Well Behaved At All Times

JENNY, KRISSIE, & EILEEN: May We Redirect Your Attention To . . .

2006-12-31T09:20:00.000-08:00

. . . the 2007 website for The Unfortunate Miss Fortunes?

It's at http://www.unfortunatemissfortunes.com/ or you can click on the nice link above, of course, but we never trust links. They break.

We've loved having this blog, but as you may have noticed, we're a little undisciplined. A lot undisciplined. Over at the new place, we'll have Mollie watching us. There will be no sloppiness. Posts will be posted on time. Graphics will stay in place and they'll get dusted, too. The cover will be up as soon as we get it. Plus you'll get to see the site designed before your eyes because Mollie and Mara can't design it until they see the cover, so what you're going to see is a tastefully plain little place over there, then the cover will go up, then some bells and whistles . . .

And every Friday a new post. Plan your weekend around it. Well, maybe not. But really, it'll be so much better than it has been here.

2007. Have a wonderful one. We're planning to, especially every Friday until July when all hell breaks loose. Or The Unfortunate Miss Fortunes break loose.

Happy New Year everybody!

Jenny, Krissie, and Eileen

JENNY: Coming in 2007

2006-12-07T21:01:00.000-08:00

You may have noticed that this blog is, well, erratic. We tend to lurch about, then disappear, then come back for awhile. But now we have A Plan.

Yes, I know we've had those before, but this is a real plan, one we've showed to Mollie who will hold us to it and we're afraid of Mollie, so we'll be following it. On January 1, Well Behaved will be moving into the Miss Fortunes web space and the beginnings of its new look. The website won't be up yet, but Mollie will have seen the cover (we haven't seen it yet, we told you we'd show it to you as soon as we got it, didn't we?) and begun the very basics of the design and the new blog will reflect that. And along with that is a regular posting schedule. No, really, one of us will post every week. And if the one scheduled to post doesn't, the others will come on here and make fun of her. Or something.

So in January we're going to talk about our characters, Eileen about Dee, Krissie about Lizzie, and me about Mare and Xan.

In February, we're going to talk about what took us by surprise while we were writing them because we all were caught flatfooted by some of the things that happened while we wrote.

In March, we'll post the first four POVs from the book, Mare, Lizzie, Dee, and Xan in that order. Yes, I'm sure. Everybody's on board with me this time. It's a go.

In April, we'll talk about the men in the book, some of whom survive to the end.

In May, we'll talk about the magic and the problems that caused us in writing.

In June we'll talk about Salem's Fork and the fun we had writing that, Eileen especially, who called the paper there the New Fork Tines. June will also see the website debut with more excerpts on it each week so that when the book comes out in July, you'll be slavering for it. We are not subtle people. We're exploiting you mercilessly. We want you to know that up front.

And in July when The Unfortunate Miss Fortunes finally hits the bookstores, we'll go back to our usual random posting as we start doing booksignings at RWA National and wandering around cluelessly again.

But really. We have a plan.

EILEEN: Copy edits: the final chapter

2006-12-05T15:57:00.000-08:00

Yes, I did get the manuscript in record time from Krissie(there's a really interesting group dynamic here. Krissie seems completely done with tinkering at copy edit level. Jenny and I seem not to know when to quit. Just a FEW more changes. I swear it's finished now...). The problem, as Jenny said, was that the manuscript was coming in just about the same time as the armageddonlike ice storm that swathed the midwest. I got the manuscript at 6PM from an intrepid Fed Ex driver who was already slipping dangerously close to my car and trees, and at 9:30PM, our power went out. That was Thursday. This is next Tuesday. My power went back on late last night. This is my first day back home after taking my show on the road around my siblings(that after my husband ran away from home to Chile, where they're having summer, of course---okay. So it was a business trip. He's still warm). I spent twelve hours in my bed with chocolate, wine and a romance book. I consider it therapy.

But here's the heroic part. I got the copy edit off Friday afternoon after working on it by Coleman lantern the night before to the symphonic sound of tree limbs snapping and crashing and transformers exploding. Quite atmospheric. Then it took me three hours to find someplace with electricity who could mail the thing off. Office Max is my new hero. The manuscript is in. Now we wait for the cover. In the meantime, we've been talking about posting an update on our characters, now that we've seen how they turned out. Then, maybe a peek at the first POVs. Until then, I'm scanning for generators on Ebay.

eileen

JENNY: Copy Edits and Shorter Pith

2006-11-30T21:09:00.000-08:00

For those of you tracking us through the publishing journey, we are now two thirds of the way through the copy edits. That’s when the revised manuscript comes back having been edited by someone trained to find all the grammar and punctuation mistakes along with continuity and factual errors and anything else we screwed up. We still have to go over the manuscript because you never know who you’re going to draw as a copy editor. You can get some real nightmares who think they know how to write better than you do and start changing your words or sometimes they’re just inept and don’t catch your mistakes. And really, it’s up to you to know grammar and punctuation, they’re your tools as much as vocabulary and syntax. Our copy editor was pretty good except for a tendency to miss the forest for the trees. One of my faves was a line Mare has where she’s explaining their family history to Crash and says that they were pretty lucky in the past in that there were only a couple of pond duckings and just one burning at the stake, and then adds that heads are gonna roll for that one “if we ever get time travel.” The copy editor changed that to “time to travel.” That’s the kind of thing you just look at and shudder. Thank God we caught it.

Since there are three of us, the copy edit became a moveable feat. I got it the day before Thanksgiving (sent to me by Needles, the same person who sent me the copy edit at the SMP dinner in Atlanta, I believe) and sent it on to Krissie the following Monday (hey, I had pies to make and then I had to go over the river and through the woods), who turned it around at lightning speed and sent it to Eileen who was supposed to get it today except they’re having ice storms where she is. We’ll see it one more time, in galleys, also called page proofs, sheets of paper that look exactly like the pages of the finished book. I love those. We’re not supposed to rewrite on those, but I do. I’m going to try not to this time because I think the book is in pretty good shape except for Toledo and the shivers, but everybody else is slapping my hands on those so I’m just going to have to let it go.

Then there’s the copy line for the cover. The others were too long and not sexy enough. I don’t do sexy. I’m sorry, I’m just not one of those “He was a hunka hunka burnin’ love” blurb writers. But Jen came back and said marketing needed a shorter blurb so it would fit on the cover and it needed to be hotter to describe the book. So I suggested “THE UNFORTUNATE MISS FORTUNES: Coming their brains out on every page. “ She loved it but she didn’t think marketing would go for it. Those people in marketing; no vision. So then I tried, “The only thing wilder than their magic is their men,” and I think that one stuck. We’ll see. Well, you’ll see. As soon as we get a cover design, we’ll post it here.

So that’s where we are. Moving right along. At a fairly rapid clip for publishing, really. Next time you see one of those shows where a character writes a book and it’s in the bookstores the following month, you can snicker because you know the truth.

It takes longer than that to write the blurb.

JENNY: Pith and Cover Copy

2006-11-10T21:17:00.000-08:00

Yep, we're done, THANK GOD, and I love it, too. And then Jen e-mailed us and said,

"I need a wonderful, pithy copyline for the front cover of THE UNFORTUNATE MISS FORTUNES (and we'll have something to show you soon on the cover, so stay tuned). What would be a good copyline, leading into the title and enticing readers?"

And of course Eileen and Krissie were out playing in the wildflowers or something, so there I was, forced to pith. I have no idea what the copyline will be, but here are some of the idea I sent Jen:

Love. Magic. Relatives who want to suck your power out through your ears.
THE UNFORTUNATE MISS FORTUNES
Some days it's just one damn thing after another.

Love* Magic* Bunnies*
THE UNFORTUNATE MISS FORTUNES
Up to their asterisks in trouble.

Dee, Lizzie, and Mare are going through a bad spell . . .
Or three.
THE UNFORTUNATE MISS FORTUNES
Magic happens.

Dee, Lizzie, and Mare aren't very good at magic.
Yet.
THE UNFORTUNATE MISS FORTUNES

Yeah, you try it. It's not that easy.

And I'm still in there pitching for us to put the first scene up, so maybe I'll be able to talk everybody into it for Christmas. It's a long time until the July release date, but it'd be such a nice Christmas present for all of you who read the blog. And of course, we'll put the cover up here first. I'm very excited to see the cover although with that long title and then three author names plus the pithy copy line, I'm not expecting to see a lot of cover art. We've pretty much filled up the sucker already.

But now it's all the fun stuff. Cover art and ads and publication. And reviews and I think I'll go lie down again. Argh.

THE UNFORTUNATE MISS FORTUNES.
Coming to a bookstore near you in July of 2007.

