What on Earth was the story there?  Maybe it was her SUV and she was just leaving the bag there until she could come back with, it is to be assumed, a bag from the second dog.  Maybe the SUV belonged to a former lover she didn’t much care for.  Maybe she was protesting gas guzzling SUVs.  Maybe she… there’s a whole planet of maybes contained in that one observation.  Or, as they used to say on TV in the early 1960s, “there are eight million stories in the Naked City.  This has been one of them.”

There’s the Doberman Pinscher I observed at the dog park who worshipped a tennis ball.  Seriously.  If you gave him his ball he would roll onto his back with his legs extended above him, ball between his paws, and he would just lie there gazing adoringly at the ball.  He’d do this for ten or fifteen minutes at a time.  His owner would shrug and laugh a little uncomfortably, and admit that she had no idea why the dog did this.

Or that sign, above.  I was walking past a storefront: plate glass windows, glass door with big metal doorpull. It certainly looked like a store.  And yet, apparently not.  I could write a story–maybe even a novel–about that store, about the people who worked there, or perhaps lived there.  About the build-up of frustration implicit in the sign, and about the attempt to master that frustration that I read in the “Thanks again” at the end of it.

I have a story coming out next month in an anthology, Tales from the House Band.  It’s called “The Boy Who Played Air Guitar,” and, well, it’s about a kid who plays air guitar.  Because for years, whenever I see someone playing air guitar, whether it’s Wayne and Garth or one of my kids’ friends, I wonder where the music is.  I can’t shake the notion that the music that person is playing is being heard somewhere else.  Maybe two decades ago I had this idea for the first time; it had been sitting in the back of my head until I was asked to contribute to a music-themed anthology.

Life for a writer is kind of like sourdough starter: the ingredients just sort of bubble away, fermenting, until something happens.

I really do wonder about the people in that “not a store” store, though.  What’s their story?

There are two kinds of people in the world: the people who divide the world into two kinds of people, and the people who don’t. (**Rimshot**)  Among the many binary categorizations of humans, one that I run into a lot is: people who want to figure out why a story works, and people who don’t.  And these two kinds of people can really get up each other’s nose.  From my perspective, there I am, having a swell discussion about why the film we just saw worked (or didn’t), when someone says “Why do you have to ruin it by chewing it to death?”

Ruin it?  But that’s half the fun.  For me.  Because I’m one of those people.

Okay, some of this is just professional: when I read a book or see a TV show or a movie or a play, and I like it, I want to tease out what worked.  And I really enjoy doing that with other people, seeing what worked for them, what didn’t, what they caught that I didn’t get.  Same way, if I encounter a story that doesn’t work for me, I want to understand how they lost me.  If I’m disappointed by something that seemed promising, then I really want to understand it.

I can trace this directly back to High School, when I discovered for the first time the heady satisfaction of debating plot and character in English class.  I was aware, even at the time, that many of my classmates thought this was 1) a waste of time and 2) something to be endured in order to move on to something more enjoyable, like field hockey practice.  De gustibus. But adolescence is often the first time you get a chance to have opinions and have them be taken seriously; adolescence was when I discovered that figuring out the why of my opinions so that I could defend them was interesting in its own right.  Fun, even.

I love seeing films with my husband; aside from the obvious (who else’s hand do I want to hold during the scary bits?) he comes at films from a very different place: he’s a techie, a recording engineer, a guy who hears things that pass me by.  And he’s not too shabby in the plot department either, so talking over a movie or TV show with him is fun because he’ll tell me something sonic that I missed, that might have influenced the impact of the story in a way that would never have occurred to me.  Ditto my brother: he and I were raised in the same household, watched the same TV, were formed by the same stuff, and yet his take on film and books is wildly divergent from mine (I almost stopped speaking to him when I found out how much he liked Peggy Sue Got Married, a movie I hate) and yet his reasoning is fascinating.

I know there will be people in every crowd who like or dislike a creative work but don’t want to talk about their opinions.  Some people just have a visceral reaction and don’t care to pursue it.  Some people get anxious when their opinion goes against the opinion of the group (I thought Cowboys and Aliens was a swell movie, but voicing my opinion brought down a surprising pile of outrage on my head). Stating an opinion makes you vulnerable; I don’t know that friendships have actually broken up over whether Han Solo shot first, but I wouldn’t be surprised.  And some people aren’t good at looking at the reasons why something worked or didn’t, and the exercise offers them no pleasure.  All perfectly legitimate reasons to change the topic to gardening or where to go for dinner.

