I was planning to post my schedule for Conestoga, and then I realized that anyone who was going to be there would get a program that's probably more accurate than the information I currently have, so why bother? If you're in the Tulsa area and for whatever odd reason would be coming just to see me, Saturday would be the best day for it. I've got a reading in the morning (probably including a sneak peek at The Book In Search of a Good Home), some panels, and as an added treat, I'm doing my (in)famous workshop on using techniques from mythology and psychology to create characters. This isn't me rambling on about archetypes on a panel with a lot of other people rambling on. This is a real solo workshop, with handouts and everything. Plus, Saturday's when the birds of prey will be there. I loved that last year.

There was Fitz, the baby owl who'd been rescued after being washed out of his nest in a storm (I imagine he's been returned to the wild by now). He also came to the Harry Potter party, and I spent quite a lot of time holding him then. We bonded. Needless to say, that made a certain event that happened early in book 7 a bit more upsetting to me.



Then there was Valkyrie, author/artist Larry Dixon's red-tail hawk. She was also apparently a rescue and they've been trying to return her to the wild, but she doesn't seem to have any interest in going. I've always been fascinated with falconry, but I don't live in an environment suited to that.



I still haven't decided if I'll be taking my computer. I'm not at that stage in my work, and chances are I'll get too busy to post. Nothing happens on Fridays in the publishing world, so e-mail access isn't essential. But it's nice to know I could post updates if the spirit moves me.

In other news, I think I have settled on my ideal schedule. Exercising just before lunch really seems to be working for me. Then I recover during my lunch break, and I manage to be on an energy high all afternoon, even without caffeine. I find I'm sleeping better, which means I spend less time in bed trying to sleep, so I get up earlier, get more stuff done during the morning, which gives me time to exercise, and then all the business and all the exercise (all the "should" stuff) is done and I have the afternoon free for writing work. It does sort of mess with my eating schedule, as I'm not that hungry for lunch, then I get ravenous mid-afternoon, but then that spoils my appetite for dinner. I've adapted by just drinking water and eating some fruit for lunch, then having a protein/carb snack mid-afternoon. So, instead of three meals, I'm having a real breakfast and dinner, but two afternoon snacks instead of lunch. Another thing that seems to be helping the sleep is nothing electronic within 30 minutes of bedtime. That's something I gleaned from my medical writing side job. According to the med school sleep experts, the flickering lights on the screen of a TV, computer or videogame reset circadian rhythms, waking your brain up just when it's starting to get ready for sleep. You'll sleep better if you don't do any of that right before you go to bed. That's when reading is good. I also cut off writing-type activities because that also wakes up my brain. (On the other hand, some TV or videogames can be good for stimulating the brain before you need to work, in case you need an excuse.)

Now, of course, I'm going to get my schedule out of whack by traveling, but this does seem to make for more productive workdays.

And I have been pretty productive. Taking the slower approach to The New Project seems to be working, as in all the development work I've done this week, I've found all kinds of parallels and connections that I hadn't realized were there and that I can use. I have a better sense of my main character, who was something of a cipher to me. I think part of my problem (though "problem" is probably too strong a word) is that I tend to come up with big, high-concept ideas, which is great, but that means I also tend to get overly excited and want to just start writing NOW, which means I'm more likely to skim the surface instead of really delving into all the potential of the idea. And that means multiple rewrites to get it all right. By forcing myself to take my time and really dig, maybe I can save time on the other end and still get more out of the idea.

The hot weather is forcing me to adjust my schedule. Normally I do errands in the early afternoon, but this morning I hit the library as soon as it opened, then got to the bank, a couple of shops and the grocery store in time to get home and exercise for an hour before lunch. Now I can focus on work the rest of the day.

I've just read yet another writing book that has stuff I may try to incorporate into my process. One of the weaknesses I've identified is that I don't handle emotions well or omit the emotional response from scenes that should be emotional (probably because I, myself, tend to go into totally calm robot mode in a crisis. That is my emotional response, but not every character reacts that way, and it's hard to convey that on paper without making it look like a lack of a response). So, I found a book called Emotional Structure by Peter Dunne on Amazon and thought I'd give it a try. This is a screenwriting book, and the structure mentioned in the book is specifically for feature film screenplays, which doesn't translate exactly to novel structure, but there were still some good concepts in the book that apply to novels.

For one thing, his premise is that plot is the events that happen, while story is the characters' emotional reactions to those events, which is what the movie (or book) is really about. The plot events force the characters to take an emotional journey. The events and emotion are intertwined. He gives a pretty good step-by-step process for developing a script (or book) with this in mind, illustrated with a script he's developing to show how the process works as he goes from a three-line summary to a three-page outline, to note cards, to one-liner outline to more extensive outline to a script.

