A Parent and a Kid

Today the Pens welcome Veronica Wolff, who is generous to be giving away a copy of her newest book, Devil's Highlander, to one lucky commenter!

I confess, when the fine Fatales asked if I’d blog and mentioned Parents as a potential topic, I made a little perplexed frowny face. I could opine at length on, oh, food, TV, sex, men. But parents? What have I got to say about parents?

But then I started thinking, just a little, and realized just how much I actually have been thinking about the topic.

For starters, there’s the whole concept behind my latest book: my Clan MacAlpin series follows a family of orphans (what else?!) in seventeenth century post-war Scotland. (Like how I got that bit of publicity out? Clever, huh?) I won’t explore why I chose to take the poor kids’ parents out of the equation—Adrienne already covered the cruel whimsy of authors yesterday, so ‘nuff said there.

But you could argue it’s impossible to think about life—fictional or otherwise—without contemplating parents. It always, eventually, comes up. Whether you’ve lost your parents, are a parent yourself, are estranged from a parent, or, like me, are lucky enough to still have both of them around.

It’s been a very explicit topic for me these past few weeks. I mean, consider my current summertime location. Though I live in San Francisco, the kids and I are on an extended visit…to my parents.

Boom…there’s a minefield of topics right there. Coming home again. When kids become parents. And the dreaded Becoming our parents. Gack.

And seriously. My perplexed frowny face? The lady doth protest too much. Because I am a parent, and honestly, even though my oldest was born nine years ago, it still sometimes wigs me out a bit. I worry I might never get used to the concept that I’m the one in charge. That I’m the one establishing boundaries, and setting examples, and answering questions about God and boys and moral fiber and stuff.

But for now it’s nice to be “home.” Like, at my parents’ home. The home where I can find high school paraphernalia rolling around in old dresser drawers. Where, if I wanted, I could wear jammies all day, because I don’t know the neighbors, or have a carpool to drive, or a dog to walk.

Where, for just a few weeks, I can foist all the hard calls onto someone else. Like, sure we can watch TV till late…we’re at Grandma’s, and it’s her call. Or, we don’t often buy cookies, but Grandma does, so please pass mommy the Oreos, honey.

See where I’m going with this?

So here I am in Florida, with my parents, and I find myself regressing to a different age, one where I sit elbow-to-elbow with my kids, eating Captain Crunch for breakfast (who can resist the lure of the crunchberry?), requesting special mom/grandma-made tuna sandwiches, and watching more TV than is good for any reasonable human.

I miss my husband and can’t wait to get back to my real home, but for now I’m enjoying every minute of being both a parent and a kid again.

Veronica Wolff is an award-winning, bestselling author with a soft spot for kilts and vampires. Not necessarily at the same time. Known for her Scottish time travel series, she's changing gears, launching two new series with the Penguin Group: The Clan MacAlpin Novels, featuring a family of strapping, seventeenth-century Highlanders, and The Watchers, starring a group of vampires and the teenaged girls who train to watch over them.

Just A Little Advice

--Adrienne Miller

There are a lot orphans in the world of romance heroes and heroines. It’s one of our favorite tricks, along with creating enough dukedoms and viscountcies to make a volume of Debrett’s thicker than the unabridged OED. We just love killing off a backstory parent or two. We’re not cruel. It just makes good story sense.

Cut down a character’s parents and you have severed their anchor to the world. Do it before they have established strong roots, and you take away their source for easy answers about who they really are and where they fit into the world. Then just set them adrift on the sea of life and watch them stumble around, pouting and raging. Good fun.

Not a single character of mine has had two, relatively sane and happy parents still living, which is kind of a shame...or would be, you know, if they were real. 

My own mom always blamed me and my sister for her going gray early. She also used to threaten to sell us to gypsies at least once a day, though I can’t imagine the going rate for a couple of suburban low-level miscreants could have been all that high. But they both gave me advice that I’ve tried to follow to this day.

“Swing early and swing often.”  Yeah, I know it’s from the whole Chicago voting style, but this one I know from my dad. My poor dad always ended up as the coach of my softball teams. He never signed up for it, but about three practices in to the season it always became crystal clear that none of these suit and tie dads knew the first thing about playing ball, and in stepped the reluctant hero. I could fill a whole book just with his batting advice.

