WORDLESS WEDNESDAY (mostly)

My world of Plum hasn't been greeted with the amount of fanfare and fondness that I had hoped you would have for it. I really would like to live there. I claim full responsibility for your not embracing this fictional world with glee. Janet Evanovich clearly paints a much more enticing picture than I. So, I am stepping out of Trenton, and Stephanie's world, for a day to reconsider my options. While it is always fun to write about a fictional place that you would love to step into, it is less so if no one takes the journey with you. So, I leave you with this to ponder instead. You can thank Shoes over at Red Shoe's Chronicles for this one. He wrote an entire post that brought me to this place. It was very funny if you need a chuckle.





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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!


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It really is all about me.

I proposed something fun for this blog yesterday. Pain as your constant companion just isn't fun. And talking about it isn't fun either. There is a point of release and then there is a point of dwelling. Those lines are really close together. So, I try to not talk about it at all to avoid the possibility of crossing into the area of dwelling. I think I have landed into the land of dwelling because SO MUCH is happening with SSD and MY PAIN is bad right now. Those two things put it all right there at the forefront. So, when that happens I have to consciously put something else on this blog so that it takes up some mental space. I need something positive to think about and make me happy. Then I need to make myself do the stuff that scares me a little (like see what is really up with my novel and get my domain site on a web hosting server). Yeah, I practice avoidance. I admit it. Eventually I will have to do something about these things; I just want to bring my stress levels back down to tolerable before I do. Otherwise, if it is hard going or bad news I will be on the ceiling, and that really isn't attractive.ever.

So, I started thinking about fictional characters I would like to be. Everyone knows that I would like to be Buffy The Vampire Slayer. This is not news. Of course, Buffy has not really had the easiest time of it. The more I think on that, the more I realize how hard it would actually be to be her. She took a lot of hard knocks and I don't mean just physical ones. Lots of heartbreak there. So, I am taking a pass on Buffy for right now. She is very badass and I love that about her, but I am going in a different direction.

For years (and I mean years), my mom did everything but beat me over the head with Janet Evanovich's Stephanie Plum series. She loved those books and I had it in my head that they were murder mysteries. I read enough murder mysteries in my time at St. Martin's Press to pretty well cure me. I like character driven books. I love suspense books. Matter of fact, when I was thinking out this blog I remembered that I read the Kinsey Millhone series right up until I found J.D. Robb's series and then I was done with Kinsey Millhone. I didn't piece that together until today. Why was that? Kinsey pretty well worked alone. J.D. Robb writes futuristic murder mysteries featuring an interesting cast of characters. The first novel introduced them all. The delicious Rourke. Irish. Gorgeous. And numero uno suspect turned out to be not guilty of murder, but our detective, Eve Dallas, married him. He is also a gadzillionaire, which is very sexy. There is the very sensible Peabody and her kooky, nerdy, and brilliant computer genius boyfriend... you see where I am going? Detective Dallas has her own Scooby Gang. There is an entire cast of characters that I care about here and they are in every novel. They are all quirky and you can't help but love them. Some more than others. That Rourke. I really love him. However, my point is that I care about all of them. If you are going to write a series, develop interesting characters.

That brings me back around to Janet Evanovich. I knew it was a series. My mother cornered me on vacation several years ago. We were gone a week. I read a book a day. The first was the worst. We are going to talk Plum for a while. This isn't going to be a book review because it isn't about any one book. This will be a character study. I like all of the characters. Janet Evanovich is brilliant with characters. Anyone aspiring to write great characters should read the Plum series. And they are funny. Seriously funny. Of course, our main gal is Stephanie Plum. She is the person I would want to be most of the time. Okay, pretty much all of the time. I totally get her. She and I are a lot alike. She pretty much backdoors her way into all of the good stuff in her life, too. The only thing she has going for her is persistence. That is it. An unwillingness to give up.

All of the books are written in the voice of Stephanie Plum. Book one starts 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." Now, who can stop reading with an opener like that? Not me. I was hooked.

So, who is this Stephanie Plum? She grew up in Trenton, NJ. She was a lingerie buyer who is out of a job. She is so desperate for work that she goes to her cousin Vinnie, who I will tell you more about later, but he is vermin, to get a job as a file clerk. Vinnie is a bail bondsman. The clerk job is gone, however they need someone to catch their FTAs. That would be their Failure To Appears. Bail jumpers. I think you can see where this is going. There is no one in the world who is worse at this job than Stephanie Plum. (Well, I would probably be equally bad.) Her first skip, if she can catch him is... wait for it... Joe Morelli. The boy who stole her virginity and wrote about it on the bathroom wall. He is now a vice cop in a case that went very wrong and he skipped his arraignment. Stephanie will get $10,000 if she can find him.

This is the last time she saw him:
"The next time I saw him, I was three years older. I was on my way to the mall, driving my father's Buick when I spotted Morelli standing in front of Giovichinni's Meat Market. I gunned the V-8 engine, jumped the curb, and clipped Morelli from behind, bouncing him off the right front fender. I stopped the car and got out to assess the damage. "Anything broken?"

He was sprawled on the pavement, looking up my skirt. "My leg."

"Good," I said. Then I turned on my heel, got into the Buick and drove to the mall.

I attribute the incident to temporary insanity, and in my own defense, I'd like to say I haven't run over anyone since."

Yeah, she took the case. The fact that she has NO experience in catching FTAs didn't make a difference. The fact that Morelli had been a vice cop for years didn't factor in. The fact that most bounty hunters carry guns and know how to shoot them should have crossed her mind. It did. Very fast. And then it was gone. She did get a stun gun. Although, I think it has been used on her more times than she has actually stunned anyone else. Just sayin'. Did she get her man? This isn't a book review or a tell-all. We are delving into the person that is Stephanie Plum and what turns out to be HER Scooby Gang. This is just the teaser taste.

But, to answer your question... Stephanie ALWAYS gets her man. It's HOW it happens that makes the ride so hilarious. When your FTA handcuffs you naked to your own shower stall, you know that you just made a big bad mistake. When another really hot bounty hunter has to come to your apartment with cuff keys so that you aren't attached to your shower for the rest of your life... you have to ask yourself, is this a good or bad thing? Or maybe the question is... I really should work out more if I am going to spend so much time naked in these kinds of compromising positions. Or maybe I should work out more if I am going to be chasing the bad guys. I don't know. Too many questions for my overworked brain.

Now, I just wish I was Janet Evanovich. She has so many excellent characters in her Plum Scooby Gang. Tomorrow you will find out some more about Morelli the Vice cop (and virginity stealer) and Ranger (the hottie with cuff keys in the shower). He is a bounty hunter if the fee is high enough, was Special Forces, runs Rangeman. And he might be Batman. He has skills. Tomorrow's blog isn't for the weak of heart. Of course, it is still really about Stephanie and how she relates to these people. And since I am Stephanie; it's all about me.