Dear Jane Espenson

For all of you out there who are not painfully geeky uber-geeks, Jane Espenson was one of the head writers on Buffy the Vampire Slayer--the most excellent TV series, not the one starring the stocky, violent, husband-stealing skater girl.

My brother Troy and I geeked out so completely over that wonderful, fabulous, hilarious, never-to-be-equaled series, we not only knew the names of its writers but could often identify who wrote a given episode without looking at the credits. And we lurrrrrrved our Jane Espenson episodes.

So lately, spurred on by my sci-fi loving husband, I've been trying to fill the Buffy void, that gaping, Joss Whedon-shaped hole in my heart, with the Bionic Woman. Centered around a young woman who kicks booty--check. Based on beloved series from childhood (unlike Buffy, but it was a point in its favor)--check. Subject of considerable network marketing muscle, so it stands a very good chance of not being canceled in its first season (Unlike the late, much-lamented Firefly.)--checkeroo.

The only reason I'm still watching is because Jose refuses to give up on it, but I'm about ready to strangle the Bionic Woman writers with a string of their own cliches. Lately, while Jose watches, I have resorted to entertaining myself by pondering whether my seven-year-old self could have come up with better dialogue while playing with my circa-1976 Jamie Sommers doll (complete with roll-back latex skin and tiny bionics beneath the little trapdoors in her legs and right arm). "You're a stupid dummyhead. No, YOU'RE a stupid dummyhead. Let's go beat up Barbie, 'cause she's blonde."

But I digress....

The mess that is the new Bionic Woman saddens me. But I still love the IDEA of the Bionic Woman, and my daughters need strong female superhero role models, dammit! So I have come up with a plan to save the show: I am asking the divine and supremely talented Jane Espenson to come on board and save this series. (After checking on IMDB.com, I've discovered that she's working on Battlestar Galactica right now. But it's my blog, so I'm still asking. Perhaps the divine and supremely talented Jane Espenson could multitask....)

Here are my top five reasons that Jane Espenson should become Bionic Woman's head writer:

1) So picture this. You get into a horrible, horrible car accident, lose two legs, one arm, an eardrum, and an eye, and to save you, your secret agent doctor boyfriend installs some nifty bionics, thereby giving you shiny new legs, an arm, an eardrum, and an eye that look EXACTLY like your old ones, except they're better, stronger, faster than the ones you had before. And, as a bonus, you are not dead. What is your reaction?

Is it:

A) You're PISSED. You rip off your hospital monitors and throw your boyfriend across the room.

Or is it:

B) You tell your boyfriend, "Gee, thanks so much for saving my life and preventing me from living the rest of my life as Stumpy the One-Armed Wonder!"

The Bionic Woman writers went for A. Why, I cannot say, as it makes zero sense. Because WHO THE HELL WANTS TO BE STUMPY THE ONE-ARMED WONDER?

I certainly do not, and would have been plenty grateful to have working parts that looked like my old ones, instead of a nifty wheelchair for my stumpy, one-eyed, one-armed self. And I know Jane E. would have given Jamie a reaction that actually made sense, so confident am I in her writing powers.

2) Jane E. would NEVER have let a line like, "I'm not looking for Mr. Right. I'm looking for Mr. Right Now" be uttered by a main character ... at least not without a healthy dose of irony. :::mental forehead smack::::

3) Picture this: A young woman with newly installed super powers goes walking in a dark alley.

Watching from her perch on the couch, Tracy addresses her television thusly: "Ugh, if someone tries to mug her and she kicks his ass, I'm going to throw up."

Back on the TV screen, someone tries to mug the young woman, and she kicks his ass.

Jane E. would NEVER have allowed that cliche into my living room on any episode, much less the freaking PREMIERE.

4) Since Jane E's writing was a huge part behind Buffy's underlying "peace, love, non-bigotry" philosophy, I am confident that she would not have been pleased with the casting of Isaiah Washington and his bigmouthed, f-word blurting self. (The gay slur f-word, of course, not the other f-word.)

Why is this guy still getting work on anything, much less a very popular prime-time drama? From now on, I think the guy should only be cast on after-school specials about tolerance, if at all.

5) Jane E. rocks. That is all.

Where Have I Been?

Finishing book contract, chasing pre-schoolers, frantically de-cluttering, cursing my pack-rat tendencies, cursing my husband's love of entropy, cursing wall paint that smudges when you LOOK at it, putting our house on the market, trying to keep Jose from panicking because he's RETIRING FROM THE NAVY (Can I get a WOOT! WOOT!? Anyone?), and all in all, being cranky.

But I'm making an effort to resurrect my blog, as in RIGHT NOW. Random post to come shortly....

