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More than you ever wanted to hear from Jenny Crusie.
And we’re off. Starting the book tour at the Lennox Barnes and Noble in Columbus, Ohio tonight (found shoes, looking for jacket and curling iron), then to my old stomping grounds, Books and Co in Dayton (well, Beavercreek), Ohio tomorrow night. Both signings are at seven, and I’m going to talk about how Maybe This Time grew out of Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw. Or banana bread. I’ll figure it out in the car. For those of you who have somehow forgotten, here’s what the book looks like:
Because you can’t see that book cover too many times.
I am way behind in the comments and I will catch up, I promise, but this week is Columbus, Dayton, Cincy (on Thursday) so it might be some time. Not ignoring you, I promise. Just traumatized by the thought of make-up. ARGH.
Oh, and there’s a new poll. If I missed an answer, add it in the comments, please. Thank you.
In other news, Maybe This Time is in stores! You didn’t now that? Have you been under a rock? This is what to look for:
It’s the red one in the middle. The others are just up there to show you what might have been.
Okay, now that we’ve got Maybe This Time on there for the homepage for the website, let’s talk about something else. Because at this point, we’ve pretty much beaten the book to death. (Spoiler space is still open two posts back for conversation.)
I just got off the phone with a reviewer who said she’d been talking to writers groups about books with too much dialogue, and they’d told her that they had to write lots of dialogue because editors want white space on the page. I said, “No, that’s not right.”
This began because it’s true that many readers will pick up a book and flip through it, and if there are big blocks of type on a page, they’ll put it back because they’ve been there before. Big blocks of type mean the writer is explaining something, that nothing’s changing, because you throw in a paragraph break when something changes. That means that books with big blocks of type are often (but not always) full of authorial interruption to explain stuff like the Gatling gun. Or what the character is feeling. Or memories. For many books this translates into no story on those pages which annoys people who read to find out what happens next, which is the majority of readers.
With me so far? Big blocks of type are not bad. White space is not good. Big boring stretches of exposition or interior monologue are bad. Scenes in which things change and move are good. It’s not about the look of the page, it’s about the content.
So why is “more dialogue” not a good idea? Because dialogue has to be there to move the story, not break up the page. Because dialogue has to be a struggle, not an exchange of information. If you take that big block of exposition that explains something, and make it into a conversation where one person explains something to another person, it’s still not story, it’s still exposition, and it’s still going to be boring unless there’s something at stake. In other words, a conversation in which one character tells another character how to defuse a bomb that’s in front of them is going to be boring unless you get on the page that they’re really scared, or that one is scared and one is foolhardy, or that this is a conflict they’ve had before because one of them doesn’t listen and he’s the one who has to defuse the bomb . . . . It’s like s** scenes: If all you’re doing is giving instructions, write a manual. A scene is a unit of conflict between the protagonist and antagonist in which they struggle over a goal until one of them wins.
Don’t worry about white space. Worry about conflict and change, scene arc and climax. Cut out all the stuff that doesn’t matter (“A machine should have no unnecessary parts”). The white space will take care of itself.
Jen Weiner has a fabulous blog–you must read her take on the Literary Establishment and the slavish love they’re showing Oprah-dissing Jonathan Franzen–and she’s been kind enough to review Maybe This Time, too. You should go look.
Maybe This Time has been in stores twenty-four hours now, and yet my life has not changed. Oh, well, I like my life the way it is anyway. But Jennifer Weiner did a great interview with me–she’s so smart–over on her blog. And the book cover’s still beautiful:
Okay, you’re probably wondering why that intro is up there with the bookcover. It’s because whatever I put here goes up on the website home page, so if I’m chatting with you all, it looks weird. But we’re past the jump now, so I can say that this post is here so people can discuss Maybe This Time without spoiling it for anybody who hasn’t read the book. We’ll be doing a real book club for Maybe This Time on the fifteenth over at Cherry Forums, but for people who just want to chat about the story, this is the place for your comments. For people who haven’t read Maybe This Time yet, GO AWAY. Unless you like spoilers. Then by all means, read on.
Note: THE COMMENTS TO THIS POST ARE SPOILERS. ABANDON ALL LACK OF KNOWLEDGE YE WHO ENTER HERE.
Now watch, people will complain anyway. Sigh.
