Sex and the City: It’s All About the Ending

Thank you, Deb, for having me as part of your blog hop on “TV Done Right.” This is a great follow-up to Caroline’s blog hop on TV endings that sucked. It’s ironic that we writers are doing blog tours on TV, but TV has been experiencing a “golden age” the past few years, and there’s a lot we novel writers can learn from our counterparts in the teleplay game.

Although Deb’s hop is focusing on series in their entirety rather than just on endings, I believe that the ending determines how viewers or readers feel about the show – or book, or movie – as a whole. There are millions of pissed-off “How I Met Your Mother” fans due to the way the series blew its ending. I am one of many pissed-off “True Blood” fans because Sunday night’s series finale ended with Sookie pregnant by some anonymous guy. The converse, of course, is that if a show does it right, the warm-and-fuzzies color the entire series – even if some seasons and some episodes were decidedly weak. My example: Sex and the City.

For the sake of this argument, let’s forget (I’d like to) that there were two movies that followed the end of the series, and that (God forbid) there’s even been talk of a third. Let’s concentrate on the night Big rescued Carrie in Paris, when she looked up from collecting her broken necklace from the floor of that hotel lobby, and saw him walking through the door. I still get chills, thinking about this moment, ten years later.

For a show ostensibly about the power of female friendships and women’s ability to stand on their own (high heeled) feet, it was the ultimate fairy tale moment: The Prince coming to rescue his princess. And it worked so well because these two people had been through more downs than ups during the series run; I, for one, was convinced they would not end up together.

Carrie broke up with Big when he discouraged her from going to Paris with him; he returned with a bland fiancée. (“Your girl is lovely, Webbell.” “I don’t get it.” “And you never will.”) Their first break-up happened when Carrie pressed Big to say that she was “the one,” and his response was, “You could be.” In this finale, on a wind-swept bridge in Paris, Big took Carrie in his arms and told her the words she’d wanted to hear for years: That she was the one. Natasha, Aiden, Post-It Note Guy … all those others were just distractions. Carrie and Big were going to be together after all.

It worked because, like the show itself, it doesn’t happen in real life. In real life the man you spent years loving and hating finally disappears forever, and you marry the guy who waited patiently in the background. In real life writers don’t have $100,000 worth of shoes and live in a Manhattan walk-up. In real life no one can walk down the street in six inch Manolo Blahniks without falling flat on their face. Sex and the City was not real life. It was a fairy tale, and its ending reflected that.

Of course, even though Carrie and Big were the main attraction, I can’t leave out the other characters and their happy endings. Samantha, whose battle with breast cancer had left completely asexual and totally not herself, finding her big O again. Miranda, the cynic of the bunch, accepting everything that being part of a family included, taking care of her mother-in-law as she slid into dementia. And Charlotte, finally getting confirmation that she’d become a mother at last.

Please indulge me as I go on an aside about how much I loved Charlotte and Harry. Poor Charlotte, so desperate to marry she ended up with a guy who was not only wrong for her (Trey), but wrong for any woman. Then hiring Harry as her divorce lawyer because he wasn’t good-looking and she wouldn’t feel the need to impress him. Falling for him anyway. Converting when Harry told her he couldn’t marry a woman who wasn’t Jewish. Becoming completely immersed in Judaism. And then the angry fight with Harry: “I gave up Christ for you!” that breaks them up. Being adopted by the bubbalas at her temple. Attending a singles event at the temple, where even the absolute perfect man can’t shake her funk about Harry. And then when Harry shows up, she apologizes and asks if they can start over. He says no. Then drops to his knees and proposes. Oh, God, what a moment that was!

And the series finale reveals just how perfect these two are for each other: When an adoption falls through, Harry cries and Charlotte is the one who comforts him.

So I won’t get into the many missteps the series had along the way. They were erased from my memory as I watched Carrie swagger down the street, fortified by brunch with the girls, and answer a phone call from “John.”

Tune in tomorrow for Monique McDonell’s choice!

Why Did She Do That?

As a reader for a literary agent and a reviewer for a book review web site, I read about 2-3 manuscripts and books a week. All of the manuscripts I read for the agent are unpublished, and many of the books I read for the web site are self-published. There’s a certain ruthlessness in reading these projects. Most manuscripts are not ready for publication, or even representation. Most self-published books couldn’t attract traditional publishers for a reason – even if that reason was a too-small market for an otherwise good book. It’s hard to get lost in a book that you’re reading for an evaluation; even while you’re trying to lose yourself in the story, half of your brain is keeping a checklist about what works and what doesn’t.

