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August 15, 2006

Between, Georgia

I'm All About the Boys Today...

The Chicks are going to be blogging on BEING BETWEEN as a sort of THEME for the week, but I thought I would talk a little about about the actual book. More specifically, about the GUYS in the book. I feel moved to share some weird little real life anecdotes about how Guy 1 got his name and how I secretly feel about Guy 2....

My main character is BETWEEN a lot of things, including two men. One is her bad boy band husband, Jonno Overmilk. I had a hard time naming him. He started out as Jon-Jon Murphy. I wanted him to have some sort of OBNOXIOUS cool-in-highschool nickname, you know? Some sort of in-clique Bastardization of his name that he was glory-daze-pathetic STILL using in his 30's. Jon-Jon was too KENNEDY, but it was close.

SO, I am playing online scrabble with my friend Matt. We do this all the time. We are DEADLY serious about it and it usually ends in BLOODSHED and WEEPING. You know that moment in Conan the Barbarain where the Mongol Chief asks Conan what is best in life? And Conan says: To crush your enemies, see them driven before you, and to hear the lamentations of their women! Yeah. That's how Matt and I play scrabble.There are days when I think would eat live mice before I would open up a triple word square for him.

Now, if you don't play scrabble, there's this thing you can do where you use ALL your tiles. It's called a bingo, and it's worth a HUGE fat bonus. Matt and I routinely Bingo 2 - 4 times a game. If the board is reasonably open and we are given decent tiles that we suspect MIGHT contain a bingo, we will make the other person wait twenty minutes, half an hour even, for our next move. And we are SHAMELESS about the things we will TRY to make into bingos.

One day we are playing, it's his turn, and the pause begins to STREEEETCH.

Me: YOU SUSPECT YOU HAVE A BINGO!
Him: Oh, I KNOW I have a bingo. I just have to find it.

SO I go answer some e-mails and get a little work done, checking back on the board every few minutes.
Matt starts putting up tiles at last, and he spells out....OVERMILK.
He hasn't hit ENTER yet, but he's BLATANTLY put this dumbass stupid NOT A WORD up there.

Me: Dude, that is pathetic. SO not a word.
Him: Dude. It might be.
Me: Use it in a sentence.
Him: The cream was not undermilk. It rose to overmilk.
Me: DUDE! PATHETIQUE!
Him: I feel it might be a word.
Me: If it's a word I will completely name a character OVERMILK in the book I am working on. That's HOW sure I am that you are barking out your butt.
Him: Okay, pressing enter.

Heh. It was a word. It is a farm term -- you can overmilk a cow and it is ONE WORD, not TWO as any rational human would think. So I made Jon-Jon have last name Overmilk, though Matt said I should have had to make my main character's FIRST name be Overmilk. And then I realized.... Jon Overmilk. Jon O. Jonno. VERY high school in-clique sounding nickname. And if it ALSO sounds a little urinal cake-y.....good. He's that sort of guy. *grin*

Guy the second is Nonny's best friend, Henry, and I have to tell you --- I had a LEETLE teeny crushlet on Mr. Henry. He's a bookstore owner and....I got a little fluttery, writing about him. And as for READING HIM! I got to read the audio version of Between myself, and there are a LOT of male characters in the book but...Henry was the only problem.

I had a genuine CRUSH!, and I got scared trying to make him be all I see in him. The first day of taping, I only read TWO of Henry's lines, and one was "Me Neither" and one was "It's terrible to be robbed, of course." NOT LONG LINES. But I had to read both those lines OVER AND OVER with new instructions from Bob-my-director, who was telling me to NOT sound like Elvis, to NOT sound like Dennis Quaid in the Big Easy, to NOT sound like a muppet on crack. I don't know what Henry sounds like, but at least my director didn't let him sound like THOSE things.

After take 90, Bob said: Why is Henry so hard -- Jonno sounds great, so you can do men. Why are you balking at Henry?
Me: I don't know.
Bob: The uncle sounded good, this is just another man.
Me: I want to do him right.
Bob: So you are intimidated because you LIKE him.
Me: I MORE than like him. I want to have sex with him. And I want to read him so well that YOU want to have sex with him, too.
*Long pause.*
Bob: Well, we have a ways to go, then, don't we.
*Another Pause*
Me to the Sound Engineer: Um, were you taping when I said that 'I want to have sex with Henry' part?
Sound Engineer: You betcha.

This week's blog was brought to you by Between, Georgia, Joshilyn's bold,
funny novel about a rural south Juliette, her redneck Romeo, and a family
feud that blows Georgia's smallest town wide open.

Posted by at 3:20 AM | Comments (5)

Comments

Posted by: Eileen at August 15, 2006 10:07 AM

Posted by: ZaZa at August 15, 2006 3:29 PM

Posted by: Jennifer at August 15, 2006 4:28 PM

Posted by: Charity_s at August 15, 2006 5:24 PM

Posted by: dee at August 16, 2006 3:52 PM