EILEEN: We're really done

2006-11-05T19:39:00.000-08:00

Now it's my turn. Krissie sent the manuscript to me, then I put in the stuff I needed to and forwarded it to Jenny. And, again--and Krissie's right;it better be the last time--I'm finished. All three of us are also going over for continuity things(Krissie had to change Venice to Toledo, Spain among other things),and I, dubbed Minister of BackStory, had to put it in in dribs and drabs, so I, too had to read the whole thing, and yeah, this could just be all hype, but I have to tell you, it isn't. This is such a fun, full, unique, kickass book, that I can't wait to share it with you guys. I can't tell you what a rush it is to work with two other authors who have such singular and different voices than I do. For anybody who sings, it's going from solo work to a trio who has perfect harmony. Maybe you won't notice when you read. But trust me, it adds to the flavor. And each of the sisters is absolutely singular, not to mention their true loves(yum) and Xan. Ah, Xan. I think we've given up casting her. There just isn't anybody out there like her.

And if we haven't told you before, barring flood and famine, St. Martin's has told us that The Unfortunate Miss Fortunes will be out July, 2007. Perfect beach reading! So now, as soon as Jenny gets back off the road, it'll be her turn, and with all the planets in alignment, or whatever, we can give it to Jen Enderlin and let her bring it into the world. Now, I'm off to torture some very horny fairies. Who knew?
eileen

KRISSIE: We're Done

2006-10-31T10:47:00.000-08:00

You heard that before, right? One last go round last night and this morning, and we're finished. The way we work, Jenny keeps the master version because she's a) smarter b) more energetic or c) she's a glutton for punishment. Every time she sends me a new final version of the mss. I have to save it with a new name. I've got UMF Final. I've got UMF Final Atlanta. UMF final August. Absolutely Final UMF. Last Pass. Last Pass After Eileen. Final Version Xan Changes.
Trust me, there's more.
Jenny did her revisions and sent me the mss. I typed in mine, did a Save As and passed it on to Eileen.
It's now officially called I'm Sick of Revisions Halloween. I think it's a catchy title. The only problem is, what will I call it when it gets sent back to me? The Beast That Will Not Die?

It's worth it. Trust me. I looked at my scenes and swooned because Lord knows I'm not plagued with false modesty. I read Jenny's and Eileen's and swooned again, because the immodest one knows how to choose her collaborators.

We rule!

EILEEN: ciao, bellas!

2006-10-04T22:52:00.000-07:00

So there I was in my lovely hotel room in Matera, Italy where I was speaking at the International Women's Fiction Festival, and the owner, who advertised that he had wi-fi, pointed to the ethernet plug in the wall--to which, of course, I had no cable. Then I looked for internet cafes, which were open--only when I wasn't available. Evidently they abide by siesta hours, too(the only thing open in a southern Italian town from 3-8PM is a gelateria). So, thank heavens, on Wednesday one of the attendees' sons produced an extra ethernet cable, and I opened my mail to see...."well, we haven't heard from Eileen, but we're trying to get the revisions done..." So I, dedicated professional that I am, spent my free time in my room(okay, the one in the old palazzo from the 18th century with the balcony overlooking the valley), working on revisions. I am a good girl. I even worked on them on the plane home. And in 4 of the 7 airports I hit in 36 hours to get home. Still working. Finished soon. Amazing how "I love it!" makes revisions so much easier to do.
And yeah, okay, I did take time out to sit in the piazza and sip wine to the sound of church bells and Puccini coming from the music school next door. Bellisima!

Eileen

JENNY: And now a word from our editor . . .

2006-09-17T21:34:00.000-07:00

Well, I WANTED to post the first scene but cooler heads prevailed and said wait until we hear from Jen our goddess of an editor and today we heard and her exact words were:

"I LOVE IT."

No, kidding, that's what her e-mail said. So Krissie and Eileen and I said, "Yahoo." Then she said it was "brilliant" and "seamless" and we said "Yahoo" again twice. And then she said she'd be sending the revision letter, which is also good news because she's a terrific editor and she'll tell us how to make it better. I know that sounds incredibly Pollyanna-ish, but I've been working with the woman for ten years, and trust me, she'll make it better.

So now we're waiting for the revision stuff. And of course, Eileen just left for Italy, and she doesn't know if she'll have internet where she's going, soooooooo . . .

We'll let you know what happens.

Publishing is kind of a hurry-up-and-wait game so what you're experiencing waiting around is what we experience, too. Makes you feel all special and in the know, doesn't it?

JENNY: Beta Reader: That Would Be You

2006-08-20T13:41:00.000-07:00

A beta reader is somebody who reads a story prior to publication and looks for the bugs, glitches, and general goofs. You were already beta readers when you read the "Cordially invited" stuff we put up and commented on it.

Right now we are discussing whether we should do this--I jumped the gun because I THOUGHT we'd already agreed to it but I was wrong, so blame me--or if we should wait until closer to a pub date which we don't have yet ot until Jen gives us the editing notes which could be weeks. If we do decide to go with it, what we'll probably do is put it up here on the blog, since the first chapter is in four parts that are in order: Mare, Lizzie, Dee, and Xan. And since the collage is finished, too, I can put that up at the end and it will make more sense then.

And then you can bask in anticipation until next summer because I'm pretty sure that's when it's coming out,although we will report back on the fights we have over the rewrite, the copy edit, the galleys, the book cover . . .

Oh, and that first page you deciphered? Very good job, but we changed it. That's the book writing biz, one rewrite after another.

Eileen: c'est finis!!

2006-08-19T19:35:00.000-07:00

Unbelievably, considering how micromanaging both Jen and I are, the manuscript is off. Krissie was able to pry it from our crabbed, clawed fingers and force us to email it to our editor. Of course, now twelve hours later we found some stuff we really, really want to change, but thank heavens, we have to wait.

I'm sitting here feeling rudderless. What do I do now? This thing has consumed us for so long, like a big literate tapeworm, that I don't know how to survive without it.(it occurs to me that you should never leave your metaphors to a medical person. I could have said magical obsession or something equally as poetic, especially considering the fact that if this had been a tapeworm of any kind I would have at least lost weight over it. Yeah. Not so much).

Okay, yeah, I do know what I'm going to do. I'm going to spend the next two days watching all the movies I missed and then get onto the other project I'm in the middle of. Then I'm going to hold my breath that it really is as good as we think it is.

One more thing. We thought it was going to be a really fun book. A neat idea, a wonderful collaboration, and a compelling story. It's nice to know we were right. It's been a rare privelege to work with my two co-conspirators. I wouldn't have missed it for the world. I can't wait for you to see it.

eileen

KRISSIE: It's almost done

2006-08-18T05:08:00.000-07:00

Phew! It's almost on its way out the door (until our editor shoots it back to us). Hard work, but worth every second, even if I did have to throw a Lizzie-like temper tantrum (not that Lizzie actually throws temper tantrums) and tell the two cantankerous sisters to stop tinkering. Nothing like being ready to turn a book in, as we we were on the first of August, and then rip it apart and redo it.
It was worth it.
Not that I want to let Elric go. Someone who looks like Howl of Howl's Moving Castle and acts like Alan Rickman is pretty damned delicious. Lucky Lizzie.

JENNY: Status Report

2006-08-17T23:41:00.000-07:00

You're probably wondering what happened to us.

Beta readers. A curse and a blessing. We had the book finished and were going through the editing process and then our beta readers pointed out a few, uh, problems. We won't go into them here but they were significant. So we came home from National, changed offstage Rellie into on stage Xantippe and gave her a point of view, a henchwoman named Maxine, and an unsatisfactory boyfriend named Vincent; revamped the plot; added a True Desire spell, an Impulse Spell, some extra magic, a death (don't worry, we could spare him), and several in-jokes that makes us fall down laughing but by now we're giddy so just ignore us; and did another couple of rewrites. And now we're ready to go. When we all sign off on the manuscript tomorrow, it's done. It goes out. We're finished.

Until it comes back with the editor's notes, of course.

However we do feel that you can never have enough beta readers, particularly for the first chapter, so we're planning on putting up a PDF of Chapter One with the link here, and then inviting you all to tell us where we went wrong. Because we know you will.

So stay tuned. We haven't forgotten you. We're just tying up some loose ends here and we'll be back.

Really.

JENNY: The Calm Before the Rewrite

2006-07-21T18:59:00.000-07:00

We finished the first draft Monday. Then we sat in Vermont, St.Louis, and Cincinnati, and went, "Wow." Considering this all started last year in the bar at RWA National in Reno when Eileen said, "I have this great idea for a story, there's this shapeshifter and whenver she tries to have sex, she turns into the guy's mother," and I said, "Have another drink, Eileen," and then several months later we signed a contract to do an anthology of three 20,000 word novellas, and then a couple of months after that we said, "Hey, let's put on a show in the barn!", no, we said, "Hey, let's write a collaborative novel instead!" and now we have a novel of 103,000 brilliant words, and we're going to do a final rewrite at RWA National in Atlanta and then send it off to our brilliant editor . . .

Well, we're just gobsmacked, that's all there is to it.

We'll let you know how the rewrite goes next Wednesday. There may even be pictures. Of us strangling each other.

One hundred and three thousand words. Who knew?

JENNY: Mare, the Collage

2006-07-04T11:07:00.000-07:00

So, I'm on the final pass of Mare and on the final pass of Mare's collage, which is not the collage for The Unfortunate Miss Fortunes, just the collage for my 1/3 of it. Krissie and Eileen have wonderful things in their parts of the book that aren't in my collage, although their sisters are in here because their sisters are in my part of the book, if that makes sense. But here's Mare's collage. Not quite finished, but almost. Like The Unfortunate Miss Fortunes. I really love this book. All of it, not just Mare.