I only have the same 24 hours a day that everyone else has, and I found myself no longer having time to read for the simple pleasure of it. This was ironic because the reason I wanted to work for the agent and the web site (other than being a writer myself) was because I loved reading so much. So I decided to “cleanse my palate,” as it were, and read a few books that has already been vetted by other professionals – in other words, bestsellers that had been well-reviewed.

It was a well-timed break. Not only did I fall in love with the stories, but without having to catalog a writer’s strengths and weaknesses, my mind was able to wander the way an every day reader’s mind does – wondering about the characters and plot. What’s going to happen next?

The two books I chose were Liane Moriarty’s “The Husband’s Secret” and Taylor Jenkins Reed’s “Forever, Interrupted.” It was a highly scientific decision based upon the fact that both books had gotten positive press and they were both available at my local library. “The Husband’s Secret,” obviously, is about a woman who finds a letter written by her husband and the fall-out of his confession; “Forever, Interrupted” is about a young widow dealing with the mother-in-law who didn’t know she existed.

It was pretty obvious, due to the novel’s multiple points-of-view, exactly what the husband had done. But I was still engaged by the question as I read the book. Similarly, while reading “Forever, Interrupted,” the question, “Why wasn’t the mother ever told about the marriage?” nagged at the back of my mind as its narrative unfolded. (And yes, the questions were answered by the books’ endings.)

What is the question you want readers asking while they read your book? Do you even have a question? Plot springs from a character’s goal and the actions the protagonist takes to reach that goal. Most readers will be asking the question, “Will she achieve that goal?” In “Forever, Interrupted,” the protagonist wanted to have a relationship with her mother-in-law, and that question stood in the way.

Questions of motive are also intriguing. Perhaps your readers know what happened, but not why. Keep them guessing. Keep them asking. Draw out the clues. Deliver the answer in the end.

The purpose of story, no matter what form it takes, is to elicit emotion. What emotion do you want from your readers? Keep them engaged, questioning, laughing, crying.

A surprising number of unpublished manuscripts that I’ve read do not attempt to engage the reader in this manner at all. There’s a popular saying among writers: Show, don’t tell. This usually means writing out a scene rather than describing what happened in it. That’s also the best way of engaging the reader emotionally. A summary just doesn’t elicit emotion the way “showing” does.

If a reader isn’t asking questions, there’s no reason to keep reading the book. Give her a reason.

Looking for Beta Readers!

I’m happy to announce that after writing about five drafts of my current light women’s fiction novel THE SEESAW EFFECT, I’m ready for other people to tell me what’s wrong with it! If you’re a writer and you’ve got some time to beta read, please let me know! A short synopsis is below, followed by the first chapter:

The Seesaw Effect
What happens when you’re on the high end of the seesaw, and your partner jumps off? A big, painful crash! When it comes to the work-life teeter-totter, Erin Murphy is a balancing-act expert. True, she works for Democrats while her husband Jack is a spokesman for Republicans, but at home they’re in sync. Their children -- 13-year-old animal-nut Jessica and 8-year-old Batman-obsessed Michael – come first. And her career is just as important as his. But on Election Day, everything changes. Suddenly, Erin is out of a job … and Jack is the new star of The Right Choice TV network! As Erin searches frantically for her next position, Jack begins to practice what he preaches. Their house turns into a battlefield: What’s wrong with saying “Merry Christmas” to their son’s Jewish teacher? How can there be global warming when it’s cold outside? Jessica takes her mother’s side (her father is a “disgusting planet murderer”), while Michael just thinks it’s cool that Dad’s on TV and he’s making a million dollars. And Michael’s not the only one impressed with the family’s new money: Who are all these new people floating around Jack, and what do they want? As Erin’s friends take sides about what she should do with Jack 2.0, the only person who understands is a fellow stay-at-home parent: Scott. Scott is easy to look at, and just as frustrated with his marriage as Erin is… But the biggest battle is Erin’s alone: Should she keep pounding the pavement? Or become a perfect trophy wife and mother that Jack now wants her to be? Without a title and a salary, how can Erin figure out who she really is?


Chapter One

Winston Churchill once said that democracy is the worst form of government except for all the others that have been tried. But Churchill was in D.C. during an election year. There were only seven days left until Election Day, and it was a miracle I still had hair. And about those other forms of government: Were they really all that bad?

Yes, it was “only” mid-terms, but for everyone I knew – including my husband Jack – that meant 60-hour work weeks, neglected spouses and children, lots of bad pizza and rumpled clothes. I had 200 unanswered emails, 42 texts and 17 unheard voice mails (Who the hell still leaves voice mails?).

