Daily Chocolate

The other night I had a visit from a college friend with whom I share an unbreakable bond: we worked together at a positively horrific job the year we graduated from college. It’s like having an old army buddy — our relationship is forged in blood and tears.

My friend — let’s call her Magenta, because she’d get a kick out of that — is now a hot snazzy lawyer in Manhattan. She’s also my number one fan, in the sense that she is the first person who ever styled herself as a fan of my novels. She was the first person to read my initial, stumbling attempt at novel-writing (this was before I’d joined RWA or realized how hard this whole thing really was), and she actually started up an email loop back in 2002 to distribute my hot-off-the-keyboard snippets of my work in progress, which would eventually be called MELTDOWN and would also eventually win a Maggie Award (and no, I’m never getting over that, so stop asking. I wuv my Maggie). Because Meltdown is about a pastry chef and has a very hot scene involving chocolate, and because Magenta is a fan of the Daily Candy website, we called the snippet emails DAILY CHOCOLATE. In its heyday, DC was forwarded to six people. I had six people rooting for me to sell that book. That was a lot, for that stage of my career.

Well, I finished that book, and I finished two others, and through it all, Magenta cheered me on. She went to dinner with me and helped me hammer out the original plot of LOST GIRLS, and even told me that she thought the title sucked and I should call it “Across the Line”. (I won that argument.) She read LOST GIRLS and she read NIGHT VISIONS, and she read the proposal for SECRET SOCIETY GIRL and was really excited that my protagonist Amy lived in her college. (Sailor Boy has one up on her, though, since Amy lives in his old dorm room.) Like me, like my editor, and hopefully like all the other young women who will read my book, Magenta sees a lot of herself in Amy. And considering that every character in my book is by necessity based on the people I went to college with, she’s not wrong.

When I went to NYC in June to meet with my editor and her boss, I went out with Magenta afterwards to spill. Outside of my writing friends and Sailor Boy, she is the friend that understands the most about what is going on with my career. Before the whole lawyering thing, Magenta worked for film companies

A few weeks ago, I finally sent her the complete, and last night was the first opportunity we had to talk about it. After everything I’ve just said, I doubt you’ll be surprised that the things she wanted me to tweak were the exact same things that my editor brought up in her eleven page revision letter. I felt as if she and Kerri were doing some sort of bizarre mind meld thing. Like they gotten together up in that mythical Manhattan place to gang up on me.

Sorry, don’t mind me. It’s a job hazard. I write about conspiracy theories for a living.

So I fed Magenta half a bottle of wine, and discussed my book, and discussed the website I’m prelimming (verbing weirds language, but I love it), and some of my thoughts about the sequel. Magenta is an excellent brainstormer. She gave me a lot to chew on and some really rocking ideas for the sequel. I’m getting pretty excited about starting it.

Thanks, hon, for everything, and especially for Daily Chocolate.

(Oh, and she brought me chocolate last night. How apt.)

PS: The Knight Agency blog has reprinted my post about high concept.