Author rambles

There’s nothing more important than family

especially when they leave you alone…

People often compare writing to childbirth and it’s true that there is a huge cathartic relief to getting an idea that’s been festering in your brain out on paper (or pixels as the case may be). But likewise, when life gets in the way it’s like Braxton-Hicks contractions sending you to the hospital only to be sent home, tired and disappointed.

That’s what last week was like for me. It seemed like all the other hats I had to wear were preventing me from getting the time to wear the writer hat. And I am convinced there is nothing more frustrating than not being able to complete a thought due to constant interruptions. It leaves you with this sense of scatter-brained impotence. That’s the danger of being a one woman band. I’m a mother, housekeeper, friend, community member, ad hoc nurse to sick children, wife, daughter, sister, apparently on every political phone list known to mankind, AND writer, editor, promoter.

But sometimes you need that certain special someone in your life to remind you that the very connections (wife, mother, etc) that spread you thin are there to help you when you are stretched too thin.

Yesterday my husband (possibly for his own sanity’s sake due to having to live with my constant moaning) took all distractions but the sick kid away for an entire afternoon and evening, and bribed said sick kid into leaving his mother alone with Star Wars movies and games allowing me to get not only some writing done but some editing and … the biggest shocker of all … READING!

I feel like I gave birth to triplets!

Huzzah! … Drinks all around … I just might get this sequel out by January after all!

*smooches*

A whiskey in your coffee kind of day…

Sometimes you just have to let go and let it roll, you know?

I came to the sad truth last night that my children are all singularly and collectively way more funny than their mother. If I had a dollar for every time someone’s urged me to write abook about the funny things my kids say and do… but I’m reasonably certain there’s already been a coffetable book published of the cute and funny things someone else’s kid says. Of course, everything has already been published at least once. Aren’t there only like, six plots in existence, really?

What was I saying?

Surely, by now you are used to the rambling. It’s what I’m internet famous for. That, and the sailor’s mouth. And my sloppy gangster love (but for them old time gangsters, not the ones today who can’t even define the word omerta), not to be confused with my equal sloppy love for law enforcement. Because I love them both, or rather the battle between the two. I love a good chess game, feud, or battle of wills. Better than whiskey in your coffee. Two opposites combined for an extra special zing!

So just now I was thinking while enjoying my Irish coffee, for every bad day like the one I was having yesterday and the day before, there’s a great day lurking around the corner. And just when you think no one but your close friends are noticing, some stranger mentions something in an offhand way that makes you realize maybe, sometimes, you’re just as funny as a six year old.

So thank you friends and strangers for being the whiskey in my coffee!

PS– More character updates in the “More about the Downey Trilogy” tab. I also edited the Downey Family tree so it’s easier to see the age grades/generations for who is contemporaneous to whom.

Cuz fun is necessary. Cuz.

Just a quick update to say I will be making a page later with all the quotes I have put up on the Facebook page, along with the character background facts I am going to start sharing on the page. If I get time, I will put up the Downey-Anastasio kinship chart I made. (All the fellow Anthropologists geek out a bit. ;P )

In the mean time I will leave you with a bit of wisdom from my youngest child, Sam:

“Mama, you didn’t get the time to have fun yesterday. Cuz we have to do that every day. Cuz.” (said while emphatically nodding)

🙂

Wuuuut?! Snow White is a snitch?

So, as mentioned before, my husband and I are making our way through our summer Red Shirt programs. Last night I made it up to episode 18 of Once Upon a Time.

Oh Snow … Snow, Snow, Snow. Never rat out your friends. This turns them into Maniacal Evil Soul Crushing Bitches! It doesn’t matter your ‘pure as the driven snow’ child heart was in the right place. As they say in Chicago, “Keep your mouth shut!”.

Naw, I’m kidding.

I knew it was you, Snow!

Well, maybe not. To think all that evil heart-demolishing the Queen has done could have been prevented by the axiom of ‘Mind your own business’! I mean, as the show likes to hammer into its audience, ‘Evil is not born, it’s created.’

Which, yeah. Anthropologists all over the world nod in affirmation.

This reminds me of an argument my husband and I once had in the middle of the night as we were watching some show, I think it was Rizzoli and Isles or maybe Mobwives or perhaps I was mocking his beloved Criminal Minds, I don’t remember, but I made the comment that criminals deserve love too and their family members should never have to apologize for loving them. This devovled into an argument about whether or not sociopaths are capable of love and therefore whether they deserve the devotion of their family and friends or whether it’s the ulitmate con (his point of view).

What, doesn’t everyone have philosophical debates with their significant others in the middle of the night? No? *crickets*

True, he loves his cops shows, but he especially loves them when the cops in question dance all over the shades of grey (Damn you EL James!) as you see in The Shield or The Wire. So I was surprised he took this hard line stance. See, for me, I luuurve complicated family relations involving morality and situationally justifiable law breaking from Les Miserables and The Count of Monte Cristo all the way to The Godfather. And I believe that no matter what side of the Thin Blue Line you are on, if you have a Code you live by … you live and die by it. But you were taught that code. It’s not a given. The issue of morality always has to be contextualized by its setting. And similarly, people are taught how and what it means to love people in their own families. Love is even more irrational than morality. So to debate whether anyone is deserving of love is specious to me.

So it should come to no one’s surprise that in response to his comment “Is this supposed to make me feel sympathetic to Regina?” I said, yes of course! She was taught her nastiness. Isn’t that the point? No one is saying it’s ok to rip a man’s heart out of his chest and pulverize it. It’s just some of us are saying if only Snow had kept her trap shut, if only the King weren’t such a douche, if only Regina’s mother weren’t an abusive controlling sociopath … and a thousand other if onlys that are actually what make the storyline compelling.