On the down side, I wish he'd given more varied examples because while I think that a lot of these ideas could apply to just about any kind of story, he seems very focused on love stories or stories that have a strong romantic plot. Granted, most movies do have some kind of love story in them (and quite a number of books, too), but I think you can have emotion and emotional development without having romantic love. I was watching Lethal Weapon 2 on HBO this weekend while I was reading this book, and a lot of what the book says about how the middle of the movie is where the emotional stuff comes to the forefront actually fits that movie, but with the partnership/buddy love between the two main characters rather than with a romantic relationship. I think you could tell a similar story with love between family members, relationships between co-workers, etc. Even in a movie with a romance in it, the relationship that brings character growth may not be the romantic one. All the examples in the book, though, are of the romantic variety.

Meanwhile, I hope his sample script was really just a hypothetical to illustrate the steps in the book because I didn't think it was very good, and it was rather obvious. The romantic plot in it didn't ring true to me. It seemed like your typical, standard Hollywood "there's a man and a woman in this movie, so they have to fall in love with each other, and they really ought to come to their big emotional moment while they're in the shower together because we need some skin" relationship. He also dissed The Terminator in a way that made me think he hasn't actually seen it because he said that was the kind of movie that was all about destruction instead of emotion, and it didn't have the quieter, reflective scenes in between action scenes because what is the Terminator going to reflect on? But actually, that movie fits all his principles, since the main character is Sarah Connor, not the Terminator, and the middle is where the love story develops that affects the way the plot comes out. The first act ends with Kyle Reese telling her "Come with me if you want to live," and then the middle is mostly about their developing relationship as she first thinks he's crazy, then finds out he isn't, so that they're then working together, and she wants to learn more about him and about the person she's destined to become. They do have the quiet, reflective moments where they get to know each other in between action scenes, like under the bridge where he tells her about his world, and then in the motel after they make the bombs.

However, I've yet to find a writing book that I agree with 100 percent. What I do is find what works for me and then incorporate it into my Frankenstein's monster of a process.

I think I'm going to give the screenwriting process a try with The New Project, using his outlining method. That goes back to my big weakness, which is impatience. I'm in a rush to get things down on paper (well, virtually, as I try to be paperless), but then once things are written, they feel more set in stone, and it's harder to revise when a scene isn't working. Maybe if I go through all the outlining steps of developing a screenplay, down to writing a detailed outline, that will address my recent problem of not knowing what the book's about until I've written it, but without having to actually write it in book form. I can play with the content and structure of all the scenes before I commit them to actual narrative.

In other news, after my lament a few weeks ago about the disappearance of the Bermuda Triangle from pop culture, today's TV listings show that our local PBS station is showing something about the Bermuda Triangle tonight. Yay!

I had a real blast from the past last weekend when I watched Pretty in Pink on HBO. I don't think I've seen that movie since 1986 (I didn't see it during the theatrical run, but I saw it that fall on video when they had a Molly Ringwald film festival in the dorm TV room). It came out in the spring semester of my senior year and was about the spring semester of the characters' senior year, so the characters are (theoretically) about the same age I am (in general, the John Hughes teen movies are about my generation). It was interesting seeing the contrast between then and now.

First, the cast. This seems to be where casting 20-somethings as teenagers really shows up because most of those people don't look anything like they'd be in the same age range with me, except maybe Molly Ringwald and Jon Cryer. James Spader and Andrew McCarthy haven't aged too badly, but they definitely look older than around 40. The real shock was seeing Kate Vernon as a teen character after being so used to her as Ellen Tigh on Battlestar Galactica. She seems to be typecast as the bitchy slut. Oddly, Margaret Colin, who had a brief scene as a teacher, is the one who seems to have aged the best. She was playing an "adult" character (but probably wasn't much older than most of her co-stars) and now looks younger than most of the "teens" from the movie. One definite effect of the time warp came in the subplot with the Annie Potts character. Most of the movie, she wore outfits that were essentially period costumes, then at the end it's supposed to be a sign of growth when she dresses like a normal person. Except her "normal" outfit is such a stereotypically 80s outfit that she looks like she's wearing yet another period costume now.