If you’re one of the people who doesn’t want to talk about it, please don’t feel you have to do so.  All I ask, as one of those people, is that you let us get it out of our systems.  Give us five minutes.  You might be amused by the back-and-forth (always happy to provide amusement for my fellow humans).  You might hear something that interests you.  You might realize you have something to say–although, again, you don’t have to.  But don’t try to head off this kind of discussion–a post-mortem is like the Hydra: if you cut off one head two more pop up, until the entire night is taken over by whether the ending of The Sixth Sense is properly set up (it totally is).

When the discussion has wound down there will still be time to talk about other things. Like gardening. Or where to go for dinner.

Or rather, I had missed not having to impose that structure on myself.  As a freelancer, every morning you get up and say “Now today we’re going to get the following things done,” and you make yourself stick to it–but that takes energy that could be as usefully applied to the getting of the things done.  If you follow me.

My new state of employment raises some questions about all the other bits and pieces of my life.  When will I make cakes?  How will my family cope when I’m not available for emergency mid-day bale-outs?  (“I left XX at home, could you just…”). Will the dog forget my name? And of course, when am I going to write?

Of course, while I was looking for a job (my least favorite part of the whole last year–particularly given the gloomy state of the economy and employment) I thought about these things.  Some of them were pretty easily dealt with: I’ll make time to make cakes after I get home, if cakes are needed.  My family will cope–and about time, too.  The dog never forgets anyone who feeds her (and now she’s in a playgroup and gets to play with the other kids every day!).  And: I’ll write on the train.

On the highly unscientific evidence of the last four days, it can happen.  I set myself a goal of writing three pages (longhand) on the train.  Given that I have a 20 minute ride on BART and another thirty minutes on Caltrain to get to work (and then the process reverses itself in the evening) I have plenty of time to do this–and while I permit myself to run longer if inspiration hits and I want to, if I run out of what I want to say after three pages, that’s fine, I can read or make phone calls or stare into the middle distance contemplating whatever seems contemplation-worthy.  This week I did it three days out of four; on the fourth, I brought my laptop in hopes that I would spend that commute transcribing the handwritten stuff.  That didn’t work: there’s not enough space, and trying to concentrate on my train-wobbling writing is hard enough on a flat, stable, unmoving surface.  So next week it will be me and my notebook, FTW.  And three pages a day = a book a year, give or take.

Will I be able to keep this up?  That’s where the persistence part of the program is going to have to kick in.  It’s easy to do now, when the shiny is all over the process and the job. In six weeks, or six months, or a year from now, I will probably have to make myself do the writing some mornings, because entropy gets to you after a while.  What I’ve got going for me is 1) experience, both with doing the writing and getting it done, and with my own sometimes-need to just hold my nose and do it, 2) curiosity (because I never really know how the Hell I’m going to write a book until it’s written), and 3) the nascent faith that there are people out there who want to read stuff I write (that last one is such a new thing for me that I’m almost afraid to mention it lest it burst and leave me with egg on my face).

So I bought a small pile of notebooks yesterday, and some nice gel pens, because having decent tools help.  They will become part of my daily take-to-work kit, along with the water bottle and the lunch bag.  And we’ll just see how this goes.  So far, as the guy falling from the airplane says, so good*.

*I choose to believe the guy has a parachute and that the parachute will deploy properly.  Your mileage, as always, may vary.

Say what?

Aside from all the craft-related reasons to read–research, inspiration, scoping out new trends and (let’s be honest) the competition–how do you come to want to be a writer if you don’t read?  If the acquisition of story isn’t a kind of fuel for you? To me that’s like being a chef who doesn’t much like to eat; yeah, you can do it, but why?  It’s not like there are not more remunerative jobs, jobs with higher status.  So why? And how?  Why would you think of writing fiction if you never touch the stuff?

