P IS FOR PLUM

That would be Stephanie Plum. 

I love all things in the Stephanie Plum Universe.  It could be possible that I have a crush on Ranger.  His full name is Ricardo Carlos Manoso .  He's second generation Cuban-American.  Was Special Forces.  He has abilities that make me think that he might be Batman.  Just kidding.  Sort of.

Stephanie's partner in crime is a former hoe by the name of Lula.  She has a fondness for Spandex and poison green outfits that really should be outlawed, given that she is full-figured and all, and she always buys her outfits about four sizes too small.  Yikes.  However, since Stephanie is a bond enforcement agent (and horribly inept), having Lula ride shotgun only adds hilarity to the mix when they botch the capture.  Since they are hunting FTAs in Trenton, NJ, and everyone carries (but Stephanie), it is shocking that they haven't been shot... yet.  However, that isn't to say that numerous attempts haven't been made on Stephanie's life.  She once had her car blown up four times in just one book.  (This is a series.)  Make that four different cars.  Obviously.  And Lula carries a weapon at all times, but can't hit the broad side of anything, so that always gets interesting.

Then there is Stephanie's family: her mother side is Hungarian.  Grandma Mazur is my favorite.  She is probably in her 80s, acts like she's 40, but looks like she's 110.  She also carries regular, and can't hit anything, though she did once shoot up the turkey set out for dinner.  Her favorite pastime is getting her hair done (and catching up on the gossip), and going to the viewings at the funeral homes.  However, she is working on getting banned for constantly opening the lids on closed viewings.  Local funeral homes have taken to nailing the lids down to prevent her from getting a sneak peek.

I can't forget to tell you about Joe Morelli.  That is Stephanie's on-again, off-again boyfriend.  Janet Evanovich starts off the first book of the series just like this: "There are some men who enter a woman's life  and screw it up forever. Joseph Morelli did this to me - not forever, but periodically."  I think that pretty well sums up Morelli and Stephanie Plum...

And this series.  It is a rollicking fun ride.  If you want to laugh, read Janet Evanovich's Stephanie Plum series.  It is Hilarious.

Rating: Passion


Have your read any of the books in the Stephanie Plum series?  Do you have a favorite book series that makes you laugh so hard that your sides hurt?  Do you have a favorite character in a book that always makes you laugh whenever you read the book?  

Hangers Aren't Just for Closets

Remember when I posted about hookers? Actually, it was just about good hooks for the first chapter of your novel, but hookers got your attention, did it not? Today we are jumping to the end of the chapter and seeing what grabs you... the hanger. It is that pivotal sentence that decides whether or not you keep on reading. Hopefully, the storyline is so good that you keep on reading even if your hanger is only mediocre, because I have turned a lot of pages over the last few days and discovered that even the best writers don't always pull off excellent hooks or hangers every chapter. Instead, they rely on that little thing called character development and strong storyline to push the whole thing along. However, it never hurts to start and end your chapters with punch. At least sometimes....



So, Falling for Fiction and Cassie Mae are running a bloghop/contest looking for submissions of our best Hangers of our current Work In Progress. The top three get judged and winners get selected. Works get critiqued. It is kinda sorta a big deal. Anyone who has even this tip of this iceberg figured out understands that they need lots of eyes on their writing in order to whip it into shape. Edit Edit Edit is the name of this game. And if you can get someone to look at it to help you actually figure out some of your excesses, plotting errors, etc. you can really start to make things happen with your WIP. So moving on to my Hangers for this Event...


I had no idea what I was going to tell him, but the truth was out of the question.


He was so solid. I felt so amorphous. I hoped that what he had was contagious.


It made me so mad I nearly socked him in the eye.


and just for fun:
Was that really all that was left to me? I realized that it was.


Like the last time, I went sifting through my book collection to see what Hangers the published authors came up with to see how it was "done." Here are their offerings:

Richard Bach in The Bridge Across Forever:

Grounded and rich and homeless, I hit the streets on a planet of four billion five hundred million souls, and in that moment I began looking full-time for the one woman who, according to the best people who ever lived, wasn't there at all.


After that, when I looked for him, everything went dark.


Don't forget! I shouted wordless, across decades. Never forget this moment!


Janet Evanovich in Three To Get Deadly:

We all stood staring at door number three.


"That's Lula," I said. "She's got the runs."


Our eyes met, and Vinnie laughed his nasty little laugh and I knew he had something good for me.


Deborah Smith in A Place To Call Home:

Some brands of kindness are hard to abide.


The world is spanned by small bridges between people. He'd crossed another one.


I exhaled as if I'd been holding my breath for years.


And that gives you some idea as to how hard it is to find good hangers. I had a terrible time finding good hangers in THREE TO GET DEADLY, and it is my favorite Plum book in the series. But the hangers were, by and large, terrible. Even Richard Bach's book was tough to pull a good hanger from, which shocked me. Deborah Smith's book was full of them. Of course, I really love her books; they almost always make me cry. But that is really neither here nor there. The point was hangers.