And now, back to work. I can't believe this is almost done.

EILEEN: Presenting....Rellie

2006-06-30T12:09:00.000-07:00

It seemed only fair that after we put the idea of who Rellie should be out there for you, that we should answer our own question. Actually, Jenny came up with it and sent it to Krissie and me, and we made a unanimous vote, based on this photo. Rellie is this particular Diana Rigg(at least the fantasy of her). Ageless, sensual, but classy-looking, so that no man looking at her would think she was power-mad and voracious. It isn't until the climax of the book when she faces off with the girls, who try to turn her into something harmless like a geranium(you can imagine how well that goes over) , that you realize just what she is.

I wanted Jenny to post the picture, but she's the one putting all the scenes in order, and I don't want to hassle her, or Dee could end up having sex as a hedgehog. And ya know, she has problems, but not that one.

So I hope you approve. I think when you read the book, you're going to be delighted. Jen is even now collecting pictures of other important items, like the house, and oh, the girls. And by the way, yes, that does mean that the first draft is finished. And if I say so myself, after reading the sections written by my colleagues, it's going to be so kick-ass. And when you get a chance, ask either of them about the law firm we've created, Snark, Sex and Whimsy.

eileen

JENNY: Jacket Copy

2006-06-21T18:24:00.000-07:00

Authors usually don't get to write their own jacket copy, but we're going to send some in on Friday with the first draft of our book and we thought we'd get some feedback from you all since you were so briliant with Esmerelda (Hello, Diana Rigg):

You are Cordially Invited To
A Weekend
with
THE UNFORTUNATE MISS FORTUNES
currently on the run and hiding out as
The O’Brien Sisters of Salem’s Fork:

There’s Eileen Dreyer’s DEE, a feisty little redheaded beauty who at sixteen kidnapped her two little sisters from the clutches of their devious Aunt Esmerelda and went on the lam. Now it’s thirteen years later and Dee’s working at a bank during the day and painting at night, trying to control her sisters and her passions and her shapeshifting power, which is a lot more difficult when Danny James shows up one Friday morning, making Dee’s heart beat faster with his dangerous smile and his equally dangerous questions. Dee’s not sure Danny can be trusted, and then she finds out he’s named his motorcycle Esmerelda . . .

And then there’s Anne Stuart’s LIZZIE, the middle sister, ethereally lovely and ethereally dizzy, who at twenty-six is determined to save her family by learning how to turn straw into gold, if she can stop turning forks into purple bunnies and lustful thoughts into marvelous shoes. Then Friday morning a sorcerer named Elric turns up, a little annoyed at the havoc that Lizzie is creating with the fabric of the universe, and even more annoyed with the havoc he finds Lizzie creating in his heart. Lizzie doesn’t trust anybody, but Elric says he can teach her to turn straw into gold . . .

And finally, there’s Jenny Crusie’s, MARE, the youngest sister and self-proclaimed Queen of the Universe, who towers above her sisters in height but whose telekinetic power is dwarfed by their gifts—as Mare puts it, “I’m a human remote control”—and who spends her days tyrannizing everyone at Value Video!! and her nights stretched out on the roof above Lizzie’s workroom contemplating the futility of her existence. But then Friday morning two guys show up—a Value Video!! VP named Jude and her long lost love, a motorcycle mechanic named Crash—and they both seem to think she’s just what they want forever. Mare finds this completely plausible but then things begin to go terribly wrong . . .

It’s the worst weekend the Unfortunate Miss Fortunes will ever have, but the best one, too, when their powers will be tested, and so will True Love and True Sisterhood. Or as Mare puts it, “I always knew that Power of Three stuff was crap.”

You won’t want to miss a minute . . .

EILEEN: Danny and Dee

2006-06-19T02:01:00.000-07:00

First of all, great ideas on the antagonist place holder. What say you, girls? I kind of like Angelica Huston, myself. Especially as the mother in Ever After.

But now, about me. Yes, that's me confabbing at the apartment. Is this the sweet life or what? I thought I'd let you know a bit about poor, misunderstood Dee and her honey. Dee has been in charge all her life. She's the oldest, she's the one who kidnapped her sisters when she was just sixteen and went into hiding to protect them from her Aunt Rellie(Angelica). She still sees herself, twelve years later, as their sole protector, even though they're both adults. But while she can't imagine anything else, she's really tired. She feels imprisoned, but of course can't stop, because she loves her sisters so much, and she's so afraid of Rellie, She's the only one who really knows how evil her aunt is. So she works in a bank to bring in money to help keep the girls afloat and paints at dawn when nobody can see her. And she does her best to deny her shapeshifting gift, since it's usually just inconvenient, like when she gets aroused and turns into the guy's....mother. Yeah. That's how lucky she is. She's now the oldest virgin in North America.

So along comes Danny James, who says he's a researcher for a world famous author, and he's researching her family. And she wants nothing to do with his leather-jacket-wearing-vintage-motorcycle-riding-travels-the-globe ass. He scares her to her toes. He also makes her hugely envious, because he's everything she thinks she can never be. So Danny's job is to convince Dee to take a chance. To take those first steps away from her prison. As for her shapeshifting, he doesn't believe in it at all. He's researching a book to debunk the whole idea of paranormal powers. And yeah. He has a few big surprises in store for him, too.

eileen

JENNY: Antagonist Troubles

2006-06-18T14:26:00.000-07:00

We still haven't nailed down a placeholder for the antagonist, although we agreed that she turns into Maleficent at the end before something goes wrong and she turns into something else. But we need a lethal, sexual older woman first. Eileen wants Lee Remick. I said, "Susan Sarandon?" because I'm a huge Sarandon fan and I'm a big believer in respecting your antagonist, but Eileen nixed her. I can't remember who Krissie suggested because it was awhile ago, when we were in NYC, but here's a picture of us brainstorming (well, it's a picture of Eileen and Krissie brainstorming, I was taking the picture).
You'll notice it's a garden apartment, hence the basement wall, and we're writers, hence the two laptops, and it's the Village, hence the general all round air of coolness. And no, we still don't have a placeholder. For a long while, mine was Jessica Walters for whom I have tremendous respect, but she's just not the direction we ended up going, so I'm saving her for a later book. Now if I could just think of some dark-haired sultry bitch in her fifties that I have a great deal of respect for . . . You know, besides me.

JENNY: Mare's Weekend

2006-06-16T08:12:00.000-07:00

Boy, are we close. This is Mare's weekend; it's all Mare all the time here in Ohio. The outline is in place--yes, Eileen, I sent it to you days ago--most of Mare's scenes are roughed in, and I'm writing the final drafts now. I LOVE MARE. Okay, she's deeply flawed, but I love her anyway. And Crash, well, he's not deeply flawed, he's not deeply anything, he's the simplest hero I've ever written, and that's his strength and I love him. Because as he points out, when you've got a woman as complex and talented and insane as Mare, the last thing she needs is a complex, talented, insane man. You need a Crash, solid as a rock, no magic whatsoever, a guy who can fix a motorcycle or your plumbing or your broken heart, and who can tell your vicious bitch of a shape-shifting evil aunt from a diner waitress when the chips are down. Loving this book. Must go finish my part of it now.

Eileen is on vacation without e-mail. Krissie is finishing up a copy edit. Both will be back on Monday when, fingers crossed, Mare will finished and victorious and in the solid, sure, sane arms of her motorcycle mechanic. Whose real name is Christopher, by the way.

EILEEN:survival of the fittest

2006-06-10T15:27:00.000-07:00

Well, as Krissie said, we've gone to the three winds(after Krissie left her makeup behind at the apartment. You need to email me back, Krissie, so I know what stop to send it to). I"m in Topeka, Krissie's in Albany and Jen's in Richmond, Virginia. So we've survived another round of "What were we thinking?" And it really isn't Jen's falt that she's so good at micromanaging. Or that it sent me into fetal position. Because without her saying, "Okay, exactly what is Dee doing at 1:15 PM" (and me getting way too anatomical in my answers), we never would have brought this baby together. You know that "it sounded like a good idea", well, we've all been writing our parts obsessing about how we were actually going to make it fit together, and darned(Krissie said that nobody says darned in the Northeast), with Jen's brave persistence in the face of truly operatic whining, it looks like it just might do that. And how good are we? We ended up having exactly 16 scenes apiece without any kind of planning. So not only brilliant and witty, but eglatarian, too. Not only that, but the story arcs are elegant, the heroes handsome and the girls sisters in the best of ways. They even have symbol that will unite them. More on that in another post. For now, after spending an entire day just trying to get out of Manhattan, and then another giving a workingshop in Topeka, I'm going to lie down and let my brains slowly seep out my ears. Then, when I drive to Michigan tomorrow to sit on the beach with my extended family, I will get back to writing. (JEN! I need the scene list you promised!!!)And Jen never said "Matrix" even once.

eileen

KRISSIE: Oh ... My .... God ....