I guess there are reasons.  I guess.  My own writing is so firmly rooted in my need for story, my impulse to play make-believe, inspired by the writing of other people, that I can’t really wrap my brain around the idea of a writer who doesn’t read.  Okay, so writing-wise I am an auto-didact: I learned to tell stories by reading stories.  In fact, I’m a little suspicious of writing classes and writing books, because writers can hide behind prescriptions to the detriment of their work (“but look, I made it a classic 5-beat plot! And I gave the heroine backstory with telling details! and there’s lots of visual detail in the scene! and…”).  But that is just me: there really is no wrong way to do this writing thing, if it works for you. Except not reading?  It just doesn’t seem like a negotiable to me.

You don’t have to read fiction: many writers I know read more non-fiction than fiction simply because it’s research, or a springboard of ideas.  You can read poetry, plays, magazines, shampoo bottles, but you have to read.  If for no other reason than to see how other writers use language and work their ways around technical writing problems.

So why would a non-reader want to be a writer?  Why would a non-reader assume that other people would want to do the very thing he/she scorns?  Fame?  It could happen, but it’s not something you can depend upon.  Fortune?  Again, it could happen, but statistically it’s unlikely. The wish to use a skill, be your own boss, work a solitary job?  There are better ways to do it than write.  It’s like being a cook who doesn’t like food, or an historian who thinks the past is boring.

I don’t get it.  Do you?

Now, I am as close to a fiction addict as you will find this side of a twelve-step meeting, and I didn’t relish being told my passion for story was babyish. This led to discussions, friendly but unresolved. In truth, it was as if we were beings from two different species trying to reach detente. I’m afraid I didn’t know enough then to explain, or defend what I found so necessary about story. Twenty-five years later, with a lot more experience, I’m still thinking about the question; only now I have more ammunition.

A year after I met Justin, I attended the Clarion Writers’ Workshop–that bootcamp for science fiction and fantasy writers. One instructor, SF critic and writer Algis Budrys, brought the issue of story’s purpose up in class. His position was that all reading was a life-saving activity. That all reading, perhaps especially the fictional stuff, was instructional. That fiction gave us models for behavior in crucial situations, and allowed us to evaluate what works and doesn’t work, where a character’s behavior clashes with our own personalities or values. The example that he gave was: what does a thirteen year old get out of Romeo and Juliet? For one thing, he suggested, the play allows teenagers to experience an extreme variation on a very real situation they may face: first love, with someone their parents disapprove of. It’s a textbook case of how not to handle the situation and a homily on the effect of chance on even the best laid plans.

If you look at story this way you can see its utility everywhere, especially with kids. Boys–and these days, thank God, girls–read adventure stories to experience, and prepare themselves, for lives which will require physical and emotional courage. I could give you a laundry list of wonderful books which present these challenges, but right now I really only need to mention two words: Harry Potter. All over  the world kids faced physical challenges and explore honor, betrayal, fear, loss–and the glee of putting one over on the hall monitors–with Harry and his friends.

Here’s a thought experiment: think of a favorite book and ask yourself: Why That Book? What part of your emotional life did it echo or validate? In story we get to experience adventures–and trials–we will face in real life. Our choices may not be as terrible as Sophie’s, but some will be hard enough. Our worlds may not be as colorful as Garp’s, but they will be filled with sudden, horrendous loss and and anger and love, and experiencing that world gives us a chance to think about how to manage own own.

For years after attending Clarion, I thought about each book I read this way: how did reading this book save my life? In some cases, the fix was slight but real: after a long chaotic morning at work, lunch in the ordered universe of Lord Peter Wimsey might lower my blood pressure enough so I could face the chaos again. In others, the fix was lasting and profound: when I was a teenager, moved from New York City to an isolated rural area, with a parent whose alcoholism was rapidly revealed, I found my experience mirrored, and validated, and rendered bearable, in Red Sky at Morning, a wonderful book that is both howlingly funny and deeply perceptive. That book saved my life. It reminded me that I was not alone, and encouraged me to celebrate the absurd as a way of surviving.

Story also allows us–not to hide from pain, but to to approach and deal with it. I couldn’t have written my novel The Stone War if I hadn’t had children, that invaluable aid to a writers’ imagination. My favorite example: when she was three, my older daughter knocked out a tooth at the playground; Every night for several weeks afterward she wanted to hear the epic tale of how she lost her tooth; the repetition became a way of making a painful and frightening experience familiar, to make it a part of her story–a small, manageable part. Far from allowing us to escape harsh reality, story often lets us embrace it–manageably.