It made me feel better that even published authors have a tough time with writing a good hanger. Or maybe I should have gone to the library and pulled out a Patterson novel. All of mine are in storage. Don't know. In any event, this was definitely a learning experience. Win or lose, I learned something. So, that makes it a win. Yay!

Are You Packing Heat?

My original line of thought was to post about Morelli and Ranger today, but I don't think you people are ready for that. Seriously. So, we are going to take a look at Stephanie (aka me) through other eyes today. Let's turn that around. We are going to look at the world of Plum without all of that testosterone making our eardrums melt and our brains do screwy things.

Let's do a quick tour through Stephanie's immediate family. This will be fun. Grandma Mazur. She is my favorite character in Stephanie's family. She has taken up permanent residence with Stephanie's parents "now that Grandpa Mazur was scarfing down his normal two-eggs-and-a-half-pound-of-bacon breakfast in the hereafter." Grandma Mazur's favorite pastime is funeral viewings. This is pretty much a daily ritual. The deceased is judged on which funeral parlor is chosen, the quality of the casket, and it better be an open casket or Grandma Mazur is likely to get caught sneaking a peek. This is a no-no even in Trenton. Stephanie often gets dragged along to these outings to prevent this sort of thing, because family members get irate when their closed casket viewings become open casket thanks to Grandma Mazur.

"Grandma Mazur was seventy two and didn't look a day over ninety. I loved her dearly, but when you got her down to her skivvies, she resembled a soup chicken. Tonight's dress was a fire-engine-red shirtwaist with shiny gold buttons." This is one of grandma's tamer outfits. She often wears things like spandex biker shorts, or whatever she thinks might be trendy. And, like everyone else in Jersey she packs heat. Yeah, that sweet little old lady carries concealed and doesn't have a license to do so, but no one has a license in Jersey and everybody does it. Grandma is a lethal weapon because she thinks she is a crack shot, and she can't hit the broad side of a barn. So, when she pulls out her gun, everybody duck! She did manage to kill the turkey after it was cooked and on the dinner table. Of course, she wasn't aiming for it. At least, it couldn't get more dead.

Stephanie's mother thought that life really couldn't get any harder than it did when her mother, Grandma Mazur, moved in. She was wrong. She started dipping into the cooking sherry. She became a compulsive cleaner. When Stephanie started catching criminals, she moved on to the hard stuff. But just a nip now and then. And she irons a lot. It is safe to say that she has the cleanest house in Trenton. Stephanie's father is pretty much retired, but drives a cab for fun. His time in the cab picked up when Grandma moved in. He spends most of his time in front of the TV and is monosyllabic. So, long as he gets three squares a day, he seems to be mostly okay. I think that he pretends his real life is happening somewhere else. But this is purely conjecture on my part.

Remember when I told you that we would get back to Vinnie? Well, we're back. Vinnie is Stephanie's cousin. "Vinnie was forty-five, 5'7' without his lifts, and had the slim boneless body of a ferret. He wore pointy-toed shoes, liked pointy-breasted women and dark-skinned young men, and he drove a Cadillac Seville." Do you remember when I told you that Vinnie just gave Stephanie the job. It didn't exactly go down like that. She blackmailed him into giving her the job. Vinnie likes kinky sex and everyone knows about it except his wife. Well, that was going to change unless Stephanie got that job. It went a little bit like this:

"So give me one week, Vinnie," I said. "If I don't get him in a week, you can turn it over to someone else."

"I wouldn't give you a half hour."

I took a deep breath and leaned in closer to Vinnie, whispering in his ear. "I know about Madam Zareski and her whips and chains. I know about the boys. And I know about the duck."

He didn't say anything. He just pressed his lips together until they turned white, and I knew I had him. Lucille would throw up if she knew what he did to the duck. Then she'd tell her father, Harry the Hammer, and Harry would cut off Vinnie's dick."

Yeah, she went for the hard sell on the job. Sorry to have mislead you on that yesterday. Actually, it wasn't so much misleading, it just wasn't telling. I was saving it for today.

Getting back to Grandma and the things you need to know about her:
1) She is always up for anything. The more dangerous the better.
2) Favorite expression: "Isn't that a pip?"
3) Grandma was willed a 1953 Powder Blue Buick with a shiny white top, whitewall tires big enough to fit a backhoe, and gleaming chrome portholes. Stephanie likens it to a beluga whale and says that it turns corners like a refrigerator on wheels. Grandma can't drive, and this is ALWAYS Stephanie's last resort vehicle. She hates it. However, her cars are constantly being blown up, so Stephanie drives it a lot.
4) Some funeral parlors nail their caskets shut because of Grandma Mazur and her penchant for peeking when she shouldn't.