And Maybe This Time is in stores! I’d tell you to go out and buy it, but that would be exploitive, so I’ll give you Andie’s banana bread recipe instead:
Andie’s Banana Bread
(You can knock back the chips and nuts to half a cup or even leave them out, but Alice will not be happy.)
Mix together:
3 overripe bananas, mashed
2 eggs
1 teaspoon vanilla
½ cup white sugar
½ cup brown sugar
½ cup yogurt
Mix together:
1 ½ cup flour
½ teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon baking soda
½ teaspoon baking powder
Fold flour mix into banana mix and add:
¾ cup mini chocolate chips
¾ cup chopped pecans
Bake at 350 in four mini loaf pans (5.75 x 3.25) for 45 minutes or 2 regular loaf pans (8 x 3.75) for 55 to 60 minutes.
The Maybe This Time collage is one of my favorites because it has such a mood to it. Also it was a LOT of fun to make. (Click to enlarge. Click again and it swallows your computer.)
Music has a huge impact on my storytelling, but I’ve never written a book that relied as much on a soundtrack as Maybe This Time. The book takes place in 1992 so the music was crucial in rewinding my brain back twenty years. Although there are no flashbacks in the book (I am strongly anti-flashback), a lot of the music flashes back even farther to the year North and Andie were married, 1982, evoking memories and affecting actions in the present (well, in 1992).
The music from 1982 was music from Andie and North’s courtship (short though that was) and marriage. Andie’s theme was “Layla,” by Eric Clapton (original version) because North said that was the music that had to be playing in her head when she moved. (North’s theme was “Human” by the Pretenders, but I lost it when I moved the setting back to 1992 since it didn’t come out until 2004.) Their song was “Somebody’s Baby,” by Jackson Browne, because that’s what was playing when they met. And North said his first clue that Andie was going to bolt was when she kept playing “Any Day Now,” by Ronnie Milsap, when he came home at night; he really hated Ronnie Milsap. All of those (except for the Milsap) show up on a mix tape that North made for Andie in ‘82 that includes Clapton’s “Rock N’ Roll Heart” and “Man in Love;” North is a big Clapton fan, but then who isn’t? Another set of music from 1982 is a mix tape that Alice plays that belonged to her dead mother: “Gloria,” by Laura Branigan; “She Bop,” by Cyndi Lauper; “Time After Time,” also by Lauper; and “Make a Move on Me,” by Oliva Newton-John. Her mother wasn’t deep, but she was happy.
But in 1992, there’s the music on the kitchen radio that Andie and Alice dance to while they bake, which includes “Hurt So Good,” by John Mellancamp (the announcer says, “Here’s an oldie,”), “I’m Too s**y,” by Right Said Fred (Alice loves “I’m Too s**y”), and “Everything Changes” by Kathy Troccoli. Andie sings an old Disney lullaby to Alice, “Baby Mine,” because it’s the only one she knows, but North brings her a just-released album as a present: Clapton’s Unplugged with the acoustic “Layla” on it. Ironically, the song “Maybe This Time” was thematically right for the book, and since it came out in ’72 it was chronologically right, but it didn’t work at all musically: too melancholy.
I can’t imagine writing this book without the music to put me back two decades, so I owe a debt of gratitude to all the artists who helped and inspired me. Also, it turns out that you can play “Layla” over and over and over again and never get tired of it, so a special thanks to Clapton. Maybe This Time wouldn’t have been the same book without you all.
If you’ve ever read a gothic romance, you know the house is everything. They used to call gothic romances “Girl Gets House” books, and there was reason for that: the girl marrying the hero and getting the house was a metaphor for her claiming power over her space, staking her turf if you will. But in Maybe This Time, Andie doesn’t want the house, she can’t wait to get out of the house, and when she does, she never goes back. For it to have that great an effect on her, it had to be fairly ominous. So I went on an internet search and found exactly nothing. Then Stroppy Rachel came through with an English country house that had been for sale for awhile. It wasn’t exactly what I wanted but it was d*** close, so I stole the floor plans and changed them a bit and then photoshopped (badly) the house to get what I wanted, and voila, thanks to Rachel, I had Archer house.
Here’s the photo-shopped house:
And here’s the ominous version of the photo-shopped house:
And here are the floor plans:
And here’s the Great Hall where the seances happen:
And thank you, Strop. I couldn’t have done it without you.