I do find it amusing that the so-called "poor" girl had her own private phone line and answering machine and drove a cute classic car with a custom paint job. I was on the lower end of middle class in high school, and I definitely didn't have a private phone line (not that I would have gotten much use out of it, as I'm not a big phone person). We had one car for the entire family most of my high school years, and my poorer friends who did have cars had rather beat-up old 70s hatchbacks. Molly may have lived on the wrong side of the tracks (literally), but she didn't live or act like any poor kid I knew. Meanwhile, her fabulous, creative concoction of a prom dress was utterly hideous. She managed to take two reasonably cute dresses, cut them apart and put them back together as a big, shapeless sack, which is a crime against fashion. I remember being utterly disappointed in the big reveal of her "eat your heart out, rich boy" prom dress as a teen. All I could think was "I don't think that's going to have the effect you think it will have." The other dresses at the prom were very much like what was at my proms (and not too far from things I wore).

When I first saw the movie, I wanted Molly Ringwald to go for Duckie and not worry about the rich guy. I guess I was in a phase where I wanted my male friends to notice me as a girl. In my teen years, my Duckie equivalents were too busy chasing the Kristy Swanson girls to notice me, and the rich, cool guys who paid any attention to me turned out to have girlfriends I didn't know about, and they just wanted my help with their homework. As an adult, I found Duckie's behavior a bit disturbing and on the stalkerish side of things with some definite control/jealousy red flags, and I found Andrew McCarthy's shy/awkward/kind of dorky first attempts at talking to her utterly charming. There does seem to be a pattern in teen movies of the "hero" dumping the heroine before the big dance, then the friend steps in to help her save face, but then she ditches the friend at the dance when the hero comes to his senses. In this case, the friend pretty much ordered her to ditch him, but it's still not a very nice pattern of behavior. It makes everyone look bad.

Looking at the film as a writer, I was surprised by how weak the story and conflict really were. We never got much of an idea why Andrew McCarthy liked Molly Riingwald, and we never really saw why she liked him, other than that he was cute and rich (a similar problem with Sixteen Candles). We never got a sense of what drew them together in a relationship, other than that they were both straining against the expectations of their friends. They had one pretty disastrous date and one date that seemed to go okay before their relationship fell apart, which hardly seems like a tragic end of the world or a cause for them to declare their unending love for each other. And, really, in a Chicago suburb, was there nowhere else to go for a first date than a party with his friends or a club where her friends hung out? There were no restaurants or movie theaters, no arcades, no skating rinks? That seemed like manufactured conflict. As an adult, I couldn't bring myself to pull for them as a couple. It might have worked better if we'd had a chance to see their relationship develop a little before putting it to the test of their friends so they'd have a reason to be really torn when their friends wouldn't accept them being together.

I've seen all the other "Brat Pack" films repeatedly since the 80s, but this was the first one where I had such a huge gap in time. Oddly, it didn't make me feel too old, since I look better than most of those people do now (though it does help that the actors are all several years older than I am even if their characters would be my age). Now I need to see St. Elmo's Fire to see if I still dislike it. I last saw it in my very early 20s, when it was around the time I was the same age as the characters, and I found them all highly annoying. Will I be more sympathetic with the passage of time?

It occurred to me that my handy guide to being the Doctor's companion would make an excellent basis for an orientation/training/safety briefing video -- sort of a cross between the airline safety briefing videos and those bad, not updated since the 80s videos they show as part of new employee orientations. I suppose it could be done with just clips from the show, the generic electronic 80s-sounding music and perky voice-over narration, but to really make it art, you'd need to truly mimic the orientation/safety video vibe. You'd need a vapidly smiling TV anchorwoman type host, some cheesy graphics, the generic industrial film sets that only vaguely relate to the real situation (which would make any actual show clips even funnier), and that particular quasi-mime acting style that tends to show up in those films, with the actors miming reactions that aren't entirely appropriate to the situation -- like the way the actors in the airplane safety videos are all, "Oh, look, it's oxygen masks falling from the ceiling. Isn't that interesting?" Not that the airlines would want to model panic and fear on the safety video, but couldn't the actors at least look mildly concerned instead of pleasantly surprised? I have some friends who like to make short parody films, so maybe I'll talk to them about doing the TARDIS orientation video.

I have finally been forced to overcome my denial about the fact that it is, indeed, summer, so on Friday night I decided to give myself a good pedicure that will allow me to wear sandals. And thus, the nightmare began.