“Nobody likes walks. They’re boring. So swing early and swing often. Sometimes you’ll strike out and you’ll hit homeruns, but you’ll never be boring.”

“Just tell them to go eat shit and die.” Yeah, that's still my mom’s favorite, and I should mention that for her it was more of a hard earned revelation than a simple profanity. See, all kinds of people tried to judge her for decisions she made earlier in her life, and I think one day she realized that the only person she really had to live her life for was herself and anybody who wanted to give grief for that, well, they could just go eat shit and die.

“Some days are just too nice to be spent indoors.”  I was in the fifth grade when a sorrowful looking secretary came to get me out of class. She wouldn’t tell me what was wrong, just that my parents had come to get me. My parents, looking terribly distraught, signed me out and walked me to the car. Once we had driven off they told me they had decided that it was too beautiful of a day to be spent inside, so we were off to a baseball game. Turns out, they had told the office that some horrible tragedy had befallen my grandmother--sadly, not the last time my poor grandmother had some terrible and completely fictional accident. 

Caution: Use this one sparingly, but use it.

Parental Contradictions (by Juliet)

Do I contradict myself? Very well, then I contradict myself, I am large, I contain multitudes.

--Walt Whitman

You know how novelists are always trying to write round, complex characters? Here’s a secret: just try to write your parents.

Parents are complex, contradictory, characters. If you don’t agree, just try cleaning out their closets when they’re old. I guaran-damn-tee you, you will find out things you didn’t know. Maybe things you would have preferred never to know, or things that will charm you. And disarm you. But they will surprise you, one way or the other: Old love letters. Diaries. Receipts. Seductive lingerie.

My Parents (on the left, my dad with my sister in his lap) with friends in
North Carolina, circa 1958. I just had to include this picture...it's SO Mad Men

This person you’ve known for thirty, forty, fifty years…This person used to be a different person.

And if you are lucky enough to have them around while they grow very old, they will, no doubt, transform yet again.

For example: I went to help my dad clean out a whooooole bunch of old stuff and I found an old wallet. Made of red leather, tooled with flowery scroll designs and inscribed with a message:

To My Adirondack Queen, With Love

WTF? My father did crafts???

This was not the father I knew. The father I grew up with was a military man. A jet pilot. A Commander in the Navy. He went in for competitive skiing and motorcycle racing. He owned many guns. When we were children he ordered us about, and though we knew he loved us –completely-- we were all just a little bit afraid of him.

Dad at his dapper best. He was twenty-five and newly married.

These days, he’s gone somewhat sentimental, and even admitted to crying at the end of “You’ve Got Mail” (it was Somewhere over the Rainbow that did him in). But he also talks a lot about welfare cheats and bootstraps and...I really *hate* to admit this…he watches Glenn Beck, and yet doesn’t think the man is insane. For real. I am not making this s**t up.

But…he is also unfailingly polite and kind face to face with just about anybody – from the homeless woman on the street to the mechanic fixing his car to the banker in the three piece suit. He hasn’t got a snobby bone in his body, and is all about the content of a person’s character. In the military he served with all creeds and colors and respected –dare I say loved?—the men who served with him and for him.

He is a walking contradiction.

And Mom? My mother’s adorable. She has a huge, impish grin, a widow’s peak, and honest-to-God dimples in her cheeks. She was a warm, charming hostess – as a child I was accustomed to having people to supper every night, and visitors in the guest room or on the couch every week or so. I didn’t realize how rare that was until I grew up and realized that not everyone’s mom adopted lost souls at the drop of a hat, plying them with cake and tea and a soft shoulder to cry on.

Mom on that same honeymoon trip to San Juan Capistrano -- she was twenty-three

But…she had that Southern Woman thing of never, ever, telling you the truth if it was at all nasty or likely to go against someone else’s wishes. She was never able to simply state what she wanted, much less demand to have her own needs met. She was a martyr through and through, happy to splay herself open for the good of others and to let them take what they needed. And take we did, as children tend to do.

She was a passive-aggressive piece-de-resistance…with a wicked, pitch-perfect, sense of humor.