2006-06-07T20:23:00.000-07:00

So we're arguing like mad. Jenny's typing up a master list of everyone's scenes and harrassing poor little Eileen and me, trying to get us to behave professionally, and we've been fighting her like rebellious teenagers. I can be holier than anyone since I'm the one who's finished my draft, except they're making me add all sorts of scenes. But since they slogged up twenty blocks in the rain to go to City Quilter with me I guess I'll forgive them, even though we then went to Eileen Fisher where all the clothes were for sylphs.
Italian food for dinner, then work work work, and my eyes are beginning to cross, and it's 11:23 pm and Jenny and Eileen are night people and I'm a morning person. Tomorrow we scatter to the four winds (or three winds, since there are only three of us).
But it's coming together. I'm learning to be left-brained (under duress) and I'll probably take a little nap before Jenny starts beating me about the head and shoulders to come up with a more cogent description of my scenes.
Ah, the glorious life of a writer. Tomorrow we go to Bloomingdales (shopping is part of our bonding experience), then to lunch and a mini-shower at Jenny and Eileen's agents (for our darling editor -- if we bring her nice enough stuff maybe she'll forgive us for being a month late).
Pray for us.

JENNY: We Got Ourselves A Plan

2006-06-07T08:18:00.000-07:00

After much discussion, Eileen, Krissie and I have a scene list! In chronological order! On color-coded post-it notes! On the apartment kitchen cabinets!

Next up: Scene descriptions. And lunch

EILEEN: new york, new york

2006-06-06T21:19:00.000-07:00

When last you heard from Jenny, she was on her way here. Well, here she is along with Krissie and me, and we're kicking butt. Well, we are after I finally recovered my underwear after my luggage went MIA all day yesterday, and after we got official appointments out of the way.
Now we're cloistered in the apartment with tea, cookies and chinese food and have the whole book on a time line---color coded. Jen is quite amazing. She keeps saying, "Now, what time does this happen?" And I'm afraid my answer is usually, 'Oh, about then." "Is that 3:00 then or 3:30 then?" The best note of all on the chart is "5:00PM Lizzie and Elric: Nightgown fight." And yes, you have to read it to find out what that means.
``Oh, and now Jen's demanding more times from me, and I"m distracted by you. So I have to go now and tell her when Dee eats dinner. More later.

eileen

JENNY: New Month, Different Plan

2006-06-03T18:58:00.000-07:00

Okay, so the two-hour thing? Not going to work for me.

But now, I'm against it. Well, actually I'm in Madison, Wisconsin, flying home tomorrow night and then out again the next morning to that New York City where Eileen, Krissie, and I will assemble the Unfortunate Miss Fortunes. So I'd better get the rest of it written, huh?

I'm in a hotel room working while the rest of the conference plays, but that's okay because I don't do Saturday nights anyway. The good news is, I have Mare completely blocked out, I have her arc, I have most of the scenes written--I still haven't written Crash's but I know what they are and they're short--and we're going to block them out for each other and probably read them to each other which should be interesting, particularly the erotic ones, and I'm thinking a lot of this book is going to get done the first four days of next week.

But now I have to get some serious typing done now. Time to get these scenes out of my head and into the computer. One great thing about writing in your head, you can pretty much dictate to yourself when the time comes. And then rewrite four thousand times, but there's no staring hopelessly at the screen, wishing you were smarter or somewhere else.

Much typing between now and Monday. Mare 24/7. (Except for the teaching I have to do tomorrow. Oh and that plane trip back home. And the one to NYC. But otherwise, all typing. Plan ahead, people. Do not be like me.)

Stay tuned. I really will be back soon. No, REALLY.

JENNY: New Month, New Plan

2006-05-06T09:31:00.000-07:00

I am FINALLY done with the book tour and now I have six days before I have to get on a plane again. And they're Mare days. I have explained to my other collaborator that he will have to do other things because this is Well-Behaved time, and I'm going to try Barbara Samuel's two hour block plan twice a day, which means I will have twenty-four hours to spend on Mare and Crash and the sisters. If this works, I will hear the angels singing because I desperately need to get organized.

So today: Two hours rereading what I already have written and what Krissie and Eileen have already written and blocking out the existing plot on my giant white board. And then two hours blocking out Mare and Crash's final plot--well final until I start writing again at which point Things Happen and everything changes, but still, progress will be made.

Because I have to have all of my stuff done by the time we hit New York because we're going to spend three days putting all the parts together and rewriting as we go to make all of this into a novel. Three days in New York writing with Eileen and Krissie. I'm such a geek, that sounds like paradise, even with both of them bossing me around. (It's hell writing the youngest sister, nobody appreciates me, and as Anonymous said so brilliantly in her comment, if they don't give me what I want, I'm TOTALLY telling Mom.)

So we'll see how this goes . . .

KRISSIE: Missing in Action

2006-04-28T06:46:00.000-07:00

I've been so caught up trying to meet my other deadline that I've left my sisters to fend for themselves. It's no wonder. Lizzie's already bedded Elric, quite deliciously, and her story is roughed in. I've still got kids at home so I have to juggle things a little differently from Jenny and Eileen. Besides, Lizzie is so focused on fixing things that it's no wonder she went into her little workshop and kept at it until she was done. While Dee is flying around and Mare is charging around (at least, that's how Jenny made her sound -- like a charming bulldozer) Lizzie's in her workshop, with the glorious Elric coming up behind her, turning her eyes and her sheets purple.
And so my novella is sitting peacefully in all its rough glory, waiting until I finish the current brilliant mess in progress so I can get back to it and give it the full attention it deserves. Start weaving in Dee and Mare, and live up to the high standards Jenny and Eileen have set.
Not likely -- Lizzie's a hard worker but I'm far too easily enchanted with my own prose.
Ah, but New York is coming!!!

EILEEN: what jenny said

2006-04-24T22:56:00.000-07:00

I should be packing my suitcase. I leave for Ireland tomorrow(with my computer. I'm going to work on poor dear Dee as I've come to think of her). Instead I read Jenny's post on character and found myself asking the same questions she did. I, of course, think Dee does have a "sucky" and "suckier" choice. Either fade away as the responsible adult wihtout surcease for the rest of her life, or succumb to her aunt and have her soul sucked out--along with her sisters' souls. She really doesn't see a way out. Of course, Danny IS the way out, but she's too afraid to consider that. After all, if she just runs off with him, she leaves her sisters vulnerable, and if at this late date she decides to do that, then she feels she's betrayed everything she's sacrificed for all these years.

And yes, there is a whiff of martyr in her. It's an intrinsic part of Oldest Sister Syndrome. I know, because I am one(a sister. Not a martyr. I'm much too selfless for that.....). In my family, we actually have an Oldest Sister Society, in which only the oldest daughter of each family is invited. Because, of course, nobody understands what we've had to sacrifice but us. As the oldest sister, I think Dee wouldn't be surprised that Mare doesn't really have too sucky of a choice. After all, isn't the youngest child the spoiled one? Doesn't she always get everythikng she wants? That's sure the way of it MY family. And all the oldest sisters gather together and talk about it.

I know. I started talking about a writing exercise and ended up extolling the virtues of the oldest born. That's because I plan on thinking about the exercise more tomorrow after I'm packed, my cat's been fed, my plants watered, my various old people soothed and, my passport clutched tightly in my hot little hand, I settle into eight uninterrupted hours. Alone. With no phone. No emergency calls. No friendly calls that seem to go on for hours when I don't have the time. No business calls that are only made to request somethign I don't have time for.
But I will have time for blogging. When I find a cybercafe. So I can keep an eye on that Mare. Cause as a youngest child, you just don't know what she's gonna get up to. Now, if she were just like Lizzie.....

Eileen
P.S. We're going back to New York! We're going back to New York!! Somebody should warn them.

JENNY: Mare, Day Whatever

2006-04-23T06:43:00.000-07:00

Clearly writing and book tours don’t mix, much as sleeping and book tours don't mix. OTOH, writing conferences and planning a book can be pretty good. I went to two lectures by pals yesterday and started to noodle around with Mare’s plot again and discovered that I never actually nailed that plot down and that there was a lot about her character that I hadn’t realized.

The first workshop was Deb Dixon’s GMC. Every time I take this class, I learn something more, it’s just so full of good stuff. There were three things that struck me this time in conjunction with Mare;

Deb asks, "Why her? Why now?"

We set this up that the sisters’ “why now?” is because the antagonist is coming to town, but it made me think, Why is the antagonist coming to town NOW? What event happened in the antagonist’s life to inspire buying a plane ticket? Because whatever it is, I want to echo it in Mare’s “Why now?” so that even if the answers are two different events, they echo or parallel or reverse each other. A classic that won’t work here would be one is starting menopause and is having her first hot flash and the other has started puberty and is having her first period. That won’t work for this book—Mare is in her early twenties—but it’s the kind of thing I’m looking for.

Even bigger for Mare, though, is “Why her?” We started with the premise of the three sisters with a single antagonist, a really good way to start, but I never broke Mare out of the sisterhood to consider her solo plot. Why is Mare the character who drives her plot? What is she driving toward? If I know why the antagonist is hitting town now (and I think I do), why is it Mare’s turn at bat? Why her? Why now?