Halloween was in four days and I still didn’t have a costume for our son, eight-year-old Michael. (Our daughter, Jessica, 13, was too old to trick-or-treat, but she was putting together an outfit that made me glad I had gotten her the HPV vaccine.)

And I hadn’t paid any of the bills that were due on the 1st.

I still had to write ten more press releases, twenty more letters-to-the-editor, and three more op-eds; not to mention proofing six speeches and approving the latest fundraising letter. Instead, I logged onto my bank’s web site to send out checks.

Erin's paycheck -- $2000 (net, two weeks.) That was the only item on the “plus” side.

Mercedes paycheck -- $600 (our Spanish-speaking, non-driving nanny. She made $300 a week. Extra if I needed her to stay late.)

Maid to Order -- $200 (a hundred a week. They did laundry, too.)

Kids Taxi -- $200 (a hundred a week to shuttle Jessica to her volunteer job at Second Chances Wildlife Rescue and her horseback riding classes, and Michael to soccer and baseball practice, because Mercedes -- despite her name – couldn’t drive. And frankly, while she was great with the kids and they could talk back to me in a language I couldn’t understand, I really didn’t want her behind the wheel with my precious cargo in her back seat.)

Takeout Taxi -- $350. I ordered from them at least three times a week. You could choose from any restaurant in town -- Hamburger Hamlet, Chili's, Fridays, etc., -- and they would deliver your food right to your door. If Jessica wanted a hamburger and I wanted seafood, they even made two trips. I couldn’t live without Takeout Taxi. I could live without spending about thirty dollars a meal.

Peapod -- $500. The grocery store that delivered. Yes, I knew I paid about thirty percent more for the food, not to mention the delivery cost, the fuel surcharge, and tipping the driver, but who had time to do the grocery shopping anymore? Plus, I could schedule them to deliver when Mercedes was home, and spare myself the chore of putting away all that food.

And those were just the expenses that showed up as monthly bills. Adding the cost of gas, parking downtown, (I know I should be environmentally conscious and take the Metro. But when your nanny calls in the middle of the day, babbling hysterically in Spanish, and the only word you can understand is "blood," you don't want to be waiting around the Farragut North metro station wondering when the next train will arrive.), wearing decent clothes, eating nice lunches, and not to mention paying taxes -- the truth became painfully clear: I wasn’t doing this for the money. Because I wasn’t making any.


I had just finished the concluding sentence of a Pulitzer-prize winning op-ed on why Minnesota should re-elect Representative Michael Fine when my boss, Ken Wharton, walked in. He shut my office door behind him – never a good sign.

“I hate to do this to you, Erin, but we’re pulling the plug on the Fine piece. The numbers just aren’t there, and the board doesn’t want to risk our reputation.”

“How does that risk our reputation?” I asked. “We’re a group that lobbies for environmentally conscious candidates. No matter what their polling says.”

“The board’s also worried about the budget. We’re a week out and money’s really tight.”

“It doesn’t cost anything to send an email to the Star-Tribune. Even with the attachment.”

“Just look at the numbers.” He handed me a poll showing that the Republican challenger, a business executive named Michelle Morgan, was up by nine points. This late in the game, that was an insurmountable lead.

“Why don’t you draft a release congratulating Morgan and saying we’re eager to work with her on her environmental initiatives.”

“She doesn’t have any,” I sniped.

“This is the way the game is played. You know that.”

“The election’s still a week away!”

“And we need everything ready to hit the wires as soon as the races are called. So get to it.”

He walked out, leaving my door open and my spirit sagging.

It was hard to get excited for a mid-term election. Traditionally, Democrats were more likely to stay home when the White House wasn’t being decided. And traditionally, Democrats were the ones who cared about environmental issues. Even with the weather getting wackier every year, the economy made it difficult to run front-and-center on the green stuff. So we threw all our support behind those Democrats – incumbents and challengers -- who were willing to run on our issues. This year, we had twelve. We had identified seventeen, but five had contacted us via back channels and had asked us, no offense intended, to please stay the hell away from their race.

The ultimate irony was that our group was funded by corporations. Yep, “Corporate Citizens for Planet Earth” was a fully-owned subsidiary of Corporate America, Inc. It was a small group of companies that had decided that the higher costs they’d pay if, by some miracle, cap-and-trade or other environmental legislation actually passed was worth it for the PR value. Sure, I’d much rather work for the Environmental Defense Council, Save the Planet Now, or Resources for the Future. Those groups were the true believers – so much so, that they refused to work with us. But when I was looking, they weren’t hiring.