Five years after working with Justin, I was editing and writing for another resolutely non-fictional guy, a child psychiatrist who specialized in infant depression. One of Paul’s theories was of something he called previewing: the notion that parents prepare the way for their children’s development by showing them what the experience of that new stage is going to be like. When an infant begins to push on her feet, her father holds her up standing, giving the child the chance to experience the sense of weight on her feet, the change in her point of view when the world is seen from two feet off the ground instead of four inches. It’s as if the parent is saying “Hey, look what’s ahead of you. You keep going the way you’re going and this is what it will be like.”

That’s one of the functions of fiction, too. And particularly one of the functions of genre fiction. For most of the last century (and arguably for a chunk of the century before that) science fiction and fantasy have been ghetto literature, relegated either to the kids’ section or to adults who are perceived as being somehow stunted or immature. But science fiction, the good stuff, has also had the power to show us where we may be going and, in suggesting those directions, to triangulate back to show us where we really are now.

In the late 60s and early 70s, when I started reading science fiction, a lot of it was resolutely depressing. As a society in the 60s America had the leisure and the money to question the wisdom of all sorts of things: war, educational traditions, rampant consumerism, race- and gender- relations, economic inequality. And SF was the perfect literature for such discussions. In science fiction this was the era of the “if this goes on” story–if we keep threatening each other with nuclear weapons, if we keep ignoring the toll our lives take on the Earth we inhabit, if we keep treating each other inhumanely, if we don’t take into account the costs of what science offers us–something bad’s gonna happen…

Many of these stories were strident and one note–as a good deal of political rhetoric can be. But unlike political rhetoric, fiction, by making the discussion hypothetical–or maybe virtual is a better word–allows us to make a little laboratory, to set up conditions and see how they affect the humans in the story–and then to see how the results make us feel. Do we like the results? Do we admire or fear what has been wrought? Could we pay the price demanded? And if we can’t pay that price, does the story suggest new solutions or make us look for solutions ourselves? Does it send us away thinking “there has to be a different way?” That may be fiction’s most transformative gift.

That’s what story does. That’s how story saves our lives. After twenty-five years I finally have my rejoinder to Justin and the people who suggest I get my nose out of that book. Story is not for the weak. Far from insulating or infantilizing us, fiction is the training ground for all the battles–public and private–we face when we close the book and look up at the world.

* This is a lightly edited version of a talk I gave at the 4th Universalist Church in New York City in 2000.

The public notion of an SF convention, lovingly lampooned in Galaxy Quest, is of a bunch of people in media-tie-in themed costumes, behaving like extras on The Big Bang Theory (not that there’s anything wrong with that), obsessing over minutia of Star Trek or Star Wars.  And there is some of that.  But an SF con–especially a Worldcon–contains multitudes: many costumes are made to professional standards, and rather than being copies of Queen Amidala’s wardrobe in Star Wars Episode II, are often interpretations of literary characters or scenes.  The panel discussions range from academic tracks to scientific topics to the business of writing to appreciations and examination of the work of writers past and present.  At the same time that those of us from the book side of the Force are talking books, there are gamers gaming, anime fans watching and talking anime, costumers (the ones making those costumes) discussing technique and history; and fans discussing the history of fandom.

What’s the point of all this for a writer, specifically?  There are many upsides to going to a convention–although going to a Worldcon as your first convention is pretty much jumping into the pool at the deep end.  But conventions are a place to meet colleagues (after a couple of decades of writing and of going to conventions my interior fangirl still squees with amazement when someone whose work I admire sits down and strikes up a conversation with me) and renew friendships.  Despite all the current noise about “brand building” and “getting your name known,” I still believe that the best thing you can do at a convention is make friends, be amusing and entertaining.

