shouldn't have done it and probably shouldn't do any more of it. Or you could not promote a position about the drugs at all because your story is busy being responsible about something else. There are more realistic stories and less realistic stories. You write in the more realistic corner. And that, I think, is your answer: if the character you're writing about tokes or drinks or does whatever, it's probably going to show up in the story. I'm going to tell you not to second guess yourself when you're writing what "really happened" (I think you know what I mean by that -- there's ways that fiction can be more true or less true, and when you're writing you sometimes have this burning clear vision of what's more true). You can read it over when you're revising and editing to make sure it feels right to you, but don't try to force a message: you already have one built in to your stories as it is, and it's important and positive as it stands.* When I was first writingThe Donor I had some bad moments that a person could read it and think I was making a metaphor for certain relationships, and comparing them to the predations of a monster. But I stopped worrying about it when I realized that I really had, unknown to myself, built an entirely different metaphor, all about caring for each other and being responsible. I had thought I was just writing this story that had popped into my head full-blown when I was a little girl (eleven) and kept around until I was old enough to write it. *I will only tell you what this message is if you insist: I'm not sure you really want to know.

You guys are like my daughter, who just warned my son off a young woman he was interested in because she is a friend of hers and she didn't want to hear about her brother's love life in the gossip mill. Grossgrossgross, she said. Poor guy, I think he decided to let it go.

Dom? Weren't you just now utterly floored by the possibility that your sisters could have such a feeling as lust?