The second thing was Deb’s brilliant description of the protagonist’s choices as “sucky” and “suckier.”

As she explains, if your protag’s choice are “sucky” and “good,” there’s not much tension in the choice. Bob talks about this in a slightly different way; he says that in training they’d be given a lose/lose choice: neither choice would get them a win. He said watching people make those choices told a lot about who they were. So if Mare’s goal is to get out of town so that she can live freely (a goal I am not completely thrilled with) she needs to have choices (“I’m trapped here forever” won’t work) but they have to be sucky and suckier. I’m thinking in one she can stay with her sisters and not use her powers and in the other she can leave her sisters and probably not use her powers, although that last one seems a little contrived. Neither is really sucky enough. So I have to work on the sucky/suckier choice thing.

The third one is the one I love because every time I do this for a character, I learn something, Deb calls it the Dominant Impression, and it’s a pretty easy exercise: you label your character with an adjective and a descriptive noun. (Deb explains this much better in her GMC Goal Motivation Conflict book which is EXCELLENT.)

One approach to the descriptive noun is the character’s occupation, so for Mare I tried “Determined Party-Giver” since she’s in charge of events at the video store where she works. That didn’t help much although it’s a fair description of her as she’s written now. But then Deb gives an example to work with: Your character is driving down the street and hits a squirrel. Now describe the character. And I got “Guilty Driver.” That is, Mare would feel guilty about what happened, but she wouldn’t stop to save the squirrel because she’d figure any squirrel that got hit by a ton of vehicle would be gathering nuts in squirrel heaven anyway. She’d feel bad, but she’d keep on driving. And I realized that “driving” perfectly describes the way Mare moves through life. It’s as if she’s got AWD and big tires and she just keeps going, bumping over people in her path, feeling bad for them but driven to get to where she’s going. She’s not cruel, but she is self-directed, even self-centered. I really like that whole “driver” thing, especially since Crash works with motorcycles but seems to be ambling through life instead of driving. There’s got to be something lurking in there that’s part of the understructure of the story.

So thank you Deb Dixon, and everybody should buy Goal, Motivation, Conflict

Then I went to Bob Mayer’s class on character, another one I’ve seen before, and heard him talk about the Trait/Need/Flaw progression.
Bob’s example: The character’s trait is “Loyalty,” because the character’s need is “To Be Trusted,” which leads to the character’s flaw, “Gullibility.”
So Mare’s trait is “Determination” because her need is “To Control Her Life” which means her flaw is “Self-Centered Blindness.” I think.
But she has other traits. She is loyal, she is strong, she is compassionate, she is smart, she is lonely, she is frustrated . . . So I have some work to do there.

And finally Bob asked the question that I always forget to ask and that’s crucial to determining if the stakes are high enough: What happens if the protagonist fails? Or in my case, “What happens if Mare fails?” And the answer is, not enough as it stands. In the climax, huge things will happen if Mare fails, but in the beginning, there really aren’t any consequences sufficient to drive her through the story because her goal is so weak: To get out of the small town where they’re living and use her powers freely. To which the reader says, “So go.”

And then I have to do all of this with Crash. But it’s such good stuff, it’s tightening things up so well, plus it’s stuff I can do on a plane, so I’m making progress. Also, I love this book.

And a big thank you to the Desert Dreams conference for bringing in Deb and Bob.

JENNY: Mare 3 Dreamwork

2006-04-18T19:43:00.000-07:00

So doing this on the book tour MIGHT have been a bad idea, but I'm going to give it another shot because I actually have tomorrow night free after dinner. Then Thursday is a slammed day again, then Friday some free time . . . I'm thinking I might be able to do this.

So tomorrow I'll write. No, REALLY. Because if I don't write some fiction soon, my head is going to explode. And I think I need to do Crash's plot first. So I'm going to go to bed and fall asleep thinking about it and maybe I'll have it in the morning. Dreamwork. No, it really works. Well, it works when I don't take half a sleeping pill. We'll see how pharmaceuticals affect the creative unconscious. I'm hoping they don't take it out with a mallet.

JENNY: And now a short pause . . .

2006-04-10T19:11:00.000-07:00

Insane day today.
Insane day tomorrow.
See you Wednesday. No, really.

Jenny: Mare 2

2006-04-09T20:36:00.000-07:00

My plan was to take the diner scene, the scene where Mare first sits down with her high school sweetheart to find out why he left prom night and never came back, and put in his POV because I need his POV in here. But I've tried for the hour now, and it's not going to work, at least not until I step back and reconceptualize this. Because as it's written now, and I like it, it's about Mare trying to cope with choices: She didn't have any and now she has three and she's trying not to get sucked into Crash's life again since he left her before.

Which made me realize that although I do need Crash's viewpoint, I need it in his VIEWPOINT, that is, it's not just that it has to be in his head and his voice, it has to be his story. Which means I have to know what his story is. I know the end of it, but I have to figure out how to introduce it, and I think that has to be in a scene that follows the diner scene, not the diner scene itself.

Which means I just blew an hour messing with a perfectly good scene, but at least we've learned something from this, Dorothy.

Argh.

JENNY: Mare 1

2006-04-08T19:11:00.000-07:00

I didn't get as much done as I'd planned (that should be tattooed on my forehead) but I did spend an hour reading what I'd already written and you know what? It's good. I'm happy. Mare's got a snappy attitude on her that I really like. Very brisk, mistress of the universe stuff.

But I think the version that's on this laptop is an old one, I'm pretty sure I've got more stuff at home. And thank God, that's where I'm going tomorrow.

Note to self: Update files on laptop before hitting the road again.

Argh.

JENNY: So here's the plan . . .

2006-04-07T08:42:00.000-07:00

You know it's hard working on two novels, a proposal, and a book tour all at the same time. I know, poor me, WAH.
We had originally kind of sort of planned to blog each of us once a week--especially since our book is due like NOW--but that's not happening.
But I want to get back to Mare, I love Mare, so I'm thinking that I might try the twelve days of Mare here. Promise myself to work for an hour every night on Mare even though it's Book Tour Month, just as a vacation from Book Tour Insanity. Eileen and Krissie are working on their solo novels, but they're both ahead of me anyway.
So the plan is one hour a night, I'll give to Mare and I'll come in here and journal about what I did in order to keep myself honest.
I can do an hour a night, that's EASY.
Famous last words.
Twelve Days of Mare. Starting tomorrow. Really.

EILEEN: german magic

2006-03-25T22:46:00.000-08:00

After reading Jen's post, I think German magic must be an oxymoron. It's why Germans do such great cars--All that logic--and not such good fairies. Total illogic. I have to admit that I sometimes have trouble with logic and paranormal, because I like writing the interfacing of worlds, and there really has to be some logic involved. But I'm happy to say that I'm blissfully free of worrying what molecules do. That's because its......magic! (or as they say in Shakespeare in Love. "I don't know how it happens. It's a mystery!") ABut considering how much Jen is angsting over her Mare's logical process, her story is so kickass nobody'll notice. Especially the part about the cat who was a lion and the frog who was....well, you'll just have to see.

Eileen

JENNY: Mare & Magic

2006-03-25T06:21:00.000-08:00

Eileen can't imagine somebody having paranormal powers without being Irish which pretty much leaves Swiss-German me out in the cold. This may explain why I'm trying to desperately to establish a scientific basis for what Mare does or at least how her power works. The whole paranormal thing is not a natural for me, although I love paranormal stories. The problem I see with writing the genre is that I try so hard to make sure the story is real--characters have strong motivations, no coincidences, cause and effect--that to say, "And then she turned into an owl" just makes the whole deal harder. Which is why I'm glad Eileen's sister is turning into the owl. I know transformation stories are older than the hills, I just have a tough time making them real in my head.

I also know that paranormal stories have to have laws and logic, that there have to be limits to the powers. So I'm looking at Mare who moves things with her mind, and I’m thinking, "How?" Does she move the air around the object so that it follows the vacuum? Does she push with her mind the way she would with her arms? Where does the extra effort to move heavy things come from, more concentration or a better understanding of the mechanics of her power? And what happens to the object when it gets moved? Are the molecules rearranged? Does it heat up? And if it does, why? The friction of the molecules, the heat from Mare's mind? It’s important because the way her power works is going to reflect who she is because who she is will have shaped how she uses her power and how she uses her power will have shaped her.

I’m really loving this book, though. So much fun.

EILEEN: st. patrick was a gentleman....