“He didn’t fire you, did he?”

I looked up. Robyn Needle stood in my doorway. Robyn was 15 years younger than me, a lawyer, and more driven than a Porsche. Around her, I always felt like I should be doing more; that I should get by on less sleep and maybe farm the kids out to their grandparents for a couple of decades.

“Not today. Why? Did you hear something?”

“We’re going to lose all these races, Erin, and Ken knows it. In fact, he and the board want it to happen.”

“That sounds just a little bit paranoid.”

“Think about it. They fund us because we make them look good, like they care. It’s good PR. But if it’s all Republicans on the Hill, they don’t have to try anymore. You think they really want to pay for cleaner water? Who was the last Republican who fully funded the EPA? Nixon?”

A chill crawled up my spine. She made perfect sense. In all my years on the Hill, I never went wrong betting on cynicism and self-interest.

“Just wait,” she predicted. “Come Wednesday morning, it’s going to be a whole new ball game.”


By 5:30, I was almost done with my overdue emails when my cell phone started singing “The Sound of Music.” It had to be my husband, Jack. He didn’t have a lot of hobbies, but one of them was changing his ring tone to a song he knew I hated.

“Which suit makes me look better?” he asked as soon as I clicked “answer.” “The blue or the black?”

Surprisingly, I did not have every item in his closet categorized and memorized.

I stalled. “It depends on the shirt and tie.”

“White shirt, right? White for TV?”

“Oh, it’s for a TV interview?” For a guy with a journalism degree, Jack had the annoying habit of burying the lede.

“Not just an interview.” He let those words hang in the AT&T-sponsored air for a minute. “Election night coverage. You’re talking to the host of ‘The Right Votes.’ Starting at six pm on The Right Choice Network.”

“Wow! That’s… I’m just… that’s fabulous news, babe.”

Oh my god, my husband was going to be on The Right Choice Network. TRC. Only a few years old, it was formed by tea-loving zealots who thought a certain news organization named for a cunning animal was too soft on liberals. I wanted to throw up.

“But… but…” How to say this gently… “Don’t they usually book people months in advance for this?”

“Yeah, it was going to be Senator Northridge. But apparently he’s fled to Singapore. Something about fifty pounds of heroin and twenty guns in his house… That guy was always a nut.”

Always a nut. Like Northridge was some frat boy caught toilet-papering a sorority house, rather than a drug dealer. Jack never did take things all that seriously.

“Anyway, they saw that takedown I did of that union stooge Tony Brock on Safari News last week, and I was their first and only choice. They want more businesspeople involved with the network.”

Technically, Jack was an association person like me. Neither of us had ever worried about a bottom line. But there was no point in arguing semantics. “Well, congratulations. That’s amazing.”

“I just hope I don’t come across as too big an idiot.”

“You’ll do great,” I assured him. “You’ve always done great.”

“On ten-minute interviews. This thing’s going to be at least five hours long.”

“There’s only about twenty races anyone really cares about. We’ll prep on them, and you’ll do fine.”

“Really? You’ll help me?”

“Of course I will.”

This question wasn’t as off-base as it appeared. Jack and I worked at opposite ends of the political spectrum. He was the vice president of communications for the American Business Association. Despite its innocuous-sounding name, that group was nothing but a mouthpiece for Republicans.

Republicans pay a lot better than Democrats. Even though Jack was only a level or two above me, his salary was three times what I brought home. Which made sense, because Jack was only in it for the money.

I was the true believer. Jack didn’t really believe anything. Some days it was because he was cynical; other days he just didn’t care. He worked for ABA because they offered him more money than the hospital people and the shipping people did. Maybe that’s why he was so good at his job. It’s easier to craft arguments for or against a position if you really didn’t care either way.

The other benefit to Jack’s not caring was that we didn’t take our work arguments home. Our house was about the kids’ afterschool activities; where we were going on vacation; have you seen my yellow tie. It was a place of peace; an oasis in a political jungle.

Oasis. That’s right. I was just about to leave when I remembered I hadn’t paid the gym fees. $150 for the Athletic Oasis. And just like that, my paycheck was gone.

It was a good thing I wasn’t in this for the money. Because I didn’t have any.

Can you help? Please email me at JDeise1002@gmail.com!