First, a brief prologue. Four years ago, when I'd just sold Enchanted, Inc. after more than two years of being unemployed with the occasional freelance job, I decided to go shopping. I'd been living pretty frugally all that time, and I figured I could use a splurge. So, I hit the mall, and I guess the mood I was in made me prey to one of the Kiosk People. I don't know how widespread this is, but in every mall around here, there's at least one kiosk where they sell these Dead Sea bath/beauty products, mostly staffed by young men with exotic accents, and they're very, very aggressive salespeople who grab people as they pass and pretty much hound you to let them give you treatments. That day, I got attacked by one demonstrating the Dead Sea salt scrub. Normally, I have great sales resistance, but the scrub did feel pretty good, and my hands do get a lot of abuse at the keyboard, so I bought some. The problem was, it was pretty messy, so using it was a pain, and eventually it got relegated to a plastic bag in the cabinet under the bathroom sink.

So Friday night, I thought I'd do the full treatment and break out the scrub for my feet (and the hands get treated at the same time while working on the feet). The problem was, apparently the stuff had mutated. It went on pretty well, just a little less oily and drippy than before, and I got my feet and hands all scrubbed, but when I turned on the water to rinse, it turned into this horrible alien ooze. You know when you buy a new appliance and they have the little cards extolling their virtues stuck on with that rubbery stuff? This was like that, only damper and stickier. It didn't rinse off in hot water. It didn't come off with soap and water. It just kept getting stickier, with my hands and feet covered in globs of sticky, oozing slime. A couple of scrubbings with shampoo got enough off that I was able to get my feet into flip-flops and run to the kitchen to find something stronger. I recalled some household hint about oil being good for removing gummy residue left by labels, so I grabbed the cooking oil and the dish soap (for removing the oil) and ran back to the bathroom. By this time, we're about ten minutes from Doctor Who and I was in no shape to be on furniture or to touch anything, so I was panicking. Going through the oil and dish soap routine twice got things to the point I was willing to go into my living room, but my skin still had a slightly sticky quality, so that anything with fuzz or lint stuck to my hands and feet. I put lotion all over, then later when I was doing my nails, I tried rubbing nail polish remover on the affected areas, then more lotion. Eventually, I got it all off, and my hands and feet were pretty soft by the time I was done.

But the attack of the alien ooze definitely affected my TV viewing. First, on Doctor Who when Donna was approached by the pushy fortuneteller lady, all I could think was that she was going to force Donna to let her do some kind of scrub treatment on her. She had the exact same vibe as the Kiosk People (who are, I'm now convinced, the vanguard of some invading alien force). And then on Stargate Atlantis, the doctor being taken over by the alien stuff had her symptoms start with goo all over her hand -- pretty much just like I'd been not too long before. That was rather unsettling.

Now I have to figure out a way to get that stuff off the bathtub (where I was using it). Even after a few rounds with the Scrubbing Bubbles, the bottom of the bathtub and the faucet handle are all sticky.

For future reference, unless there really is something magical about the Dead Sea minerals, you can get a similar effect from Kosher salt in olive oil. And if you have some of that scrub stuff mutating under your sink, be very, very careful.

Donna icon courtesy of lily_merchant

First, a notice for those in the north Texas area: I will be having a booksigning with Rachel Caine (author of the Weather Wardens and Morganville Vampires series) on Saturday, July 19, 2 to about 4 p.m., at the Barnes & Noble in Lewisville, Texas (near Vista Ridge Mall). Come by and say hi! There will likely be much geeky conversation.

The film option contract is now signed, notarized and should be back in Hollywood (well, Beverly Hills), depending on the FedEx delivery schedule. There was a short conference call with the LA agency lawyer and my agent to clarify a couple of details, which was somewhat embarrassing as the way I tend to clarify things is to come up with bizarro hypothetical situations, and I'm not sure he knew quite what to make of that (I have no idea what he's really like, but on the phone he certainly sounded like Central Casting's idea of a Hollywood agency lawyer). Then I was able to get the contract notarized at my bank. They'd been snippy when I needed something like that previously, but that was at a different branch and this guy was really cool (of course he was, he was a fellow Longhorn). So yay for Chase Bank. I celebrated by going to Target and buying some new shorts. Yeah, I'm living large, but I'd recently realized I had one good pair of shorts (shorts I can wear outside the house) because all the others were in the mending basket. And then I noticed that all the shorts in the mending basket were "Mom jeans" shorts with high waists, pleats and cuffs. They're also all more than 15 years old, so I figured it wouldn't kill me to buy some new ones. Oddly, although the shorts I bought were all the same style from the same manufacturer, just in different colors, I had to get two different sizes because different colors fit different ways (they were even the same fabric, just in different colors).

Now, in honor of tonight's Donna-centric Doctor Who episode, here's a bit of silliness I wrote and posted to Television Without Pity last year. It's me being all practical about what I would do if I got invited to travel with the Doctor:

I would be absolutely certain never to violate Rule Number One (Don't Wander Off), even going as far as to have it tattooed on the back of my hand. I may be an independent woman who can take care of myself, but when I'm in a strange time/place, I'm not letting the guy who can get me out of there out of my sight.

