lizvogel

Posted by Jenny

https://arghink.com/2026/02/questionable-establishing-character-anna/

https://arghink.com/?p=32642

The thing about the first scene a character appears in is that it’s the scene that establishes that character.  You can show a character change in its arc, but the base line at which that character’s arc begins?  That’s the first scene in which that character appears.  So you have to establish a lot, but you have to do it while actually writing a scene, that is, a protagonist, an antagonist, a conflict that rises to a climax.  You can’t just dump information on the reader because they’ll need to know it later.

What I wanted with Anna (see previous post) was a calm, intelligent woman who did not make waves.  A little repressed.  Somebody who thought a lot more than she talked.  Somebody with quiet goals who tried to go along with everybody because that was easiest.  A woman who loved her dog; she might not protect herself, but she’d protect that dog.

But I also wanted this scene to have the “day that is different” feeling.  The day too many things went wrong all at once (ever have one of those?) and she was pushed to the limit.  And I wanted all those things that went wrong to be her fault for settling for less, for not going after what she wanted, for playing it safe.  It couldn’t just be a lot of people being mean to her; she had to have brought this on herself because of her flaw of playing it safe.  Last thing: none of that could be blatantly evident in this scene.  That is, on a reread, it should be plain that these people are reacting to her, but the first time through, I wanted it to be just A Very Bad Day.  (Which is going to get worse.)

So Jason is a putz, but he’s a safe putz because she’s settled, which isn’t fair to him, either; he deserves somebody who’s all in.  He tells her to get rid of the dog because he doesn’t like it, doesn’t want to live with it in the future, and  doesn’t think it belongs in the workplace (all fair things for him to think), and he expects she’ll agree because she always agrees with him (she’s trained him to expect that).  But the dog is too much of an ask for her and she says no, and that sets in motion a chain of events for the rest of the series.

Her mother is truly concerned about her still living in the pool house.  She wants her kid close, but Anna is thirty-three, so it’s time she does something about it, ejects her kid into the world.  Anna has three good reasons for living in the guest house–she lists them–but the real reason is because it’s safe and easy.  She doesn’t have to stretch.  So her mother is going to spend the next three books making her stretch, another complication in Anna’s life.

And then there’s Gracie, who’s watched her playing it safe for twenty-nine years, and she’s worried that Anna is going to settle for things (like Jason) for the rest of her life.  So Gracie digs Anna’s drawing out of the trash and spray paints a mural with Anna’s signature on it, trying to remind her of who she used to be when she invented Joan.

And then, fifty pages in, Anna is so frustrated by the day from hell she’s had that she picks up Nate in a casino and the romance plot begins.  But Anna’s character change begins in the first scene when the results of playing it safe come home to roost and she starts fighting back.

Now all I have to do is write it that way.

And thank you very much to everybody who chimed in.  I learned a lot.

https://arghink.com/2026/02/questionable-establishing-character-anna/

https://arghink.com/?p=32642

Posted by Jenny

https://arghink.com/2026/02/questionable-first-scenes-2/

https://arghink.com/?p=32630

First scenes have to do a lot of things: Introduce the protagonist, the mood, the setting, and the most important characters as community; set them in motion, in action; introduce conflict . . . it’s a lot.

I’ve also come to believe that scenes should be shorter than 2000 words.  That’s not a writing rule, that’s more to keep me from babbling.  Early scenes might hit 2500 words, but that’s a lot.  You don’t want people yawning.

But after you’ve rewritten a scene twenty or forty times, it becomes impossible to tell if it’s good or if it’s garbage.  Then you want feedback from the kind of people who post in This is a Good Book Thursday weekly.  That would be you.

So here’s the first scene of Arresting Anna.  What I need to know is:

What’s confusing?

Where does it drag?

What should be cut?

What must be kept?

Feel no need to be tactful.  I need all the truth I can get these days.

ANNA

Chapter One

I woke up on Saturday morning because my rescue dog, Johnny, a dachshund-chihuahua mix, was making a commotion because my mother, Lucianna, an Italian-American mix, was standing at the foot of my bed in her pool house where I lived, making kissy noises and saying, “There’s my beautiful baby!”

She was talking to the dog, of course.

I grabbed my catseye glasses—catseyes are my faves, especially if there are rhinestones in the frames—from the counter behind my bed to see Johnny making a happy fuss because, even though my mother had been adamant six months ago about me not getting a rescue dog—“awful, yappy, dirty sonsabitches”—the first time she saw Johnny’s long, pale, tan little body with its random puffs of white fur and his bat-like ears and curly tail, she fell hard, and now she and Johnny were devoted to each other, in no small part because she carried treats for him at all times and told him that he was the best boy who ever lived.