Write What You Know: A Real-Life Case Study

People sometimes apologize to me for not being able to make one of my son’s baseball games. I always say “don’t worry about it,” and I mean it. If I were honest, I would say, “Thank you… we really don’t want you to come!”

It’s not that I don’t love my friends and family members. Of course I do. It’s just that the last thing my husband and I want to do is make small talk while our son is on the mound. Can you imagine chatting away amiably while you’re being waterboarded? I’m not saying that watching Alex pitch is akin to torture. When you’re being tortured, at least you know there’s something you can say to make the torture end. When our son is pitching, only a perfect inning will end the torment. And that’s completely out of our control.

In my book, KEEPING SCORE, my main character, Shannon, talks about how she feels watching her son at the plate:

Then it was Sam’s turn. My stomach dropped to my feet. I had an intense desire to go to the bathroom. My hands were trembling. I hoped Sam felt better than I did.

This is a pretty good description of how I feel when Alex is pitching. It’s a good description of how I felt when he was in Sam’s position – that is, a 9-year-old playing “rec” baseball. (“rec,” short for “recreation,” is the lowest level there is.)

The sad part is, there is no difference as far as nerves are concerned between watching 10-year-old Alex pitch for his rec team – The BCC O’Briens Lions – and watching 20-year-old Alex pitch for the summer league championship in the Trop. The nausea. The racing heart. The intense desire to be anywhere else but here.

And of course the only thing worse than watching your son pitch is watching your son not pitch.

Baseball is a game where you can’t hide. Football has a huddle; soccer is expected to end in a 0-0 tie, and basketball is the definition of a team sport. But in baseball, when you’re throwing, catching or hitting the ball, it’s just you and the ball. It’s an individual sport masquerading as a team sport. If you mess up, everyone knows right away that it was you.

I give my son a lot of credit for having the strength of character to thrive under this stress. To make it even harder, a few years ago he refashioned himself from a starter to a closer. The good part about being a starter is that if you start off shaky, there are still several innings left for another pitcher to come in and try to make up for your mistakes. There’s no backstop when you’re the closer. You’re the guy they bring in when there are no outs, bases loaded and your team is only up by one run. If you blow it, it’s too late to salvage the game. If you can’t deliver, there’s no one warming up in the pen to clean up your mess. It’s you or nobody.

Obviously, Alex was not thinking about his parents when he made that decision.

When I wrote KEEPING SCORE, Alex was in high school and I was sufficiently removed from all the drama around travel baseball that I could laugh about it. But there’s the internal drama that never goes away. Maybe when Alex hangs up his cleats for good – something that hopefully won’t happen for another decade or so – I’ll write another book about baseball. In the meantime, if Alex is playing in a town near you, and you want to come to the game… do Tom and me a favor: Don’t tell us you’re there. If he does well, run into us in the parking lot afterward. If he doesn’t, pretend you were never there to begin with.

Oh, and here’s the last out from the championship game. It did come down to a save situation for Alex’s team in the bottom of the 9th. This is what happened:

Buy KEEPING SCORE on Amazon here!

How “Lost” Got Lost – My TV Do-Over Blog Hop Post

When Caroline asked me to participate in a blog hop about changes you’d make to movies or TV shows, it was a hard decision. Not about whether to participate, of course – that decision was easy. (In case you haven’t figured it out by reading this post, my answer was yes.) How could I possibly choose which movie, TV show or even book to write about when I’ve spent nearly my entire life moaning “no!” at the choices other writers have made in ending their works? Truthfully, my taste is not mainstream – when I read “Gone With the Wind” in the sixth grade, I wanted Scarlett to end up with Ashley (because she wanted him so badly; the protagonist should get what she wants!). This habit of mine persisted during my “I love soaps” phase (I thought Laura should have stayed with Scotty, but her father Rick should dump Lesley for Monica – opinions no other General Hospital fan shared) my vampire-book loving phase (really, Laurell K. Hamilton? Really??) and my vampire-TV loving phase (Team Spike and Team Eric all the way). However, there’s one opinion I hold that I’m pretty sure I share with almost all of cult-TV-watching America, and that is:

The ending of Lost really sucked.

Come back with me, if you will, to the fall of 2004, when Lost premiered to great fanfare and terrific ratings. This wasn’t just a show about a bunch of people plane-wrecked on a deserted island; it was about their mysterious pasts, complicated presents, and, above all, (in the words of Charlie): “Guys … where ARE we?” My son Alex – then a 5th grader – and I made watching the show together one of our weekly traditions, and we’d spend hours talking about how the puzzle pieces fit together and what it all meant. By the time the series ended in 2010, the show had lost about four million viewers, but it still attracted over 10 million viewers per episode, and was still critically acclaimed.