Worldcon, in particular, has dozens of things going on at any given time, including readings, sewing demonstrations, anime or film viewings, filk concerts, and panels on everything from Vampire Semiotics to urban planning in world-building to the business of finding an agent.  And everything in between.  If you plan to go to a convention and want to be on a panel, contact programming well in advance and–even if you are unknown in the field–tell them what you are best suited to speak about.  Just because you haven’t written your SF novel doesn’t mean you don’t know a lot about things that people want to hear about–but remember that they may have other experts in the field, and be gracious if they can’t find a spot for you.  If you are on a panel, mention your work as part of your credentials (“I’m the author of sixteen books featuring a vampire slayer who’s also a professor of Philology…”) but don’t go on a “Well, in my book” rampage.  Even better, mention works by other authors that are germane to the subject; I always come home from a convention with a long list of new “must read” books.  Remember that you are on a panel to enlighten and entertain, not to build your brand.  Or rather (and this is important): You Build Your Brand By Being Enlightening and Entertaining.  Apparently, after seeing me on one of my two panels at Worldcon, a woman stormed the dealer’s room looking for one of my books.  That’s the kind of brand-building I want.

It’s easy for people not on the inside to make fun of the insiders: romance writers and readers are all swathed in pink chiffon and airy salaciousness; SF writers and readers are unsocialized geeks; technothriller writers and readers are gun-happy Libertarians; mystery writers and readers are…  You get the idea.  In fact, all of these genres contain multitudes, and any get together of genre-readers and writers will contain multitudes too.  What links all of them is a love for some aspect of the genre and its craft.  And you can’t go wrong getting more exposure to craft and the people who love it.

What am I talking about?  Okay: there’s a movie out right now that is doing very well, a big CGI-laden summer movie, full of cool effects and whizz-bang.  And it lost me in the first ten minutes, and never got me back again.  From the reviews and audience comments I’ve seen about this movie, I am in the minority.

I came to the movie totally wanting to buy into the world.  And in the first ten minutes they did something stupid before I got engaged in the story.  Because of that I never did get wholly engaged; every time they did another stupid thing (and yes, it was a Big CGI-laden movie, the stupid was thick on the ground) I got pushed further away from engagement.

What was the problem?  In the first few minutes of Rise of the Planet of the Apes a researcher gets a great outcome from testing an Alzheimers drug on a chimpanzee.  On the basis of this one good result he exults, goes to his boss, says “we’re ready for human testing!” and the boss says “Yay!” and arranges for the scientist to go before the Board in order to get clearance to begin human testing.  And me–with maybe five years total of science classes reaching all the way back to high school–sitting there saying “Wait! What?  One success and you want to go to human testing?  No studies to check for side effects?  No replicating the success with other chimps.  And the Board of Directors is going to okay human testing (and none of the intrusive government agencies that regulate testing to keep bad things from happening and apes from taking over the world are going to get involved)?”  From that point on, every time there was another sticky point for goodwill to carry me past, I hadn’t the goodwill to give.

How do you keep the audience’s goodwill?  In the first place, don’t do things that are stupid just out of laziness.  A little handwaving in those first scenes, a sentence of dialogue to smooth over the issues that snagged me, and I would have eased right into the story and enjoyed it.  If there’s something that you think is going to snag your audience, address it in some way, then go right on past (“move along, folks.  Nothin’ to see here.”)  There are two terrific examples I can think of, one from TV, one from fiction.

Years ago on Lois and Clark (a rom-com series based on Superman and his girlfriend) a villain from the future comes in contact with Superman.  And he says, “Look, answer me this one thing.  You’re the most powerful man in the universe!  Why the dorky tights?  And the cape?  Please!”  And Superman looks down his nose at him and says “My mother made it for me.”  And that’s all you need, really.  He wears it because he wears it, and if it’s dorky, well: Mom. Any viewer problem with the suit has been acknowledged, and we move right along.

The other example comes from the first of Laurie R. King’s terrific Holmes-Russell books (in which Sherlock Holmes mentors–and later marries–a girl named Mary Russell).  As a Holmes fan from way back I was prepared to be horrified; Holmes and a girl detective sounded awfully Nancy Drewish.  But in the “introduction” to the book, which purports to be a memoir written by Russell in her old age, King has Russell announce, “this is not Conan Doyle’s Holmes or the Holmes that  Uncle John [Watson] wrote about.  This is the man I knew.  Our relationship was different.”  Saying that gave me permission to let go of my expectations and accept a different Holmes and that new relationship.