But, apparently, she was also an Adirondack Queen, wooed by a pretty darned handsome fella...a guy who not only skied and cooked, but also made tooled leather wallets for the gal he loved. Who knew?

They contain multitudes. Oh yes they do.

Rachael's Parents Were Right

When I was kid, I wanted different parents, in a BIG way. I thought I'd been shorted. Mine just weren't normal, I knew it.

Other kids' parents sent them to school with peanut butter and jelly sandwiches on WonderBread. I got cheese and vegemite on brown bread.

Other kids got to eat sugar whenever they wanted to. We got dessert on Friday nights (ice milk, sometimes, or ginger snaps), and the rest of the time it was carob chips, ahoy.

Other kids got to watch TV, all the channels. We got to watch one hour a day, and it had to be on PBS: Mr. Rogers, Sesame Street, Electric Company, or my personal favorite: 321 Contact.

Other kids got to shoot toy guns. We'd get in trouble for even pointing a stick at each other and saying bang (which made it super fun to do quietly, up on the hill, when they weren't looking).

Other kids' parents took them to McDonalds. Our parents took us on protest marches.

Other kids got money for their grades. We got ten cents per tooth, no exception (except that one time the tooth fairy forgot--I got a quarter the next night. I always hoped she'd forget again.)

Other kids had curfews in the double digits. Ours was nine pm. In high school. I'm not kidding. (Weekends were extended to 10pm, which was still embarrassing.)

But you know what? We got to check out 10 books at once, every week, from the public library. We got to steer the car when Dad drove, and we got to learn to drive (and drive by ourselves!) at fourteen, because they trusted us. We got to watch rated R movies, as long as they were up for an Oscar. We got to jump off the roof of the garage, as long as we landed in the iceplant. We got to make stilts. We got to do scientific experiments in the hobby shop with our chemistry lab, and explosions were encouraged. We got play full-sized arcade video games while Dad was fixing them for a friend. Our cats got to have one litter of kittens each. We got to study astronomy. We got to live on a tropical island and count the geckos on the walls. We got to go snorkeling every day after homeschool let out. We were taught how to play. We were taught how to read.

And we were always, always loved. Our parents did it right, I've decided. I'm sure they were glad when I came around.

*I'm the one in blue, Christy is in gold, and SFA-RWA fellow member and sister Bethany is in red. Oh, wow, and now that I click for embiggening, I just noticed that Mom made her dress, Dad's shirt, and my and C's dresses. (Bethany's red suit is machine-made, I think.) ADORABLE.

Writing Around the Dad-Filter

by Sophie

PARENTS

You all know the old writing advice, right - "Write as though your parents are dead"?

It's good advice. Parents are one of the strongest filters between what's cooking in our brain and what ends up on the page. And that's not always a bad thing, of course - parents are often our first teachers, our value-setters, our moral guides. I'm grateful to mine. But the day came when I had to stick my fingers in my ears and go "blah blah blah I don't hear you, Dad" - figuratively speaking, of course.

(Now I have to pause here and tell you that my dad reads this blog regularly. Hi, Dad! So even as I write about filters, I'm probably filtering. But in the last year Dad and I have had lots of great conversations about a variety of things and I don't think he'll mind me sharing.)

I've written for many, many years, and my dad's always read bits and pieces of what I was working on. My brother's always written too, and Dad read some of his work too. One day we were all talking about writing, and my dad said, "Just don't ever write anything gratuitously violent. There's no excuse for that."

(Pause, again. We have to wait a minute for my dad to say "I said that? I never said that! I don't remember saying that." I'm hoping Mike is reading this too so he can back me up.)

Here's the thing. I wrote lots of stuff for a long time with my dad's words in my mind. I tried to ignore them, but they were just too powerful. So while I wrote my women's fiction and literary fiction and so on, I veered away from violence. Which some of you, those of you who have read my stuff, may find curious. Because I would say that one of the themes uniting all of my recent work - whether it's mystery, young adult, or paranormal - is human violence and where it springs from and what it does to people and how it informs our emotional landscape and visa versa. I'm telling you, it's a *big* deal to me. It might not be going too far to say it's fundamental to my work as a whole.

