Skip to main content

Monday Miscellany

1. Apparently, Sunday is the day when all the guys who own the upholstery shops work in them with their shirts off. At least that was my experience on my morning constitutional this weekend. I don't know why, but it makes me less likely to go into these shops and inquire about having my couch redone.

2. Running Scared is a great buddy cop film. It stars Billy Crystal and the late great Gregory Hines as Chicago police officers who just need one last big bust before they move down to Florida and open a bar. If you can get past the 80s music and the hilarious technology (cell phones as big as phone books), it's a smart and funny cop movie. It's the cop movie that Lethal Weapon wanted to be when it grew up. (Yes, even the first Lethal Weapon.)

3. I mowed my lawn. I'm sure you don't care, but my neighbors are probably throwing a party.

4. I accidentally read a crappy book this weekend and now I have to wait until Monday to get started on some revisions I've put off. In fairness, I didn't know it was crappy until I was about 50 pages in (sometimes you have to let a book settle a little before you can really tell), and by then the horrible cliched writing had already taken up residence in my brain. sigh.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

On Mary Sue

I recently read a Very Popular Book in a Very Popular Series, which I was going to talk about here until I read the second book in the series and realized--OH NO--that the main character of the book is a total Mary Sue. sigh. For those of you who didn't spend time in the fanfic world, a Mary Sue is a character who everyone else loves. She's a stand-in for the author (fanfic is written mostly by women, which is why "Mary Sue," although there are some Gary Stus out there as well).She's beautiful (but not too beautiful), she's funny, she's self-deprecating, she's smart, and all the other characters will fall head over heels in love with her and think she's awesome. (An example, if I wrote Friday Night Lights fanfiction, Mary Sue would move to town and become Riggins' girlfriend, and Jason Street would have a crush on her, and Lyla Garrity would like her and even Tyra would must us some grudging respect, and their lives would all be better for k...

Why Are The Characters Friends?

Lately, I've been reading a lot of books where the main character and her best friend don't get along. This is confusing to me. Why is the main character friends with someone she dislikes, or is afraid of, or actually hates? I get that it happens--I've seen Mean Girls . I've read Queen Bees and Wannabes . Heck, I'm old enough to have been the prime audience for Heathers . But in order for this fractured best friend relationship to be convincing, it has to be set up. In both Heathers and Mean Girls , there's a reason why the protagonist is friends with a bunch of b*tches--she chose to be. She knows that they're jerks. In fact, she can feel herself becoming a jerk right along with them. It's part of the character arc, the point of the story, that being friends with these girls is not who she really is. But the relationships I've been seeing lately don't make that kind of sense. The protagonist doesn't have a reason to be friends with...

Jay Is Not On Vacation

Despite my absence from this blog, I am not dead and/or on a beach somewhere. I wish I were (on a beach, not dead), but I am not. I would sing a song about how busy I am with work (true), and how busy I am with teaching (also true), and how busy I am with working on the new projects (true dat), and how busy I am with life in general (double true), but the real reason why I haven't been posting here is because I've been querying. For some reason, querying has made me especially leery of posting here. I've seen posts from agent blogs that talk about how they don't want to know that the author they're considering representing has been rejected by everyone else in the world. Likewise, I don't think it's good form for me to post about the responses I've received when the agents haven't given me permission to do so, although some writers do it. I know I wouldn't want to see my query letter posted on someone's blog and commented on, although som...