Serenity Now!

Been a long time, huh? I blame last week’s Rant “MIA” on school vacation. It was kids, kids, kids all week, including a day when my oldest made a movie with seven friends (I was “craft services,” providing PB&J for the troops). The movie was a military action adventure involving a vacationing colonel, his replacement’s poor management skills, and the arrival of “GI Repo” to take the fatigues right off the colonel’s back. No, I’m not making this up; he did.

This past week, I was playing catch up, mostly editing “Victor’s Bride,” which I’ve decided needs to get out more. I completed the MS two years ago, sent it to two agents, then to several contests (contests—that’s a rant for another day), but that’s about it. So now I’m going to start to market it. As usual, I’m not sure how to categorize the novel. It’s a paranormal and there are romantic elements, but it’s nowhere near a “category.” It’s got sex, murder, cranky old people, a muscular and caustic hero, a sexy heroine, and a creepy, seemingly immortal villain. It’s funny, it’s dark. The best I can do to cram it into a category is to say it’s got a “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” sensibility and hope that interests agents and editors enough to give it a try.

Speaking of “Buffy” and movie-making, non-writing life just got wicked exciting—the trailer for “Buffy” creator Joss Whedon’s “Serenity” has been released. Serenity’s based on Whedon’s criminally canceled TV show “Firefly,” one of our family faves. The Serenity preview was the first one up when we went to see “Hitchhiker’s Guide” yesterday—me, hubby, the kids and two friends (fact of life: any time you go anywhere with a pre-teen/teen, you always have two friends).

And yes, that was me who let out that piercing, girly-girl shriek of delight when the preview came on (well, okay, it was really prompted by the sight of the lead, “Captain Tightpants” himself, Nathan Fillion, who should play the hunky, conflicted hero in every movie made from now on and would neatly fill the tight pants of my “Victor’s Bride” hero). Serenity is a space adventure that will be so much more because writer/director Joss Whedon (who wrote “Toy Story”) is a fabulous writer, so adept at creating compelling characters, witty dialogue, tense, thrilling drama that I can barely contain my jealousy…er…professional envy.

Okay, enough shilling for Serenity, released by Universal Pictures, opening September 30 at a theater near you… On with shilling my own work.

It's not what you know...

…It’s who you know.

Been a busy week, writing, querying, jotting down new ideas and sketching out a few old ones. Got a form rejection that sorely tested my eyesight. The toner must’ve been non-existent, the print was so faint, and the text so crooked I suspected the copier teetered on the side of a hill when it spit out my letter. See, not all of us writers hate rejection letters—I’ve learned to milk the entertainment from them; it masks the sting quite nicely.

Researching agents (I made a vow to send out one a week) I came across one that blatantly states, “Let us know if you have celebrity or media connections that will help in marketing your work.” I’m sure that’s what all the agents and potential publishers want to know, and believe me if I had the connections I’d exploit them mercilessly.

Not to say I haven’t had my share of celebrity run-ins over the years. My first celebrity encounter was a million years ago, well, almost forty to be exact when I met the Three Stooges, Moe, Larry, and that other guy who replaced the guy who replaced the guy who replaced Shemp who replaced Curly. I was way young and don’t remember much about them, except that it was at the Shrine Circus in Worcester and when we went backstage, Moe LOOMED at me, a tiny, wrinkled old man with enormous bags under his eyes. I’ve had Moe-the-Stooge nightmares ever since.

Fortunately my celebrity encounters tapered off until I was an adult and could process them better. In brief, I’ve rubbed shoulders with Butch Patrick (Eddie Munster on The Munsters), partied with the band Aha (in costume on Halloween!); was nearly creamed by Ted Kennedy’s limo outside the Harvard Club; was presented to the Queen of Bhutan; had my foot stepped on by basketball great ML Carr (my pained response? “It’s okay, I’ve got another one.”); directed Peter Jennings to the men’s room; and, at a filming, responded with military efficiency to Gen William Westmoreland’s three commands, “I need my coat, I need a cab, and I need my wife. Not necessarily in that order.”

None of my exploits compare to my mother’s claim to fame. In her younger days, working on an anti-poverty initiative, she met hippy-radical-hairy guy Abbie Hoffman, who tried to date her. She turned him down and when I ask her why she wouldn’t go out with him, she says, “He smelled.”

So, if Abbie had paid more attention to his hygiene, he might’ve been my father. And THEN I’d have some celebrity to brag about! But I guess I’ll just have to settle for a little Moe. Janet – No power in the ‘verse can stop me.

And how is that spelled?

I went to a writer’s conference this weekend and had a ball. It was a romance writers get together, which is far different from a mystery conference, or just about any other conference you can imagine. Sure we talk about plot, motivation, character arcs, etc., but the discussion invariably centers on sex. And chocolate. And eating chocolate while talking about sex. Not a bad thing at all.

Of course, I am the Complaining Woman, as my hubby has dubbed me, so I have to have something to gripe about (in a funny, Erma Bombeck way, I hope!).

First, there were the OTHER WRITERS. Now, most of the people I met were wonderful, interesting, professional women fiercely dedicated to their writing and the pursuit of publication (or publishing yet another book)—and that’s just the problem. Being in a room with 200 other writers doing just what you’re doing can be daunting, and I was torn between a feeling of sisterhood and a serious case of PMS—professional murder syndrome. I wanted to kill every last one of them.

I know that there’s room for all of us writers in the wonderful world of publication and professional jealousy (or the less poisonous ‘envy,’ as one of my colleagues wisely suggested I call it) is unbecoming. But I’m human, and humans thrive on competition, with themselves and with each other (except for at my son’s Middle School, where the traditional competition of letter grades has been 86ed in favor of the more PC “achieving/not achieving” rubric; designed so, you know, Little Johnny won’t feel bad about himself if he gets a ‘C.’ Now he’s got no incentive, so he just doesn’t care.)

So at lunch and dinner I looked around at my competition and started to think… Could I slip some arsenic into the soup of that RITA winner sitting next to me? How about an unfortunate encounter with an industrial-strength floor buffer for that 20-something who just got signed—in the bathroom—by the biggest name agent at the conference? Then I forcibly reminded myself this wasn’t a mystery writers conference and went back to thinking about sex and chocolate.

The other thing that irked me was that I made a donation to the giveaways and they spelled my name wrong in the program AND mispronounced it (flubbed up the misspelled version, too!). This bothers me only because it’s another incident in a looooong tradition of my name being misspelled/mispronounced. I don’t know why. Halpin is a simple, two syllable name—HAL and PIN—but people have been messing it up as long as I can remember (in fact, the only one who ever got it right was the immigration official in Boston c. 1880 who took my great-great whatever’s Irish surname of Halpenny and turned it into Halpin.). At least most people get the first name right; I won’t count that letter I once received addressed to “Peanet Hapne.”

Okay, so now I’m energized to get back to work, send out more queries, etc. and to hope that if and when I finally do get published my name on the book cover is spelled correctly!

Janet – No power in the ’verse can stop me…