Now I could wimp out here and go "yeah, but it's not ever gratuitous." The thing is- "gratuitous," I mean really, isn't that a cheat? Who gets to decide? Whether it's sex or violence or wordiness or grammatical liberty-taking, isn't your not-enough often my over-the-top? I reject the non-gratuitous defense.

I write violence. I have my reasons. for some people it's too much, for others too little, and I reserve the right to change course at any time.


I'm going to pause one more time for my dad to say "Dear, I would never dream of telling you what to write" and "You and your brother are my favorite authors." I like hearing that. :) Yeah, he's my dad and all, but I can't hear that enough. If the Nobel committee took notes from people's parents, I expect my dad would write one, and that's nice.

So you know I have my own little writers, right? I tell them all the time that they are brilliant writers, because to me, they are. They shine bright, bright, bright for me, and I know I can't be objective, and I don't care. I'm sure I'm saying other things to them that are messing with their heads, and that thirty years from now I'll hear about it and probably deny it. My niece and nephew are also budding writers. They're also brilliant.

Being the parent of a writer is probably a thankless task much of the time, so today I'd just like to say "Thanks, Dad."

Here's a sample of my nephew's recent work:

Maddee Spills on Names

The other day I walk into a local store where I shop now and then, and meet up with a woman who is very nice but let's just say decidedly odd. She's uber tan, uses greasepaint or some such thing to tame her wild hair, and has a mustache. She's poring over photos spread out on the counter.

"Whatcha looking at?" I ask.

"My daughter just had a baby!" says she.

"Oh she's cute!" [sorta] "What'd they name her?"

"Mitten."

Ummmmmm... what is the proper response to that?

MITTEN? WTF??



Okay, so I have a THING about names. I love names. I soooo agree with the rest of the Pens that names should mean something, they should match the person, have the right FEELING.

Which is why, when I got divorced some years back, I decided it was time to reinvent myself with a new name. And I did. I dropped the little Swiss Girl name I was born with; traded it in for the name of an island off the coast of Morocco, of all things. Why? I was trying to give honor to my father, whose family came from there. And Madeira is a lovely place, so I've heard. Full of colorful flowers and tropical vistas and that works for me.



The problem is that as lovely a word as Madeira is, it didn't completely "fit" me. It's a little too pretty. Or a little too formal. Or something. So I shortened it to Maddee, which feels more like ME.

Little side note: the reason for the weird spelling is that I wanted to own my domain name (and maddiejames.com is taken -- she's a romance writer). Now how many people would take domain name availability into account when naming themselves? I bow at the altar of the internet.



I know people roll their eyes about me changing my name in my 40s -- I realize it's weird. But life is an adventure, right?

I did it a little earlier for my son. Yep, he was born with a different name too -- and no, he wasn't adopted from some foreign country where his original name was hard to pronounce. He was born in my very own stomach (well you know what I mean). The thing is, we were SUPPOSED to have a girl. I was so positive of this that when my husband chose the name Quade "if" it were to be a boy I said "whatever." As far as I was concerned, it was going to be a girl named Quinn. And to make a very long story short, a boy popped out and my husband said "his name is Quade, right?" and I was like "whatever" 'cause you know how after you have a baby you're so relieved that it's OUT that nothing else really matters?

But really? Quade? Does it not sound very grownup and not unlike the hero of a lusty romance? And can anyone really bond with a baby with a lusty romance name? I couldn't take it. I had to change it. This after the official birth certificate and 100 Christmas cards welcoming Baby Quade to the world.



Christmas cards went out the next year which said: "Same baby, new name."

I should have done that after my divorce. "Same woman, new name."

Well hopefully not the same woman. Hopefully better.

So Quade became Riley. The name is much more common now, but 15 years ago, when my sweet little patootie was born, I had never heard of it. At least not until a big bald man walked into my office one summer morning selling strawberries. I bought some, asked his name, and fell in love. With the name, not him (lest you think that's why I got divorced).



(I know this man isn't bald but he's wearing a strawberry suit. A STRAWBERRY SUIT! Doesn't the internet rock?)