If the people writing Rise of the Planet of the Apes had just been a little less impatient and done a moment’s handwaving I’d have liked the film much, much better than I did.  I probably wouldn’t even have wondered how an army of 30-40 apes swelled to hundreds by the end of the film…

I no longer have cats because we’re all allergic to them.  While it was just me, and I was acclimated to my late cat Alexis, this didn’t matter.  Then I got married and had a kid and, sixteen months into the kid’s life, my husband spent a week in the ICU because of allergies and severe asthma, and I had to reevaluate.  Alexis lived the rest of his feline life with a former roommate of mine who bravely took him on when I had to send him away.

I no longer have the boyfriend because, well: married someone else.

But cat and boyfriend intersected in my single days in a, well, singular way.Shortly after I left college I moved to Boston. There, I fell in love. These things happen. At one point when I had been out of town and returned and called my beau to tell him I was home, he answered the phone in a state of great excitement.  ”Come over right now!  The Rabbit is having kittens!”  (The Rabbit was, in fact, a small, tidy little cat, named so because she could use her hind paws to killer effect when attacking a mouse or a shoe.)

I hied over, arriving just in time to see the Rabbit give birth to the third of her huge offspring.  It was pretty obvious, from her kittens, that Rabbit had been playing the field: the only unifying trait among the first four kittens was that they were LARGE.   As we were sitting there applauding the Rabbit for her fortitude, she gave a “meeEWp!” and produced, as a sort of afterthought, Kitten #5, a gray tabby male and the runt of the litter.  And this runt took a shine to me even before his eyes opened; whenever I came over to see my boyfriend the runt would climb up my legs (putting tears in my jeans and runs in my stockings) and plump himself into my lap.  He had selected me as his human; who was I to say him nay?

Fast forward about nine months.  It was early December when my boyfriend went to jail.  It wasn’t something sinister; in fact, the whole affair was tragicomic.  He was told there was a warrant out for him, he turned himself in, was convicted and sentenced to a month in jail.  Jail was what he termed the Billerica Home for the Criminally Bewildered, where his hardest task was not walking out the door: security was less than ferocious.  Whenever I could borrow my roommate’s car or get a ride with another of his friends, I went to visit him.  The visiting area was a large room that looked like the lunchroom of a particularly depressing 1960s school: cinderblocks painted institutional green, and institutional green tiles (why that color I don’t know.  I think it’s supposed to be calming, but really it was just nauseous).  There were tables of the sort that have the benches built in to them (again like a lunch room) at which visitors and inmates would sit.  You weren’t allowed to touch the person you were visiting, but there were no barriers.  There was also no privacy: whatever dramas were being enacted around you were unavoidable; it was hard not to watch some of them.

While I was commuting to visit my sweetie in the slammer, Alexis got sick.  Like seriously ill, with Feline Urinary Syndrome.  If he’d been an elderly cat I might have allowed economics to overpower me; but he was only nine months old, and I couldn’t just say Oh Well when the vet told me it would cost close to a thousand dollars to solve the problem.  I gulped hard and dug into my savings, and the vet rebuilt Alexis, removing his exterior hardware and building him “a urethra like a superhighway” so that nothing could block it.

Now, outside work hours, I was pinging between the Billerica Home for the Criminally Bewildered and the vet’s. Finally I got to bring Alexis home and pamper him (when I wasn’t on my way to Billerica…).  In memory this period of anxiety went on for a very long time, but in fact, my beau was only in jail for three weeks (time off for good behavior).  As was my cat.

The beau and I split up a year or so later; Alexis and I were together for another twelve years after his inadvertent sex change.  During that time he broke his nose (hereafter referred to as his nose job), and got lost in the basement of a synagogue when I moved from Boston to NYC (his foray into religious conversion).  I used to tell him that if he asked for contact lenses that as going to be the end of the relationship.  But he never did.  In his own way, Lex knew when he was well off.