2006-03-18T00:11:00.000-08:00

Since much has been made of the fact that I'm just a weensy bit Irish, I couldn't pass the day(okay, it's not exactly the day, but as you can imagine, I've been a bit preoccupied, mostly with my extended family, who all gather as if it were thanksgiving) without wishing you all a happy St. Patrick's Day. And reflect on how that impacts the book. Especially the girls. Even more so, my girl. Yeah, okay, I couldn't imagine somebody having big paranormal powers without being Irish. That's because my mom's been dead for almost 25 years and she just showed up again today to help my brother out. Irish mothers are like that. I also find that I've found the Irish to be much more comfortable with the idea of paranormality. The saying is that there is a veil between this world and the next, and that the veil is thinnest in Ireland. If you spend any time there, especially with the people, you can easily believe it. The best part is, most of them consider it as normal as nature or genetics. Some people have the gift, some don't, but everybody seems to have had experience of some kind. I like that. I like the sense that anything is possible. And I like bringing it to the Miss Fortunes, although I know that at least Dee and Lizzie aren't quite as enamored. But we're working on that.
Slainte, agus Padraic, and erin go bragh.
Oh, and for my more iconclastic friends, Up the rebels!!
Eileen

EILEEN: Poor Voiceless Danny

2006-03-15T23:06:00.000-08:00

Hmmm. Jen mentioned how differently we are approaching our sections. That Krissie has given Elric a voice, and that Jen is considering doing the same for Crash. I really thought hard about giving Danny a voice. He's just not speaking in my head. Of course, I haven't done the second half of the book yet. Who knows if he feels compelled to join in? Like Jen, I learn a lot of stuff about what's really been going on in my books about 3/4 of the way through, and have to go back in and seed stuff(most important lesson in writing--especially mystery, which always intimidated me. The book isn't finished until you send it into the editor. You can change anything anytime. And oh, my, I do).
So, as soon as I can get my poor fairies settled over in Silhouetteland, I'll be back to find out just how vocal Danny is.

eileen

JENNY:Different Writers, Different Styles, Exciting Process

2006-03-15T08:09:00.000-08:00

I think it's probably good that we're all such different writers. I don't think I can write a book now without a collage, it speeds up my process so much and it makes the story so much richer FOR ME. Other people, not so much. One of the things that's making us all crazy, I think, is that I'm not a linear writer, so while Eileen and Krissie are pretty much writing chronologically, I've got most of the first half done and some of the second half and that's just changed the first half, and they have no idea where I am even though they know where they are. We just put the first halves together, still missing two of my scenes, and when I looked at that document I realized that Eileen and I were sticking to just our sister's POV and Krissie was doing both the sister's and her guy's POVs. And I'm not seeing any way she can change that, she really needs Elric's POV in there. And it's good, he's got a great voice. So I thought, "Can do that, have four POVs, one of them Krissie's hero?" and I started thinking about Crash and realized that the scene in the diner would be much better from his POV and in fact his POV is necessary throughout. If Eileen doesn't want to do Danny's POV, I don't think it's a problem, and anyway she gets to choose whatever she wants to do. But looking at the three stories interwoven really helped me define one of the problems I was having. Crash needs to tell part of this for balance. And because he doesn't know what the hell is going on, it's going to be very helpful for me in releasing info.

Collaboration is a good, good process.

As for the collage, this is where it is now (it'll keep changing right through the copy edits):

What have I learned?
I know what the waitress looks like which is a huge help.
I know what Crash's place in Tuscany looks like. I know that I put the movie titles in the wrong places and I have to flip The Corpse Bride and Howl's Moving Castle. I know the bunnies are more important than I thought which probably means I have to change my first line again. I know what Krissie's hero looks like because she told me where to find the image. I got an entire scene out of that frog in the teacup. Jude Law is perfect for a smarmy minion (should never have slept with that nanny, Jude). Butterflies, hot fudge sundaes, muffins, frogs, the motifs are piling up.

But the spiders are gone. Mare isn't really Goth any more. And Value Video is central. Which I didn't know until I started putting things on the collage and taking them off, moving some things around until it felt like they were in the right place and then looking at them again to see why, what things were around them that had welcomed them in, narratively speaking. I learned so much from this pass.

I love collage. And New York. Can't wait for all of us together again. It moves things so fast, and we'll have so much more to play with this time.

EILEEN: Matriarch in the Making

2006-03-14T21:08:00.000-08:00

Well, my two cohorts have beautifully drawn their characters for this blog, so I guess it's my turn. I, too, wish I had the knack for collaging. The best I can do is find a photo. It doesn't have to look a thing like one of my characters. It has to have the mood of the project. And it has to be something pleasant to look at, so I don't shy away from it. But I just can't collect bits and pieces. First of all, I'm so disorganized, that before I ever got them put together, my cat would eat half and the vacuum cleaner the other half. Second of all, it's like outlines. What the book starts out as tends to be completely different by the time it ends. When I send in an outline, I always put two sticky notes in the middle of it. "Warning: Incidents Liable to Change without Notice" and "Trust me."It's one of the reasons I like to stay with familiar editors. They know by now they can do just that. Even if the outline makes no sense at all. I know where the book is going. I just can't verbalize it until I actually tell the story. Did I tell you I'm very, VERY right brain dominant?
Anyway, back to Dee. Deirdre Dolores O'Brien-Ortiz, which as Dee puts it, translates into "Sorrowful, really sorrowful Irish Mexican chick." Dee is the oldest. And, being an oldest myself, I'm very familiar with her. I always say that oldest daughters in Irish Catholic families could be registered by the AKC as a herding group.
Dee feels like she's been in charge since she was four when Lizzie appeared on the scene. She's certainly always been more mature than her flighty parents. She believes she alone has protected her sisters from not only the madness of her parents' former lives as Phil and Fiona Fortune, the Jim and Tammi Faye of psychics, but her mother's sister, Aunt Rellie, who wants to court the girls so she can siphon their powers like extra gas for her sputtering tank.
Dee has always been responsible. She has been the de facto parent for her sisters since she grabbed her sisters and her mother's jewelry collection and went into hiding on her sixteenth birthday. She's now 28, and can't imagine any other life. She adores her sisters, but still tends to see them as the children she's had to protect all these years. After having to move three times to keep away from Aunt Rellie, she believes that this is always going to be her life.
Like Jen's Mare, Dee mirrors Rellie more than she'd like. Rellie's raison d etre(my french is excreble) is control. She's controlled the girls' parents, all the men in her life(and I mean all), and feels it only her right to control the girls. She is chronically furious that they manage to escape her. As for Dee, she also needs to control. Not out of selfishness, but out of a need to protect her sisters and herself from a capricious world and an avaricious aunt. It often sets her against them, especially Mare, who is really not interested in being in control. It obsesses her, because the one thing she can't quite control yet is her power.
Dee changes into things. She can become a hawk or a mouse, which she does to gain unique perspectives for her paintings that are her real soul. But on the downside, she still hasn't been able to focus her power enough, because every time she finds herself in a hot clinch with a guy, she shape-shifts.....into the guy's mother. Obviously her love life is not a screaming success.
So she's caught, terrified to further explore her gift or her art, frustrated by the stagnant state of her life, ashamed because sometimes she resents the sisters she loves so much. She would like to be able to use her power effectively to be a better painter. She is just afraid to do it, not only because after suffering the circus of life with her parents, she is mortally afraid of notoriety, but because years ago Aunt Rellie convinced her that withough her powerful aunt, she'd never be able to. Luckily for her, Danny arrives on his vintage motorcycle, the freeest spirit she's ever met, the greatest temptation, the greatest threat to her anonymity. Danny says he's here to research a book debunking her parents' powers. What he ends up doing is liberating Dee. Deliciously and quite magnificently. On the mountain beyond the town...that's if I can get an appointment for he mountain in between Mare and Lizzie, who evidetnly are already up there sparking thunderstorms with their heroes.
As for New York, Krissie, I am SO there.

Eileen

KRISSIE: The Goddess Rules

2006-03-14T10:22:00.000-08:00

Don't you love Jenny's collage? Absolutely gorgeous. I've tried making collages, done workshops etc., but all I end up with is a bunch of pretty pictures and words that seemed like they might be a good idea at the time but end up with no resemblance at all to the finished book. When I look at collages done by friends like Jenny, Barbara Samuel or Jill Barnett I know exactly which book they represent. I think maybe I need to do a collage coat instead, since sewing/quilting is the closest thing I get to a visual art.
Well, I finished the first draft while I was trapped in a hotel room last week, and if it's not brilliant it's damned close. The problem is, I've been evil and shut the other two sisters out, which makes it a lot easier to write. All my Lizzie has to worry about is Elric the Magnificent, master alchemist (and if anyone is making a connection to the anime series Full Metal Alchemist then you're not off-base). It's tough having a middle sister -- the oldest sister fights the battles and takes care of the younger ones, the youngest sister gets to be the rebel, and the middle sister just sort of sits there.
The thing is, I'm a middle sister and trust me, I'm a powerhouse. So I figure Lizzie is too, in her own, quiet way.
Lizzie's gift is alchemy, and she hates it -- gifts like that stole her family, sent her on the run away from the bad guys, keep her from holding a job, make her house overrun with bunnies. She longs for safety and normalcy -- she doesn't want to transmute things, either accidentally or on purpose. She just wants to learn enough to make gold and then fuggedaboudit (is that how you spell it?) and marry a boring man who's lousy in bed.
Aha! She's in for a surprise, the lucky girl. Elric the Magnificent is very very good in bed.

So in the first draft she's happily orgasmic, but how she learns to accept her gift has yet to be determined. That's for when the three of us writers get together and hash things out.

I'm ready for New York again, guys!