Until that ending. Oh, that ending. It was like the day you found out Santa wasn’t real, or you figured out that time travel wasn’t possible (because travelers from the future would have been here by now), or reality shows aren’t, you know, actually real.

To recap: The series was built around present-day island mysteries and character flashbacks to the past. In season four, the show added flash forwards (and I’m just going to brag here and say when I first saw Jack in that plane wearing a beard, I knew right away we were in the future); the sixth and final season added the flash sideways – snippets of the characters’ lives if the plane crash had never happened.

This, I figured out as well. The flash sideways were lives that the characters could live if their machinations in the past were successful. (Season five had half the cast in the 1970s.) Eventually, near the end of the series, they’d have to choose whether to continue to monkey around in the past and make the better life happen, but risk not knowing each other, or give up and let events transpire as they would.

If only I, as fan, had had such a choice. Instead, the series finale revealed that the flash sideways were, in fact, a form of purgatory where the characters went to wait after their deaths. They were waiting for the other passengers on flight 815 to die, so they could all get together in a church and move forward to the golden light together. Making matters worse, ABC ran the final credits over a shot of the wrecked plane on the beach with no people in sight, making many fans wonder if this was a message that everyone had died in the initial crash and the entire series was a fraud. (The creators blamed ABC for the image and vehemently denied the entire series had been a six-year death.)

After the episode aired, fan outrage was loud and vocal. With mysteries such as the polar bear never resolved, the “purgatory” reveal seemed like a cheap, easy, all-encompassing explanation to a complicated, intricate mystery. Fans deserved more. After a six-year investment, we deserved more.

I still think my ending – a series finale that allowed characters to chose whether they wanted to stay in the present post-crash or return to a past that would not lead to a plane crash – would have been superior to the one that was actually shown. (It would have also allowed Jack and Kate to be together… although I’m assuming most viewers wanted Kate with Sawyer, since I never root for the right couple.) If nothing else, though, the saga of the Lost finale illustrates to me the importance – as both writer and fangirl – of knowing your ending when you’re still at the beginning. Yes, I’m a loud and proud plotter – and I wish Damon Lindelof and Carlton Cuse had been, too. (Although the producers expressed bewilderment at the fans’ reaction, a few years later Damon apologized, saying his disappointment with the last Harry Potter book being divided into two films made him realize a fan can be a fan and still be angry with the story.)

Beginnings are easy. Endings are hard. Millions of dissatisfied fans can’t be wrong. But hey… there’s always fan fiction.

Hop on over to Zanna Mackenzie's blog tomorrow for her TV Do-Over Blog Hop post.

Happy Birthday Keeping Score!

KEEPING SCORE will be celebrating its first book birthday this upcoming Sunday, July 27th. I’d love to write a blog post about everything I’ve learned in the past year about marketing a self-published book, but that would be a rather short post. Get some reviews up on Amazon before officially publishing it, try to do a blog tour/giveaways to generate some excitement, and when you’ve got a good number of positive reviews, schedule some 99 cent sales and try to get into BookBub, EReader News Today and other reader newsletters.

I was hoping to have another book out by this time, but since I’m working on two projects at once, that didn’t happen. But I’m determined that one of them is going to be out by the end of the year… unless I end up working with a publisher.

In the meantime, I have KEEPING SCORE on my brain. I’ll be putting it on sale for 99 cents at the end of the week and hoping to generate some excitement through that. The sale will be advertised on EReader News Today, Booktastik and the Fussy Librarian.

KEEPING SCORE went through several drafts, and the last one was the most painful. That’s because I’d hired a freelance outside editor, and he told me to kill my babies, and cited names and pages. He said I had a tendency to include “I Love Lucy” – type scenes; scenes with madcap hijinks that didn’t add to the plot.

But I love “I Love Lucy…”

So I ended up cutting out a minor subplot about Shannon’s ex-husband David needing a hernia operation and completely overreacting. But due to the wonder that is writing on a computer, those scenes will live on forever as long as Mozy continues to back up my work and Word is still a functioning program. And today, to celebrate the book birthday, is one of my favorite KEEPING SCORE scenes to end up on the cutting room floor:

By the time I fought with traffic (there's no such thing as a reverse commute when you're driving in the city), found a parking space, managed to parallel park, and walked three blocks to David's house, it was already after eight.

"Dad said to just walk in," Sam told me as we approached the front door, so I turned the knob and entered.