Many conventions have programming about film and TV, music, costuming, and the culture of fandom itself. Readercon, as I said above, is all about the books.  I was on five (!) panels–a fit of generosity on the part of the programming committee that I attribute to my willingness to moderate panels, and to the fact that I hadn’t been there in ten years (so they were making up for lost time, or wanted to store up enough Madeleine Robins to last another 10).  My first panel was on “Writing Within Constraints,” where the panelists–all writers–talked about writing to fit genre conventions, writing within a canon (as with licensed media tie-ins and comic books), and using constraints as a way to challenge yourself as a writer.  The second panel was on Jo Walton’s lovely fantasy Among Others, and was enlivened by the fact that Jo’s husband was in the front row (although at no time did he pull a Marshall-McLuhan in-Annie Hall and announce “You Know Nothing About Her Work!”).  And in the early evening I moderated a panel called “The Quest and the Rest,” which was really about the necessity for rooting fantasy in reality (the example the program description gave was Tolkein’s assertion that Sam and Rosie’s romance was absolutely essential to the plot of Lord of the Rings, but there were certainly examples aplenty).  On Saturday (yes, that was all Friday!) I had a panel on Location as Character, a subject near and dear to my heart; one of the great things about such discussions is that you come away with a list of books you simply must read Right Now.  And on Sunday morning bright and early, I had my last panel, discussing the permeable borders between fan-fiction, parody, “referential fiction”, pastiche, and straight fiction.  That one was fun, and worth a post on its own.

In addition to all that, I did a reading from The Sleeping Partner, and a workshop called “Walking Through Mayhem,” about using stage combat techniques (among other things) to create fight scenes.  I went into the workshop thinking I had about 45 minutes of material; it seems to me I used that all up in about 20 minutes, and vamped the rest of the time, but the audience seemed pleased.  Also one of my old fight buddies, Duncan Eagleson, was there, and played Crash Test Dummy.  That was not only swell, but recalled to me that certain physical memories don’t go away, they just go dormant: with a few cues we were falling into a sort of “okay, you do this and I do that and we’ll make it look good” rhythm that was very satisfying.

After the convention I made my way down to Norwich, CT, within spitting distance of Connecticut College, my alma mater.  I’d been invited to do a reading-and-sword-demo at the Otis Library, which turned out to be great fun.  The organizer had borrowed some short swords; another friend came up and was my Crash Test Dummy, and the audience seemed entertained.  And they laughed at the right places during the reading, which is very pleasing indeed.

Then home again, jiggity-jig.  And back to writing.

Mumblety years ago Althea, my first Regency, was published.  In the fullness of time my editor called and said, do you want to write more?  And I said “yes please,” and wrote My Dear Jenny. Reading Jenny now pleases me because I can see that my writing improved between book one and book two.  And I’m delighted that the ebook of Jenny joins Althea on the virtual sales shelves of Book View Café this week.  But along with the general delight of seeing the book made available again, there’s a very specific pleasure of fixing something that’s been annoying me for years.

When I wrote Jenny I used one of the tropes of Romance: the heroine who does not realize her own worth, but whose worth is recognized by the hero.  Miss Iphegenia Prydd is a poor relation, not as poor, plain, obscure and friendless as Jane Eyre, but destined in her own mind to be a worthy spinster aunt.  But of course the book, and I, and eventually the hero, have other ideas.  The thing is, somewhere close to the end of the book there is a sentence that read “He was, she felt, rather above her touch.”  Meaning, of course, that he was too good for her.

Only, see, when I got the galleys from my editor, there on page 187 or whatever it was, the pronouns had been flopped by the typesetter: “She was, she felt, rather above his touch.”  Suddenly she’s too good for him!  So I circled this, marked the error, and in my cover letter to my editor implored her please to fix it.  Six pages set upside down or in Pashto would at least not look as if I had suddenly lost track of my characters and my story.  So I sent the corrected galleys back to my editor, certain that the error would be fixed.

You can see where this is going.  When I got the book I turned to page 187 and there, once again, poor Jenny Prydd thinks she’s too good for the hero.  As tactfully as possible I pointed out to my editor that this repair had not been made, and she patted and soothed me (telephonically, as I was in Boston and she was in New York) and told me that when it was reprinted they would fix the error, no problem.  Only, of course, Jenny never was reprinted.  And for several decades the typo has niggled at me.

Thus, the first thing I did, when I had scanned the book in and fixed all the input errors, was to restore Jenny to her sense of inadequacy.  So that the hero can explain her error to her, and they can live happily ever after.  I cannot tell you how very satisfying it is to have that typo fixed!