Edited to add:
As requested, the original picture of the house, Woodlane Hall, and the original floorplans (click to enlarge):
And here’s the stone archway onto the upstairs gallery:
Andie put the weirdness that was Alice and Carter out of her mind and spent the next hour unpacking and settling into her new room. It was surprisingly charming: white paneled walls and high, sculpted ceilings and long stone-lined windows. The drapes were blue damask that clashed with the incongruously cheap silver-patterned black comforter that somebody with a lot of romance in her soul and no money in her checking account had bought to cover the large walnut four-poster bed. The rest of the furniture in the room was a mixture of styles probably inherited from different parts of the house as hand-me-downs, and the crowning touch was a cheap wood plaque over the bed that said, ALWAYS KISS ME GOODNIGHT. There was something a little obsessive about that which, given Andie’s surroundings, leaked over into creepiness. She put her pajamas on, brushed her teeth in the bathroom, put Kristin’s folder about the kids on the bed, and then, looking at the “Archer Legal Group” label on the folder, went to get her j**elry box from her suitcase. Buried at the bottom in a small manila envelope was her wedding ring, pretty and cheap, now painted and varnished to keep it from tarnishing again, the last thing she had left from her marriage. She should have thrown it out since it was worthless, but . . .
She slid the ring on her left hand and smiled in spite of herself, remembering North going crazy trying to replace it with a real gold ring that wouldn’t turn her finger green. Then she put the j**elry box away and was pulling back the covers when she heard a knock at the hall door and opened it to see Mrs. Crumb with a small tray.
“A little cuppa before bed,” the housekeeper trilled, her red cupid’s-bow mouth smiling tightly, as she put the tray on the table next to the bed. “I got no problem bringing you up a cuppa every night since it’s only going to be a month?” She let her voice rise at the end, part question, part hope.
“Uh, thank you.” Andie eyed the tray doubtfully, but the yellow-striped teapot smelled richly of peppermint and there were violets painted on the big striped cup.
Mrs. Crumb nodded. “I put in a little liquor, too. You sleep good now.”
She retreated back through Andie’s door, and Andie closed it behind her and sniffed the pot. Minty. Very minty. She sat down on the bed and poured tea into the cup and then took a sip and got a full blast of at least two shots of peppermint schnapps. Whoa, she thought. The tea was good and peppermint was always nice, but unless Mrs. Crumb was trying to put her into a schnapps-induced stupor, the housekeeper had an exaggerated idea of “a little liquor.”
Maybe she should make her own tea.
She began to read Kristin’s notes, sipping cautiously. The kids’ mother had died giving birth to Alice, she read, their father had died in a car accident two years ago, and their aunt had died in a fall four months ago in June. And now, Andie thought, they’re alone with Crumb. And me. That thought was so harrowing that she forgave them the weirdness of their first meeting. Things would get better.
Poor kids.
She sipped more tea and read more notes. The three nannies had all said the same thing: the kids were smart, the kids were undisciplined, the kids were strange, there was something wrong, and they were leaving. Only the last one had tried to take the kids with her, and Alice had gone into such a screaming fit that she’d lost consciousness and the nanny had had to detour to a hospital. After that, the nanny took the kids back to Archer House and left them there. “These children need professional psychological help,” she’d written, and Andie thought, So North sent me.
That was so unlike him, not to send a professional, not to get a team of experts down there, and she thought, He’s not taking it seriously. Either that or he wanted her buried in southern Ohio for some reason.
She shook her head and went through the rest of the folder, sipping the liqueur-spiked tea until the combination of that and the dry curriculum reports from the nannies made her so sleepy, she gave up. She turned off the bedside lamp, and the moonlight seeped into the room—full moon, she thought—and it was lovely to be so deeply drowsy on such a soft bed in such soft blue light that she let herself doze, thinking, I should have called Flo to tell her I arrived, I should have called Will, I should have . . .