My jaw nearly dropped onto the floor. Behind me, I heard Sam giggle nervously. Neither one of us could believe it.

Right in the middle of what had been the dining room, David had installed a state-of-the-art hospital bed. And it was on that bed where he lay, panting, as Chloe ran a washcloth over his forehead.

"All this for a hernia?" I snapped.

Chloe dropped the washcloth on David's face. She ran over and hugged me while David whimpered.

"I'm so glad you came!" she exclaimed.

"Oh my god," David whined. "I'm going to be sick. Chloe!"

Chloe ran back to David's side and shoved a garbage bag at him. He retched in it for a few minutes, making a huge deal out of every hack.

Sam looked like he was about to toss his cookies himself. I put a hand on his shoulder.

"We're so glad to be here, too," I said, as Chloe wiped vomit traces off of David's mouth.

"Come here, son," David whispered, his voice as raspy as Marlon Brando's in the Godfather. "I need to hold my boy."

Sam's eyes went wide. He turned and looked at me in horror. I gave him a little shove toward the bed. It was his fault we were here to begin with. He cringed as David ran his hands over Sam's head like a dying blind man.

When Chloe came back over to me, I whispered, "I thought a hernia was a routine operation."

I saw the first signs of strain around Chloe's mouth. "The operation was routine. The recovery… not so much."

"Complications?"

She sighed. "He's a complicated man."

I opened my mouth to warn her that she didn't know the half of it. But then I shut it abruptly without saying anything. An ally in David's house could be a valuable thing. I needed to keep her here as long as possible.

"I really don't see how he's going to be back to work tomorrow," Chloe continued.

"Tomorrow! Tomorrow you're going to be out buying a catheter because he's not going to be able to make it to the bathroom," I told her. "Are you kidding?"

Chloe shook his head. "Believe it or not, he's out of sick and vacation days, so every day he misses is coming out of his paycheck. He's already in the hole three days."

Her eyes shifted over to him, as if she were afraid he was listening to us. No worries. David had Sam's head firmly clasped in his hands, and he was speaking urgently to our son. No doubt conveying life instructions that you give your child when you're on your death bed.

"And with the furlough…" she whispered.

"Wait -- what furlough?"

"He didn't want me to tell you," Chloe admitted, "but if I were you, I'd want to know. He had to take a pay cut. Everyone did. And now that he's got to give even more money back… Shannon, he's afraid he's not going to be able to pay much toward Sam's check next month."

The giant rock inside my stomach just turned into a boulder. My face must have given me away, because Chloe put her hand on my shoulder and said, "I have some small savings… it's not much, but I could…"

She trailed off, and as hard as it was, I shook my head. "This isn't your problem. David shouldn't even have told you what was going on."

Chloe shrugged. "Everyone needs someone to talk to," and I felt even worse. And then she hugged me, which just compounded the guilt. "I have to run to the store for more soup," she whispered. "Maybe I should look into Depends while I'm there."

I laughed. It felt good. She kissed David and Sam on their heads, then dashed out.

I finally made my way over to the hospital bed, where David lay pale with a fine sheet of sweat over his face.

"That girl's a keeper," I told him.

"Yeah," he admitted. "She'll wake up soon enough, though. She can do so much better than me."

For a second, I actually felt sorry for him. David tried to force a grin, a hint that he was just kidding, but I knew he wasn't. I also knew he was right.

"Sit up," I ordered him. "Sounds like you really need to go back to work tomorrow."

He grimaced. "I told her not to tell you."

"She thought I needed to know. To prepare. I do."

"You going to be okay?" he asked. The question was more like a plea, and I could almost see a hint of the man I married. I really didn't have a choice. I nodded and smiled.

"I'll be fine," I lied. "Everything will be fine."

In the car on the way home, Sam blurted out, "You know what would be great? You and me and Dad and Chloe, if we could all live together!"

It just might come to that, I thought. It just might.

Of course the editor was right. The scene’s just too unrealistic; it changes the tone and the focus of the book. And while changing David into a standard work-obsessed Washingtonian wasn’t necessarily the funniest choice I could have made, it was one that best served the book. Reforming the character allowed me to express my theme of “competition kills relationships” in an additional way.

But I still think hypochondriacs are funny.

Buy KEEPING SCORE on Amazon today! (Or wait till the end of the week when it's on sale.)

What’s Your Voice Saying?

I’ve read well over a hundred unpublished manuscripts and self-published novels in the past two years. Most of them have problems. Some of these problems are big, some are small, some can be solved by deleting a character or expanding on a sequence; others require a page-one rewrite. But almost all of these problems have solutions, except one: Voice.