I would insist that the Doctor give me a slide show and briefing on his major enemies, including the ones he thinks he's totally wiped out. That way, if external forces disrupt my slavish devotion to Rule Number One and I run into an old enemy while on my own, I won't mistakenly try to make friends with it, try to help it, or ask it if it's seen my friend the Doctor, you know, that Time Lord who travels around in a blue box.

Even if the Doctor does look like a cute thirtysomething guy, I will never let myself forget that he is an alien more than 900 years old who will outlive me by hundreds or even thousands of years (maybe I'll get that tattooed on the back of my other hand) and therefore probably not interested in me in that way. I'll enjoy my time with him more if I don't have any expectations of him in that area. And, hey, if he does make a move, it will be a pleasant surprise.

I will remember that kissing me doesn't necessarily mean he's making a move, as that's also a way of transferring genetic material or TARDIS energy.

When the Doctor gives me a truly universal cell phone, I will call my mother on a regular basis and not just when I'm in a life-or-death crisis so she won't worry about me or get suspicious because it's so rare for me to call her.

Now I hope to get some actual creative work done today. The part of my brain that can deal with contracts seems to sap all the energy from the part of my brain that can be creative.

I had the kind of day yesterday that required lots of deep, cleansing breaths and a generous application of chocolate (Keebler's Grasshoppers, which are basically Thin Mints you can get year-round without being attacked by a Girl Scout, and which are utterly divine straight out of the freezer). Not that it was a bad day, just frustrating in a way that almost made it seem like it was designed specifically to drive me Up. The. Wall. Like if I were a POW and they were designing a torture technique guaranteed to break me, this is what it would be, and that would be against the Geneva Convention, but because it's business, I can't call Amnesty International to protest on my behalf. It didn't help that the dream I had just before I woke up that morning was yet another in my ongoing series of nightmares about having to go back to a corporate job, only in this one, a bunch of friends from various past jobs were all working together at a new place, and they invited me to visit them at work, then it turned out to be an ambush to try to make me take a job there. I woke up while I was still protesting that I didn't need a job and they were trying to convince me that I would only have to come to the office a couple of days a week, so I'd still have time to write. The really odd thing is that I realized upon waking that some of the "friends" in the dream were actually TV characters, which could say something sad about the role television plays in my life, except that the main one I remember was Ianto from Torchwood, and his mannerisms around the office have always reminded me of the department administrative assistant in one of my old jobs, only much, much cuter, so if I'm including that personality in a dream as part of a "This is Your Life" parade of former co-workers, it makes sense for it to be the cute version.

Meanwhile, I may have to stop watching tapes of The Office from last fall because it really is depressing. Even when I remember to forward through the commercials, they often have the little weather brief tease for the late news as the last thing before the end of a commercial break, so to avoid missing part of the episode, I have to hear about low temperatures in the 40s and 50s and cold fronts on the way, which sounds so lovely right now when it's annoyingly hot.

I've seen this post by Libba Bray linked from some book-world blogs, and the metaphor of the process of writing a book being like falling in love is painfully accurate. Except, for me, I find that the first draft is often more like those annoying couples who are always breaking up and getting back together again. You know, the ones who are madly in love and ignore all their friends while they're so wrapped up in each other, and then they have a big fight and suddenly want to gripe about each other to all their friends as they talk about what a jerk the other person is and how it's never going to work, but then the next thing you know, one of them does something wonderful and they realize they did miss each other, and they're back together again and even more mushy than before, and they'll deny having said anything bad about the other person. And then they get mad and one of them will storm out, and they'll swear it's over. And then they get back together again and love each other dearly. Then there's the point where they're really not happy together, but they're more afraid of breaking up and having to find someone else than they are of staying together and being miserable, so they stay together but don't really enjoy themselves and grow to sort of even hate each other in a passive-aggressive way. But then out of the blue something will happen that makes them fall in love all over again.

Yeah, that's me through most of my first drafts. I swing madly back and forth between love and hate, with times when this is the most fun I've ever had and times when I feel like it would be less painful to be writing in my own blood. And there are times when I'm bored out of my skull and know it won't work, but I'm committed, so I have to finish it. But then there are enough moments of pure joy to make it worthwhile. Most of the time, it's not so much the book I hate or am mad at, but rather I'm mad at myself for not being able to do justice to the perfect book that lives in my head.