JENNY: Mare, the Collage

2006-03-11T07:53:00.000-08:00

Eileen and Krissie will be in here to talk about their sisters when they get out of deadline hell for their other books--it's not like there's a rush, we're still in the first draft stage of the Miss Fortunes so we're finding out new things about our characters all the time--but I wanted to talk about Mare's character development and collaging.

A collage is artwork made up of different images glued together. When you add three dimensional objects, it becomes assemblage but we're still going to call it collage here. So when I'm getting the idea for a book, trying to get the flavor of everything, I begin a collage and then keep adding to it throughout the writing of the book and into the rewrites. The collage gives me the touchstone for the characters, the setting, and the conflicts.

So I began Mare's collage quite awhile ago, back when we first started the collaboration, and posted it on my own blog, Argh Ink. In the beginning it looked like this:

I've added to it significantly since then because I know so much more about Mare and the story. And later today, I'm going to take a picture of the collage as it is now and put it here. Really, I am.

Back at you later . . .

JENNY: Meet Mare

2006-03-04T12:01:00.000-08:00

We're about halfway through the book now and we're just starting to understand each others' characters. Hell, I'm just starting to understand MY character. I had a good idea of her voice and her desires and the way she moved through life, but watching Eileen and Krissie write her and saying, "Yes, that's Mare," or "No, that's not quite it," having to explain her to them, and most of all, playing her off the antagoninst, all have really helped me shape the character faster than I usually do.

So in the beginning, we picked our characters, and I got Moira Mariposa, the butterfly baby of the family. She was Mari when she was little, but she goes by tough girl Mare now that she's 22. She spontaneous and vibrant and big with the snappy patter but bad with authority and empathy.

I didn't realize how bad she was with empathy until I wrote the first half. She's the baby of the family so she's spoiled, but it's a tough pull-up-your-socks kind of family, so she doesn't think other people should do things for her, she takes care of herself, she just doesn't think about other people. If something happens that forces her to notice them, she cares, but she tends to go ahead then and fix them so they fit into her worldview which is that everybody should be free and happy. This works most of the time but sometimes it backfires on her. Which she doesn't notice because she's not paying attention. So she ignores her bossy older sister/mother figure and giggles with her middle sister but mostly just goes through life arranging things the way she wants them, which is reflected in her power: she moves things with her mind, so she can literally rearrange things, no hands.

But I really like designing my protags to reflect my antags so I've made her the younger version of Aunt Rellie, kind of the Anakin to Rellie's Vader. And that made her a drama queen who loves sex and shiny bright things and wants to control the world. And a liar when it suits her.

I really love Mare, she's so much fun and she's so screwed up and then she gets together with Eileen's Dee and Krissie's Lizzie and the good times roll.

I love this book.

KRISSIE: Who Comes Between Me and My Man

2006-03-01T06:11:00.000-08:00

That's why Lizzie, better known as Elizabeth Alicia (Spanish pronounciation) O'Brien-Ortiz immediately disappears into her bedroom/workshop and doesn't come out again. So she doesn't have to deal with Dee and Mare fighting and can concentrate on the entirely luscious, slightly scary wizard type who's appeared in her kitchen and plans to teach her all sorts of things. There was a time when everyone who was writing series romances was encouraged to put babies and children in them, and I fought it like crazy. You can't have wild monkey love (where did that phrase come from?) if your kid is going to wander into the bedroom, and I've always had a weakness for the kitchen table ("what's mommy doing with the cornflakes?"). So no kids interfering.
And no sisters wandering around. Lizzie is the one who doesn't have an outside job, so she gets the house as her playground, and I'll fight to the death for it. Even though I'm so sweet and demure.
Eileen's right -- we'll all kill to have our characters be true to themselves. At least there can't be bloodshed via e-mail.
I think I'm going to run off to a hotel and write for a few days. Jenny invited me back to her wonderful, quirky house with the great guest room overlooking the river, and she still has a twelve pack of Tab waiting for me (my drug of choice) but that would require getting on an airplane (not that I'm loath but it takes more time) and besides, given the choice of writing or playing with Jenny guess what I'm gonna do? And if I'm up in that wonderful room working I'd still keep thinking of the fun that awaits downstairs. Sigh.

Nose to the grindstone, pedal to the metal, onward and upward. It's time to be a genius. A really fast genius.

In the meantime, one of my major influences on this novella is coming out on DVD on Tuesday, and anyone who has any taste at all will run and get it. It's Howl's Moving Castle, the most romantic movie of the year, and if you don't like anime, get over it. The hero will make your bones melt. Plus one firecracker of a heroine. And when he turns into a bird of prey ... Sigh.

Go for it. You won't be sorry. And the dubbed version is delicious as well, with Christian Bale sounding hot enough to make one forget about American Psycho.

JENNY: Lord Help the Sister

2006-02-28T20:04:00.000-08:00

Did I ask to have the youngest sister? I know I ended up with her but I can't remember how. I remember freaking because Eileen wanted her oldest sister in her twenties which meant, of course, that my youngest sister was going to be in her twenties and I don't do twenty-something heroines, mainly because I like my heroines bitter and experienced. And here I am with a twenty-two-year-old who's not bitter. The experienced, well, yeah, she's not shy. I remember whining about the twenty-something thing a lot and then Eileen telling me to stop crying or she'd give me something to cry for and that was that.

And I did NOT shoot Eileen down. I pointed out that the Mare (my sister) in her scene didn't talk like my Mare, to which she should have pointed out that since she hadn't seen my scene how could she know but she didn't. She was gracious. And then she told me to get the hell out of her scene, which was fair. I have deep suspicions that she was e-mailing Krissie off the yahoo list and saying, "I'm going to kill Jenny, is that okay with you?" and Krissie saying, "Yes, she's obnoxious, but she's always been obnoxious and she's going to write a third of the book, so let's let her live."

And they've got their first halves done and have had them done for weeks and I'm still going, "Uh, I don't know, this isn't right yet." So I'm finishing up tonight. Or tomorrow. Really soon.

But Eileen is right. Once we got through the first day when I was trying to impose some kind of structure on the story and Eileen's eyes started to roll back in her head, we kicked butt. And it's exciting to see the stories come together. Of course I'm the only one seeing them come together because I'm the only one who's seen all three first halves, but trust me, it's exciting. Or it will be until Eileen and I have to reconcile the scene in the video store where Dee comes to tell Mare that she thinks Rellie's in town. Eileen and I will be battling that out while Krissie hides under the bed, which she can do because she wisely decided that her sister is going into her workroom immediately after breakfast and not coming out until the next day. So every now and then Eileen and I write a "Where's Lizzie?" line into the story and then forge on as Dee and Mare have their smackdown.

I'd forgotten Krissie saying, "Does it have to be erotic?" and then going batshit on us. We had this big climax planned with the three sisters together in a storm on a mountain, and Krissie insisted that her sister was going to be having sex, then, too. I said, "Yeah, I can see it now, Dee's standing there with the wind in her hair, facing down Evil, and Mare's right beside her, and in between them is Lizzie's naked butt going up and down." I think we talked her out of it, but I'm not sure. Krissie can be very pig-headed, uh, strong-minded when she wants to be.

We should probably introduce the sisters in here next week so people know what we're talking about.

Cheat Sheet:

Dee (Dierdre Dolores), oldest sister, turns into things like owls (Eileen's sister)

Lizzie (Elizabeth something that I can't remember . . . KRISSIE???), middle sister, turn things into other things, like silverware into bunnies (Krissie's sister)

Mare (Moira Mariposa), youngest sister, moves things with her mind, or as she puts it, "the wimpiest power in the family" (my sister).

And then there are the three heroes who are about as different as three guys can be which only goes to show you that it takes all kinds to make a romance novel.

Especially one written by three kinds of romance novelists.

EILEEN: Sisters, sisters, there were never such devoted sisters....

2006-02-28T08:43:00.000-08:00

There are two really funny things for me in doing Miss Fortunes(well, okay, there are more than two, but these I can print). One, that Sister Krissie actually called me a hoyden. I may put it on my tombstone. Irish girls are rarely called hoydens, after all. It's a word that gives you a certain cache. Irish girls are more likely to be called Little Mother or babysitter. Even better, being called a hoyden by the Superior Mother of Holy Hoydens herself.
Which brings me to the funny of the second part, which ties in nicely with the first. What Krissie said about how she's the moderate one? Here's the giggle. She really is! Who'd a thunk it? Now, I've known since Krissie and Jen and I did a fairly slanderous(and wildly funny) sketch at RWA one year, that both were sister iconoclasts. I knew we could each claim quite a healthy respect for our own opinions. I never realized we really could have been family.
Here we were setting up a novel about three sisters, and each picked the one she wanted. I gravitated toward the eldest, Jen picked the youngest, and Krissie said, "Yeah, Okay. I'm stuck in another manuscript at the moment. You guys just let me know." So, we fleshed out our ideas, and started crazy quilting them all together. Which was when we met in New York to brainstorm. It all became clear that week.
I admit it. I'm very happy writing the oldest sister. I have a life's worth of experience being an oldest sister. In fact, I'm the oldest sister of a large Irish Cathollic family(and have been the--ick!--matriarch since my 31st birthday). I think the AKC has registered us as a herding group. So, I may have had....definite opinions. I may have done a bit of guiding as to my recalcitrant sisters. I do wish to make this clear. I was not a shillelagh. At any time. I'm much too sweet and demur for that(kind of the way Sister Krissie is). And Jen, not having a strong opinion on anything herself, stood toe to toe with me when she felt she needed to(when she wasn't tossing around words like "matrix" just to see my eyes bleed, anyway)
First of all, let me say that it was brilliant. I know we'll be talking more later about the rush of real collaboration, when you're sitting in a small room spinning concepts and characters like plates on a stick to see if you can keep adding more without them falling, but, since I've never done this before, I have to say here how surprised I was. Three women with definite personalities, ideas of our own, fighting for the veracity of our characters as we stitch together plot, and I have to tell you, I can't remember when my brain fired so fast. It was, and is, exhilerating.
But the funniest thing I kept thinking that weekend (besides the fact that Krissie actually said, "does it have to be erotic?" before spending the rest of her time obsessed by how her Lizzie would get the chance to have hot monkey love out on a hill in a thunderstorm), was that we really did fall into our characters' birth order. I set up my idea, Jen shot it down(or vice versa), and Krissie found the compromise. Like I said, who'd a thunk?