Johnny was easy.

I let my head fall back on my pillow and once again contemplated moving somewhere else, only not really. My mother’s pool house is close to my work, I can live here for free, and there’s a pool outside my front door.

“Get up, Annie,” my mother said as she scratched Johnny behind the ears and made him close his eyes in ecstasy.

“Go away and let me sleep.” I took off my glasses and rolled over onto my side. “I had a bad night last night. I’ll work late tonight to make up for going in late.”

(Yes, I work weekends because that’s when we get most of our foot traffic, scant as it is at the Keppler Museum.)

My mother huffed. “You can’t stay late at work tonight. You have a date.”

“I do not have a date.” I did not tell her that Jason, my significant other, was the reason for my bad evening. He and I had had an argument because I’d been bringing Johnny to work with me for the past six months where he was now practically the museum mascot. People who came to the museum knew him by name. They couldn’t remember my name, but Johnny they knew. And Jason actually wanted me to get rid of this dog permanently. It finally culminated in him saying, “You have to choose, Anna. It’s me or the dog,” and me saying, “It’s the dog.”

“Oliver Olivero,” my mother said. “I talked to your Aunt Paulina, and he’s picking you up at eight.”

“No, he is not,” I said.

“Annie,” my mother began.

“One,” I said, staring at the ceiling, “he’s my cousin and a man who has shown no interest in me.”

“Second cousin,” my mother said.

“Two,” I said, “I’m not sure what the state of my relationship is with Jason.”

“Jason is a putz who will never marry you,” my mother said.

“Three, Oliver tells everyone he meets that he’s so good in bed that every woman he sleeps with shouts out his initials.”

“That’s possible,” my mother said, looking unsure for the first time. “You like him. You should at least give him a chance.”

“Why are you doing this?” I said, since my mother had never favored Oliver above any of my other cousins of various distances.

“You should be married,” my mother said. “You’re thirty-three, it’s time you got serious about life. Have somebody to take care of you. Give me grandkids. I won’t be here forever, you know.”

That made me sit up and Johnny stop yapping. “You’re fifty-two. You’re not going to die any time soon unless there’s something you’re not telling me. Are you sick?”

My mother pulled back. “No. Why? Do I look bad?” She picked up Johnny and went to check out her perfect black updo in the mirror I had on the back wall. “What? What do you see?”

I put my head in my hands. “Let’s take this from the top. I’m thirty-three, I’m healthy, and I’m employed, so I’m not exactly a child who’s dependent on other people. What is this sudden need to marry me off?”

“It’s time,” she said, peering in the mirror to make sure every hair was in place and her make-up was flawless, which of course, it was. Johnny peered with her, probably wondering who that handsome dog looking back at him was. “Oliver is a good boy, steady, good income, nice-looking—”

“I don’t want to get married.” I got out of bed, too awake now to fall back asleep. “Also, Oliver runs a chop shop.”

“He runs a car repair business,” my mother said. “Very profitable.”

I gave up. “I am going to get ready for work now. You could walk Johnny for me while I dress.”

“Of course, anything for my little angel,” my mother said, making more kissy noises at my dog, which was all a sham because the most Johnny was going to get was a swift stroll to the gate and back. My mother does not embrace exercise. She says it makes her sweat. I told her that real women don’t sweat, they glow. She told me to stop reading those commie feminist magazines.

When she had once more listed Oliver’s assets, pointed out again that Jason would never marry me, and waxed rhapsodic about how great grandkids would be (which was a crock, she was not a kid person), she and Johnny left. I brushed my teeth and dealt with the frizz in my hair and ignored make-up because it wasn’t like I was going to be seeing people.

Of course, I was going to be seeing some people, but they were my museum people. I saw them five days a week. They were used to the real me. Also, I was going to be lying low because I definitely did not want to waste time arguing with anybody or make waves of any kind. I had bigger fish to fry.

I needed to save my museum.

Look, it was a nice little museum, it just wasn’t . . . great. It needed work. Vera Keppler, the Keppler Foundation chair, was always on the verge of closing it because Thomas Keppler, her little brother and the Keppler Museum president known to all as TK, had a long history of getting swindled by buying fakes. I’d talked her out of it before when I was an intern there by saying that the museum needed to offer classes to make its focus education, always popular, and that had actually worked and had gotten me a job, but since then TK had gotten so bad with the fakes that Vera refused to let him buy art and threatened to shut us down again (the last time it had been a dozen life size ceramic Chinese soldiers with spears that turned out to be made of very heavy papier mache and not part of the famous Terracotta Army as TK had been told), so I had promised her that I had an idea that would turn everything around again if she just gave me time.