And now I am finally getting to the POINT of this post, which is that unlike my son, named after a strawberry peddler, my daughter was named after a character in a BOOK. And really, what could be better than that? I love good character names, love them with a passion. And when I read The Prince of Tides 18 years ago, I fell in love with the name Savannah. Like Riley, back then it was quite unusual. And the character was beautiful and had flaming red hair. Okay, she was a crazy person. But it was still a great name. So when my little sweetie was born with a head of bright red hair, how much more perfect could that have been?



Little side note #2: saying "sweetie" reminds me -- when I was married, I used to call my husband "sweet pea" and sometimes "sweetness." And one day on accident I put them together. Wait for it....

Okay back to book character names. Here are my faves of all time...

Novalee Nation in Billie Letts' Where the Heart Is. One of my favorite books, and one in which names are very important. There's a very curvy character who names all her children after snack foods (Brownie, Praline, Baby Ruth, you get the idea...).



Scout (and Atticus) Finch in Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird. Of course Harper Lee is a damn cool name too. And Gregory Peck? HOT!



Antsy Carruth in Gar Haywood's Man Eater. I adore that name -- can't you just picture this woman?



Saxon Roberts in Jack London's The Valley of the Moon. Seriously awesome name. I would have named my daughter Saxon if Saxon Mack hadn't sounded so weird.



Troo O'Malley and her sister Sally O'Malley in Lesley Kagen's Whistling in the Dark. Troo is SUCH a cute name. And Sally O'Malley. I mean come on -- what's cuter than that?



My daughter (when she's older, please) wants to name her daughter Huckleberry. Another literary gem.

Sophie, it will be the height of true fandom when someone names their son Goat. You wait -- it's gonna happen.

xox me, maddee

When Gigi Isn't Gigi and Anand Can't Be Anand

By Gigi -- whose name isn't really Gigi

When I was around the age I was in this picture here, I'm told I started calling myself "Gigi."

It's not really my name, but apparently I wasn't so fond of the other nickname everyone wanted to call me: "Gina."

If you've ever met me for more than five minutes, you can tell I'm so NOT a Gina. Why? Well, I'm not exactly sure. And there you have the mystery of names. But there's definitely something to it. Over 30 years later, I'm still Gigi. And it still suits me much better than Gina.

It often takes me a while to settle on character names, because I want to have that same feeling that a character fits with their name. When I hit upon the perfect name right away, it's pretty damn exciting.

For example, one of the main characters in the book I'm working on now jumped off the page as Anand Vishwanathan. A seafaring adventurer from the south of India, it was so completely his name.

Only... It turns out Anand Viswanathan is a super-famous Indian chess player. And not just any famous chess player -- but a guy who happens to be the current World Chess Champion.

Unfortunately, he looks nothing like my Anand Vishwanathan. Somehow it doesn't seem a good idea to leave my Anand with the same name as a superstar known as the "Tiger of Madras."

There are the pesky little legal reasons to consider (yes, I work with lawyers, and my agent is a lawyer, so I hear way too much about legal issues in my daily life) -- but the main problem for me is that when people read my book, I don't want them thinking about the real life chess star. I want them to form a new picture in their minds of the character I've created. Since many mystery readers are chess players, it's a fair bet many of them will know about the real life guy with the not-so-common name.

(Yes, I know it's my fault -- I didn't Google the name when I was writing my rough draft. The name was just so perfect that the rough story outline flew out of me, and I didn't stop to do research until after that first rough draft was complete.)

So if anyone out there has ideas for a new super-cool Tamil last name for my fictional Anand, who was born along the coast in the Kingdom of Travancore in the late 1800s and went on to become a sailor who came to San Francisco right before the quake of 1906 -- I'd love to hear it!

Martha May Not Be My Name

Here's something you should know about me.

Sometimes I lie about my name.

My mom picked it for Biblical reasons. I can't even tell you how upset I was to be named for the shrewish gal in Jesus' crew. We all know Mary was the favorite.

Back to my dishonest nature...

Cecilia was one of my best friends in elementary school. She was tall, Swedish, and had calves longer than my entire torso. I envied the crap out of her. She was smarter than I was. Funnier. Prettier. Nicer even, dammit.

We would hole up in Cecilia's room watching New Kids On The Block music videos to figure out which to marry and what our joint wedding would look like. She would generously let me have high-pitched crooner Joe, but we both knew that if Joe had a choice, he'd pick her.