Fortunately, today is already turning out to be much better on a frustration level, and I may even get something worthwhile accomplished.

I know I said I was going to do a series on archetypes, but I'm going to interrupt that this week because I read something interesting I wanted to share, and the series will resume next time.

A couple of weeks ago, my agent mentioned on her blog that she was reading the book Good to Great by Jim Collins, which is a business book about how companies that had been performing well made a jump to great performance. One of the things she mentioned from the book was that "good is the enemy of great," and that got me started thinking, so I checked the book out of the library and read it. While it is a book about businesses, there are lessons to be learned for a writing career, as well. I think I've done just about every wrong thing through the course of my career, and I hope I'm on track to start moving in a better direction.

First, that idea that good is the enemy of great. What that means is that thinking you're doing okay can stop you from having the drive to do better. It also may make you afraid of taking the risk of changing what you're doing. If what you're doing is working, why change? But reaching greatness may require change and risk. I think that this can apply to writers at any stage of their careers. For mega-bestselling authors, having the clout to have publishers willing to print their grocery lists without editing and knowing that people will buy that can allow them to coast at that level of success so they never push themselves to achieve what could be lasting greatness. For solid midlist authors, moderate ongoing success could make it scary to try the entirely different thing that could be what breaks them out into bestsellerdom. For unpublished authors, a lot of contest wins could be what's keeping them from selling, if their focus is on writing to please contest judges instead of editors or agents (since contest judges and editors and agents are often looking for entirely different things). All of these people may feel like what they're doing is working and that their success means they're on the right track, but that could be what's keeping them from doing even better.

( More Good to Great Behind the Cut )

I woke up surprisingly early this morning (for me) and decided to go with it instead of rolling over and going back to sleep. Now the morning is unusually cool and refreshing, so I have windows open.

The contract wasn't nearly as scary as I feared. For one thing, there were four copies of the contract in the package, so the package was a lot more daunting than the contents turned out to be. I already knew about the more alarming terms. Some of the mildly alarming things I didn't know about weren't too terribly surprising. For instance, I can't sue the studio if they make the Worst Movie Ever out of my book and I think the movie is so bad it defames my book and me as a writer. If that clause weren't in option contracts, Hollywood would either be bankrupt or owned outright by Stephen King or Michael Crichton (yes, they've both had really good movies made from their books, but they've also had some utter stinkers).

Most of the surprises were pleasant ones. There's a lot of contract language specifying exactly how I would be credited in the movie itself and in advertising (in any ad where the screenwriter is credited, except for ads mentioning or promoting specific award nominations. So they can do ads promoting the screenwriter for an Oscar without mentioning me, and they can do ads congratulating the screenwriter for the Oscar nomination or promoting the movie because of its Oscar-nominated screenplay without mentioning me). I think that was the first time I've seen "based on the novel by Shanna Swendson" in print. I actually got a bit teary-eyed. And there's even a clause in the contract about how I and a guest will be invited to the east or west coast celebrity premiere, with first-class transportation provided by the studio. Great. Now I have to come up with a date for my own movie premiere. While I normally ignore the "and guest" on invitations and go solo as long as it's not an invitation to Noah's Ark, I probably won't know a soul there, so I'll need someone. I've heard Meg Cabot talk about her experiences at the premiere of The Princess Diaries, and she was pretty big already by that point. I'd probably blend into the scenery and be utterly ignored. Yes, I know this is all totally hypothetical and based on the remote possibility that a movie might get made, but given my inability to find dates (especially ones I'd actually want to go with), I might need to start working on that now. Or I'll make my parents draw straws over who gets to go with me.

I just have a few questions I want my agent to clarify before I sign, and then I'll have to find a notary. It looks like the postal center/shipping place next to the library has notary services, and then maybe I can celebrate after shipping off the contract by going to the library cafe and having one of their awesome frozen raspberry lemonades and a pastry.

I got my box of writing books from Amazon yesterday, and I'm looking forward to digging into them. I'm in the planning stages of a book, so that gives me a case study to use as I work my way through the books. One tidbit I've already gleaned from the quick skimming I've done: It's not so much about conveying the characters' emotions as it is about triggering the readers' emotions. That's common sense, but I'd never thought of it quite that way. In most cases, it's more or less the same thing. If your character is sad, you want the reader to feel bad for her. If the character is scared, the reader should be, too. But there are times when you want the reader to feel something different. In an action story, your intrepid hero may be totally calm in a crisis, but you want the reader to feel incredibly tense. And sometimes the moments that are laugh-out-loud funny to the reader are embarrassing and awkward for the character.