Something moved in her peripheral vision, something so slight she was pretty sure nothing had moved. Exhaustion or maybe the liqueur in the tea. She looked sleepily around the room, but it was just gloomy and jumbled, a gothic kind of normal, although it seemed colder than it had been, so she let her head fall back and snuggled down into the covers and drifted off to sleep, and then into dreams where there was shadowy laughter and whispering, and someone dancing in the moonlight, and as she fell deeper into sleep, the whispering in her ear grew hot and low—Who do you love? Who do you want? Who kisses you goodnight?—and she saw Will, smiling at her, genial and easygoing with his blond frat-boy good looks, and then she fell deeper and darker, and North was there, his eyes hot, reaching for her the way he used to, demanding and possessive and out of control in love with her, and she sighed in relief from wanting him, and somebody whispered, Who is HE?, and she went to him the way she always had–impossible to ever say no to North–and lost herself in him and her dreams.
Andie followed Mrs. Crumb into a short dismal hallway with faded wallpaper and a worn wood floor. The housekeeper turned to go up a narrow flight of equally worn wooden stairs that were probably the servant stairs, and then she stopped on the first step, her watery, protruding eyes even with Andie’s now.
“I hope you didn’t get the wrong idea,” she began. “I’m sure Mr. Archer just forgot to tell me—” She looked past Andie and scowled. “Now what are you doing out here?” she snapped, and Andie turned and saw Alice standing behind her, looking even smaller and thinner than she had in the kitchen, her neck festooned with all that j**elry, the headphones from her Walkman still over her ears.
“Hello, Alice,” Andie said.
The deep shadows under Alice’s eyes and cheekbones made her little face almost skull-like. She stared at Andie for a minute and then pushed past her and Mrs. Crumb and began to climb the stairs, something stuffed under her arm.
Andie reached out and touched her sleeve and Alice jerked away and kept going.
“Is that a doll?” Andie asked, and Alice stopped a couple of steps above her and took her headphones off.
She held up a stuffed doll with a bluish-white head, its three-tiered sepia-toned s**** flaring out from a faded gold ribbon belt around its lumpy waist. The thing looked like it had been left to mold before Alice had found it, the face and dress mottled with age. “It’s Jessica,” Alice said and went on up the stairs.
It’s dead, Andie thought.
“She won’t give that up,” Mrs. Crumb said, in her idea of a whisper. “I’ve tried giving her other dolls but she just wants that one. It’s not right. We should do something about that, you and me.”
Andie watched Alice’s straight little back climb the stairs without wavering even though she must have heard the housekeeper’s voice. “If that’s the doll Alice wants, that’s the doll she gets.”
Mrs. Crumb s***ed in her breath and shook her head and then continued up the stairs.
They reached another short hall on the second floor, and Mrs. Crumb walked around the stair well and started up another flight. “Nursery’s on the third floor. Keeps the noise down.”
“Noise?” Andie said, following an entirely silent Alice, but Mrs. Crumb didn’t speak again until they were on the third-floor landing in another cramped little hall.
“This is the bathroom,” she said proudly, opening a door opposite the stairs that led to a large vintage washroom with a freestanding brass-and-frosted-glass shower in the middle of the hardwood floor. “You’re sharing this with me. My room’s on the other side”—she nodded toward the front of the house—”but I know you won’t mind since we’re going to be such good friends.” Then she moved toward the back of the house to a door that was ajar because Alice had walked through it moments before.
“This is your bedroom,” Mrs. Crumb said, pushing the door open wider.
Andie followed her into a large, high-ceilinged paneled room, dominated by a four-poster bed and a stone mantel surrounding a gas fireplace.
“And that’s the nursery through there.” Mrs. Crumb jerked her thumb at a door to the right that was also ajar, probably from Alice walking it through it, too. “I’m going to go make you a nice hot toddy now. Just the thing to help you drop off to sleep.” She smiled again, and again it didn’t reach her eyes, and then she went back out through the hall door.
“Hot toddy,” Andie said, not even sure what that was, and walked over to the open door and looked through it.
The nursery was huge, maybe thirty feet across, with a bank of barred windows across the back including a little bay-windowed alcove with a window seat full of books spilling onto the floor. There were two narrow twin beds, their mattresses naked, an ancient rocker with chipped white paint, a rump-sprung old sofa in front of a cold gas fireplace, a battered table with paper and pencils on it and several mismatched chairs scattered around it, and an old TV in the middle of the room with an ancient boom box on top of it. At the far end was a cold gas fireplace with a small, modern fire extinguisher on the mantel. It was about as cozy as an abandoned mental hospital.
Andie crossed the room and opened a door on the other side and found herself in another short hall. In front of her the door was open to a small bathroom, to the right was a stone archway to another hall, and to the left was a closed door.