I still don't think you're ready for Morelli and Ranger, so tomorrow we are going to dish on my all-time favorite Plum character, aside from Stephanie, and her men. And Grandma. I really like Grandma. That would be Lula. She was a ho (in book one), but that life really is hard on a woman. So, she reformed and is now the file clerk at Vinnie's office. Turns out she really doesn't like to file, but she loves riding shotgun with Stephanie. She isn't any better at catching FTAs than Stephanie, but it makes the story twice as entertaining. Imagine an oversized black woman in poison green spandex whose response that a situation might be "delicate" is this: "Hell, I can delicate your ass off." And that is why I love Lula. I feel the need to go watch BABY GOT BACK on Youtube. Ya'll have a nice night. Catch you tomorrow because I am going to delicate your ass off!


image found at www.weheartit.com

FOR THE LOVE OF READING

I am going to give you fair warning. I am not exactly sure where this post is going. I should probably do that on every post. Except sometimes I think it is going one place and it ends up somewhere else. No one is more surprised by that than me. Huh. I still have reading on the brain. This is not going to come as a newsflash: there are some people who are readers and some people who are not. Some people read every day; they read journals, magazines, or manuals for their job or to learn how to do something. These people are not readers. They know how to read, but they don't read for the sheer joy of reading.

I could get into the whole nature versus nurture thing on reading. Yawn. Yeah, I am excited about that prospect. Once upon a time I would have sworn that if you read to your kid they would like to read. Now, I am less certain of that. You might sway the odds somewhat, but I think nature factors in there. Plus, I really don't care. Ooooh. Yeah, I am still feeling pissy about H-Girl. She isn't a reader and I read to her plenty. C-Man loves to read. So, I am going with nature. It is kicking nurture's ass right now. Moving on....


Let's talk about me. I have always loved to read. I can't remember a time when I didn't love to read. When we moved back to Ohio, and bought the house in the suburbs of Columbus, which is where we stayed until I graduated high school, my father thought it would be lovely if we heated it with a wood burning stove. There was also a furnace installed (Thank God). The wood burning stove would have been an awesome plan if 1) My dad bought enough wood to last the winter, and 2) He fed the stove during the night and at lunchtime so that the house wasn't freezing in the morning and when we came home from school.

As it happened, the stove was placed far enough out into the living room that you could walk behind it or sit behind it. If I was home after school, you almost always could find me parked behind the wood stove, back to the wall. I started with my homework, but when that was done, I pulled out whatever book I was reading and settled in.

In college, I remember distinctly the day my sophomore year that I stumbled across Jen reading a book for pleasure. That year I was taking all core classes because I had no clue about what I was going to major in. It occurred to me that I hadn't read anything for fun in forever. She had a slew of novels. I was dumbstruck. How did she manage it? It turns out her grades weren't that great, but I didn't know that. She let me borrow one. It was bliss. It was a Sidney Sheldon. I don't even remember which one. I skipped all of my classes that day. I just read. Of course, I couldn't keep that up, but it was wonderful.

I suppose that is why I majored in English. I had no clue about a major and I had to choose something. Why did I pick it? I liked to read. That is the long and the short answer. I got to read until my eyes about popped out of my head for the next two years.

Then I went to work for a publishing house. That is the equivalent of letting an alcoholic work in a bar. Did you know that if you work for a publishing house that there is no book that you can't get for free? None. Everything is yours for the taking. It is just one phone call away. And if you are really good at working it, you can extend that to things like CDs. I never even thought of that. One of my coworkers got a box of CDs in the mail and I just gaped at him like a fool. "How did you do that?" I asked.

He looked at me like the naive pet that I am. I know that he wanted to reach over and pet me like a puppy. "I sent them books, silly girl." Ah, some people know how to work it and some people know how to work it. My admiration went up like ten notches. It must have shown because he let me have a couple of the CDs. Generosity at work. However, he didn't track me down in the future to let me know when he got shipments of CDs. I really shouldn't dwell on the past. He did take me to a Rangers game. Although, I think that is because he is an avid hockey fan and was looking to convert me. Either way. Anyway, it's all better now. Moving on...

I don't remember books departing from my life until I got married, the kids moved in, and the migraines got bad. I had lots of things working against my reading at that point. It was all I could do to hold down my job, take care of the kids, deal with my husband, and try to sleep. And then there were the ongoing migraines from hell. So, there were painkillers at regular intervals just to keep my life afloat. After the divorce, most of the time the migraines were still really bad. Of course, my best times of day were late at night. My sleep pattern was totally messed up. And I was back to living on pain pills if I wanted to go anywhere.


In the summer of 2005, I went to Florida to spend time with my parents. This was before the move. My mother had done everything but tie me to a chair to get me to read Janet Evanovich's Stephanie Plum series. I started reading. I think I read a book and a half a day, and I laughed so hard I nearly peed myself. I felt better that week than I had in a long time.


In the last few days, I have read two Stephanie Plums (15 &16) and started the Sookie Stackhouse series. I am two down on that one. I can't say my migraines are gone, but they are somewhat better. Migraines are triggered in large part by stress. Reading is stress relieving for me, so it stands to reason that it would help.

Not everyone has migraines, but everyone has stress. Take a minute right now to think about what you love to do that relieves yours. Are you doing it? In other words, are you running your schedule or is your schedule running you?