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April 1, 2006

Jenny and Bob Launch Battle of the Sexes Week!

But they get along great. Really.

Hey, everyone! It's Lani. Because Jenny and Bob are currently touring their asses off, I'm going to be posting their blogs for them, and today's is just one more reason why you should rush out first thing on April 4th and grab yourself a copy of Don’t Look Down! Enjoy!

Jenny: Hi, I’m Jenny Crusie and I just wrote a great book (she said modestly) with Bob Mayer called Don’t Look Down. I wrote the heroine’s point of view (all of Lucy’s scenes) and Bob wrote the hero’s point of view (all of Wilder’s scenes) plus this crazed sniper wandering in the swamp (Tyler) because Bob wanted a crazed sniper. Don’t Look Down is about a film director who comes to a movie set to finish the last four days of shooting on somebody else’s movie and ends up contending with her ex-husband, the Russian Mob, the CIA, and this Green Beret moonlighting as stuntman who doesn’t seem to get the idea that “director” means she gets to tell him what to do. I had the same problems with Bob, so I sympathized.

Bob: I’m Bob Mayer. The other half of this fearsome twosome. Actually the book is really about a Green Beret who has to save the movie from, well originally I had the Russian mob, the IRA, the aliens from Area 51, the Knights Templar (which would have been really timely, damn it), and several other nefarious groups, but Jenny forced me to cut it back a bit. We absolutely needed the crazed sniper because it is an ironclad rule of writing that every book needs a crazed sniper. I was taught that in Creative Writing 101 at the JFK Special Warfare School at Ft. Bragg.

Jenny: We had plans to keep everything nice and tidy with Bob doing the action parts and me doing the romance plot. Or as Bob said, “I don’t do that yucky emotional crap,” so I was stuck with the Yucky Emotional Crap (YEC) from there on out. Bob would write a scene and say something like “Wilder pulled Lucy closer” and then he’d write in parentheses “Needs YEC here.” And I would write the YEC.

Bob: Wilder would usually pull Lucy closer to use her as cover from enemy fire. No. That was a joke. Really. He would never do that. The big disconnect we had was sex and love. Wilder seemed to have no problem having sex, and lots of it, in the five days the plot took. But he had lots of trouble uttering three words. You know. Those three words. While Lucy was simply babbling those three words. But the sex. Well, it was easier the refloat the Titanic than to work her sex scenes in. But work them in we did.

Jenny: We also had plans (well, Bob had plans) of writing the book in an orderly fashion but it soon turned out that I was a dachshund yoked to an ox: Bob set his sights on the end of the book and went straight toward it, strong and steady, while I yapped around his feet, darting off in all directions, diving into the literary underbrush, backtracking to make sure I hadn’t missed anything interesting. He wanted to get to the explosion part, and I wanted to know what shoes Lucy was wearing.

Bob: Who looks at feet? You always watch where the barrel of your weapon is pointed. Well, if it happens to be pointed at someone’s feet, then so be it, but you don’t shoot at someone’s feet, for Chrissakes. Forehead. Double-tap. I like to write linear. Start to finish. I have been corrupted. Sort-of. My next book I just wrote the resolution first. But, by God, I’m now writing from the beginning and going to get to that resolution in linear fashion. I think.

Jenny: Then we got to the end of the first draft, no thanks to me, and Bob said, “We’re done!” I said, “You must be kidding. Now the good stuff starts.” It was as if he’d built a house and thought it was finished, and I had to point out that the bathroom needed tile and there were no drapes and a little paint on the walls would be good, too. So I added a Wonder Woman motif and Bob said, “What the hell?” and then got into the spirit of the thing and started a High Noon motif, and pretty soon he was asking me what kind of shoes Lucy was wearing. Okay, not the shoes, but I think toward the end, he kind of liked picking out the drapes. At least he liked the curtain rod.

Bob: When I redo a house I hate that finishing stuff. I like knocking down walls and putting up the sheetrock. But finishing sheetrock I am not good at. Of course, Jenny still hasn’t seen High Noon. But if you read the end of Don’t Look Down, our Romantic Adventure, you’ll know what I mean. I get the idea of rewriting now. Although, I did rewrite before. More along the way. Rewriting while writing, if you get my drift.

Jenny: Basically, Bob was a Guy through the whole thing while I was reasonable and thoughtful and, you know, womanly. But what we found was that, even though much of the time we wanted to kill each other, our differences made for a better, stronger book, and we both became better writers because of it.

Bob: We have corrupted each other a lot. I’ve spent months working over just three chapters for my proposal for my next stand-alone book. And I started with characters, not plot, which is a big change for me. I feel it’s a much stronger book for me. But I still haven’t mentioned shoes in it. I think.

Battle of the Sexes Week is brought to you by Don’t Look Down, Jenny Crusie and Bob Mayer's new Romantic Adventure, in stores April 4th!

Posted by Lani at 6:00 AM | Comments (7)

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