What is voice, and why is it an unsolvable problem? Simply put, voice is the tone, style and word choice that the writer uses to tell the story. Every writer has her own voice, and the really, really good ones can write in different voices in different books. Voice cannot be divorced from story; it’s the way in which the story is told. Even in novels that are written from the third person point of view, voice is considered a reflection of the protagonist’s thought process.

Compare and contrast the voices in these three paragraphs:

Two new friend requests. I click the icon and accept the first one, a girl I know from the gym. I freeze over the second. No way. I bring the phone closer, staring at the tiny photo icon. My chest constricts. It can’t be. Oh my God. It is.

In one hand she had the hammer from her little box of widow’s tools. As she turned the knob and pushed the bathroom door open, she raised it. The bathroom was empty, of course, but the ring of the toilet seat was down. She never left it that way before going to bed, because she knew if Danny wandered in, only ten percent awake, he was apt to forget to put it up and piss all over it. Also, there was a smell. A bad one. As if a rat had died in the walls.

So here’s how it went in God’s heart: The six or seven or ten of us walked/wheeled in, grazed at the decrepit selection of cookies and lemonade, sat down in the Circle of Trust, and listened to Patrick recount for the thousandth time his depressingly miserable life story – how he had cancer in his balls and they thought he was going to die but he didn’t die and now here he is, a full-grown adult in a church basement in the 137th nicest city in America, divorced, addicted to video games, mostly friendless, eking out a meager living by exploiting his cancertastic past, slowly working his way toward a master’s degree that will not improve his career prospects, waiting, as we all do, for the sword of Damocles to give him the relief that he escaped lo those many years ago when cancer took both his nuts but spared what only the most generous soul would call his life.

Things to look at: Sentence length and variety. Word choice. Point of view. Verb tense. Examine how they all come together to communicate story genre and narrator type. What inference do you make about the genre and age level of these novels, based on these passages?

The first passage is clearly from a romantic comedy. While age here can’t really be determined – it could be adult, new adult or YA – it’s obvious from the sentence structure and word choice – not to mention the actual content of the paragraph – that this is from a funny story. (Love Like the Movies, Victoria Van Tiem).

What images do “piss,” “widow,” “smell” and “rat” prompt in your mind? Clearly, these are unpleasant words, and they set up the reader to know that this story will be unpleasant. The sentence structure is relatively unsophisticated, but there’s a term here that tells the reader that this book is for adults: “apt to.” Young protagonists are not “apt to” use this term in their mental musings. (Doctor Sleep, Stephen King)

Ever since The Catcher in the Rye, readers are prone to expect narrators in literary YA fiction to be cynical, descriptive and just a bit long-winded at times. And some of their word choices scream YA. They exaggerate in numbers, coin slang like “cancertastic,” and use more adjectives and adverbs than adults might. (The Fault in Our Stars, John Green)

Imagine, for a second, that the paragraph from Love Like the Movies wasn’t from a romantic comedy at all, but from a Stephen King-like horror novel. Would those sentences help build tension and fear? Or would they be funny in an unintentional way?

Most writers don’t consciously think about voice. They have an idea; they sit down at the computer and start typing. Eighty thousand words or so later, there’s their book. In most cases, they’ve written the book in the same voice that runs through their heads when they’re ruminating about the world. Their favorite words show up over and over again. They use adverbs if they like adverbs. Some writers like “said;” others will substitute another action.

This is why voice is an unsolvable problem. There’s nothing wrong – there’s never anything wrong – with a writer’s voice. It’s natural and in many cases unchangeable. A writer can’t change his natural voice any easier than he can change his dominant hand. But some voices are simply not suited for the age level or genre in which their story takes place. A writer with a natural YA voice just won’t be able to come up with a sophisticated war thriller. A writer with a light, breezy voice probably shouldn’t tackle a heavy story about death. And someone who naturally uses complex, sophisticated sentence structure and ideas probably isn’t the best writer for that romantic comedy idea.

This scenario may seem unusual, but it’s a problem I’ve run across several times in the past few months – enough that it prompted me to write this post. Is it something a writer can self-diagnose? I’m not sure. But it’s not something that can be edited away. Perhaps rewritten – in a page one rewrite that restructures the story around the voice, rather than the other way around. Take a hard look at your own writing, and make sure that the voice is hand-in-hand with the story you’re telling. Does the level of sophistication of your story match the level of sophistication of your voice? If not, there’s some hard thinking in your future.