I was what you would call a midlist girl. I showed up, but no one really cared. I wasn't spectacular enough of a failure nor a success to be noted, but Cecilia liked me and that was nice.

My parents were big fans of sending me away to long sessions at brainy camps, only instead of being surrounded by awkward nerds, I had to deal with sophisticated, smoking Euro teens since I lived overseas.

Once summer, sitting cross-legged during camp orientation in a crowded gym floor, surrounded by effortlessly chic, lithe French and Italian girls, I introduced myself as "Cecilia."

A complete, utter lie.

But instead of taking it back, I smiled and said, "Ceci for short."

Here's what you need to know about this newborn Ceci - she is fearless and outspoken and witty and somehow ridiculously popular just by virtue of faking it. She strung along a hot, Yugoslavian* kickboxer twice her age. She aced her tests and spouted depressing French poetry to entranced masses. She ran rooftops. She broke into country clubs to play lousy tennis games.

When I returned to school, a part of Cecilia burrowed inside and came back with me. I never recaptured that height of awesomeness, but I stopped envying my friends. Instead, whenever I felt that tingle of "I wish I was like that," I would take a piece of my friend and burrow it inside myself.

I have Cecilia's confidence. Maria's daring. Alexandra 's savoir faire. Viviane's brashness.

So if you ever meet me and I tell you my name is Juliet or Sophie or something else, just go with it. I'm working on a little piece of Pens.


* It was still Yugoslavia back then.

Name...calling

After a week of debauchery...okay, not exactly debauchery, just lots of late nights and copious amounts of chardonnay, dirty martinis, and now thanks to Sophie and Juliet, Laphroig (not all on the same night people!)...my post was not up at midnight.

I outlined several ideas in a trusty notebook during the RWA conference:

Naming Your Characters with as much thought and consideration as naming your babies. I search through ethnic names and historically common names and current baby name books. I give thought to their personality and their family background. I try to have the name *mean* something, even if I'm the only one who ever gets the context.

Name Dropping: a vertible who's who of who the Pens hung with at the recent RWA conference in Orlando. We played with some of our past guest posters, Tawny Weber, Karin Tabke, Alicia Rasley, Rachelle Chase, Kristan Higgins, Sarah Maclean, and more. Because we're a social lot, we met some new guest posters this past week that we'll introduce you to this year. This was all outlined in a more pithy and cute manner, but frankly my notebook is sitting in my carry-on in the entryway floor with my suitcase, unpacked.

I also had a few more ideas, unformed except for a paragraph or so in my head.

What you're getting is, the 'I woke up at five am-ish, realized I forgot to finish my post, and load into Google rush job!' post. (Now that I'm back on the West Coast, my body has decided to go East Coast).

Here it is, a completely different idea: The name calling post. I'm a Do-Do Head Or a Doo-Doo Head. Just pick whichever you prefer. :) Or call me a new one...cause honestly, I'm going back to bed.

Lisa

My Favorite Topic Ever

L.G.C. Smith

Due to poor planning (the RWA Conference ended yesterday -- I think I can safely say a productive time was had by all the Pens in attendance), I didn't leave myself enough time to do NAMES justice. Because, y'all (I'm in Austin just now and have been for five weeks of 2010 -- one picks things up) know, NAMES are my thing. I need time. Quality focus time not disrupted by: Cracking up over someone's (not mine) Spanx balled up in a corner of the bathroom. Reconnecting with old friends and making new ones (hey there, all of you, especially Rebecca Hagan Lee and Betty Rosenthal -- I've missed you guys!). Getting so nervous (after all these years of writing professionally) when talking to an absolutely delightful agent that I tossed my drink in the air, splattering both of us. Yes, I did. Fortunately, it was water. Still hysterically mortifying.

So I'm going to punt, but only until Saturday. Or Sunday. If it's okay with the rest of the Pens (I'm not sure we have rules exactly, but we do have practices).

And to anyone who can put more OTT punctuation, parentheses, and so on in fewer words (and still be roughly readable), I'll buy you a drink next year at RWA in New York. A real one. If you promise to spill it on an agent, editor, publisher, NYT Bestselling Author, bookstore buyer, marketing or publicity director, I'll buy you ten.

See you this weekend.