Yesterday I was all ready to rant about how it's just the middle of July and I'm already seeing all these ads about fall on TV. It's not fair to taunt me with the idea of fall in the middle of July. That's just cruel. And then I realized that I was watching my tapes of the latest season of The Office, and I guess I got distracted (crossword puzzle) and forgot to forward through the commercials, so I was watching commercials from last September. Which was fall. Which would explain the "new fall sweaters are here" and "take your fall vacation here" ads. It was the ads for The Bionic Woman and the "Friday Night Lights is now on Friday!" ads that finally clued me in.

Finally, I've been lucky (or maybe obscure) enough not to have to deal with a lot of spam blog comments. When I get them, they all seem to be for the same posts. For the longest time, it was a post from more than a year ago that kept getting them. Now they're showing up for a post from last week. Most of them are utterly nonsensical and don't even point to or promote anything, so I don't see what the point is, and there's nothing unique to that post that would give any particular search terms that would trigger a spambot. It remains a mystery.

I had a total slugfest this weekend -- as in being mostly motionless, not hitting people. I came to the shocking realization that if I was really tired and having trouble keeping my eyes open, then maybe I needed rest (imagine that!). Of course, that was when one of my neighbors started doing something with a power saw, so I never got an actual nap (and it was a bit suspicious how the saw would go quiet, but then the moment I closed my book and prepared to nap, it would start up again), but I did read something pleasantly mindless and let myself drift in and out as needed, which was nice. I seem to need a completely unprogrammed weekend every so often. Not that my weeks are that busy or strenuous, but a couple of days of doing nothing much while not thinking much about work can make a big difference in my energy levels.

And, boy, am I going to need my energy levels this week. I finally got the contract for the film option (yes, it takes that long), and it's more than 40 pages of Hollywood legalese that I have to read, since I'm not stupid enough to just sign something Hollywood sends me. I wish I had Katie on stand-by, since if there were a way Hollywood lawyers could magically veil portions of the contract and then drop the veil when they want that clause to kick in, I'm sure they'd do it. Not that I can scream or complain about anything at this point. Everything that can be negotiated has been (which is what's taken so long). It's a take it or leave it situation, but I need to know exactly what I'm taking. I know I'm signing away some big things -- like they have the right to make further movies based on these characters without necessarily following the subsequent books in the series (like with The Princess Diaries movies, where the sequel wasn't based on a book). I'm not at the point in my career where I have the clout to retain more control, but I might never reach the point in my career where I have the clout to retain control without the boost that a movie based on my books could give me. So, yeah, I'm going to have a fun day. Good thing I have plenty of chocolate in the house.

I got the book Good to Great that I mentioned last week, and I read it in practically one sitting on Friday. It was a business book that almost read like a novel. The "good is the enemy of great" concept was just the starting point, and from there they broke down what made companies that had achieved real greatness (in terms of performance) from companies that were merely consistently good. If I still had a day job in corporate America, I might have found the book depressing, since I've never worked for a company or organization that met any of the guidelines for being "great." They were all in the fairly self-destructive loops of companies that never achieved greatness or never sustained it. I've had a few bosses over time who met the characteristics of the great company leader, but they were middle managers stuck in organizations that definitely didn't allow them to do their thing (which is why they all ended up leaving in frustration). My guess is that this is one of those books executives give each other as a gift and put on the shelves in their offices without reading it because most of the problems I see in businesses in the news today could have been avoided by even thinking a little about the findings in this book (and it's really a research report, not just an idealistic "how things should be" book, so the findings are proof that it works). No publisher I've ever worked with fits the model of "great" company. In fact, they seem to a large extent to do the exact opposite. The problem is that it takes going against a lot of human nature to achieve greatness, which is why they only found 11 companies in the Fortune 500 that met the parameters of greatness (and some of those have recently been in the news as failures, so even that greatness hasn't been sustained indefinitely). I'd be curious to find out if any follow-up work has been done to see if someone has managed to turn a company around by following these principles.

However, I think I've extracted some wisdom from the ideas on what makes a company great that can apply to a writing career, and that will be my Wednesday writing post.

And now to go tackle that contract (whimper!).

I can't believe it's Friday already. Where did the week go? Looking at my to-do list, I see that I accomplished a lot, but it doesn't much feel like it.

The Harry Potter symposium is in town this weekend, and I've been toying with the idea of going just for the day on Saturday. But it is pretty expensive, and I'm not sure of the benefit. True, that's a key target audience of people who might be inclined to like my books, but since I never got around to submitting anything for participating in programming, any contacts I make would have to involve direct conversations, and I'm afraid I'm in a big introvert phase right now, which means that I would turn invisible in the crowd.