Yes, right is right and wrong is wrong (within your culturally taught emic worldview) but isn’t it simply delicious getting to know all the sides of a person?

“This was like discovering your vanilla cupcake had a chocolate fudge center.” — Tommy Gates, “First, I Love You”

Chocolate, Wine, and a Good Friend

… are the cure for the writer blues. And quite possibly everything.

I have to preface the rest of this post with a disclaimer so I don’t offend the wrong people. True, those of you who know me know I don’t usually concern myself with such things, other people’s opinions of me are their problem. Two farts and tinker’s damn are three currencies more than I care about what people think of me. But, it’s best not to bite the hand that feeds you. Or takes royalties from you in exchange for allowing you to sell books … whatever. But the last thing I want to do is insult or belittle a book retailer selling my book, with whom I would like to have a long and fruitful relationship. Because I would — like fruits in our relationship, that is — which I hope eventually gets to be less one-sided. And then we’ll be back to being besties.

“In such cases as these, a good memory is unpardonable.” — Elizabeth Bennet, Pride and Prejudice

Oh, the babbling again. Fine, I’ll get to the point.

After I released my book it took my distributor forever (alright, fine, a month) to get the book out to Apple and Barnes & Noble, meanwhile Amazon was happily providing my book to the masses. Then, immediately after stocking the book, Apple and B&N and all the rest of the retailers (except, of course, Amazon with whom I get to deal directly) had it shelved in with all the poetry and plays. Why yes, it is rather like Shakespeare … with gangsters … only not.

“God damn fucking tragedy is what that was.” — Mickey Downey, Second of All

‘Oh dear’, I said (in the highly sanitized Disney historical revision of events) and sent a politely worded missive to the distributor reminding them it is a Fictional novel, to be classified as Fiction & Literature. They directed me to change my genre classification and added, perhaps “romance” should be the category.

A rose by any other name…

Alright. *Kanye shrug*

Of course there is romance in the book. Actually a good bit. But if anyone is expecting in this first book the classic boiler plate ‘boy meets girl, love and banter and sexy situation ensue followed post haste by the ubiquitous Happily Ever After’, they will be sorely disappointed. As would anyone thinking they will be getting poetry or a broadway play. But hey, I’ll play the game. Click went the finger stroke of the near real time digital age.

That was three weeks ago. Still no change.

So, yesterday in a fit of immense gratitude to Amazon I dropped the price of my book to $3.99 and shall commence, henceforth, actively leading people to purchase the book from them until Apple and B&N and Smashwords start actually communicating with each other faster than the Platte runs in September (or molasses in January for my southern fried friends). In fact, I might just start participating in their periodic giveaway and monetizing programs.

“It’s not personal. It’s business.” — Michael Corleone, The Godfather

First, I Love You

by Genevieve Dewey

On sale at Amazon for $3.99!

Dammit, Jim! (The value of the Red Shirt)

You know how it is, every fall season there are new shows paraded in front of us that are going to be the next new hottest thing everyone is talking about. Trouble is there’s only so much time and so much DVR space.

So, in our house we have what my husband calls the Red Shirt process.

(For those of you born only a few years ago or hidden under a rock or perhaps newly escaped from a Neo-Luddite compound this is a reference to the original Star Trek series in which a tertiary character, always wearing a red shirt, usually never seen before or only seen once or twice, and in whom the audience has zero invested, beams down to a planet with Captain Kirk and shortly thereafter gets unceremoniously killed. )

We each pick a few shows and let the DVR record the entire season while other shows we actually make the effort to watch the episodes periodically. Then during the ‘Dark Times’ as my husband calls the period between NFL drafts and the start of football season, we watch our Red Shirts.

After three consecutive episodes you can get a feel for whether you are going to enjoy that series or not. If so, you can watch them back to back no pesky waiting, or simply press Delete. No investment. No hype. No feeling like…well, I’ve spent every [insert day of week here] watching this tripe might as well see how it ends.

Of course as a writer (and voracious reader) the Red Shirt is invaluable. I mean you can’t very well kill off one of your main characters during an ongoing series can you? I mean who here actually worried Harry Potter was going to bite it until the very last book? No, of course not. It’s a necessary tool to advance the plot and create tension.

This is where soap operas have started to go wrong. They have become all about the ‘ohmigod they killed Kenny!’ moments. They’re like adrenaline junkies, soap writers, always looking for what the next gasp inducing crazy over the top shenanigans is going to be. Often by killing one of the major characters or drastically changing a character’s core to fit a plot. And in doing this they forget sometimes that most (yes, I’m generalizing) people watch Soaps or dramas for the multi-generational family dynamics, romance, sweeping revenge plots and the occasional hanky panky. None of which can successfully engage an audience if the characters are not ones we have invested in — in may cases grown up with — because they have been killed off and replaced by a newbie or so blatently Thrown Under The Bus we don’t recognize them anymore. That’s why there should always be a third party Big Bad Guy and a Red Shirt. Death, mayhem and chaos can ensue, we can root for the characters we’ve invested in and cheer when these other characters bite the big one. (Then perhaps get resurrected a decade later in a completely contrived and highly implausible but oh so deliciously soapy manner.)

And people wonder why certain reality shows take off? I mean, besides the vicarious guilty pleasure of watching the human equivalent of a slow motion train wreck, of course, you don’t have to worry about one of the ‘characters’ getting killed off before the Big Finish. Barring the state of New Jersey falling into the ocean, naturally. The only Red Shirt necessary is the certain knowledge that for every one reality show going off the air, three more pop up, and of course your ‘characters’ will show up from time to time on Page Six the next time one of them cheats on their baby daddy.

Yes, in the world of entertainment, the Red Shirt concept is one of the best tools the human mind has to engage in suspense with a subconscious woobie they can hold on to … you know … when the Dark Times come.