New (gulp) cover

OK, every cover represents some artist's creative endeavor, so I'm going to do my best to be supportive and positive. :::deep breath::: Here's my December cover. Please note that Alex Gray, my hero, is actually 26, not 56, and he wears sweatshirts and jeans, mostly, not strange patchy vests that look like something out of Land of the Lost. But I was having a bad computer day when my Art Fact Sheet was due, and I completed it by phone, so I guess that's what happens....

Every cover represents some artist's creative endeavor. Every cover represents some artist's creative endeavor. I am being supportive. I support this artist's creativity. White light ... white light ...



The blurb, on the other hand, is awesome:


As an experienced search-and-rescue tracker, Alex Gray had solved his share of mysteries. But beneath his cool Lakota demeanor, Alex was running from his own dark secrets … including a traumatic family history that connected him to a killer. Now someone from his past had returned to play a deadly game. And only one woman could help him….

Sophie Brennan knew that Alex was the key to stopping the string of murders plaguing the Washington mountains. But as the authorities questioned her credibility, she had to resist the almost mystical connection she shared with Alex. For hiding in the shadows, someone was waiting to silence her whispered warnings …forever.

About That Whole "Formula" Thing

So I was recently featured with two other local romance writers in an article written for my local newspaper, herein to be known as The Article That Shall Not Be Named or Linked To. All in all, it's not a BAD article, though there's definitely a sort of nudge-nudge-wink-wink-I-Certainly-Don't-Read-This-Stuff quality to it. I'm sure the local braintrust at the Newspaper That Shall Not Be Named or Linked To is too busy making their collective way through the Modern Library's Top 100 Works of Great Literature and developing a comprehensive plan for world peace this summer to read something for pure entertainment.

But I did want to publicly clear up a misquote in the piece about my having started writing romance "because there's a formula," as the thought of that quote sitting Out There, unanswered, is making my hair curl. And in this humidity, making my hair curl any more than it already does is just sick and wrong.

So anyway, here's the truth, which I told to said local braintrust in painstaking and carefully emphatic detail: I started THINKING about writing romance because I MISTAKENLY THOUGHT there was a "formula" that would make it easy, and I could use it as a stepping stone to writing a "real book." I know--how obnoxious. But I was quite young and I hadn't actually read a romance novel, so I was operating on the fumes of other people's stereotyped perceptions. So, my plan to rule the publishing world firmly in my head, I actually went and picked up a romance--Anyone But You, by Jennifer Crusie--and I discovered that it was a smart book; a very fun book; a book that didn't offend my feminist sensibilities in the least, but affirmed them; and a book I loved so much, I still have it on my shelf. And that's when I became a genuine fan of the genre.

That Crusie book was a great learning experience, because (and yes, I'm going to start trotting out my literature background--bear with me, I do have a point) I was just a couple years out of Boston College, where I'd gotten an M.A. in literature. At BC, I'd selected my courses so the majority of them were about women writers, and my papers were often about the "dilemma of women as artists," or, in plain, un-pedantic English, the critical response to women writers and how it impacted both their work and their careers. Needless to say, women writing about women's lives have very rarely been literary darlings, especially during their careers. Otherwise, George Sand, George Eliot, and Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell may not have found it necessary to adopt male pseudonyms--without which they may not have work that survives in print to this day.

I am NOT comparing my work to that of the Georges or the Brontes. But what I realized was that by giving in to the kneejerk, uninformed urge to look down my nose at romance, I was part of the same machine that had suppressed women's writing since women started writing. Why COULDN'T a romance novel be a good read? Why couldn't it be just as entertaining and fun and loved as a romantic film like When Harry Met Sally or Strictly Ballroom? Why was it socially acceptable to enjoy a romantic subplot in a mystery or general fiction book? Or a romance disguised as a general or women's fiction book? Or, my favorite, a "love story" (i.e. romance) with a craptacular ending written by a man?

Not everyone has to like romance--we all have different taste. I don't like tragic family sagas or cyberpunk. But slamming it just to make yourself look more well-read and intelligent? Ridiculous.

Also, there is NO FORMULA TO ROMANCE, other than the general conventions that bind any genre. For us, the story needs to focus on the growth of a relationship between two people, and we need to deliver a happy ending. End of story. End of formula.

Mystery has a formula, in that sense. Sci-fi does, too. Male "love story" writers have a formula, too--manly man of impeccable honesty meets woman, swoons, falls in love, says sappy things, and is pulled irrevocably apart from his One True Love by tragedy, often cancer.

I told all this to the author of The Article That Shall Not Be Named or Linked To, hoping that in supportive female solidarity, she would write a clever, unapologetic article about our clever, unapologetic genre.