eileen

KRISSIE: Oh, They're Both Right

2006-02-25T10:28:00.000-08:00

You wouldn't think I'd be such a little peacemaker when I'm such a brazen wench, but when I'm stuck between Miz Jenny and Eileen the Irish Shillelagh (think a big stick that whaps everybody upside the head, as opposed to an Irish Sheela Na Gig, which you really don't want to know about) I end up as demure as a saintly little nun, always agreeing with both of them because I don't dare to do anything else.
So, yup, Eileen was drinking too much champagne and even I was drinking too much champagne and there was that damned limo we were supposed to climb into before we got out in front of two thousand of our peers and made total fools of ourselves, and I said "of course" and Jenny said "of course" and here we are.
The thing is, we all have deadlines up the wazoo, we have our own distinct styles and work habits (watch Eileen's eyes glaze over every time Jenny says the word "matrix") and we're jumping into this like naked teenage boys at the local watering hole. Like tanned, lean, golden-skinned nineteen year old boys who ...
Stop it, Krissie!
You can see the erotic part won't be a problem for me.
So we're in the midst of controlled chaos, having a blast, and you all get to be witness. And you'll notice that while they pretend to be well-behaved at all times, neither of them are ever going to be confused with a nun, and I'm the epitome of restraint and perfect manners and really an absolute lady at all times, compared to those two hoydens.
I still don't understand how I ended up being the moderate one, but I guess the world of writing is full of surprises.
And we've got a lot of them coming up.
Where's the champagne?

EILEEN: How We REALLY Started

2006-02-24T01:46:00.000-08:00

Okay, I admit it. It started as a joke. I was at the Romantic Times Conference, and all I heard was that nothing was selling but erotica and paranormal. Well, I was in a mood(my family can tell you all about those. They cover everything from trying to shoot the TV during a particularly improbable CSI episode--even though I don't own a gun--to painting the inside of my house orange because winter is just too dull.) This mood was because I'd just found out that my suspense career was in temporary hiatus, and, as usual with my books, no one who publishes knows quite how to market them. So when I heard about all this erotic paranormal business, I reacted with what I consider to be a great amount of restraint and elegance. I may have finished my cosmopolitan in one slurp(did I mention that this happened in the lobby bar) and snapped, "Fine. You want paranormal? You want erotica? I'll give it to you. I'll write a book about a woman with paranormal powers. She's a shape-shifter. Problem is, every time she has an orgasm, she changes....into the guy's mother." I got a laugh and forgot about it.
Until the RWA conference a couple of months later. There I was trapped backstage at the marathon Rita Awards ceremony(the only good part of which was Jen winning her Rita) with alcohol and Sister Krissie. I told her my joke. Then I said we should do a book together, make it three sisters, all having different paranormal powers they can't control. Krissie, glassy-eyed from being back stage for three hours, nodded and muttered something polite, I'm sure just to shut me up.
It might have ended there, if I hadn't finally escaped back stage to find Jen in the lobby bar(do you sense a theme?) celebrating her Rita win with friends. Flushed with success, she listened to my idea and told me it was great. I, of course, forgot about it when I got home, because I have ADD, and I can never remember anything I did at a conference when I get home--especially calls I've promised to make or appointments I set up in a frenzy of enthusiasm. Besides, I was in the middle of a set of outlines I was trying to sell without much success, and a tour for my latest suspense novel, which took me across the US.
But the idea just wouldn't leave me. So I thought, oh what the heck? and emailed Jen and Krissie. And much to my surprise and eternal delight, they both said yes. The moral being, boys and girls, never throw out an idea, no matter how far fetched. You just might find two other souls brave--or crazy--enough to help you realize it. As for me, I couldn't have imagined I'd be lucky enough to be caught in a novel with those two. We're having such a whale of a time, we may just do it again. I really hope so. Next book it's Jenny's turn to come up with the layout for the fictitious town.

Eileen

JENNY: How We Started

2006-02-23T13:45:00.000-08:00

Eileen, of course, started everything.

I was in Reno at RWA National and ran into her which is always fun because Eileen does not have boring days. I'm not sure Eileen has days, she always seems to be passing in a blur on her way from somewhere fun, heading toward some place more fun. But she grabbed me and said, "I have an idea for a book. The heroine has paranormal powers but she's a virgin because whenever she's in bed with a guy she turns into his mother." I thought about saying, "You know, there'd be some massive psychological blowback to that pretty much all around," but it was Reno and we were partying so I said, "Good one, Eileen," and we spoke of other things.

A couple of months later, she called and said, "Remember that idea I had where the heroine turns into the guy's mother?" I said, "How could I forget?" She said, "Three novellas, three sisters, each with a different power. You, me, and Krissie." Frankly, she had me at "You, me, and Krissie," even without the paranormal aspect, which I'd been wanting to try for years. I like paranormals but that's a whole nother level of storytelling I'd have to master, so I'd put that ambition on hold until Eileen showed up. When she said, "Krissie, too," well, I had to do it. Have you met the divine Sister Krissie, aka Anne Stuart? Well, then you know. She's brilliant, funny, and an excellent person to buy jewelry with because she always says, "Oh, you should have that." In fact, there's a necklace in the book that I bought when I was with Krissie; it's my sister's talisman and it just seemed right that I should use it since I think of Krissie whenever I see it.

So I called my agent and said, "I need to do this novella," and she said, "How about a NOVEL?" because it's been awhile since I did a solo book, and I said, "Let me send you this idea, just look at it and see what you think." And then I waited because my agent is very, very, very smart, and if she'd said, "This is a bad idea," I'd have passed. But she called back about fifteen minutes later and said, "This is a fabulous idea, you were born to write this, go for it." I love my agent.

So with our agencies handling the contracts and all the uninteresting clerical/legal work, Eileen and Krissie and I started e-mailing, throwing out ideas for our heroines and their back stories and antagonists and heroes and all that good stuff. We set up a Yahoo Groups list so that the three of us could talk on that which means we have a nice archive of how we got to where we are today, should we ever want to wade back through it all. We couldn't decide whether to make the sisters Irish (that would be Eileen) or Latin (can't remember who came up with that) so we gave them both, an Irish mother and a Latin father, which meant we could give the sisters double Latin/Irish names which turned out to be an interesting character builder. Another good decision: we gave the sisters all the same antagonist, Aunt Rellie (Esmerelda), a character we modeled variously on Auntie Mame, Sue Ann Niven, Lucille Bluth, and Maleficent.

And then we went to work on our novellas with one twist: We decided to make them take place at the same time. So Eileen's opened with the sisters at breakfast. Twenty thousand words later, Krissie's opened with sisters at the same breakfast, starting that day over. And twenty thousand words after that, mine opened at the same breakfast. I loved the idea of doing the first scene three times in three different POVs but I was overruled (grump, grump) so Eileen's starts at breakfast, Krissie's starts as her sister leaves the breakfast scene, and mine starts as my sister leaves the breakfast scene.

And then we decided to interweave them, at which point our novella anthology became a novel which I am SO jazzed about.

So right now we're writing the first half of our individual stories for The Unfortunate Miss Fortunes (Eileen and Krissie have had their first drafts done for weeks, I'm just finishing mine now so I'm the slug) and beginning to talk about how we're going to integrate them into the book and we're going to use the blog to keep a record of that. We'll be picking a topic to talk about each week. Next week, we'll tell you about each of our sisters, how we came up with the names, the personalities, and powers and the problems. And in later weeks we'll talk about building the perfect hero, plotting our stories and interweaving them, and why Eileen wants me to get the hell out of her story (infodump, ARGH), and why Krissie plays the peacemaker between the hot-headed Irish lass and the control freak from Ohio, much the way her sister Lizzie plays the peacemaker between Eileen's bossy older sister Dee and my reckless younger sister Mare. In short, this blog is going to be the story of how we're writing The Unfortunate Miss Fortunes.

By the very fortunate Eileen, Krissie, and Jenny.