It's also occurred to me that I currently have a real marketing dilemma. Because the majority of the population has never heard of my books, most marketing activities I do primarily sell the first book in the series. That book is already considered a success. The issue right now is the ratio of sales of subsequent books to that first one, so the more the first book sells, unless all those people very quickly go on to buy the rest of the books, the worse things look for the later books in any snapshot of sales figures. Since the publisher doesn't seem to have any interest in capitalizing on the steady ongoing sales of that first book by doing something big to promote the whole series, hooking new people at this point actually works against me in a weird sort of way. What I need to figure out how to do is reach people who read the first book or the first couple of books and get them to buy the rest of the series, and that's a real challenge. Anyone who's interested enough to write to me, to read my blog or sign up for my e-mail list is also probably interested enough to have already bought the whole series. Anyone who bought the books via Amazon likely got a reminder of the release of the others. I don't know if the drop-off is because of people not knowing about the rest of the books or not wanting to read the rest. I have run into people at conventions who've asked me if a third book (or in a few cases, a second book) is available, so there may be some awareness issues. I suppose people who buy the first book when they hear me speak at a convention may not know about the rest because they aren't in the section of the bookstore where these people would be shopping. I will have to ponder this further.

But enough serious stuff. I've had something supremely silly running around in my head for a few weeks, and I think I should inflict it on everyone else. I've been watching the BBC Robin Hood series (though not the latest episode, since TimeWarner never got around to posting it to OnDemand here. Grrr.) and, for some odd reason, I've lately marathoned the first three seasons of the US version of The Office. And then I found that the two of them started merging in my head until I realized that in many respects, they're the same show. It's not a perfect one-to-one correlation, but there are definite patterns.

Spoiler warning for what's shown of Robin Hood on BBCAmerica and on seasons one through four of the US version of The Office. Also, extreme silliness warning. And apologies in advance if this totally ruins both shows for you.

Basically, the Sheriff and Guy on Robin Hood are Michael Scott and Dwight on The Office. We've got the extremely self-centered, egotistical, volatile, drama-queeny boss and his sycophantic, extremely ambitious sidekick who believes firmly in might making right and who thinks that his devotion to his boss will ultimately get him what he wants out of life -- namely power and money. I guess you could say that Guy is Assistant (to the) Sheriff. In both cases, the boss is perfectly willing to use his sidekick when it suits him, but he actually holds him in contempt and would willingly sacrifice him if necessary. And the sidekick bases a lot of his self worth on his "estate" (Dwight's beet farm, Guy's estate that used to be Robin's).

I wonder if one day Guy will try to usurp the Sheriff's position, so that Prince Jan -- er, John -- will have to step in and put a stop to it. And then Guy will be stuck doing the Sheriff's laundry.

That was the first parallel I noticed. Then I realized that as our "hero," in both cases we have a cheeky, charming man of the people who likes to pull pranks on the boss and his sidekick and who is the main focus of the sidekick's hatred and jealousy. He also has the loyalty of almost everyone around besides the boss and his sidekick, and the boss's boss's boss considers him a valuable asset (King Richard on Robin Hood, David Wallace the CFO on The Office).

The romantic relationships don't track perfectly, as Dwight hasn't really shown any interest in Pam, but both of our cheeky heroes have a romantic relationship with a woman who's been a longtime friend, and both relationships have gone through a sort of love triangle phase where the other guy was entirely unsuitable for her and potentially abusive. And both of the sidekicks have gone through some fairly creepy emotional tailspins over the women they're interested in.

Then we have the disloyal underling who switches sides. On The Office, Ryan the Temp seemed to mostly be on Jim's side (not that he declared any loyalty, but he was definitely against Dwight and Michael). Dwight tried to groom Ryan into his lackey, but Michael was the one utterly enamored of Ryan, which made Dwight feel insecure and threatened. And then Ryan switched sides and became an enemy when he got the job at corporate, actually betraying Jim. Meanwhile, Allan on Robin Hood started out as a member of Robin's gang, then betrayed Robin, switched sides, was originally being groomed by Guy to be his lackey, but then the Sheriff discovered him and was impressed enough to make Guy feel insecure and threatened.

I'm sure there are more parallels if I let myself think more about it, but I've already disturbed myself with this much.

We'll see if I can make myself leave the cave this weekend. I want to do some housework, as I had two separate nightmares last night where my messy house was an issue. Sci Fi Friday is back tonight, with Doctor Who and Stargate Atlantis. And then new Foyle's War on PBS Sunday.