Ah, well, at least we were upgraded from authors of "bodice rippers" to "pulp romance."

For a more respectful and accurate interview (although I was feeling a little snarkier than usual when I answered the questions), see my friend Rich Dansky's website. Rich writes the stories for Red Storm Entertainment video games, including the Tom Clancy tie-ins, and he's an accomplished horror novelist.

La Cucaracha

Thanks to Sharron McClellan for pointing this out. Check out her video here.

What Cracked Me Up Today

(Hi, Jen. No, I'm not dead. I'm just in deadline prugatory between work and books, and Something Had to Give, namely this blog. I'll be back blogging soon, I promise--even though I've been a bit of a blog slug all year.)

So today while I was reading the news online, I saw a brief article about the Australian spotted jellyfish, which has recently been migrating far north and is invading the Gulf of Mexico, where it is threatening to utterly disrupt the already fragile ecosystem by gorging its little jelly self on fish eggs and shrimp larvae. Curious as to how undulating hordes of Australian spotted jellyfish got this far north--and wondering whether global warming was to blame--I read on, and discovered that it's been traveling long distances not by blobbing pleasantly along across thousands of miles in that signature, soothing jellyfish way, but by slurping itself to the side of ships and hitching a ride to Mexican waters.

Now an article that talks about invasive species, ecosystem disruption, and the decimation of entire industries--in this case, Gulf fishing and shrimping--would hardly be amusing to most people, and I daresay, it wasn't to me. But then I started reading the commentary that AOL so thoughtfully allows readers the space to provide. Generally, I avoid AOL news commentary, because much of it is either batcrap crazy or grossly intolerant, racist, homophobic, and all kinds of offensive.

But underneath today's jellyfish invasion story was this little gem:

Oh No! The Jellyfish are comming[sic]! REPENT SINNERS, REPENT! Your [sic] gonna be at the beach, fornicating (or whatever you sinners do) and you'r [sic] gonna look up, and BAM! everyones [sic] gone! RAAAAAPPPPPTUUUUREEEEE!

Yes, it's childish and ignorant, but it made me laugh, so there.

MySpace Musings

So I've had my new, improved MySpace page for about a month now, and I just thought I'd share what I've learned so far....

Things I like about MySpace:

1) I can now say I'm friends with Meg Cabot, George Takei, Alice in Chains, and the Police without lying.

2) Fun little web gadgets, like the one I found that shows all of my book covers twirling about in a happy little circle.

3) Reconnecting with people who probably think I've fallen off the planet, like my old college buddy Scott, or fabulous Intrigue author Dana Marton, whom I've been meaning to email forever.

4) Sparkly graphics. Pretty colors. Ooooooooh.

5) Filling out the profile information. Despite the fact that I always make myself sound like a crashing bore in profiles or surveys, I luuuuuuurve filling them out. I can't even resist those warranty cards that come with small electronics (though yes, I know better than to mail them!)

Things I hate about MySpace:

1) People who friend me just so they can electronically pelt me with bulletins about their e-book. People! I hate e-books--and I mean the format, not the content. I stare at a computer screen all day and for much of the night when I have a book due. The last thing I want to do is curl up in bed with my laptop and read on it, too. For one thing, it's hot, which sucks when it's approaching 100 degrees outside. And not so cuddly. And I can't stuff it in my purse and take it with me to the dentist or the waiting room at the DMV when I need to renew my license. Yeah, I know, I can get an e-reader, but I'm cheap. And I like paper. (Although book publishers really ought to get their green thing on and start printing more books on recycled paper, or at least paper from sustainably managed forests. Because the rainforest is shrinking, global warming is serious, and we all need to do our part. That is all.)

2) That giant sucking sound I hear in my head when I've spent more than an hour fussing with my page layout. (Sparkly graphics. Pretty colors. Oooooh.)

3) That Alana Davis won't friend me back. I LOVE YOU, ALANA DAVIS! WHY WON'T YOU BE MY FRIEND! WHY? WHY, GOD, WHY?*

4) Spam comments. Spam sucks.

5) Friend envy. It totally is not a measure of one's worth as a human being if one does not have 600 friends on MySpace. Although maybe if my books stayed on the shelves longer....

* I'm totally kidding about the Alana Davis thing. I was a tad miffed that she apparently has judged my devotion as a fan by my book cover and apparently found me lacking, ergo my MySpace friend request to her has been pending for about three weeks now. But you know, bridge, over it. I'm still cool enough for Andy, Stewart, and Sting, as well as Alice in Chains, so IN YOUR FACE, Alana Davis.