No, I didn’t have an idea, I just needed time to think of one.

Look, the museum was a great job for me. They didn’t care what I taught in my art classes there as long as nobody complained, so I had a lot of freedom. In fact, as long as I stayed away from politics and stopped twelve-year-olds from painting nudes (Barry Sanderson had a thing for boobs), nobody cared. And I loved teaching art. Plus, I got to work with my best friend, Gracie Kwan, our tech queen, and I was going out with Jason Lassiter, the museum manager, so it was pretty much the center of my existence.

But I was running out of time to come up with that brilliant idea.

I finished dressing in what I considered my work clothes: a sweater set that had seen some action—children are notorious for being sloppy with art—and a pencil skirt that gave the illusion of business wear. Today’s armor was a green merino cardigan and shell with plain red edging and a tasteful blotch of India ink on the hem where Barry Sanderson had turned around just as I looked over his shoulder to see what he was doing and hit me with his brush.

You teach art, these things happen.

I corralled my hair into my favorite, white-flowered clip and picked up my grandma’s purse, another point of contention between Mama and me. “Why are you still carrying that old thing,” she’d say almost daily. “I’ll buy you a new one.” And I’d tell her it was vintage leather and a very good bag—it was Prada—and did not tell her that I loved it, in part because it still had many of the things my grandmother had kept in it, like the bag of M&Ms from 2005 (candy that she’d kept for me) and her small hairbrush and her beaded coin purse with quarters and her hammerless snub-nose .38 caliber revolver with the specially made blue contoured grip Grandpa had given her . . . I still missed my grandma a lot. My grandpa had given me her handbag at her funeral, telling me she wanted me to have it, and I’d cried all over him because she’d remembered how much I’d loved it. And how much I loved her. I was keeping it.

I met my mother and Johnny outside by my sixteen-year-old Prius, another vintage possession of mine that made my mother nuts. “Tell Oliver not to be here or you’ll be dating him,” I told her, put Johnny in his car seat and my bag on the floor, shut the door on my mother’s protests, pulled around to the front of the house, hit the button on my phone to open the gates, and escaped into the outside world, in this case the lovely little river town of Keppler, New Jersey.

Instantly, it was more peaceful. Yes, there was construction noise and horns honking, but none of it was about me.

Well, it wasn’t about me until I stopped my car in the middle of the street to look at the graffiti on the side of the Keppler Town Hall, which was your basic one-story brick abomination from the seventies. It had one blank wall that had been painted white but was now covered with a spray painted, stenciled mural of a rabbit, a parrot, and a cat, all standing around a pile of burning books, toasting marshmallows over the flaming literature and laughing evilly. In the bottom right corner was a signature: Joan of Art.

Johnny put his feet on the edge of the window and looked out and then back at me and whined.

“I know,” I told him. “What the hell was Gracie thinking?”

Actually, I knew what Gracie had been thinking. The mural was because three members of our town council had been trying to ban LGBTQ books to “protect the children,” and they’d organized some irate homophobic mothers to go in, check out those books, and not return them. Those members were Harold O’Hare, Ursula McGraw, and Kitty Prescott. Yeah, the hare, the macaw, and the cat.

I’d thought that sketch was pretty funny when I’d drawn it. Then I’d thrown it out, and Gracie had evidently pulled it out, cut the stencil, and spray-painted the damn mural from it.

As I was watching, a guy in coveralls arrived with a roller and a bucket of white paint and began to lazily obliterate the mural, which was a shame because Gracie had done a good job. Johnny barked at him, and we’d already caused enough notice by parking in the middle of the street, so I put the car in gear and drove to the museum to confront my best friend who was using my secret identity without permission.

So first Jason Lassiter being anti-dog, then Oliver Olivero and my mother fixating on marriage (for me, not her), and now Gracie drawing attention to Joan of Art. And people wonder why I play it safe.

Because everybody around me is nuts, that’s why.

https://arghink.com/2026/02/questionable-first-scenes-2/

https://arghink.com/?p=32630

Posted by Jenny

https://arghink.com/2026/01/32611/

https://arghink.com/?p=32611

I adore this book.  Well, I like most of everything Jodi Taylor writes, but Amelia Smallhope is a heroine in a million.

Which is a damn good thing because Amelia is a picaro hero, and if you’re going to follow one of those through a story, they better be fascinating.  Don Quixote, Tom Jones, Fanny Hill, Moll Flanders, Huckleberry Finn, the list is long, and the genre is tough because of that reliance on the hero.  And Taylor nails it with the ballad of Amelia Smallhope, best heroine ever.

Here’s your educational moment for today:

https://arghink.com/2026/01/32611/

https://arghink.com/?p=32611