Jesus, she thought. This place is Little Gormenghast. I’m going to get lost here and never be found.
She opened the door to the left and found Alice sitting on a twin bed, leaning toward an old white rocker at the foot of the bed. The walls were pink, her bedside table had a pink lamp, and her bedspread was pink and covered with daisies.
“This is my room!” Alice said, straightening as she clutched her blue Jessica doll to all the j**elry on her thin little chest. “You have to knock before you come in!”
Andie surveyed the little room, puzzled. “Do you like pink?”
“No!”
“I didn’t think so. Sorry about not knocking.”
Andie closed the door and then crossed the small hall into the larger one and found another staircase on her left, this one stone and much grander, and to her right a massive stone archway. On the wall in front of her was another door, so she opened it.
Carter jerked back against his headboard, his eyes wide, almost dropping the comic book he’d been reading. Then he saw her and scowled. “You ever hear of knocking?”
“Sorry,” Andie said. “I can’t tell which doors are rooms and which ones are halls.”
“This one’s a room,” Carter said, and went back to his comic.
Andie looked around and saw ancient heavy furniture and a bed covered with old blankets in various shades of drab. The only interesting things were the stacks of comic books, papers, and pencils on the bedside tables that said Carter did something besides glare and eat, and the carpet at the end of the bed that was riddled with scorch marks. Pyro, she thought, and was grateful the house was mostly stone. She looked up to see Carter watching her, his face stolid, so she nodded and began to close the door only to stop when she took a second look at his bedside table.
There was a lighter on it, a cheap plastic job. She opened the door wider and saw two more on the other table.
He was still staring at her, and she thought about saying, “What in the name of god do you need three lighters for?” But it was her first night and Carter already didn’t like her and she was too d*** tired.
“Don’t set anything on fire,” she told him, and closed the door.
Then she walked through the stone arch on her right and almost ran into an ancient wood railing that ran around three sides of an open space. The railing rocked a little as she put her hands on it, so she looked over the edge carefully.
The opening dropped two stories down to a stone floor, empty in the growing darkness.
Okay, then, Andie thought, and made a circuit of the gallery, discovering doors that led into the nursery and into the servants’ stairwell. Then she went back to the little hall and to Alice’s room where she knocked.
“Go away,” Alice said.
Andie went in and saw that Alice had changed into a too-large jersey T-shirt that hung down past her knees, clearly a hand-me-down from some adult. She looked both pathetic—poor little Alice had to get ready for bed on her own—and eerie—poor little Alice‘s shirt said, “Bad Witch” on it in sickly green letters. She looked oddly defenseless without her armor of necklaces—they were hanging over her lampshade now—but with her white-blonde hair standing out every which way, she also looked demented. We’ll comb that tomorrow, Andie thought.
“Sorry,” she told Alice. “I just wanted to say that if you need me, I’m on the other side of the nursery.”
“I won’t need you.” Alice got into bed and pulled her covers over her head.
“Right.” Andie noticed that Jessica had fallen to the floor. “You dropped something.” She bent and picked up the old doll and poked Alice under the covers.
“Hey!” Alice said, and then Andie pulled back the covers and handed her the doll.
“Good night,” Andie said, and Alice pulled her covers up over her head again.
“Yes, we’re going to be great pals,” Andie said, and headed back across the nursery to her own room, thinking that it was no surprise the nannies had c****ed. They’d probably expected to be put living in the tomb at any moment, probably by Carter and Alice.
She heard something from the hallway by Alice’s room and went back to check. Alice’s door had come partly open, and inside Alice was talking.
“She’s not staying,” Alice was saying. “She’s just going to be here a month. She’s not even a nanny. It’s okay. We’re staying right here.”
Andie pushed open the door a little more expecting to see Carter, and Alice looked around, alone in her room.
“I told you,” she began.
“Who were you talking to?”
“Nobody,” Alice said, turning her head toward the wall.
Imaginary friend, Andie thought, and said, “Okay.”
Then she turned to go and saw the white rocker at the end of the bed.
It was rocking.
She looked back at Alice who met her eyes defiantly.
“What?” Alice said.
She did that, Andie thought, and said, “Nothing. Good night,” and closed the door, now in complete sympathy with the nannies who’d bolted.
Anybody with sense would.
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